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Jan. 22nd, 2006 12:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaOK, so the sharp minds on my flist were not fooled by my little joke, and identified the quote immediately. Yes: it was the young Hitler, the guy who wrote the book (literally) on how to manipulate popular hysteria.
I've been reading Richard Evans's excellent new history of the 3rd Reich. Am irked because only vols 1 (1871-1933) & 2 (1933-39) have been issued; vol 3 is due out next year (1939-45) & I am very anxious to get it so I can find out how the story ends.
Vol. 1 is the most fascinating--the step-by-step description of how Germany, cradle of the Enlightenment, fell so thoroughly and quickly under the spell of dictatorship. It's such an immense tragedy: each mistake by each element that could have done something different strikes the heart like a blow. The French who would not relent in their punitive reparations; the Communists who would not make common cause with the democrats against fascism; the deep-seated faith in military traditions.
And of course I am haunted by the sense that we here in the US are standing on the brink of something terrible: a Supreme Court that believes in kings; an executive that is rabid with imperial ambitions; a liberal center that seems incapable of action: Germany, c. 1926.
Half my family is South German Jewish, with a few Bavarian Catholics tossed in. If one can speak of a "Germanic character" without sounding like a Nazi, one can say that the German character is peculiar: the absolute, rigid commitment to duty and government, to the Nation, Heimat, Patria, is hardwired into the culture, for all its long traditions of liberal, secular, free-thinking pluralism. My grandparents narrowly escaped with their lives; some of my relatives were bought out of Ravensbruck and Dachau. But once transplanted to America they still could not grasp the idea that criticizing the government is healthy. I remember how they berated me for protesting the Vietnam war, though they were themselves liberal Democrats and opposed to it. Speaking ill of the president shocked them.
My family was from Bavaria, mostly, and many of them lived in Munich during Hitler's rise (a few in Freiburg, also a hotbed of Nazism). They were prosperous, deeply assimilated German Jews of the middle and upper-middle class, business owners and professionals, attorneys and academics. My great-grandmother and her sister both married into Catholic families of the old upper class--names that included a "von," the particle of nobility. It's a sign of how little real antisemitism there was in Germany until the cataclysm. My great-grandmother's family fled to the US in 1935; her sister and husband escaped to France in 1938; others to New York or London; one brother to South Africa. He was gay and opened an antiques business in Johannesburg after the war. As a child I remember him visiting us once, around 1966: a sweet soft-spoken man, who quite blithely explained that apartheid was not so bad because black Africans had no souls. My father left the table. I remember thinking: gay and Jewish, a refugee from Hitler on two counts, and still capable of that. That's what racism is: something so appalling, so vicious, so self-serving that it can't be explained.
Evans says that one factor in Hitler's success had to do with the popular refusal in Germany to acknowledge that they had lost WW I--it was all the fault of weaklings in the Weimar government who had not "let" the army win. How familiar that sounds! So vividly reminiscent of the excuses we mouthed after the disaster of the Vietnam War. If only the politicians had "let" the army do their job! (As Hitler says: forgetting is what the populace does best: we forget that the American army had 2 million men in Vietnam, and a free rein to do anything short of the nuclear option, including carpet bombing of whole cities; and we still lost.)
And just as WW II began (in the popular consciousness, at least) as Germany's delusional attempt to refight WW I and this time "do it right," so our latest adventure in Iraq is an outgrowth of America's insatiable urge to rewrite history and win in Vietnam. Kick the ass of those crappy illiterate peasants who refused to recognize the gift of democracy when we handed it to them (on the point of a bayonet, but what the hey).
So tonight I got up on a ladder and brought down the shoebox of photos marked "1900-1940." Curling black-and-white pictures of my grandfather, great-grandfather, and uncles in the uniforms of WW I; one photo of great-uncle Max recovering in a military hospital in 1917 from being shot and gassed. But here is a wonderful photo of my great-great-grandfather, with monocle and vandyke beard, a lawyer and landowner in Baden. He is dressed in rustic hunting clothes, standing on a country lawn around 1908, surrounded by his family; it looks like a still from a Merchant-Ivory film, or a Sargent sketch: the younger boys and girls have sailor shirts and straw boaters. My great-grandmother, the oldest child, stands next to her first, Jewish, husband (a justice of the peace), who is in white linen, with a watch-fob: not for him the careless dress of a rural holiday. On the grass among the tea-things is my grandmother as a toddler, and 6 other children, all posing for the camera; a gamekeeper and a maid are in the background.
Here is a set of 4 photos of a dashing, unknown blond man in the uniform of the German air corps, leaning on the struts of a biplane in 1915, one booted leg cocked. Mysteriously, a note on the back in my great-grandmother's impossible Gothic script says he was a suitor, though she was 10 years married by then.
Here are my grandfather and his brother in Freiburg in 1919, in a sepia group photo of about 20 young men in the uniforms of the Freikorps. At first this makes no sense to me: The Freikorps were quasilegal paramilitary corps, formed when the Treaty of Versailles prohibited Germany from rebuilding its army; they were nationalistic and rightwing; the forerunners of the Stormtroopers. But not in 1919. My grandfather fought in WW I on the Russian Front; after the war the Freikorps skirmished with the Soviets and the Poles, but this would have been seen by so correct a German as my grandfather as a patriotic action. Apparently he subscribed for a time to the idea of Greater Germany--enough, anyway, to wear a uniform again, for a little while. Like most of the Great War generation, he did not talk much about that time, but when he was very old, he showed me his Iron Cross, and the letter of award that had come with it. After the war, Germany and its military were in such disarray that they did not get around to awarding medals for many years. One of the first things Hitler did on acceding to the chancellorship was to woo the army (and reopen its festering anger at the shameful peace of 1918) and so my grandfather's medal for valor (3rd class) was awarded him by the Nazis in 1933, over the name of the Reichenau and the Reichswehrministerium, and signed "Heil Hitler." My grandfather told me that anyone who was wounded got the Iron Cross 3rd class; no valor was involved.
And here is a photo from the 1930s of a smiling, dumpy blonde woman on in riding togs, sitting aboard a handsome thoroughbred horse--herzliche gruesse von Baby Mecklenburg, it says: Babette, Duchess of Mecklenburg. "We met her in the summers in Starnberg," says a note on the back.
Smiling college friends got up in Bavarian dirndls and lederhosen, grinning on an inn balcony in--yes--Berchtesgaden, of all places. in 1923. This is the next generation: my grandmother and her boyfriend, later husband. I look more closely. That was the year of the hyperinflation, when the Reichsmark went from being worth 4 to the dollar to 130 billion to the dollar, and prices doubled between breakfast and lunch. But people still took vacations, apparently, for here is a happy group laughing on the ski slopes above Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and again, lifting champagne glasses at Davos: it is someone's birthday.
Those Catholic brothers-in-law of Jewish wives despised the Nazis; the one who escaped to Paris with his wife kept her from the hands of the SS by brandishing a revolver on the morning in 1938 when they came pounding on the door; an hour later they were on a train over the border. But here is a photo of the handsome sister of the other brother (my step-great-grandfather): she married into the Röchling family, founders in the 19th century of one of the great Saarland steel manufacturers that the French wanted--and briefly got--after WW I. 20 years later, Röchling built the tanks that decimated France. Here she is with her arm around my great-grandmother's shoulder, on a promenade at the pretty lakeside resort of Tegernsee in 1925; they are wearing the bathing costumes of the era. After the war the head of Röchlings and his fellow directors were tried and convicted of war crimes: slave labor, among other things. But Rochling Steelworks still exists, and thrives today; and her daughter, my somewhat distant cousin by marriage, is still alive, an elderly lady with a great sense of humor and a vintage 1932 Rolls Royce; she is very wealthy indeed. And yes, here they are: mother and daughter, in floorlength satin and long fox furs, guests at a formal wedding. They are standing with the unidentified bride, in white lace, who leans on the arm of her new husband, handsome in his officer's uniform. On the back is written "Matthäus Kirche 24 Juli 1943." That makes it Berlin, a fashionable church in the Tiergarten that was destroyed two years later (though it has since been rebuilt): http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/planen/staedtebau-projekte/kulturforum/de/einrichtungen/matthaeuskirche/index.shtml.
And here is a signed photograph of Oswald Spengler, author of "The Decline of the West," and a friend of my great-grandfather, a member of the intellectual circle of Munich in the interwar years. The book is now almost unreadable, and pretty thoroughly discredited, with its reactionary notions of High Cultures and the inevitable cycles of history, and its romantic Wagnerian sense of the Twilight of Europe, but nonetheless I like this picture of a stolid, studious, well-intentioned writer, autographed in the manner of the period. Another eminent friend from that circle, the illustrator and theater artist Emil Preetorious, who designed Wagner operas at Beyreuth, also has left a signed photo from the 1920s, but it is very odd: in it he lies full-length on the carpet, gesturing with one contemplative hand to what I think must be a Greek cup or dish. At least I hope so, but it's hard to tell.
Unless they are professionals, people only take photos when they are on holiday, smiling, in groups, arms wrapped around knees at the beach, squinting into the sun; leaning their elbows on the table among the wineglasses at a party, heads tilted; standing with stiff sobriety in their best clothes and jewels at ceremonies; propping their children on their laps, pointing to a puppy; or huddled against the wind in heavy coats to say goodbye at a train station. They do not take photos in the midst of a crisis or under grueling fear and constraint. Except for that one wedding in 1943 I have no photos from Germany from the war years. The American photos show people who got away: standing on a lawn in Chicago in 1940, tennis racquets under their arms; eating lunch on a terrace in California in 1942; playing in the summer surf in Michigan in 1944.
Photos don't show the things one has lost, or left behind.
I've been reading Richard Evans's excellent new history of the 3rd Reich. Am irked because only vols 1 (1871-1933) & 2 (1933-39) have been issued; vol 3 is due out next year (1939-45) & I am very anxious to get it so I can find out how the story ends.
Vol. 1 is the most fascinating--the step-by-step description of how Germany, cradle of the Enlightenment, fell so thoroughly and quickly under the spell of dictatorship. It's such an immense tragedy: each mistake by each element that could have done something different strikes the heart like a blow. The French who would not relent in their punitive reparations; the Communists who would not make common cause with the democrats against fascism; the deep-seated faith in military traditions.
And of course I am haunted by the sense that we here in the US are standing on the brink of something terrible: a Supreme Court that believes in kings; an executive that is rabid with imperial ambitions; a liberal center that seems incapable of action: Germany, c. 1926.
Half my family is South German Jewish, with a few Bavarian Catholics tossed in. If one can speak of a "Germanic character" without sounding like a Nazi, one can say that the German character is peculiar: the absolute, rigid commitment to duty and government, to the Nation, Heimat, Patria, is hardwired into the culture, for all its long traditions of liberal, secular, free-thinking pluralism. My grandparents narrowly escaped with their lives; some of my relatives were bought out of Ravensbruck and Dachau. But once transplanted to America they still could not grasp the idea that criticizing the government is healthy. I remember how they berated me for protesting the Vietnam war, though they were themselves liberal Democrats and opposed to it. Speaking ill of the president shocked them.
My family was from Bavaria, mostly, and many of them lived in Munich during Hitler's rise (a few in Freiburg, also a hotbed of Nazism). They were prosperous, deeply assimilated German Jews of the middle and upper-middle class, business owners and professionals, attorneys and academics. My great-grandmother and her sister both married into Catholic families of the old upper class--names that included a "von," the particle of nobility. It's a sign of how little real antisemitism there was in Germany until the cataclysm. My great-grandmother's family fled to the US in 1935; her sister and husband escaped to France in 1938; others to New York or London; one brother to South Africa. He was gay and opened an antiques business in Johannesburg after the war. As a child I remember him visiting us once, around 1966: a sweet soft-spoken man, who quite blithely explained that apartheid was not so bad because black Africans had no souls. My father left the table. I remember thinking: gay and Jewish, a refugee from Hitler on two counts, and still capable of that. That's what racism is: something so appalling, so vicious, so self-serving that it can't be explained.
Evans says that one factor in Hitler's success had to do with the popular refusal in Germany to acknowledge that they had lost WW I--it was all the fault of weaklings in the Weimar government who had not "let" the army win. How familiar that sounds! So vividly reminiscent of the excuses we mouthed after the disaster of the Vietnam War. If only the politicians had "let" the army do their job! (As Hitler says: forgetting is what the populace does best: we forget that the American army had 2 million men in Vietnam, and a free rein to do anything short of the nuclear option, including carpet bombing of whole cities; and we still lost.)
And just as WW II began (in the popular consciousness, at least) as Germany's delusional attempt to refight WW I and this time "do it right," so our latest adventure in Iraq is an outgrowth of America's insatiable urge to rewrite history and win in Vietnam. Kick the ass of those crappy illiterate peasants who refused to recognize the gift of democracy when we handed it to them (on the point of a bayonet, but what the hey).
So tonight I got up on a ladder and brought down the shoebox of photos marked "1900-1940." Curling black-and-white pictures of my grandfather, great-grandfather, and uncles in the uniforms of WW I; one photo of great-uncle Max recovering in a military hospital in 1917 from being shot and gassed. But here is a wonderful photo of my great-great-grandfather, with monocle and vandyke beard, a lawyer and landowner in Baden. He is dressed in rustic hunting clothes, standing on a country lawn around 1908, surrounded by his family; it looks like a still from a Merchant-Ivory film, or a Sargent sketch: the younger boys and girls have sailor shirts and straw boaters. My great-grandmother, the oldest child, stands next to her first, Jewish, husband (a justice of the peace), who is in white linen, with a watch-fob: not for him the careless dress of a rural holiday. On the grass among the tea-things is my grandmother as a toddler, and 6 other children, all posing for the camera; a gamekeeper and a maid are in the background.
Here is a set of 4 photos of a dashing, unknown blond man in the uniform of the German air corps, leaning on the struts of a biplane in 1915, one booted leg cocked. Mysteriously, a note on the back in my great-grandmother's impossible Gothic script says he was a suitor, though she was 10 years married by then.
Here are my grandfather and his brother in Freiburg in 1919, in a sepia group photo of about 20 young men in the uniforms of the Freikorps. At first this makes no sense to me: The Freikorps were quasilegal paramilitary corps, formed when the Treaty of Versailles prohibited Germany from rebuilding its army; they were nationalistic and rightwing; the forerunners of the Stormtroopers. But not in 1919. My grandfather fought in WW I on the Russian Front; after the war the Freikorps skirmished with the Soviets and the Poles, but this would have been seen by so correct a German as my grandfather as a patriotic action. Apparently he subscribed for a time to the idea of Greater Germany--enough, anyway, to wear a uniform again, for a little while. Like most of the Great War generation, he did not talk much about that time, but when he was very old, he showed me his Iron Cross, and the letter of award that had come with it. After the war, Germany and its military were in such disarray that they did not get around to awarding medals for many years. One of the first things Hitler did on acceding to the chancellorship was to woo the army (and reopen its festering anger at the shameful peace of 1918) and so my grandfather's medal for valor (3rd class) was awarded him by the Nazis in 1933, over the name of the Reichenau and the Reichswehrministerium, and signed "Heil Hitler." My grandfather told me that anyone who was wounded got the Iron Cross 3rd class; no valor was involved.
And here is a photo from the 1930s of a smiling, dumpy blonde woman on in riding togs, sitting aboard a handsome thoroughbred horse--herzliche gruesse von Baby Mecklenburg, it says: Babette, Duchess of Mecklenburg. "We met her in the summers in Starnberg," says a note on the back.
Smiling college friends got up in Bavarian dirndls and lederhosen, grinning on an inn balcony in--yes--Berchtesgaden, of all places. in 1923. This is the next generation: my grandmother and her boyfriend, later husband. I look more closely. That was the year of the hyperinflation, when the Reichsmark went from being worth 4 to the dollar to 130 billion to the dollar, and prices doubled between breakfast and lunch. But people still took vacations, apparently, for here is a happy group laughing on the ski slopes above Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and again, lifting champagne glasses at Davos: it is someone's birthday.
Those Catholic brothers-in-law of Jewish wives despised the Nazis; the one who escaped to Paris with his wife kept her from the hands of the SS by brandishing a revolver on the morning in 1938 when they came pounding on the door; an hour later they were on a train over the border. But here is a photo of the handsome sister of the other brother (my step-great-grandfather): she married into the Röchling family, founders in the 19th century of one of the great Saarland steel manufacturers that the French wanted--and briefly got--after WW I. 20 years later, Röchling built the tanks that decimated France. Here she is with her arm around my great-grandmother's shoulder, on a promenade at the pretty lakeside resort of Tegernsee in 1925; they are wearing the bathing costumes of the era. After the war the head of Röchlings and his fellow directors were tried and convicted of war crimes: slave labor, among other things. But Rochling Steelworks still exists, and thrives today; and her daughter, my somewhat distant cousin by marriage, is still alive, an elderly lady with a great sense of humor and a vintage 1932 Rolls Royce; she is very wealthy indeed. And yes, here they are: mother and daughter, in floorlength satin and long fox furs, guests at a formal wedding. They are standing with the unidentified bride, in white lace, who leans on the arm of her new husband, handsome in his officer's uniform. On the back is written "Matthäus Kirche 24 Juli 1943." That makes it Berlin, a fashionable church in the Tiergarten that was destroyed two years later (though it has since been rebuilt): http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/planen/staedtebau-projekte/kulturforum/de/einrichtungen/matthaeuskirche/index.shtml.
And here is a signed photograph of Oswald Spengler, author of "The Decline of the West," and a friend of my great-grandfather, a member of the intellectual circle of Munich in the interwar years. The book is now almost unreadable, and pretty thoroughly discredited, with its reactionary notions of High Cultures and the inevitable cycles of history, and its romantic Wagnerian sense of the Twilight of Europe, but nonetheless I like this picture of a stolid, studious, well-intentioned writer, autographed in the manner of the period. Another eminent friend from that circle, the illustrator and theater artist Emil Preetorious, who designed Wagner operas at Beyreuth, also has left a signed photo from the 1920s, but it is very odd: in it he lies full-length on the carpet, gesturing with one contemplative hand to what I think must be a Greek cup or dish. At least I hope so, but it's hard to tell.
Unless they are professionals, people only take photos when they are on holiday, smiling, in groups, arms wrapped around knees at the beach, squinting into the sun; leaning their elbows on the table among the wineglasses at a party, heads tilted; standing with stiff sobriety in their best clothes and jewels at ceremonies; propping their children on their laps, pointing to a puppy; or huddled against the wind in heavy coats to say goodbye at a train station. They do not take photos in the midst of a crisis or under grueling fear and constraint. Except for that one wedding in 1943 I have no photos from Germany from the war years. The American photos show people who got away: standing on a lawn in Chicago in 1940, tennis racquets under their arms; eating lunch on a terrace in California in 1942; playing in the summer surf in Michigan in 1944.
Photos don't show the things one has lost, or left behind.
