Translated from Rolf Gutte/Freerk Huisken, Alles bewältigt, nichts begriffen! Nationalsozialismus im Unterricht. Eine Kritik der antifaschistischen Erziehung, VSA-Verlag, Hamburg, 2007, p. 84-78.
The people – unwilling participants
Almost half of all Germans voted for Hitler in 1933 and helped him to power by casting their votes. And support for his policies continued in the period that followed. Even textbooks cannot deny this fact. However, they do not simply take it as a simple fact that suggests that at the end of the Weimar Republic, alongside indifference and opportunism, alongside rejection and skepticism, there was a growing political interest in the National Socialist program among the German people and that many of them pinned their nationalist hopes on the Nazi slogan “Germany awake!” Rather, this fact is obscured with all sorts of analyses and interpretive explanations in order to cast a better light on the reputation of the same people who built a democratic state after 1945. If the understanding look back at the political “immaturity,” the ingrained traditions of obedience, and the authoritarian thinking of the Germans during the Weimar Republic had already signaled a great deal of understanding for their shift to National Socialist pledges, this way of looking at things runs into difficulties in the period after the National Socialists took power. Shouldn’t the gullible electorate have at least recognized the “true face” of the new rulers after 1933, especially since they were putting the people to the test with all kinds of “undemocratic measures”? In view of the public persecution of Communists and Social Democrats, the Enabling Acts, the persecution of Jews, the elimination of labor unions and the ban or dissolution of all the Weimar parties, shouldn’t a storm of indignation have broken out among the German people? Nothing of the sort happened. Even the textbooks note “the extraordinary success of the National Socialists in referendums ... and a fundamental agreement among broad sections of the population with most of the goals of National Socialism.” [35]
The Germans’ enthusiasm for the new “national community,” for the “back-home-to-the-Reich” of German compatriots into “Greater Germany,” for the “Labor Front,” the diplomatic successes of the state leadership, and also the intoxication of victory in the face of victorious “blitzkriegs” is undisputed. How does all this fit together with the established judgment of democratic posterity that the Nazi regime was a reign of terror, an unjust regime that plunged Germany into the darkest period of its history?
How, textbooks repeatedly ask, can the agreement between the people and the leadership be explained? This artificial riddle arises because the simplest and most obvious answer to this question is not allowed. The fact that the declared agreement between a people and a political leadership is explained by the political will of the citizens only applies – according to the textbooks – to democratic conditions. The re-election of Helmut Kohl or his removal from office are evidence of clear political majority decisions made by the electorate with will and consciousness. However, this simple, almost tautological reference to the will does not apply to anything that citizens did under fascism – with the exception of the resistance to Hitler, of course. What they did and consequently wanted back then, they could not have wanted, is the explanation given. After all, who could want such atrocities, approve of such crimes in theory, and be willing to participate in them in practice?! Certainly not the Germans. Hence, the textbooks are certain, their agreement must have been produced against their true will through all kinds of manipulative influences and unfavorable circumstances that they obviously could not change. The intellectual supporters and accomplices of fascism are thus declared to be victims – in other words, participants against their will.
This puts the question “how could it have come to that?” on the agenda in a completely new way: it is not a question of determining what the Germans thought and did at the time, i.e. what they wanted. Rather, the aim is to explain the theoretical and practical judgments of the German people that deviate from what the textbook authors would have expected of them: Why did the Germans fail to immediately send Hitler packing, as was actually their duty? What made the German people not only tolerate and suffer “all this,” but also participate in the implementation of the fascist state program? All the explanations that are asked for are intended to protect the German people from “sweeping” and “hasty” criticism and instead clear the way for “critical understanding.” Charges are sought that exculpate the German people. Contortions are needed in that the most obvious explanation is passed off as the most far-fetched. After all, the young should see Germany as their spiritual homeland and feel a sense of shared responsibility for it. They should not be mistaken in the belief that they belong to the right nation – with the right leadership and the right people.
Anyone who, in the same way as the textbook authors, sets out with the intention of providing evidence to explain the “incomprehensible” to students and at the same time to equip them with a good opinion of the German people cannot avoid an intellectual balancing act: “How was it possible for the National Socialists to largely control, oppress – or win over – the German people?” [36]
So what was it then: terror or propaganda? Did the fascists oppress the people or win them over? For the author, however, both are possible. He can only imagine the German approval of the National Socialist program as the result of lies, deceit, or manipulation. The acclamation, he claims, was not actually genuine! Rather, one must take into account the devastating effects of state terror on the Germans’ will to resist or the psychological terror of fascist propaganda. The ease with which people can be seduced is as important to consider as the sophisticated seduction skills of the leader himself, who in the end also provided an uncanny reason for people to follow him because of the effect of his real or – of course only apparent – successes.
This scholastic concern to exonerate the German people by claiming that they were the victims of manipulation of their will cannot avoid, on the other hand, the inevitable admission that nothing would have happened without the cooperation of the German people. This contradiction has its own logic:
Terror
In the series of arguments that attempt to explain the lack of widespread resistance among the Germans, which is noted in every textbook, reference to the use of violence is at the top of the list. The argument presented to students in different variations is that the individual was powerless against the brutal oppression of the people by National Socialist terror.
They are asked to imagine that the Germans did not offer any notable and successful resistance because of the associated risk to life and limb. Every single opposing German on their own against an overpowering state power? A senseless and life destroying undertaking!
At the same time, however, there is an enormous amount of praise hidden in this idea: the German people, a unique nation of opponents of the regime, would have resisted had it not been so dangerous! The message is that people would have wanted to if they had only been able to: “Since it was not possible to make the political opponent ‘harmless’ with the methods of the rule of law, they [i.e. the fascists] abandoned the rule of law; in its place came the rule of arbitrariness, because nobody knew what could make them politically liable to prosecution and what punishment they might have to expect.”[37]
In other words, a huge number of potential political opponents refrained from opposing the government because none of them knew which of their thoughts and actions were punishable by the new masters. A strange idea: they did not want to tolerate the fascists, but breaking the law was also out of the question for these Germans. Did they still want the fascists to confirm that their opposition to fascism was legal?
Neither one nor the other is true. The verdict on “arbitrary rule” is not correct, nor is the explanation given for the failure to resist convincing. Because if people really didn’t express their displeasure with the fascists out of fear of punishment, but rather came to terms with it, they knew what awaited them if they publicly opposed Nazi rule. It was not ignorance of the consequences of punishment that stopped them from doing so, but knowledge or the opportunistic calculation familiar to every citizen: it is better to somehow get by under fascism than to end up in prison – especially since Hitler also had his good sides. As is well known, in a private assessment of damages, the consequences of punishment were put above the annoyance that fascism caused them.
The claim that the legal system of the Weimar Republic didn’t give the fascists a means of eliminating political opponents is also not true. In reality, they found many legal remedies in the previous state and enacted others on the basis of the Weimar Constitution.
In practice, the Nazi state acted in the same way as any other state, including democratic states, when it came to eliminating disagreeable political opponents, namely through law and order. The National Socialists also left no doubt as to who or what their new rule was directed against, and accordingly made all legally enforced measures public.
This is considered arbitrary by the democratic lover of the law who finds that it is being used for purposes that do not suit him. He thinks of the law as an institution through which his political values are to be enforced. He is just as familiar as the fascists with their “system of injustice” that the law turns a state interest into a force which the citizen must submit to. The fact that parliament under Hitler became an organ of acclamation for his legislative proposals does not change this fact.
The idea of arbitrary rule, which supposedly prevented the people from acting as opponents of the regime, is also discredited by other facts. After all, at the time of the “seizure of power,” there were a number of mass organizations that could have taken action against an emerging fascist state power if they had been prepared to do so as one. As is well known, they were not. Hitler had a relatively easy time with the unions, the SPD and the KPD, not because he passed laws arbitrarily, but because the established state power and the NSDAP’s apparatuses of violence, which had been declared additional state organs, confronted him with a political opponent who – with the exception of the KPD – did not see in Hitler the danger that Hitler, conversely, saw in him. The SPD and the unions were not at all convinced that Hitler’s policies had to be fought immediately and unconditionally.
The claim that the large organizations were paralyzed or had hoped that “the nightmare” would not last long – “The parliamentary opposition was initially disturbed after the arrest of the KPD and some SPD deputies, paralyzed by the pseudo-legal and pseudo-democratic actions of the National Socialists, and eliminated after the party ban. The widespread belief in all political groups that Hitler would not be able to hold on for long then caused the illegally continuing party organizations of the left to act with caution”[38] – is not very convincing because their ‘paralysis’ was already the result of their destruction by the fascists. The fact that Hitler regarded and treated them mercilessly as enemies – regardless of the reservations and hopes, criticism and approval that existed in the ranks of the parties and organizations concerned – is something that couldn’t have remained hidden from them after being banned. So it is downright silly to cite the successes of the reign of terror as proof of the impossibility of opposing it as a political opponent.
Absolute opposition and the consequences for carrying it out were initially rather one-sided: the fascists had long since finalized their elimination plans when their “political opponents” were either still puzzling over the extent of the danger or considering whether they might find points of contact in the socialism of National Socialism. The fact that the unions, for example, publicly celebrated the day that the National Socialists had already renamed “National Labor Day” for the last time on May 1, 1933, instead of starting a strike after Hitler came to power, does not exactly speak for the consistent political opposition of their members. The fact that they were nevertheless banned the following day despite their peaceful celebration does not prove the opposite, but rather that Hitler had plans for the “German Labor Front” that – in his opinion – could not be realized with the existing union organizations and their self-image, but could be realized with German workers.
Overall, it must be said that a functioning state in which people work and study, in which administration and order exists, in which family and leisure life exists, cannot be based on permanent terror and violent oppression of the entire people. It is true that the elimination of political opponents, which cannot be achieved without direct coercive measures, may cause disorder. But whether or not it disrupts the life of the state as a whole depends entirely on the support that this terror finds among the people. For where a majority of the people refuse to obey, civil war takes place, but not the social and state life that characterized the “everyday life” of fascism. Its functioning normality was not possible without a majority of people who were determined to make a national awakening, willing to work and ready to defend themselves.
The textbooks have to admit that most Germans did not feel like resisting at all, neither in practice nor in spirit – in contradiction to their own assumptions about the lack of resistance: “The German people cheered wherever Hitler appeared.”[39]
However, they do not take this as a refutation of their own claim, but rather discover the cheering to be the result of psychological terror.
Psychological terror through propaganda
It was not only physical terror that the people were subjected to at the time, but also psychological terror, a permanent attack on their minds: propaganda, the spreading of lies and the hammering in of nationalist phrases – a permanent manipulation of the mind. At least this is how schoolchildren should imagine it: “Terror and propaganda go hand in hand when a minority wants to gain and maintain power over a people.”[40]
“Undoubtedly, it was the sophisticated system of terror and propaganda that the NSDAP developed under Hitler’s direct influence long before it came to power that brought about the disastrous paralysis of the German will to resist, which enabled the National Socialist state and the party that dominated it to maintain their power until total defeat in a six-year war.”[41]
The idea that terror and propaganda are closely linked can be found everywhere. However, this does not mean that it is correct. Objectively speaking, these are two different and logically distinct methods of influencing the will of the people. Terror aims to break the political will; propaganda aims to convince the people with arguments and evidence and to win them over to the cause of a party or the state. Political propaganda is therefore also used in democracy as a means of justifying the qualifications of a party or its leadership to take or maintain power and to convince the people that their concerns are in the best hands with certain democratic politicians. This well-known fact, which is evidenced by the daily party disputes, political agitation, and election campaigns of the democratic parties, is assessed quite differently with regard to the NSDAP and Hitler’s government policy.
Propaganda back then was not political persuasion, but manipulation and psychological terror. Why is that? This alleged distinction cannot be seen in the methods used. The same means are used in fascism as in democracy: public media and school education, politicians’ speeches and election campaign events, party conferences and party programs. And all media was used to promote goals, to present the fascists’ reasoning to the citizens, and to demonstrate the beneficial effects of policies in such a way that they made sense to them. Yet all of this is said to have been something completely different. Because, from today’s point of view, the fascists wanted to win over their people for criminal purposes, their propaganda is said to have nothing in common with that of democratic parties, but to be part of a “sophisticated system of terror and propaganda” that caused a “paralysis in the will to resist.” The same process is therefore not the same, but the opposite, because it cannot be that so many Germans were actually convinced by Hitler’s program. Hardly any textbook therefore refrains from painting a sophisticated propagandistic horror scenario. One can and should associate “brainwashing” with mental torture methods or the “conditioning” of the masses deprived of their consciousness and will, as if the German people were a collection of Pavlovian dogs who could be trained to behave a certain way by combining and repeating signals. Unfortunately, this excuse also contains an unintended, damning judgment of the Germans: Were they really will-less tools in the hands of a fascist leader? Is it possible that the German people today are not made up of genuine democrats at all, but rather of unconscious followers who, because of sophisticated advertising methods, follow the leadership on the major issues of the nation and willingly tighten their belts at the signal from above?[42] Of course not, say the textbooks, although we must always be aware of the danger. And since we all are, including our politicians, this danger does not seriously exist in a democracy. The idea of manipulation is therefore applied selectively. Nowadays – and the critical student who sees through manipulation knows this too – we are at most “seduced” into consumption by advertising.
Incidentally, the theory of the seduction of the masses through propaganda and advertising, which is commonly known by the word “manipulation,” does not itself do without the assumption of an independently judging mind. It assumes that people are endowed with free will and consciousness, otherwise there would be no need for manipulation to outwit the mind. The images of mass events at which people listened devoutly to the Führer do not represent brainwashing in which the wired brain is mechanically or biochemically manipulated, bypassing the mind. That is, at best, the image that the caricature pushes. Rather, it claims an influencing of thought which has the purpose of eliminating the exercise of independent free will. By freely using their intellect, the citizens are said to have disconnected themselves from it! However, this contradiction does not seem to bother anyone. On the contrary: it is not only used in the false explanation of fascist conformity or “compulsion to consume,” but is also always used whenever it is about warning against fellow human beings and “sects” that express undesirable thoughts and even try to convince others of them. The suspicion is then quickly expressed that manipulation is at work here.
The theory of repetition or habituation is a similar yarn: “Through constant repetition of what the leadership considers necessary to achieve its goals, people’s critical sense becomes increasingly dulled, and they finally believe what may initially have seemed to them to be a lie: in the service of this task – namely to think and act only in the spirit of National Socialism (the goal of all propaganda) – all possible means were used ... ”[43]
On the one hand, it assumes that a “critical human mind” is synonymous with an oppositional mindset among the people, which has become “increasingly dulled through constant repetition of what the leadership considers necessary to achieve its goals.” This is strange in itself. Why should a critically alert mind, of all things, abandon its oppositional convictions and accept “what may initially have seemed to be a lie” to be true when this lie is “constantly” repeated? The number of times a message is repeated does not reduce the amount of untruth recognized in it. Rather, the propaganda gets on one’s nerves. This does not change even if the press is “controlled” and “concentrated.” Unless one wants to claim that people are only capable of critical thought, of seeing through a lie, of proving an argument false, if they are taught to do this by other, e.g. independent and pluralistic, press organs. Leaving aside the question of where journalists actually get their insights from, and not examining whether the local public sphere is actually characterized by pluralism and independence, it should be noted that the manipulation theory is based on the judgment that people are not very good at developing their own thoughts when thinking. This theory claims that the conscious mind is easy to override. However, which thoughts are one’s own and which are foreign, when like it or not all thoughts, even reproduced thoughts, are identifiable by having been thought through by oneself, is again not recognizable in the thought. This sorting is carried out entirely according to the standard of the dominant thoughts: Only desirable thoughts are one’s own, undesirable ones are foreign, manipulated thoughts.
In a speech to the Bundestag on the occasion of the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism on January 27, 1996 – which will certainly find its way into textbooks – the former Federal President Roman Herzog even wanted to explain the approval of the Holocaust by using the theory of habituation: “The effects of this policy were so terrible above all because they crept into public consciousness in carefully measured doses, indeed because they were infiltrated into the brain in a well-dosed way. There was no point of no return at which the leap from discrimination and humiliation to ‘annihilation’ would have been recognizable to everyone. Getting used to the ‘small steps’ helped them look away, and looking away helped them overlook what had happened or what they didn’t want to know about.” [44]
The idea that is being alluded to here is that of a slow-acting poison that is administered in carefully measured doses and that, taken as a whole, produces effects that are not noticeable in the single dose. Although the Federal President will not apply this idea to his own mind, nor will he want to deny that his listeners use their minds independently, it is intended as an image that should make the allegiance of the Germans to Hitler more plausible. It is based on the idea that the great crime of the National Socialists, the Holocaust and the “senseless” total war, could not have been wanted by the average German. At most, says the President, he took part in the “small steps.” Does he really want to claim that the “small steps” were comparable to the harmless dose, i.e. not dangerous and therefore no reason to protest? Is he saying that it was only in light of the “Final Solution” that the Nuremberg Race Laws, the Star of David and the list of prohibitions for Jews could be recognized in retrospect as part of the Nazis’ racist extermination program? Just because wearing the yellow star did not kill a Jew and he survived the ban on owning a radio, there was nothing “inhumane” about it? Are we to understand this to mean that the final consequence of racism had to be carried out before everyone could recognize the racism in Kristallnacht in retrospect?
At the time, not only was everyone aware of the political content of racism – the sorting out of everyone who was “un-German” and “unreliable” and therefore “useless” for the purposes of the nation. The Federal President also knows this: “The gradual escalation in brutality took place in public and could be read about in the law gazettes.”[45] Indeed, that is what happened. So anyone who “got used to the small steps” was not unable to know about the judgment on the Jews spread by the National Socialist state power, but was very aware of it and shared it in principle. Perhaps they distanced themselves internally from the consequences with all their practical consequences – professional bans, destruction of livelihoods, public denunciations, expulsions and extermination. He then considered them “excessive” or “unattractive” and therefore preferred to look the other way. In this way, people mentally and perhaps also practically made common cause with the prevailing raison d'état. A process of imperceptible “habituation” to the unrecognizable evil is therefore a process that is nothing other than approval of the political findings about the Jews.[46] This second-class acquittal, according to which German creatures of habit are said to have accepted the warning signs “Don't buy from Jews!” like brushing their teeth every day, has the major flaw that something is declared to be habitual normality that is supposed to have been a singular monstrosity. And Germans are supposed to have gotten used to it![47] So what then?
The seduction of the people
The fact that the majority of Germans allowed themselves to be won over and abused by a “megalomaniacal” leader and his radical propaganda for “this kind” of state purpose also casts a bad light on this seduced people. Doesn’t successful propaganda, no matter how cleverly orchestrated, ultimately require people who allow themselves to be seduced? On the one hand, yes, even the textbook authors know this. But they also know that there are traditional, inherited “imprints” and “dispositions,” ingrained values and habitual behaviors that work deep inside people, which elude daylight consciousness and reason: “Hitler took up the views inherited from the world of 19th century thinking about the advantages of the authoritarian state, about the omnipotence of the state and the citizens’ duty to submit, about the primacy of power over law. He became the representative of a broad section of the German people who had been brought up and raised in these very ideas...”[48]
While the masses could not escape the manipulative psychological terror because it was deployed with enormous effort, Hitler also somehow, according to information from the Federal Agency for Civic Education, had an easy time with the German people. He only had to “take up” the “traditional views” that had accumulated in the German soul over the course of time: favorable conditions that were “representative of a broad section of the German people” and unfavorable conditions for the German people, who once again had no choice but to go along with it!
The actual reasons for submissively taking part are not analyzed, but on the one hand a submissive attitude with no content is invented and on the other hand the Germans are accused of an equally empty admiration of power as such. But nobody could do anything about it, because everyone was brought up and raised that way. Man is a being who can not only be manipulated against his will by state propaganda, but is also determined by upbringing and circumstances? Shifting to a special ethnic character of the Germans is just as probable as an “authoritarian character” allegedly located in the human psyche, which is supposed to explain why Hitler and his followers were able to command a compliant people. What is striking about this argument is that it does not want to know anything about the actual substantive similarities between national state leadership and a nationalist civic spirit. Criticism of the submissive sense of duty, which always includes loyalty to the state and thus a willingness to make sacrifices and put one’s own interests aside for the sake of the success of the nation, is just as absent as criticism of the corresponding need of citizens for proper leadership by the authoritarian state.
What is presented as the “world of 19th century thinking” and is said to have filled the heads of Germans in the form of “traditional views” is, however, anything but a subservience with no content. Love for Germany, interest in its greatness, and the pledge made to the authorities that one is prepared to make any sacrifice – in other words: pure nationalism – is presented as harmless and as empty as anachronistic thinking and a product of education, and is transformed here into its own historically generated condition of socialization. In this way, the political views of Germans in textbooks become a product that they are not responsible for themselves, but which they have carried around with them as a cultural heritage.
The political ideas of the Germans are ultimately reinterpreted as natural impulses and unconscious currents inherent in man himself: “No one can say of himself that he is free from all this... Hitler is inside us... Certainly not in a brown shirt and with a rubber truncheon – but with commonplace judgments (the Russians are this and that), with pub politics, with the friend-enemy relationship (some are good, others bad), with the devaluation of compromise..., with the sniffing about party bickering... ...with the predisposition to follow.”[49] Aren’t we actually supposed to think of the Germans as a people of secret opponents and would-be resisters who didn’t get a chance only because of Nazi terror, or as victims of manipulative techniques that turned people away from their true convictions? Now the motto is that no one can be sure that “he is free from all this... Hitler is inside us”! So many contradictions are obviously accepted because there is only one thing that matters: to present as many reasons as possible for the Germans’ unwilling participation as an exoneration. If no one can “say of themselves that they are free of all this,” if there is a potential Hitler inside everyone, then the Germans only differ from other nationalities in that they were unlucky enough to have been exposed to a real Hitlerization. The citizens of other countries were lucky at the time, otherwise the fascistic disposition slumbering within them might also have broken out!
This is not specifically German, say the social psychologists, who do not want to attach German guilt to a typically German national character in a racist way – as has become customary in a niche of the German left these days.[50] People generally tend to make “commonplace judgments” about other peoples. In pubs all over the world, they rant about the “friend-enemy relationship” with other nations. They all have a “predisposition to follow.” Exactly, says the fascism researcher, who knows his way around the world of national rivals. And he is right in one respect: the judgments cited are not in fact typically German, but typical of nationalists – of all countries. This does not make them true, nor does the spread of nationalist judgments prove what the argument is supposed to stand for: Namely, that it is a human characteristic, a nationalistic potential inherent in human nature. If that were the case, then no one would know with such brutal precision that as a German he has to run behind the German flag, as a Frenchman behind the tricolor, and as a Russian behind the Russian flag. He would not know why he is not allowed to join forces with nationalists from other countries who run behind other flags in the awareness of their common loyalty to their fatherland. He would not know that nationalism does not unite the nationalists of all countries, but divides them to the point of war.
The leader – seduction personified
This is another learning objective that students find illustrated in textbooks: A Pied Piper stood at the head of state, controlling every subdivision of a cleverly staged representation of state power. This is portrayed as utterly irresistible. The portrayal operates with the familiar basic conviction that only important men make history and that, in the eyes of the people, they are therefore always more than mere holders of state power, more than just character masks of a leadership function that guarantees them credibility and prestige. Because of his suggestive charisma, people fell for him in droves, not to mention the impressive staging of his appearances at Nazi Party rallies, at parades, and in the mingling with crowds that is normal for heads of state.
The textbook authors take this myth-making seriously. They ask: What was so attractive about the Führer’s personality, what made him so charismatic? The fact that there must have been something special about his qualities as a person is proven by the enthusiastic crowds who, as we know, did not hail him as the embodiment of political goals: “The ‘Führer cult’ was zealously cultivated. Hitler’s picture hung in every schoolroom and office... Every day it was hammered into the people that Hitler was the ‘savior of Germany’ or the ‘tool of providence’ ...he lived alone and without needs, only for the good of the people... This propaganda, skillfully fed by Hitler’s public appearances, had a great effect. Many Germans trusted their ‘Führer’.”[51]
“The dictator never missed an opportunity to show himself as a man of the people: sitting next to his chauffeur, with children, with ‘laborers of the fist and the forehead’... He showed himself to be unpretentious, a man who ate simple food, loved big dogs and always worked for the German people.” [52]
The fact that crowds cheered wherever Hitler appeared can be considered a notorious historical truth. It is not disputed in textbooks either, but declared to be a problem. Once again, the obvious fact that the cheerers and the Führer must have been quite similar in their views on national affairs is disputed. This time, the reference to the Führer’s (self-)portrayal with mass appeal serves to convey the message that a seducer was at work. The cult of the Führer, the quasi-religious exaltation of his person into a “tool of providence” who “a stroke of fate” had arranged to save Germany, the perfidiousness of ecstatic mass suggestion through solemn, uniformed scenes, etc., all this is intended to support the argument that the people had become victims of a psychologically engineered mass hysteria. It was not a shared national concern, not agreement on the matter that inspired the cheerers, rather they became victims of a propagandistic effect emanating from the special personality of Hitler: “People’s Chancellor,” himself a worker, sitting alongside (!) his chauffeur, “eating simple food and speaking to workers,” modest in his personal requirements, a tireless man of duty, a simple private in the First World War who was wounded for Germany!
This attempt is also not convincing. Taken on its own, Hitler’s self-portrayal as the “appointed one,” his confidence-inspiring closeness to the people on the one hand and the cult of the Führer exalting his person on the other do not provide sufficient reason for the frenetic “Führer commands – we follow!” Many cult leaders consider themselves to be an emissary of higher powers and feel called to higher things, do not fail to stage the appropriate spectacles, and yet still do not trick the people. The correspondence between private life and public actions, the pure credibility of a person as a personality, does not produce a national mass frenzy on its own. Politicians are not simply measured by the credible consistency of their person with any action, but by the way in which they exercise the highest state office in the interest and for the good of their own nation. Approval of certain political causes always precedes the acclamation of the person who represents them. The program to promote the national cause and the success of its implementation are the yardstick by which the representatives of this highest state office are judged. This is no different in democratic states.
Hitler may have been regarded by the German people as a man of personal integrity. But the masses cheered Adolf Hitler not because of this, but because he pursued the right goals in the eyes of the people and was successful in implementing the concerns of the German nation. For this reason, the Führer appeared to the cheering Germans as a specially appointed person who embodied the national goals of all Germans. Trusting this incarnation of the national interest was a matter of honor, acclaiming and obeying him was a service to the common state mission. Even the “outbursts,” “exaggerations” and Hitler’s “excessive emotionality,” which many later claimed “not to have taken seriously,” as not only the textbooks report, were approved as long as things were looking up for Germany again.
However, to the extent that this success failed to materialize after Stalingrad, the “doubts” about the competence of the supreme leader and commander of the German Reich inevitably increased; and afterwards, even former loyal comrades-in-arms, who still today speak with secret admiration for the Führer’s impressive personality, were convinced that Hitler had gone “too far,” had no limits to his “megalomania,” and had thus abused his high office in order to realize his abnormal psyche. The less national success, the more the person who has to answer for this success comes under fire along with the cause being criticized. To put it the other way around: Hitler’s rhetoric, his posturing and gesticulating, the staging of his appearances with all the pomp, his personal credibility and his rousing determination, the demonstrated leadership qualities that supposedly captivated the German people, would have been nothing but lazy magic, good for cabaret artists and caricaturists, without national success. And it is well known that filmmakers and writers have satirically tampered with the figure of Adolf Hitler in order to make the Führer look ridiculous in the hopes that laughter will “kill him off.” They all exploit the Führer’s failure in a rather mindless way. Not so the textbooks in post-war Germany. Although they too separate the effects of the Führer’s (self-)staging from the embodiment of the national cause for which he stood as Chancellor, they do not do so in order to make him look ridiculous. This is simply not possible if one intends to restore the honor of the German people. For how would the German people look in the eyes of posterity if it turned out that they had fallen for a joke?
Occasionally, textbooks concede an consensus between the Führer and the people that is not due to psychological terror or manipulation. The Führer, it is said, was adept at responding to the private feelings of the people, their wishes, dreams, their natural, completely “normal” need for community and collectivity. The textbooks claim that understandable feelings were shamelessly instrumentalized in the process. The nationalist wishes and dreams of a renewal of German power and strength, the “people's need” for a German national community against all things un-German, are declared to be the quasi-natural content of an apolitical, intimate emotional world that Hitler was able to harness for his evil intentions. As if the need for security in a community could be met by the prospect of spending winter in a trench!
The assumed correspondence between the private feelings and fascist politics therefore only exists when the good German already feels nothing but nationalistically. Only as a politicized subject, whose heart beats German, does he theoretically and ultimately practically make common cause with his leader when the latter enthusiastically proclaims his political dreams of national greatness.
Because Hitler “plunged Germany into misfortune” his personality must be given double recognition. He was not only a gifted orator with charisma, but ultimately a psychopath and criminal who betrayed the people twice, as a person and as an office holder. As a person, he was not at all the person everyone was supposed to think he was and yet did think he was: the credible embodiment of Germany’s great future. According to the textbooks, he was in truth an ambitious charlatan, a power-obsessed provincial politician whose twisted psyche drove him to a megalomaniacal lust for power as compensation for all kinds of socialization deficits. His perverse will to power led him to aspire to the highest state office. And as Chancellor, he betrayed the people because he discredited the highest office that the state and the people could bestow: He lost the war. Such an imposter of national responsibility! That wouldn’t have happened, young people are supposed to think, with party competition and elections every five years!
The successes of the National Socialists
The Führer not only made demagogic speeches, but also achieved something. By virtue of his office, he is even said to have won over the citizens with his successes: “Hitler’s dual strategy of terror and success proved irresistible. In the very first year, 35 concentration camps were set up in Germany and filled with German political opponents. And the successes were not long in coming. The number of unemployed fell rapidly. After just a few years, six million people were actually reintegrated into the economic process: Full employment had been achieved – mainly through rearmament.”[53]
“Hitler built large structures, Reich highways, industrial plants, magnificent buildings, and in time also numerous barracks and air bases. This put money in the hands of people and kept the wheels turning in the factories.” [54]
What does “dual strategy” actually mean here? Are these successes seriously supposed to have been the culmination of Hitler’s mass manipulation? None of this is true. That was his policy and not mass opportunism. And one thing is certain: Such successes always convince nationalist citizens. It starts with the main hit: the Führer provided six million unemployed people with “wages and bread” again. Even today, this “achievement” is seen as an incredibly understandable reason for the masses to have followed the Führer. And all the textbook wisdom about how the people must have been manipulated is no longer of interest. Now valid, good reasons for the Germans’ allegiance are compiled. With Hitler’s “real successes,” the conscious stance of the people is made the criterion for their approval.
The next contradiction becomes obvious: Why did the Germans, who were convinced of the goodness of fascist policies by Hitler’s job creation program, have to be manipulated at all? The textbooks see no problem in this. They add up – at least on the one hand – manipulation and the recognition of Hitler’s state jobs program and arrive at the sum of influencing factors to which people were exposed. The greater this is, the less chance people must have had of escaping the influence of the fascists – even if this sum includes “factors” that made it clear that many Germans did not want to escape fascism at all, but, convinced by its successes, enthusiastically went along with it.
On the other hand, it is also fitting that the success of Hitler’s state employment program is questioned and interpreted as a “strategy” to beguile the masses. In truth, he was concerned with taking advantage of them for war preparations. Hitler did not hide the fact that his gigantic employment program was intended as a labor service for national reconstruction and the “defense readiness” of the German people. He wanted to mobilize the unused labor power of the people for this purpose. There was no talk of a material service to the people. On the contrary: the people were to serve the imperialist state program and nothing else. If the Germans, who toiled for low wages, saw this as the fulfillment of their desire for bread and wages, then they, like their fellow workers today, must have been of the same opinion: The main thing is work – no matter what kind, no matter for what wages, and no matter what purpose it serves. Even back then, the hardship of unemployment made people modest and loyal to the state. Even then, modesty laid the foundation for the equation of the material interests of the people with the political interests of the state. Those who had work and a wage that enabled them to survive also gave their consent to a program that did not include their survival.
It is instructive that today’s textbook authors see this as a “beguilement program.” They consider it a scandal that people’s “elementary interest” in work and bread was exploited for state purposes. It could have been noticed, as they once again switch to the manipulation theory, that their employment was not for their sustenance, but war preparation. The fact that this standard does not apply in a democracy either, that even in democratically administered capitalism sustenance is only secured to the extent that employment follows state interests, which today is called location competition or growth and means business success for German capital, must be kept quiet.
The same nationalist logic is also applied to the successes of Hitler’s Germany in the field of “uniting the nation.” Even in retrospect there is still an enormous amount of understanding for the fact that the Germans of the time were enthusiastic supporters of a reconciliation of all national differences and for a united nation that rolled up its sleeves together. The demand for a unity of people and state is still very close to nationalists today.
The “reunification of all Germans” in an undivided nation has been considered “indispensable” for decades, and “chancellor meetings” are held to ensure social peace in Germany, in which “politicians” and collective bargaining parties conclude solidarity pacts and Alliances for Work. On the other hand, the Germans have to put up with retrospective criticism of their enthusiasm for Hitler's “One People-One Reich-One Leader” because they gullibly trusted in an only “apparent” unification of the nation and thus applauded a false statesman and his goals. They failed to see the other side of the coin “behind the façade,” the accusation goes: “The apparent ‘unification of national forces’ led to an outbreak of highly charged excitement... Behind the façade of ‘national renewal’, Hitler unhesitatingly began to destroy the constitutional state and the rule of law.”[55]
“On the streets and squares decorated with black, white and red swastika flags, people rejoiced at the ‘unification of the nation’. Did they forget that the persecutions continued?” [56]
The foreign policy successes of the National Socialists and the Führer’s statesmanship in dealing with the victorious powers of the First World War are also treated according to the same logic. On the one hand, the “Blitzkriegs” were successes that made hearts beat faster and are still the subject of admiration today. On the other hand, they were only “early successes” from which one could have quickly concluded that they served the wrong cause. Once again, this should not be taken from the cause but rather from the failure that was ultimately bestowed on it.
A rather normal people
The riddle of why the Germans allowed these “terrible events” to happen, which is as silly as it is easy to solve, is therefore based on an unsubstantiated assumption. It is this: with a few exceptions, the Germans have never been fascists and anti-Semites; and even if they were perhaps – influenced by their upbringing – no friends of the Jews and convinced fascists, they never freely gave their consent to the program of persecution and extermination of the Jews.
The truth, on the other hand, is that large numbers of Germans approved of the Nazi Party’s anti-Semitism and chauvinism. They did not remain silent because they lacked the courage to express their protest. Rather, they looked on because they had little or nothing to criticize about fascist policies. And in fact, many did not just remain silent out of fear or shame, but shouted “Juda verrecke!”, denounced the Jews in their neighborhood, and reported people who were hiding Jews.
Of course, there were also Germans for whom Hitler went “too far” and who could have imagined fascism without a program to exterminate the Jews. And there were also those who genuinely rejected the persecution of the Jews, the euthanasia program and the preparations for war, and wanted nothing to do with fascism. But even for these two types of good Germans, the riddle posed by the textbooks can’t be solved.
The former engaged in a civic exercise that everyone knows from democracy. They came to terms with the “exaggerated” anti-Semitism by keeping in mind the many “achievements and successes” of fascism, which even the critics found “indisputable.” What staunch Christian Democrat today is an ardent fan of tax increases, nuclear power plants, or social cuts? But he knows how to cite the necessities for them, to name objective constraints, to sniff out the responsibility of third parties, or sees compensatory benefits provided by his favorite party that cause him to “swallow a bitter pill or two.” Such calculations were not unfamiliar to the citizen under fascism either: it seemed irrefutable to him that the victorious powers were to blame for Germany’s “plight,” he saw shortages of raw materials and space (“a people without space”) as objective constraints, and Hitler’s successes in the fight against unemployment convinced him. Moreover, Hitler had kept his promise to erase the national disgrace and restore Germany to greatness and prestige!
And those other Germans who were neither party members nor willing to make their peace with the Star of David and concentration camps do not pose any major puzzles either. As if it were something completely out of the ordinary for citizens to keep their discontent to themselves and at most share it with their family or at the tavern! As if, conversely, it were encouraged and customary in a democracy to immediately go public with any anger over the ruling policy and stubbornly vent it until it is resolved in a satisfactory manner! Yet nationalist opportunism is the first virtue demanded of the citizen. Even provided with reservations, the citizen’s submission to the – more or less total – authority of the state still thrives on the need to hold onto the opinion that one’s own state, which is responsible for one’s own affairs, is ultimately not so bad. Why should this basic civic pattern not have been reliable under fascism?
And finally there was always recourse to the nationalist ideal as a last resort for critics: in 1933, one could think that “the nightmare” would soon pass, later adopt the enlightened view that Hitler would sooner or later have to normalize under pressure from the German people, and finally accept the verdict that this policy was dishonorable for Germany. So there were already those who went along against their will. But it is precisely their practical opportunism that testifies to the fact that there was certainly no lack of people among the Germans who went along with it out of conviction.
The unwanted lesson:
The self-confident obedience of democratsWhat students are supposed to learn:
The German people, students learn, never really wanted fascism. Like other peoples, the Germans were no angels. But fanatical racism and mass murder were far from their minds. The fact that they nevertheless followed the Führer – apart from a few convinced fascists – was because he manipulated their will, broke their resistance with terror, and beguiled them with illusory successes. This is how people ran into their misfortune against their will. Students learn that this cannot happen in a democracy. For democracy is designed to translate the will of individual citizens into policies and to bring them together for the common good. There is no fundamental antagonism between them and political rule. This only exists in fascism or totalitarianism. In a democracy, the citizen is still the sovereign.
The following insights, on the other hand, are undesirable:
1. The majority of German citizens followed Hitler’s policies, just as the majority of them followed and continue to follow the policies of all the post-war governments. There is no other reason for this than the fact that, unfortunately, the policies made by Germans in the name of Germans for Germany always make sense to them. And that is why! They feel themselves to be Germans and therefore rule out the possibility that ordinary German politicians could ever deliberately damage them.
Any damage to their interests can therefore only be caused by objective constraints, the world market or foreign countries. The idea of a national identity, conceived as the fundamental identity of the political will of all Germans, contributes to the fact that German politics has this bonus. This is why citizens do not follow the leadership blindly, but rather in the political conviction that the central national goals of politics are in order. It is their nationalism that tells them that the political leadership, which promises that Germany will do well, deserves their approval. That is why the majority of them voted for those Weimar leaders who wanted to wipe out the stain of the lost First World War, because they too saw this defeat as a disgrace. That is why they cheered Hitler, because he not only declared the “shameful Treaty of Versailles” null and void, but also wanted to make the German nation the leading world power. And so today they are proud of their governments – regardless of their party composition – which have “reunified” Germany and established it as a firm and respected player in the Western alliance, as a major European power and as a global economic power. They are proud of the goals the nation has achieved – even if they have to pay a price for this, which could make it clear to them that for the majority of German citizens, national and private welfare are not compatible.
2. Citizens of nation states have become accustomed to taking a rational view of the political and economic system in which they live.
It is not customary to test it thoroughly for its compatibility with private well-being before giving or withholding approval. Rather, citizens generally behave as if they want to prove the false theories about a pre-state national identity correct, as if there really is a common nature between people who speak the same language, belong to the same culture, and have the same history that existed before any state-forming grouping of people. So they make a prejudice into the maxim of their actions and put their trust in German politicians simply because they are also German. But there is no justification for this trust. The fact that politicians seek and exercise power over them on the grounds that they are pursuing voters’ interests should give rise to the deepest mistrust. For it is neither obvious that citizens need politicians who pursue their well-being on their behalf, nor is it obvious that this requires rule over them: an institutionalized central power that guarantees the “representatives” the political freedom to have the upper hand in the event of a disagreement between national and private citizens' interests. Rather, it is more likely that this dissension must exist as a veritable social contradiction if a government secures power over the country and its people in a monopolized form.
3. However, it is not made easy for citizens to subject the nation-state system in which they live to an unprejudiced examination. The holders of political power do not think of giving their young a kind of state-free time for reflection, after which they can decide for or against the German state, for or against democracy and capitalism, for or against statehood in general. It is the other way around: as long as they have the right parents or belong to the right race, all newborns are recruited as citizens. They are then Germans because they have been made Germans by state decree, and have to submit to German laws and all the constraints that democratic capitalism has established. A natural event, birth, thus becomes the political process of incorporation which then applies for life, unless another state uses force to ensure that the German becomes a Frenchman, Pole or Czech. Linguistic, cultural or historical borders are not respected, but rather shifted and thus become a new foundation for old ideologies about pre-state national identities.
Citizens who set out to become clear about their interests and who look around the world for the means to realize them thus find specifically ordered conditions in modern nation states to which they must first submit. They have to respect the will of the rulers, even if they can object to it.
As children and adolescents, they have to obey their parents, even if they do not understand why kinship is a reason to obey a father who has a controversial opinion on pretty much all aspects of life. They have to go to school and devote themselves to their lessons, even if they don’t like the curriculum or studying for grades. And they have to obey all the rules that follow from the state’s protection of private property, especially if their own is not worth mentioning, and they therefore view this number 1 social rule with skepticism.
4. It is part of democracy that it presents all state obligations, against which there is no possibility of appeal, as offers to the free will of the citizen. Democracy does not dictate which of his wishes are permitted and which are forbidden, what he should or should not be, which school he should attend and with whom he should socialize. Only the fact he must attend school, the fact he needs money for every need, even if he doesn’t have any – that is certain. It assigns him neither a place of residence nor a job, neither an income nor a life partner. Rather, he may decide everything for himself once he has accepted that he needs a job because of the money and that he has to pay rent for an apartment. In making his free decision, he must take into account conditions that quickly prove to be limits to his interests. These arise from the assertion of undisputed state authority, from the safeguarding of private property in the means and results of production, and from the protection of the integrity of the person. They are structured in such a way that the citizen quickly comes to see the freedom to pursue his own desires as an obligation to serve the interests of others. And that’s precisely the joke of this form of bourgeois society:
■ Anyone who has set themselves the – still quite modest – life prospect of finding a satisfying and well-paid job, of having their own home in which they can be happy with their loved ones, but finds out at school that their performance does not allow them to attend the schools that grant the right to enter the market for the better-paid professions, has received their first lesson in democratic capitalism. It is this: since the mode of production primarily requires cheap laborers, the education system is set up in such a way that the majority of young people are excluded from further and more promising educations. The professional goals in life are therefore only valid in practice if this sorting confirms them. If not, then they are not valid. No one’s career aspirations are forbidden by the state, and no one is forbidden a career goal because of their background. Competition always ensures that the right people in terms of quality and quantity remain. Those who have not achieved their goal can then console themselves with the ideology that this is due to their lack of motivation or ability. No one should accuse the democratic system of not giving them a chance.
■ Anyone who then reduces their career prospects to “factory worker” – neither the new profession nor the workplace is prescribed to him – and finances what remains of their desire to own their own home with loans that wipe out their income, regardless of how high it is and whether they can find work at all, has learned the next lesson. It goes: Since there is not a single food product here without the producer’s and retailer’s interest in profit being met, all monetary desires must be relativized to the private ability to pay. Since this varies greatly depending on the type of employment – whether you are someone who has to work for someone else’s profit or someone who makes others work for the their company’s profit – many wishes fall into the category of luxuries. Which wishes they can still fulfill then depends again on them and their ability to work or save. No one should say that they did not get their chance in the company or a wide choice on the commodity market, that they did not have the freedom to choose between owning their own home or renting an apartment, raising children or going on vacation, having a seat at the pub or a family life.
Another lesson he learns is that the service that each citizen has to provide to society engrosses every aspect of his life when he looks after his wishes. In this way, the majority of citizens in a democracy exhaust themselves trying to realize their own concerns, reduce them by to “possibilities” altogether, deny themselves a lot, indulge themselves a little, and yet always fulfill other people’s social concerns first and foremost. The increase in capitalist wealth and state sovereignty quickly relativizes the fulfillment of one’s own goals or completely wrecks them.
The freedom to devote oneself entirely to one’s own interests, which democracy not only promises its citizens but actually grants them, has the small catch that it is not accompanied by the provision of the means that people need when they set their private well-being as their goal. They can romp around in the world of commodities to their heart’s content, but they have to respect prices. They are free to apply for a job. But since employment does not depend on the will of the applicant, but on the calculation of the company as to whether it is profitable work, those seeking a job have the dubious pleasure of being able to use this freedom quite frequently. The freedom granted is therefore abstract, i.e. it is separate from everything that gives freedom its desired content in the first place. What is permitted is subject to conditions which, on closer inspection, are not at all conditions for the realization of freely chosen private wishes, but, on the contrary, force citizens to set new goals for themselves in accordance with what these “conditions” allow. The fact that this is also a free decision does not change the fact that it results often enough in a life that people did not imagine: It is dominated by the compulsion to cut corners and serve necessities. No wonder that democratic freedoms are valued more as a value in themselves than as a means of successfully participating in the creation and use of social wealth. They are not suitable for this purpose, nor are they supposed to be. For where wealth exists only as state-protected capitalist private property, its source is the free wage laborer who is “free in the double sense, that he as a free man he can dispose of his labor power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realization of his labor power.”[57]
5. The fact that citizens with “no other commodities” cling to their state which gives them these wonderful freedoms is due to a small but very fatal confusion that they allow themselves and for which this society is the foundation: It is the state guarantee that private interests can be pursued under the conditions of the capitalist raison d'être, which seems to them like a gift bestowed on them by the state. Conversely, the conditions that ensure that they themselves are taken into service appear to them as a service that the state provides for them. In view of the unfettered will of private individuals, the system of capitalist laws appears like an offer that could actually serve the private interests of anyone, if only they would make a sufficient effort. Thus the world, which is organized according to the principle of accumulating money, is also seen as a single collection of opportunities by those who have no source of their own for accumulating money. And where the desired well-being does not materialize, a citizen endowed with opportunities is more likely to blame himself for not having done enough than to ask himself whether he has not doubly misunderstood the matter of opportunities – namely, as a guarantee that his concerns will be fulfilled.
Since, for good measure, no one in a democracy is obliged to concern themselves with “big-time politics” and it is not held against anyone if they confess they are not “very interested” in politics, another species is particularly widespread in this country alongside the politically convinced nationalist: The citizen who has not acquired his trust in the state by dealing with foreign and domestic policies, but who simply clings to the misconception that he has it so good in this democracy because the state gives him every opportunity. However, this “apolitical” nationalist very quickly reveals a political core. If money is becoming increasingly scarce because wages are falling or not being paid and prices are also rising, then good advice is hard to come by. Anyone who then accepts one of the state’s interpretations of their material losses, according to which “we lived beyond our means” and hence the national debt got out of hand, foreign countries are poaching our businesses or foreigners are taking away our jobs, trusts that their own situation will improve if they help their state save money. Then they “tighten their belts” and look abroad to find someone to blame.
In this way, their own material concerns are completely ruined by their politicization. The citizens allow themselves to understand the perspective from which the state views unemployment: Wages are too high, taxes are too low, foreign countries are more successful in cheap production, etc. They then take an interest in the state budget as if it were their own, make idealistic suggestions to companies on how to reduce mismanagement, and suddenly knows their way around the world market where German commodities and German capital are denied the right to succeed. This is how democratic leadership likes the German nationalist – regardless of whether he still hopes that this will ultimately improve his financial situation or whether he already considers it a success when the Deutsche Mark, which he has too little of in his pocket, wins the competition on the money markets.
6. Not just any people, but a people of nationalists – that is what ruling democrats need in order to be able to carry out their policies uncontested and with the consent of those who are enlisted for this purpose. This is precisely why they do not rely on people identifying themselves with them as a people, but rather favor the method of forced recruitment which at the same time always excludes certain people who are deemed unfit for citizenship. And the people who have been turned into Germans understand this when they confuse their lack of alternatives in this matter with a kind of natural necessity and settle into it. Democratic civic nationalism is therefore a form of voluntary obedience to local rule. It attaches so much importance to it because it needs the citizens’ contributions for its national political projects, which simply do not coincide with the welfare of its subjects, and knows that their approval of domestic and foreign policy is a good prerequisite for its success.
Democracy therefore depends on the fact that the abstractly liberated and self-confident will of the citizen deals entirely independently with its submission to highly unpleasant objective constraints and is not infrequently grateful to the founder of freedom for being allowed to participate in its successes.
Something like this can be done without an oath of loyalty to the German nation. Democracy only demands this from the elite of its civil servants. Every civil servant takes it and every recruit knows it to be the pledge of allegiance by which he promises to put his body on the line for the state if necessary. And democratic states also have the whole people take such a pledge – at least in spirit – when they run out of peaceful means in competition with other states, when they are planning an armed conflict, and need the citizens’ “hurrah” even more urgently than before; and a “hurrah” that is no longer for constitutional values, but only for the nation and its foreign policy concerns.
In crisis-free times of peace, this kind of thing is sometimes frowned upon by democrats as “rah-rah patriotism.” When it comes to overcoming state crises in a democracy, this criticism is forgotten. Then approval of the leadership is no longer a matter of free expression of opinion, but becomes a duty. In such exceptional situations, democratic politicians appreciate something that is the rule under fascism.
[35] XII, 287.
[36] Unsere Geschichte Bd. 3, Diesterweg, Frankfurt 1986, p. 151.
[37] Ibid. p. 149.
[38] Zeiten und Menschen Bd. 4, Schöningh, Paderborn 1978, p. 135
[39] Unsere Geschichte Bd. 3, p. 153.
[40] Fragen an die Geschichte Bd. 4, Bielefeld 1971, p. 128.
[41] Didaktischer Grundriß für den Geschichtsunterricht Bd. 4, Paderborn 1969, p. 110.
[42] It is not enough, especiallt for a fascist regime, to bend their will to what is demanded. It expects its subjects to accept what is demanded and to make it 100% their business. And there is no other way to do this than through the use of reason. See the Undesirable Lesson at the end of the chapter.
[43] See: Beurteilen Handeln, Hirschgraben, Frankfurt 1969, p. 115.
[44] Speech of the Federal President, January 19, 1996.
[45] Ibid.
[46] It is no different today: anyone who shared the opinion a few years ago that the Soviet Union was “the evil empire” or the opinion circulating today about the “fascist Serbs” is not only sharing a (mental) judgment, but is also always authorizing their state to act accordingly. It is well known that the sovereign decides and does not ask its citizens when and how internal and external enemies can be fought most successfully. So we shouldn’t be surprised when small steps turn into big steps and even a “leap” in the end!
[47] Does this also apply to the present? So is the new German “xenophobia” okay as long as no foreigners’ homes are set on fire? And is the demand “Jobs in Germany only for Germans” acceptable as long as there are no practical consequences? A strange logic, because the respective end must have its intellectual basis in the “before.” In practical terms: Would today’s opponents of National Socialism actually have any reason to criticize their raison d'état and political morality if Hitler had won his war and not gassed the Jews, but “only” forced them to leave German soil?
[48] Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 22.
[49] See Beurteilen Handeln p. 78 und 80.
[50] This refers to the so-called anti-Germans around the magazine “konkret.”
[51] Fragen an die Geschichte, p. 126.
[52] Unsere Geschichte, p. 153.
[53] Ibid., p. 149.
[54] Der Mensch im Wandel der Zeiten, Bd. 2, Braunschweig 1960.
[55] Grundzüge der Geschichte Bd. 4, Frankfurt 1968, p. 159.
[56] Ibid., p. 161.
[57] K. Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. 1.