By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – November 15, 2009
Two weeks ago my dear friend Dr. Don Ardell, otherwise known
as “The Well Infidel,” published on these pages an essay on the German song
“Die Gedanken Sind Frei” and the role that it played for the German intra-war
anti-Nazi resistance movement known as The White Rose Society.
Don’s essay celebrates the song, the White Rose Society, and
its young leadership, among whom were Sophie Scholl and her brothers, the “Geschwistern
Scholl.” I sent a comment to Don
on his essay, which originally appeared in his weekly “Ardell Wellness
Report.” I am sharing a significantly
expanded version of that comment with you here. In discussing the historical significance of The White Rose
Society, I noted that unlike many other countries that were combatants or
otherwise participants in World War II, Modern Germany has both recognized its
responsibilities for the indescribable horrors that the Nazis turned loose upon
the world and completely turned its back on the political ideology that created
them. I have had several personal experiences that attest to this
reality.
First, I was privileged to attend the 1999 Frankfurt Buch
Messe (book fair) as a guest of my academic publisher, Ursula Springer. She is a German who emigrated to the United
States after World War II. Here she
met and married Bernhard Springer, one of the sons of the Jewish owner of the
large German Publishing Company, Springer Verlag. When the Nazis stole the company in 1938, Bernhard managed
to make his escape to the Untied States. After the war he remained here and eventually established the Springer
Publishing Co. Upon his death in
1971, Ursula inherited the company. I was lucky enough to become one of her author/editors, first for a book
entitled “Health Care Delivery in the United States.” Published in 1977 it was the first textbook of its
kind. Ursula had taken a flier on
me and the equally youthful team that I had put together, and the book became a
success, both for us and for Springer. The invitation to join her at the Buch Messe was a result of that
success.
I had several experiences at Frankfurt which were highly
instructive about the nature of modern Germany. That year the Buch Messe
celebrated the most important books of the 20th century (that's important, not
greatest). For 1926 it was Hitler's Mein Kampf. On the
cover of the original was the Nazi version of the swastika (that is the Hackenkreutz,
the Crooked Cross, the reverse of the original symbol that goes back millennia
appearing in art as diverse as that of Native Americans and Hindus).
While the book could be displayed at the Buch Messe, its original cover could
not be. Germany has a law that forbids the display of Nazi symbols.
At the event by simultaneous translation I heard a speech by
the then Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer of the Green Party. Each year
at the Fair there is a designated “guest country.” It is given its own pavilion with all kinds of special
displays and presentation. That
year the Guest Country was Poland. The first third of Herr Fischer’s speech was devoted to welcoming Poland
as the "Guest Country" and celebrating the century’s long cultural connections
between the two countries, going back to the Middle Ages. The middle
third took a different, and for me (and for many other listeners from outside
Germany too I am sure) a totally unexpected turn. It was devoted to an impassioned apology for the Nazi
invasion of Poland and the subsequent WW II. In the speech Minister Fischer stated that modern Germany,
while recognizing the responsibility of the German nation as a whole for the
Nazi period, regards it, as well as Nazism, as a totally unacceptable anomaly
of German history.
I should note that I may have mis-heard or now mis-remember
the use of the word “anomaly” by Minister Fischer. The fact is that in terms of German history, Nazism did not,
like Athena, spring full-grown from the brow of Zeus (or in the German case,
Wotan). With a credit to my good
friend Michael Faulkner a political scientist/historian of modern Europe with a
specialty in Germany from 1919, who writes the “Letter from the UK” for
TPJmagazine, it should be noted that: 1. The seeds of Nazism go back into the
19th century. First planting their
poisonous roots in the early 19th century, the elements of aggressive
chauvinism, racism and anti-Semitism were very evident by the late 1800s. 2. Nazism represented the most extreme
and aggressive aspect of modern German imperialism that can be dated from the
1870s. 3. Nazism can only be
properly understood against the background of the defeat of German
imperialism's first bid to become a major world power (in World War I) and
a subsequent failed socialist revolution (1918-19) that terrified the capitalist
ruling class in Germany. With the
subsequent failure to provide a stable bourgeois democratic government under
the Weimar Constitution, Nazism essentially was the German form of a triumph of
monopoly capitalism over what was a totally divided working class movement. This was done both to secure their
profits and to enable a second attempt at becoming a major imperialist power
(in World War II).
Returning to Minister Fischer’s speech, the latter third was
devoted to an apology for the Holocaust, as impassioned as his apology for
World War II. Oh my. The
speech just blew me away. Could
one, I thought, just imagine a US Secretary of State making a similar speech
about, say, slavery, or the atomic bombing of Japan, or the killing of
2,000,000 Vietnamese, to say nothing of the firebombing of Hamburg in July, 1943
that killed up to 100,000 civilians (more than were killed at Hiroshima), or the
Dresden Raid of January, 1945, or etc.? No, I could not.
As for the second instructive experience concerning how
modern Germany regards its past, in 2007 (following the 2007 International Triathlon
Union Age-Group World Championships held in a totally rebuilt Hamburg as it
happened) I had the chance to visit Berlin. All over the city there are
World War II memorials --- to both pre-war and intra-war resisters to
Nazism. One of the most impressive of those is right outside of the old
Reichstag building. That is the
one whose fire in February, 1993, just after Hitler’s ascension to be German
Chancellor (Prime Minister), almost certainly set by Goering and his henchmen,
gave Hitler the justification for establishing his dictatorship. (9/11,
intentionally set or not, anyone?) There is not one memorial anywhere to
the Wehrmacht and etc. (Not that I was everywhere in Berlin, but I was
with Mike Faulkner. He knows
Berlin inside out. He fully supported that statement.) Compare that to the
situation in the US South, where there are memorials to Confederate (that is
traitors to the Constitution) "heroes" all over the place, especially
on battlefield memorials celebrating Confederate States of America forces’
victories over the forces of Constitutionalism, otherwise known as the Union
Army.
Then there is the massive Holocaust memorial in the center
of the city. A field of square columns, it appears from street, where you
first see it, as a simple field of those squares. But then you can descend into the field, onto a floor of
widely varying heights and all of a sudden you are in a maze. Without the signage pointing to the
exits, one could easily get lost in it. A marvelous visual rendering of the Holocaust itself which, after all,
was begun publicly as the innocuous sounding “Final Solution to the Jewish
Question” and quickly became a maze of death. The memorial takes up several square blocks. It can never become inapparent. Then there is the Jewish Museum, also a
massive, and most elegant, structure, celebrating German Jewish history going
back to the Middle Ages. It also covers the Holocaust, both directly and
indirectly. There, among many
other things of interest, I found an exhibit on the first female Rabbi
ever. Her name was Rachel Jonas. She came from Breslau (Wroclaw in
Polish), the same city that my great grandfather came from. She was thus
very possibly a relative. She was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz in
1942. And I found out about this in Berlin.
Finally for this note, I would like to note how the Germans
now refer to what outside of the country is called “Kristallnacht,” loosely
translated into English as “The Night of the broken glass.” As the website of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum says in part:
“On November 9–10,
1938, the Nazis staged vicious pogroms—state sanctioned, anti-Jewish
riots—against the Jewish community of Germany. . . . Encouraged by the Nazi regime, the
rioters burned or destroyed 267 synagogues, vandalized or looted 7,500 Jewish
businesses, and killed at least 91 Jewish people. They also damaged many Jewish
cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes as police and fire brigades stood aside.”
Indeed, since the Gestapo, the SS, and the SA (the
Sturmabteilung, the Nazis’ private militia) took an active part in the events,
one can say that the events were more than “encouraged” by the regime. Indeed too, “Kristallnacht” is the name
that the Nazis gave to the events. However, in Germany now they are referred to as “the government pogrom of
Nov., 1938,” placing the responsibility for the horror fully where it belongs.
I just wonder if in our country, if it succumbs to the very
real threat of fascism that seems to be becoming more real every day (see my
1996 book published under the pseudonym "Jonathan Westminster," The
15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022) and then
somehow recovers, will be able to come to terms with it as modern Germany has
been able to come to terms with, and turn its back on, the most dreadful black
mark on its history. I also wonder just how many Geschwistern Scholl
there will be, fighting back against Cheney and his Savagely Beckoning
Le-vinitating O'RHannibaugh Republican Scream Machine, their competing
political leadership from Palin on down (or up depending upon your
perspective), and their hating, hateful acolytes, as they pull us down into a
fascist pit that armed with nuclear weapons might even outdo that of the Nazis
in the horrors it perpetrates upon mankind and the world. If the American fascist repression is
not as successful as it was in Germany, if there are many more resisters than
there were in Germany, and if Constitutional Democracy eventually returns to
our beloved land without it having been totally destroyed, in one way or
another, by the US fascists, still will that future truly United States be able
to do what modern Germany has done in terms of turning its back on its past. I wonder. 