No title

Number 144

TELOS

Fall 2008

The Genealogy of Terrorism Introduction Russell A. Berman An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany Jeffrey Herf Mohamed Atta on the Magic Mountain Sean M. McIntyre

3

8 39

“Death to the Enemies of the Revolution”: Heiner Müller’s Versuchsreihe Robert Buch

52

The Sovereignty of the Individual in Ernst Jünger’s The Worker David Pan

66

The Subject in the Danger Zone Helmut Lethen

75

From Folk to Ummah: A Genealogy of Islamofascism Russell A. Berman

82

Response Ability: A Commentary on Berman, Lethen, and Pan Andrew Stuart Bergerson

89

Why Are They So Happy? Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Local Context Arden Pennell

95

Jewish Cannibalism: The History of an Antisemitic Myth Pieter W. van der Horst

106

A. R. L. Gurland, the Frankfurt School, and the Critical Theory of Antisemitism Kevin S. Amidon and Mark P. Worrell

129

Social Power and the Fetishization of Jews: American Labor Antisemitism During the Second World War A. R. L. Gurland

149

Notes and Commentary Critique Today: The University and Literature around 1968 Christoph König

173

American Antigone: Hegelian Reflections on the Sheehan-Bush Conflict Jim Vernon

180

Introduction Islamist terrorism is not disappearing, nor is the challenge to understand its origins. Whenever it began, it catapulted to the forefront of public attention on 9/11 and has been haunting the world ever since. The diversity of its venues makes it a global phenomenon. Successful attacks and foiled plots have taken place in Bali and Bosnia, in China and Indonesia, in Denmark and Germany, in Spain and England, in Israel and Jordan, in Algeria and Argentina, in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, and Tunisia—demonstrating the wrongheadedness of that simplistic thinking that blamed the massacres in New York and Washington solely on U.S. policies. What we face is a worldwide threat defined by a willingness to use extreme violence against civilians while justifying it with appeals to Islam. The local pretexts vary widely, the organizational structures are loose, and the technical sophistication is uneven, ranging from hypermodern high-tech capacities to archaic decapitations, sometimes in the same event. This Islamist terrorism will remain a primary security threat in the coming decades, demonstrably able to adapt and evolve and to benefit parasitically from competition and contradictions in the international system. As frequently noted, the designation “war on terror” avoids naming which terror. This reluctance has weakened efforts to articulate the scope of the conflict and to specify the enemy. Yet it would have been politically disastrous if the West explained its response to Islamism in a language that lent support to its misrepresentation by our enemies as a war on Islam. Still, it is Islamist terror, not terror as such, that is the enemy. There are other networks that utilize non-state violence for political goals—in the name of separatist aspirations, as with the Basques, or for idealist goals, as with some environmentalist groups. Their violence too is illegal, and the respective states attempt to combat it as criminal activity. Islamist terrorism occupies a different space, a gray zone of non-state warfare, drawing on a global vision (unlike local separatist movements), international networks, and a revolutionary-redemptive ideology. Meanwhile, its protean forms elicit multiple responses, from naïve denial—always an appealing pipe dream for those who imagine the world to be without difficulties—to an assimilation into the categories of business-as-usual policies and to a repertoire of repressive police mechanisms, which, while registering some successes, have also threatened to undermine civil libertarian norms. .  See Jean-Claude Paye, Global War on Liberty, trans. James H. Membrez (New York: Telos Press, 2007). Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 3–7. www.telospress.com



   Introduction

Although no response to Islamist terrorism can forego a consideration of its origins, the origins discussion itself can suffer from the same kind of oversimplification that undermines the “war on terror” rhetoric. Just as that terminology refuses to name the Islamist milieu of the perpetrators, suggesting some empty abstract terror, the corollary simplification reduces Islamism to Islam, setting up a one-to-one correspondence between ancient sacred texts and modern murderous acts. Islamism has ancient roots, so goes the argument, and springs afresh from the Qur’an and the Hadith in every act of violence. It is intriguing that proponents of this Islam thesis, critical of terrorism, in effect adopt the claims of the jihadists: those who blame terrorism on Islam endorse bin Laden or Khomeini or—choose you villain—for getting Islam right. Yet their understanding of tradition is terribly simplistic, as if members of any community behaved, regardless of the vicissitudes of history, in transparent adherence to foundational texts with unambiguous and monolithic meaning. Life among signs and symbols is never that simple. The point is that we can distinguish between the politicizing claims and dogmatic pretexts made by the terrorists—ideology in a narrow sense—and their affective attraction to terror. The latter, their commitment to the murder of civilians, to the pain they inflict and the possibility, indeed the desideratum, of their own death, the self-sacrifice of the suicide bomber—all this has other sources, not at all traditionalist or Muslim but at the very core of the modernist experience of the West. The unique character of Islamist terrorism is the asynchronous combination of an appeal to archaic materials, the Salifist dream of a return to the seventh-century Caliphate, and a psychology of terrorist violence that echoes very western contents, the modernist discontent with modernity, the aestheticist rejection of the falsity of bourgeois comfort, and the totalitarian libido of evil. The jihad of terror pretends to be a return to Islamic origins, but in fact it is acting out a lust for indiscriminate slaughter with a good European pedigree. The German example is especially instructive: the birth of terrorism out of the spirit of German violence. Around both World Wars, it was common to believe that Germans and German cultural traditions were antithetical to democracy. This was the conservative German defense of the Kaiser, as much as it became the centerpiece of the critique of the Versailles Treaty: the claim that democracy had been imposed, like a foreign body, on Germany. Meanwhile in the West, the same image, redefined as a pejorative, of the congenitally authoritarian German became standard: as if all Germans were caricatured Prussians. This debate about the incapacity of Germans for democracy notwithstanding, Germany has become a stable, indeed in many ways exemplary, liberal democracy. That unexpected outcome is instructive in the face of claims that the Arab world, or Islamic culture, is immune to democratization or that the notion of an Arab democracy is hopelessly oxymoronic because democracy is merely a western value. Those who make that claim



Introduction   

out of sanctimonious multiculturalism have broken solidarity with the democrats and dissidents languishing in the prisons of Egypt and Iran. Yet before that success story of the twentieth century, the democratization of Germany, came to a happy end, the same country hosted two totalitarianisms, Nazism under Hitler and, after World War II, Communism in East Germany. Modernist culture in Germany includes a strong current of illiberal fascination with violence and sacrifice; and it was in Germany that the largest western terrorist organization, the Red Army Faction (RAF), thrived in the wake of the student movement. It is this subculture of terrorism that contributed to the formation of the suicide bomber: the mixture of ruthlessness and ideology, conspiracy and heartlessness. In some cases, the connection between German and Islamist terror is direct, as in Nazi support for the Mufti of Jerusalem or the RAF’s ties to the Arab world; more generally though, the German case sheds important light on the culture of killing and the subjectivity of the perpetrators. The genealogy of Islamist terrorism leads back to German violence, which this issue of Telos explores. Jeffrey Herf’s essay provides a magisterial overview of the history of the RAF, the terrorist organization that overshadowed German political life for decades, the so-called Baader-Meinhof group. Reading the list of the murdered victims, which Herf properly includes, one cannot help but be struck by the arbitrariness: how individuals going about their everyday lives could suddenly be struck down by the violence of brutal individuals who, invoking ideological clichés and dubious political justifications, seemed primarily intent on demonstrating their own cold-bloodedness and proving their cruelty. The RAF dossier gives no evidence of anguished idealists who ever worried about the ethics of killing in the name of their principles. Such bourgeois doubts never crossed their minds. At stake instead was a performance of toughness, a disregard for sentiments, let alone legality, categories that they could vigorously surpass in the terror of the revolutionary deed. In his introduction to The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre notoriously justified anticolonial violence: “to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remains a dead man and a free man.” Sartre was wrong, and the RAF showed it: its violence only left dead victims and live murderers. Yet as Herf demonstrates, this age of murder also depended on ideology, a dogmatic communism that issued from the ossification of the New Left, amplified by assistance from the Communist regime in East Germany as well as a network of ties to other repressive regimes. (As the war in Iraq winds down, it is worth remembering that RAF fugitives found safe haven in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad, with its long history of hospitality for terrorists.) This magnetic attraction to the Soviet bloc went hand in hand with .  Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 22.

   Introduction

antisemitism: as the Marxist hostility to the “bourgeoisie” and its economic forms transformed into an existentialist disdain for bourgeois life, violence toward Jews became the ultimate proof of revolutionary virtue. Terrorism pretends to pursue substantive goals, be they political or religious, but actually has little to do with either. Instead it plays out a grim existentialist drama, an animosity to normalcy, a disdain for comfort, and a contempt for human happiness. A group of essays traces the emergence of the revolutionary New Man as an agent of this cruelty out of the crucible of European modernism in its German variation, and it is this New Man who prefigures the contemporary terrorist. The conservative revolutionary hatred for the Weimar Republic, with its disdain for liberal democracy, left an affective legacy that, combined with anti-colonial ressentiment, turned into jihadist anti-Americanism. Sean McIntyre considers the engineering student Mohammed Atta in Hamburg in relation to a fictional engineer, Hans Castorp, the hero of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: Castorp famously encountered the temptation of terror in the figure of Naptha, modeled on the revolutionary Communist Georg Lukács. Unlike Atta, Castorp is able to resist, but the novel registers the transformation of an aestheticist sympathy with death into a desire for murderous violence and suicide. The Communist lineage then leads through the work of the East German playwright Heiner Müller, heir to Bertolt Brecht and, as Robert Buch demonstrates, a dramatist intently focused on the centrality of death and sacrifice in the logic of revolution. David Pan traces the conservative-revolutionary path through Ernst Jünger’s writings by showing how he posits a new form of subjectivity, emancipated from the constraints of humanist culture. (Telos Press will soon issue a translation of Jünger’s On Pain, in which he describes this transition from liberal sentiment to an ethos of detachment and placid objectivity, a psychological profile that anticipates the mentality of terrorists.) Similarly on the historical Right and at times expressing enthusiasm for the Nazis, the poet Gottfried Benn invoked a heroic subjectivity that, as Helmut Lethen shows, thrives in proximity to existential danger, the antithesis of bourgeois security. My own essay uncovers the genealogical connection between this Nazi culture, the magnetic pull to murder, and Islamism: as Matthias Küntzel has shown in Jihad and Jew Hatred, Nazi ideology opportunistically infected Arab anti-colonialism but thereby transformed it, imbuing it with an eliminationist antisemitism and a deep-seated anti-modernism, neither of which would have been necessary components of a consistent resistance to British imperialism. The “folk” of German völkisch ideology became the Ummah, the pan-Arab and then .  For a Nietzschean critique of this death cult and hostility to life, see Jay A. Gupta, “Freedom of the Void: Hegel and Nietzsche on the Politics of Nihilism: Toward a Critical Understanding of 9/11,” Telos 129 (Fall-Winter 2004): 17–39. .  Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11, trans. Colin Meade (New York: Telos Press, 2007).



Introduction   

pan-Islamic collective that surpassed any national institutions in which the categories of a liberal public sphere might have developed. Andrew Bergerson provides a reply to three of the essays, in which he foregrounds an alternative category to the culture of terror: responsibility. Whatever the political pretexts of the suicide bomber may be, whatever political ideals may be invoked, the core message of the terrorist event is always the refusal of the perpetrator to take responsibility for the consequences of the deed. Heroizing the moment of the deed is an excuse for avoiding the future with its burden of mundane life: in that sense, suicide is the easy way out. Arden Pennell reflects on the legacy of the Nazi killing-machine, the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and how it has been strangely integrated into the normalcy of the metropolis. Antisemitism is inextricably wrapped up with modern and postmodern terrorism. Pieter W. van der Horst’s essay uncovers the ancient roots and their current ramifications. He wrote this lecture as a valedictory address on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Utrecht but faced pressure to omit the final section, included here: van der Horst explores the connections between the antiquity of the blood libel and contemporary antisemitism in the Muslim world. Antisemitism was of course always a central concern for the Frankfurt School. Kevin Amidon and Mark Worrell survey the work of A. R. L. Gurland, a lesser known member of the group, with a particular focus on the character of antisemitism in the American labor movement. The example of his work included in this issue of Telos demonstrates, methodologically, a capacity for empirical research (typically underestimated in standard histories of Critical Theory) as well as the nature of the prejudices that were present in the working class during the war years. Nonetheless, Gurland (and Paul Massing) expressed cautiously optimistic views about American attitudes, in sharp contrast to the bleak pessimism of Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The lesson: prejudices and ideologies were not permanent then, nor should we assume that they are today in the milieu that generates terrorism. In the Notes section, Christoph König contributes to the discussion of the 1968 legacy with regard to the politics of literary studies around Adorno and Peter Szondi (discussed at length in Telos 140). Finally, Jim Vernon takes a parting look at the anti-war movement and its iconic representation, reading Hegel’s account of Antigone into the dramatic dialectic between Cindy Sheehan and George W. Bush. Next Telos appears after the election. Russell A. Berman

An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany Jeffrey Herf It is best to begin with the obvious. This is a series of lectures about murder, indeed about an age of murder. Murders to be sure inspired by political ideas, but murders nevertheless. In all, the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, hereafter the RAF) murdered thirty-four people and would have killed more had police and intelligence agencies not arrested them or prevented them from carrying out additional “actions.” Yesterday, the papers reported that thirty-two people were killed in suicide-bomb attacks in Iraq, and thirty-four the day before, and neither of those war crimes were front-page news in the New York Times or the Washington Post. So there is an element of injustice in the amount of time and attention devoted to the thirty-four murders committed by the RAF over a period of twentytwo years and that devoted to the far more numerous victims of radical Islamist terror. Yet the fact that the murders of large numbers of people today has become horribly routine is no reason to dismiss the significance of the murders of a much smaller number for German history. Along with the murders came attempted murders, bank robberies, and explosions at a variety of West German and American institutions. The number of dead could have been much higher. If the RAF had not used pistols, machine guns, bazookas, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), remote-controlled .  This article was originally delivered as the opening lecture of the lecture series “The ‘German Autumn’ of 1977: Terror, State, and Society in West Germany,” held at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, on Thursday, September 27, 2007. .  The Red Army Faction, or RAF, was also often referred to as the “Baader-Meinhof Gang” with reference to two of its founding members, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. Meinhof’s leadership role was surpassed by others. The group referred to itself as the RAF, and I will use that term here. Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 8–37. www.telospress.com





An Age of Murder: ideology and terror in germany   

bombs, and airplane hijackings, and if the West German radicals of the 1970s through the 1990s had only published turgid, long-winded communist manifestos, no one would have paid them much attention at the time. I doubt that the German Historical Institute would have decided to sponsor a series about Marxist-Leninist sects of the 1970s. First, to understand the impact of the RAF, we need to expand our focus in time and space. The periodization of West German terrorism was not limited to the German fall of 1977. The RAF began in 1970 and did not dissolve until 1998. It waged an almost thirty-year war against the Federal Republic of Germany. Moreover, as a number of contributors to Wolfgang Kraushaar’s indispensable two-volume collection, Die RAF und der Linke Terrorismus (in particular Martin Jander, Thomas Skelton Robinson, and Christopher Daase), have pointed out, the RAF must be understood in the context of its connections to the international terrorist networks focused in the Middle East as well as to the Soviet Union. Contrary to the tendency to romanticize the RAF, its international links—and its trans-national link to East Germany—belie efforts to present it as an isolated group. These links were crucial to understanding its political significance. That significance lay in a larger political effort that combined the various motivations of West German terrorists with the efforts of Communist intelligence services to weaken West German ties to the United States and of Palestinian terrorist organizations to weaken or break—or at least raise the cost—of West German support for the state of Israel. In this sense, the story of West German terrorism is a chapter in the history of the cold war. The RAF wanted to destroy both capitalism and liberal democracy in the Federal Republic in the hopes of giving support to an expected global communist revolution, led by “liberation movements” from Vietnam to the Middle East to Latin America, against global imperialism led by the United States. In those twenty-eight years, more than a thousand police and government officials .  Martin Jander, “Differenzen in antiimperialistischen Kampf: Zu den Verbindungen des Ministerium für Staatssicherheit mit der RAF und den bundesdeutschen Linksterrorismus, ” in Wolfgang Kraushaar, ed., Die RAF und der Linke Terrorismus, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006), 1:696–713; Thomas Skelton Robinson, “Im Netz verheddert: Die Beziehung des bundesdeutschen Linksterrorismus zur Volksfront für die Befreiung Palästinas (1969–1980),” in ibid., 2:828–904; and Christopher Daase, “Die RAF und der internationale Terrorismus: Zur transnationalen Kooperation klandestiner Organisationen,” in ibid., 2:905–29. See also Christopher Andrew and Wassili Mitrochin, Das Schwarzbuch des KGB, vol. 2, Moskaus Geheimoperationen im Kalten Krieg (Berlin: Propyläen, 2006).

10   Jeffrey Herf

worked to capture members of the Red Army Faction. The publicly available files of government investigators and trial records encompass eleven million pages. Work in the archives of the intelligence services of the former Communist states, including those in East Germany, is still in the early stages, while the files of Western intelligence agencies—the CIA, U.S. military and diplomatic intelligence services, the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst), the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt), and the West German Justice Ministry files—will hopefully be made available to researchers in accordance with the thirtyyear rule. Second, the terrorism of left-wing groups beginning with the Tupamaros and the June 2nd movement in West Berlin in 1969, and then evolving into the Red Army Fraction, was a chapter in the history of two major European and German political traditions: communism, and antisemitism. To be sure, many communists and antisemites did not engage in politically inspired murder, but the terrorism that emerged in West Germany in 1969 had its fundamental ideological roots in the communist tradition. German left-wing terrorism is incomprehensible outside that context. In addition, Communist states—East Germany, perhaps the KGB—and movements of the radical left inspired by communist anti-imperialism—most importantly radicals in the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its offshoots— offered money, weapons, fake travel documents, travel assistance, and escape routes. The role of communism, particularly the Marxist-Leninist analysis of fascism that was central to it, is no less indispensable for understanding why the post–New Left sects in Germany, Italy, and Japan were so much more murderous than was the aftermath in the United States, France, and Britain. The communist interpretation of the causes of the Axis dictatorships was that they were the product of capitalism. Hence, as capitalism was reproduced in all three societies—and as many persons who had served the governments of Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany returned to positions of influence in the postwar democracies— the terror groups could draw on a long communist tradition, sustained as .  Butz Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum: die Geschichte der RAF (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2007), p. 17. .  Richard Herzinger, “Deutsch-palästinensische Achse des Terrors,” Die Welt am Sonntag, September 2, 2007, p. 17. Martin Jander’s research in the Stasi files indicate that the RAF had multiple contacts and forms of assistance from the East German intelligence services. See Jander, “Differenzen im antiimperialistischen Kampf.”



An Age of Murder: ideology and terror in germany   11

well by the existing Communist regimes, including East Germany, which described and denounced Italian, Japanese, and West German democracies as “fascist” or “neo-fascist” governments. Moreover, and very importantly, the Vietnamese Communists’ Tet Offensive was a military failure and a propaganda success for the international Left, which interpreted it as evidence that the United States might be defeated in Vietnam. Third, this age of murder was also a product of the intersection of antisemitism with left-wing radicalism. Indeed, as Kraushaar among others has noted, a peculiarity of the German—but also of the Italian and Japanese—terrorists of the 1970s and 80s was its close links to Palestinian terrorist groups. Indeed, he makes a good case that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became even more central for West German radicals than did the war in Vietnam. The placement of a bomb by the West Berlin Tupamaros in the Jewish Community Center in West Berlin in 1969 and the 1992 attempt by the RAF to blow up a bus in Budapest filled with Russian Jewish émigrés on their way to the Budapest airport and from there to Israel are two antisemitic acts that serve as starting and end points to the age of murder. The writing of history often entails an injustice insofar as we pay more attention to the perpetrators of crimes than to their victims. Tragically the latter often vastly outnumber the former, even when both numbers are considerable. The commentaries about the RAF suffer from this injustice as well, so that the names of the most prominent killers become familiar while the identities of their victims sink into oblivion. At the many trials and then in some recent books, such as those by Butz Peters and Anne Siemens, the family members, friends, and colleagues of the murdered have rescued their memory from oblivion. So, before we turn to historical analysis or avoid the essential with a flight into theories and causal analysis, I think it appropriate to recall the names of the people murdered by the RAF and to indicate when, where, and how they were murdered. The RAF dismissed them as “pigs” or, in more intellectual moments, as “character masks” for .  For analysis of these comparisons, see Dorothea Hauser, “Deutschland, Italien, Japan: Die ehemaligen Achsenmächte und der Terrorismus der 1970er Jahre,” in Kraushaar, Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, 2:1272–98; and Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2004). On the centrality of anti-fascism in the history of twentieth-century communism, see François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000).

12   Jeffrey Herf

capitalism. Not one of these people had done anything to deserve having their lives cut short and their families and friends shattered: 1.

Norbert Schmid, 33, October 1971, policeman in Hamburg, shot while checking the identities of two RAF members.

2.

Herbert Schoner, 32, December 22, 1971, police officer, shot by the RAF in the course of a bank robbery in Kauserslautern.

3.

Hans Eckhardt, 50, March 3, 1972, police detective (Kriminalhauptkommissar), shot to death in the course of the arrest of two members of the RAF, Manfred Grashof and Wolfgang Grams, in their safe-house apartment in Hamburg.

4.

Paul A. Bloomquist, 39, May 11, 1972, First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army, murdered when the RAF set off a bomb in the Main headquarters of the U.S. Army in Frankfurt.

5–7.

Clyde R. Bonner, Captain in the U.S. Army; Ronald A. Woodward, specialist in the U.S. Army; and Charles L. Peck, also specialist in the U.S. Army, all killed by the RAF’s bomb attack on the European headquarters of the U.S. Armed Forces in Europe on May 24, 1972.

8.

Andreas von Mirbach, 44, May 24, 1975, military attache of the German Embassy in Stockholm. Shot several times at close range by RAF member and thrown down a set of stairs in an effort to compel the West German government to release previously imprisoned members of the RAF.

9.

Heinz Hillegaart, 64, May 24, 1975, the economics attaché in the Stockholm Embassy, shot in the back of the head and killed by the RAF in the embassy seizure.

10.

Fritz Sippel, 22, May 7, 1976, police chief of the town of Spendlingen (near Offenbach), shot in the head by an RAF member in the course of a check of identity papers.

11.

Siegfried Buback, 57, April 7, 1977, the Attorney General of the Federal Republic (Generalbundesanwalt) from 1974 to 1977, murdered in his official car on the way to work by an RAF member firing a rapid-fire weapon from a motorcycle.



An Age of Murder: ideology and terror in germany   13

12.

Wolfgang Göbel, 30, April 7, 1977, Buback’s driver, murdered on the same day and in the same way.

13.

George Wurster, 33, April 13, 1977, in charge of chauffeurs of the Attorney General’s office. He sat next to Bubeck in the back seat and died of his bullet wounds a week later.

14.

Jürgen Ponto, 53, July 30, 1977, chief executive of the Dresdner Bank (Vorstandssprecher), shot to death with five bullets fired at close range by RAF members Christian Klar and Brigitte Mohnhaupt in his house in Oberusel. His wife, Ignes Ponto, witnessed her husband’s murder.

15–18. On September 5, 1977, the RAF kidnapped Hanns-Martin Schleyer in Wuppertal-Elberfeld. Schleyer was president of the National Association of German Employer Groups (Bundesvereinigung Deutscher Arbeitgeberverbande), the main national association of German big business. Schleyer had been on an RAF hit list found by the police and thus had extra security. The kidnapping, in which about twenty members of the RAF participated, began with a massacre, carried out with machine guns and machine pistols, of the drivers of his two-car convoy and his body guards. They were: Heinz Marcisz, 41, Schleyer’s driver; Reinhold Brändle, 41, driver of Schleyer’s second security car; Helmut Ulmer, 24, a police officer in the accompanying car; and Roland Pieler, 20, a police officer who was sitting in the backseat of the security car. Both Brändle and Pieler’s bodies were riddled with over twenty bullets. 19.

Arie Kranenburg, 46, September 22, 1977, police official (Hauptwachtmeister) in Utrecht in the Netherlands, shot by RAF member Knut Folkerts in a car-rental office.

20.

Hanns Martin Schleyer, 62, October 18 or 19, 1977, murdered by RAF member with three shots to the head in an as yet unknown location. After a call from the RAF to officials, his corpse was found in the trunk of an Audi in Mulhausen, Germany.

21.

Hans-Wilhelm Hansen, 26, September 24, 1978, police official, shot as he and several colleagues surprised RAF members Angelika Speitel, Michael Knoll, and Werner Lotze when they were engaged in target practice in a forest near Dortmund.

14   Jeffrey Herf

22.

Dionysius de Jong, 19, November 1, 1978, a Dutch customs officer, shot after he and colleagues stopped RAF member Rolf Heißler as he illegally crossed the border from Germany to the Netherlands.

23.

Johannes Goemans, 24, November 14, 1978, a Dutch customs officer who died of wounds suffered in the same shoot-out in which Rolf Heißler died.

24.

Edith Kletzhändler, 56, November 19, 1975, a housewife shot in the throat by a bullet fired by RAF members Wagner, Klar, and Beer, who were firing at police.

25.

Dr. Ernst Zimmermann, 55, February 1, 1985, chairman of the executive committee (Vorstandsvorsitzender) of the Machine and Turbine Union (MTU), murdered by an RAF commando with a bullet to the head in his home in Gauting.

26.

Edward Pimental, 20, August 8, 1985, American soldier. RAF member Birgit Hogefeld met him at a club, then invited him to an apartment where he was shot by RAF members in order to get the use of his army ID card.

27–28. Frank H. Scarton, 20, American soldier, and Becky Bristol, 25, civilian employee, both killed on August 8, 1985, when the RAF used Pimental’s ID card to enter and place a bomb on the U.S. Air Force base in Frankfurt am Main. 29–30. Prof. Dr. Karl Heinz Beckurts, 56, July 9,1986, member of the board of directors of the Siemens corporation and responsible for research and development; and Eckhard Groppler, 42, Beckurts’s driver. Both were killed in the same RAF car-bomb attack in Straßlach in Bavaria. 31.

Dr. Gerold von Braunmühl, 51, October 10, 1986, Political Director of the Federal Republic’s Foreign Ministry, close adviser to Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher (and former member of the German Embassy staff in Washington), shot at close range in front of his home in Bonn. His wife heard the shots and found his body lying in the street.



An Age of Murder: ideology and terror in germany   15

32.

Dr. Alfred Herrhausen, 59, November 30, 1989, Chief executive officer (Vorstandssprecher) of Deutsche Bank, murdered by the RAF on his way to work by a bomb that blew up his armored, chauffeured car.

33.

Dr. Detlev Rohwedder, 58, April 1, 1991, Chief executive officer (Vorstandsvorsitzender) of the “Treuhandanstalt,” the German government office responsible for privatizing and in some cases closing former East German factories. An RAF sniper murdered Rohwedder with a shot into his bedroom window from a distance of about 80 yards. Rohwedder’s wife, Hagard Rohwedder, an administrative judge, rushed to his aid and was shot in the arm.

34.

Michael Newrzella, 25, June 27, 1993, senior officer of the GSG-9 (Border Guards, Group 9), the counter-terrorism unit of the German Federal Police, shot by RAF member Wolfgang Grams in the train station in Bad Kleinen in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

While we do not know of all of the attempted murders that the German police and intelligence services were able to prevent, several notable events are public knowledge: the aforementioned June 2nd Movement placed a bomb in the Jewish Community Center in Berlin in 1970; an unsuccessful attempt on August 25, 1977, to launch forty-two projectiles filled with 150 kilos of explosives at the offices of the Justice Ministry (Bundesanwaltschaft) in Karlsruhe; and of course the hijackings of an Air France plane to Entebbe in 1976 and of a Lufthansa flight to Mogadishu in 1977. You will recall that the Entebbe hijacking was distinctive because the terrorists, including Wilfried Bose, a product of the left-wing scene in Frankfurt, separated Jews from non-Jews at the Entebbe airport. Only the armed intervention of Israeli and German commandos respectively saved the lives of the hostages, with the exception of the German pilot and an ill, elderly Jewish passenger in Entebbe. Were it not for the intervention of the security services and occasional technical errors by the RAF, the toll of those murdered could have numbered well into the hundreds. The history of West German terrorism has been dominated by works about the RAF. In a recent collection of interviews edited by Anna Siemens, Für die RAF war er das System, für mich der Vater: Die andere Geschichte des deutschen Terrorismus (For the RAF he was the system, for me he was

16   Jeffrey Herf

my father), the widows and children of those whom they murdered speak. It is well worth reading. Mirbach’s son, Clais, notes that in their interviews with the German media, former members of the RAF admit to a mistake here and there but all in all often present themselves as courageous idealists fighting for a better world. They remind him of former Nazis who repressed their responsibility after World War II and “did not want to know anything about the grief of their victims.” And that, he continued, was a peculiar twist of history as anger over the repression of Nazism’s victims was one root of the student movement and later of the RAF, and thus one cause of his father’s murder. Corinna Ponto, the daughter of Jürgen Ponto, reflects on how close her mother came to being murdered by the RAF when they killed her father and how lucky she was to be on a trip to London. Noting that all of the RAF’s victims were innocent of any wrongdoing, she stresses that even to speak of “the innocent at all in this connection is a completely false use of language.” She recalls that during the funeral for her father, and despite intense police presence, the RAF set off a bomb in the family’s backyard as a message of intimidation to her mother not to testify in any future trial—this, despite intense police presence. The family left Germany and came to the United States for a time. The employees of the Dresdner Bank in Frankfurt staged a protest march in the center of the city against the RAF. In the reading that I have done for this lecture and in my memory, I do not recall a single large demonstration against the RAF from the Left. So many of the same people who said that the government exaggerated the threat, never went out into the streets to denounce the murderers. Frau Ponto speaks movingly of what a murder means. Her young children were deprived of the opportunity to kid around, argue, and discuss with their grandfather: A part of their history has been stolen. Murder is always also murder combined with robbery (Raubmord). One thing is clear: the RAF perpetrators had and have the opportunity to become “ex-perpetrators.” . . . Whoever has been a victim can never become an ex-victim. Many of the RAF perpetrators are today often spoken of as “ex-terrorists.” This “ex” is .  Clais von Mirbach, in “Wer ist v. Mirbach war die erste Frage der Mörder an die Geiseln,” in Anne Siemens, Für die RAF war er das System, für mich der Vater: die andere Geschichte des deutschen Terrorismus (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2007), pp. 66–67. .  von Mirbach in ibid., p. 67.



An Age of Murder: ideology and terror in germany   17

a privilege. I will not acknowledge that anyone is an ex-murderer or an ex-child kidnapper. But everyone called the people who were in the RAF “ex-terrorists” and today they live in our society. The “ex” gets transformed from a minus into a diffuse plus.

Gabriele von Lutzau, the stewardess aboard the hijacked Lufthansa flight, was asked if she had any interest in talking to one of her former captors to discuss her motives. “I’m not interested in the background, in her history or in understanding her. This woman acted without a single moment of humanity. Her attitude was ‘we are better than you. We’re going the righteous way against Western imperialism.’ Her distorted view of reality is not one I ever want to face again.” This willingness to give voice to the victims is a welcome change from a media obsession—and some now embarrassing radical chic among intellectuals—about the RAF members. The relationship of the West German New Left to subsequent terrorism has aroused a great deal of debate. The following strikes me as fair and plausible. The RAF and its circles of sympathizers were by-products of the New Left and of its disintegration. To be sure, many members of the 1960s Left rejected terrorism. Yet it is no less the case that the New Left attack on Western democracy as a sham, on capitalism as an unjust and irrational system, and on anti-communism as a tool to maintain imperialism by depicting a non-existent threat, all placed Western democracy on the intellectual defensive. Kraushaar has recalled that in September 1967, two prominent leaders of West German SDS (Sozialistische Deutschen Studentenbund) wrote what became known as the Organizationsreferat, or “Paper on Organization.” It was presented to a meeting of SDS in Frankfurt am Main in 1967 and was passed by majority vote. Speaking under the flag of the Vietcong, they argued that “the propaganda of bullets in the ‘third world’ must be complemented by a propaganda of the deed in the metropoles. It is there that an urbanization of rural guerrilla activity is historically possible.”10 Written with a grasp of Marxist theory, it lent intellectual legitimacy to political violence several years before the idea .  Siemens, Für die RAF war er das System, pp. 120–21. 10.  Rudi Dutschke and Hans Jürgen Krahl, “Organisationsreferat,” Diskus: Frankfurter Studentenzeitung 30 (February 1980): 6–9, cited by Wolfgang Kraushaar in “Rudi Dutschke und der bewaffnete Kampf,” in Wolfgang Kraushaar, Karin Wieland, and Jan Phillip Reemtsma, Rudi Dutschke, Andreas Baader, und die RAF (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005), pp. 20–21. On Dutschke and political violence, see also Michaela Karl, Rudi Dutschke: Revolutionär ohne Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Neue Kritik, 2003).

18   Jeffrey Herf

became the RAF’s practice. It also weakened the opposition to the use of violence in larger leftist circles. By 1969, the New Left was making headlines for its disruptions of the German university lectures and exams. Theodor Adorno, co-author of Dialectic of Enlightenment, one of the most influential works of left-wing social criticism of the postwar era, found himself at the center of these disputes. In a letter of June 19, 1969, to Herbert Marcuse—his old friend, fellow member of the Frankfurt School, and by then an international hero of the New Left—Adorno spoke of his depression over the fact that leftist radicals had broken up his lectures twice that summer semester and that he had to call the police to restore order to the Institute for Social Research building. He complained that the radical Left was preventing others from speaking and attacking professors. “The danger that the student movement will turn toward fascism is one I take more seriously than you do. After people here in Frankfurt screamed at the Israeli Ambassador, I’m no longer convinced of the assurance that this has nothing to do with antisemitism. . . . You must once look into the manic, cold eyes of those who even when appealing to us (Fr. School) turn their rage against us.”11 Adorno was not reassured by Marcuse’s rejection of the possibility that the student Left might revert to fascist methods. In a statement of July 17, 1969, he described the efforts of radical students to break up end-of-semester sociology exams, in the course of which one young man physically struck the sixty-six-year-old professor.12 That Adorno had been struck was news. In 1970, professors at the Free University of Berlin, including Thomas Nipperdey and Ernst Nolte, helped to form the Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft. The Bund journal indicated that Adorno’s experience was not unique.13 On three occasions in 1972 and 1973, communist students threatened to shoot a professor of English at the Free University because he 11.  Theodor Adorno, “Nr. 338 Brief an Herbert Marcuse, 19. Juni 1969,” in Wolfgang Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: Von der Falschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946–1995, vol. 2, Dokumente (Hamburg: Roger and Bernhard bei Zweitausendeins, 1998), pp. 651–52. 12.  Theodor W. Adorno, “Am 14. Juli sollten die Vordiplom-Klasuren.” 13.  See Jeffrey Herf, War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance and the Battle of the Euromissiles (New York: The Free Press, 1991), pp. 101–4. The founders of the Bund included Richard Lowenthal, Herman Lübbe, Hans Maier, Thomas Nipperdey, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, Ernst Nolte, Walter Rüegg, Erwin Scheuch, Helmut Schelsky, Frederick Tenbruck, and Ernst Topitsch.



An Age of Murder: ideology and terror in germany   19

would not permit disruptions of his class. In November 1973 at the University of Tübingen, following an open tribunal organized by one communist political group, a professor and two students were physically thrown out of the classroom and onto the floor. In December 1973, after an introductory economics course was disrupted for the fifth time, the president of the university closed the economics department for a week. In doing so he said that the events recalled the beginnings of Nazi domination when Marxist and Jewish professors were attacked by right-wing extremists. In February 1974 at the University of Heidelberg, radical leftists placed a stink bomb in the office of political scientist Klaus von Beyme and sprayed paint on the walls of his office after a lecturer’s contract was not renewed. In the fall of 1976 in Heidelberg, police were called so frequently to keep university buildings open that they were eventually required to remain permanently in the buildings. In December 1976, at the Free University of Berlin, communist students displayed the following opinions about faculty members on posters: “Hang (Horst) Möller,” “(Ernst) Nolte will be liquidated—Möller castrated—Miethke kidnapped—AND THEN studies will be done right.”14 According to a survey of 3,000 university professors by the Allensbach Institute in 1977, 10 percent said they had been attacked in leaflets and posters. Those who had publicly criticized the radical Left reported receiving anonymous, late-night phone calls and threats of physical violence. These incidents reflected an important change in the political orientation of the West German Left that emerged in the 1960s. From above, Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr’s policy of neue Ostpolitik brought with it a reluctance to criticize the Communist government of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. That, so the argument went, would undermine detente. From below, the revival of Marxism led to an association of any kind of anticommunism with Nazism, with the result that the young democratic Left—led by persons such as future German Chancellor Schröder— entered student government coalitions with smaller Communist sects to their left. The era of a popular front replaced that of Social Democratic anti-totalitarianism of the 1950s and early 1960s. In this climate, those who criticized communism or revolution or who used the word “totalitarianism” to describe communist regimes and movements could be dismissed as counter-revolutionaries or fascists. The East German and 14.  Ibid.

20   Jeffrey Herf

Soviet equation of anti-communism with fascism seeped into West German Marxist discussions. As is now well known, Israel’s victory in the Six Day War in 1967 accelerated a bizarre and enduring transformation within the West German Left away from the strong support for Israel of the Social Democrats of the first postwar decades to a growing hostility. This shift rested on a number of what became familiar comparisons, or rather assertions of similarity, between fascism and Zionism, Israel and Nazi Germany, and Al-Fatah and anti-fascism. Within the radical Left, advocates of the new hostility to Israel spoke of overcoming the “Judenknax,” short for “Judenkomplex,” that is, a supposed guilt about the Holocaust under which West Germans were said to be suffering.15 Kraushaar thus makes a compelling argument that the RAF did not have its origins on the periphery of the radical Left. Rather, its key ideas came from well within it. He draws attention to what he calls “the badly neglected” ideas and activities of one Dieter Kunzelmann, the first of West German radicals to take the idea of urban guerillas seriously when he founded the Tupamaros West Berlin in fall of 1969. The noun “Tupamaros” came from the name of a terrorist group in Uruguay composed of students inspired by the Brazilian legislator and communist, Carlos Marighella. In spring 1969, Marighella published The Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla. It was quickly translated into many languages by left-wing movement presses, and it became a bible for terrorists around the world. (I saw it in my taxi-driving days in New York at bookstores near Columbia University.) In 1971, Rowohlt, the German publisher of a series of left-wing paperbacks, published Handbuch der Stadtguerillo. In 110 pages, Marighella made the case for a shift from Guevara’s adventures in the countryside to the formation of small groups of unconnected cells of four to five persons within cities, who would engage in political murders, kidnappings, robbery, and attacks on political institutions with the intent 15.  Dutschke, however, had a more nuanced view. In his notes of 1967, he wrote that “[t]he founding of the state of Israel was the political emancipation of Jewry. It must absolutely be preserved” (Die unbedingt erhalten bleiben muß). If the Israeli “system of domination” that served as a outpost of American and English interests would be displaced with an embrace (Verbruderungen) with the Arab mass, that would constitute “human emancipation.” But in order to reach this goal, Israel needs to be preserved: “The Arab great power chauvinism . . . is the pendant to Israeli imperialism.” Rudi Dutschke, “Notizen,” Mappe 2, Blatt 1/2, June 1967, K21/48, Archive of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, cited in Kraushaar, Rudi Dutschke, p. 48.



An Age of Murder: ideology and terror in germany   21

of shattering the ability of the ruling powers to maintain law and order. These actions would, he predicted, spark a mass revolt. The tactic failed everywhere. Marighella, was shot and killed by Brazilian police in São Paulo in November 1969, only five months after he published the original edition of the Minimanual. (He was 58 years of age.) The first sentence captured its key message: “The urban guerrilla’s reason for existence, the basic condition in which he acts and survives, is to shoot.” It included chapters on assaults, surprise, bank robberies, occupations, ambushes, street tactics, strikes and work interruptions, desertions, seizures, theft of ammunition and explosives, liberation of prisoners, executions, kidnaping, sabotage, terrorism, armed propaganda, the war of nerves, rescue of the wounded, the seven sins of the urban guerrilla (inexperience, vanity, boasting, etc.), and popular support.16 Kunzelmann’s accomplishment, and later that of the RAF, lay in applying Marighella’s doctrine to West German circumstances. The fact that the author had been shot, far from suggesting that there may have been a flaw in the doctrine, added to his luster as a martyr of the revolution. The idea of the urban guerilla and the attack on Israel and on West German Jews became radical left-wing practice on November 9, 1969 (yes, the anniversary of Kristallnacht). On that day, a bomb was found in the Jewish Community Center in Berlin. In his Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus, Kraushaar has filled in details of this bizarre and disturbing event. The bomb did not explode, a result that was intended by Albert Fichter, the man who admitted to Kraushaar that he made and placed it there. Four days later, “Shalom and Napalm,” one of the most infamous yet defining statements of the emerging terror scene, was published in Agit 883, a magazine of the radical leftist scene in West Berlin.17 The authors wrote 16.  Carlos Marighella, Urban Guerilla Minimanual (Vancouver: Pulp Press, 1974), available online at the Marxists Internet Archive website, http://www.marxists.org/archive/ marighella-carlos/1969/06/minimanual-urban-guerrilla/index.htm. 17.  “Shalom and Napalm,” Agit 883 40 (November 13, 1969): 9, cited by Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die Bombe im jüdischen Gemeindehaus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005), p. 46. The leaflet was also translated and reprinted in Bommi Baumann, How it all Began: The Personal Account of a West German Urban Guerilla, trans. Helene Ellenbogen and Wayne Parker (Vancouver: Pulp Press, 1977), pp. 57–58. The literature on the West German Left and Israel is now extensive. See, for example, Martin Kloke, Israel und die deutsche Linke: Zur Geschichte eines schwierigen Verhältnisses, 2nd and rev. ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Herg and Herchen, 1994); and Kraushaar, Die Bombe im jüdischen Gemeindehaus.

22   Jeffrey Herf

that “the victorious end of the war in Vietnam” will mean “the beginning of Vietnam wars on all fronts.” Their focus was on the Middle East. There, European and American capital supported “the Zionists in their aggressive military operations” in the Arab world. West German restitution payments (Wiedergutmachung) and development aid contributed to the Zionist defense budget. “Under the guilt-laden pretext of coming to terms with the fascist atrocities against the Jews, they (West German government and industry) make a decisive contribution to Israel’s fascist atrocities against Palestinian Arabs.”18 With the following sentences, the leaflet’s authors then accepted responsibility for placing a bomb in the Jewish Community Center: The neurotic-historicist examination of the historical lack of legitimacy of an Israeli state does not overcome this helpless anti-fascism. True antifascism is the clear and simple expression of solidarity with the fighting fedayeen. No longer will our solidarity remain only with verbal-abstract methods of enlightenment à la Vietnam. . . . The Jews who were expelled by fascism have themselves become fascists who, in collaboration with American capital, want to eradicate the Palestinian people. By striking the direct support for Israel by German industry and the government of the Federal Republic, we are aiding the victory of the Palestinian revolution and force for the renewed defeat of world imperialism. At the same time, we expand our battle against the fascists in democratic clothes and begin to build a revolutionary liberation front in the metropole. BRING THE BATTLE FROM THE VILLAGES INTO THE CITIES! ALL POLITICAL POWER COMES FROM THE BARREL OF A GUN. Signed, Black Rats, TW Schwarze Ratten (Tupamaros West Berlin).19

For the West Berlin Tupamaros, a focus on the Nazi past and the fate of the Jews was an expression of neurosis, a kind of guilt complex that stood in the way of psychic health and clear thinking. The Israelis were the new Nazis, and the Palestinians anti-fascist heroes. This line of reasoning lifted the burden of the Nazi past from its advocates and opened the way for West German radicals to attack Israelis and Jews with a clear conscience. Kraushaar views it as the kind of “defensive antisemitism” that Theodor Adorno found prevalent in West German society in the 1950s, one in which the actual relation of perpetrator and victim was reversed, 18.  “Shalom and Napalm,” pp. 46–48. 19.  Ibid., p. 48



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facts were denied and avoided, while anger was expressed at the Jews for the damage they had supposedly done to postwar collective narcissism. Kraushaar views Kunzelmann’s reference to the Judenknax as a leftist variant of the defensive antisemitism that Adorno had observed fifteen years earlier. Yet as East German Communists had demonstrated since the anti-cosmopolitan, this escape from the continuities of German history had been the norm in East Germany for twenty years before Kunzelmann and the West Berlin Tupamaros emerged. Here again, the interaction of indigenous West Germans with a transnational diffusion of ideas from East to West Germany deserves mention. On November 15, 1969—the same day that anti-Vietnam war demonstrations in Washington, DC, were accompanied by tear gas, battles with police, and thousands of people chanting “Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, NLF is going to win”—the Tupamaros in West Berlin distributed another leaflet, “Transform Your Hatred into Energy.”20 It called for the creation of urban guerillas. “Transform your hatred into energy! . . . fight in the street . . . make terror in all corners of the city. Good targets are the American industrial facilities, banks, police stations, and anything that makes men into slaves.” This marked the first time that a radical leftist group explicitly advocated “terror.”21 The irony of this historic moment has been eloquently expressed by Ulrich Enzensberger, a 20.  “WANDELT EUREN HASS IN ENERGIE,” leaflet from the Vietnam War demonstration on November 15, 1969, in West-Berlin, Archive of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, cited in Kraushaar, Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus, p. 56. 21.  Dieter Kunzelmann, “Brief aus Amman,” cited in Kraushaar, Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus, pp. 66–72, originally in Agit 883 42 (November 27, 1969): 5. Several days later, the Tupamaros West Berlin sent a taped confession and justification for the attempted bombing of the Jewish Community Center. A woman’s voice declared that “[Axel] Springer, [the publishers of a range of conservative newspapers], the West Berlin Senate and [Heinz] Galinski [the Chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany] want to sell us their Judenknacks. We won’t join that business. . . . Wiedergutmachung [West German restitution payments to Israel] finances a new fascist genocide. . . . Learn from the one who placed the bomb in the Jewish Community Center [Jüdische Gemeindehaus], learn from the Tupamaros, Che lives! Vietnam is not here. Vietnam is in America. But listen: Palestine is here, we are fedayeen. This afternoon we fight for the revolutionary Palestinian liberation front, Al-Fatah. Strike now [Schlag zu].” Ten days later, Kunzelmann published a “Letter from Amman,” in Agit 883. There he repeated and accentuated these same points. “Palestine is for the FRG what Vietnam is for the Amis. The left has not yet understood that. Why? The Judenknax. Those who fight fascism are for Israel.” Things are not so simple. It is essential to grasp the “fascist ideology of Zionism” and replace “simple philosemitism with clear solidarity for Al-Fatah, which in the Middle East has taken up the battle against the Third Reich of yesterday and today.”

24   Jeffrey Herf

former member of the West Berlin radical commune scene, who noted the irony of this attack, taking place as it did at the same time that the West German government under Willy Brandt was doing more to face the facts of the Nazi past. In his words: “Just in the moment when the social liberal coalition in connection with the decisive point about Germany’s postwar borders decided to accept responsibility for German crimes, the revolt of postwar youth against the older generation shifted into irresponsibility. Among quite a number of us, the effort to escape from German history via the path of revolution ended [in a situation in which] with a clear conscience we continued our own most evil traditions.”22 West German terrorism was also the third of German Communism’s attacks on social democracy in the twentieth century, the first two occurring during the last six years of the Weimar Republic and then in the “forced unification” and suppression of the SPD in postwar East Berlin. Die Rote Armee Fraktion published its first manifesto on June 5, 1970.23 It followed an armed attack on a jail in West Berlin that led to the escape of Andreas Baader, during which one of the prison guards was badly injured. In June and July 1970, members of the RAF traveled to Jordan where they received weapons training from the PLO and its offshoots. “The Concept of the Urban Guerilla,” the RAF’s first “position paper,” appeared in April 1971 and was followed soon after by the longer statement “On the Armed Struggle in Western Europe” (Über den bewaffneten Kampf in Westeuropa) and a year later by “Serve the People” (Dem Volk Dienen).24 “The Concept of the Urban Guerilla” imported Marighella’s ideas to West Germany. All were long-winded and repetitive. “On the Armed Struggle in Western Europe” was the RAF’s defining statement. Meinhof included forty-eight footnotes and thus much evidence of the RAF’s immersion in the Communist tradition.25 Meinhof drew inspiration from the Paris Commune, the October “Revolution” of 1917, and the 22.  Ulrich Enzensberger, Die Jahre der Kommune I: Berlin 1967–1969 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 2004), p. 368. 23.  “Die Rote Armee aufbauen: Erklärung zur Befreiung Andreas Baader vom 5. Juni 1970,” in RAF: Rote Armee Fraktion: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF (West Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1977), pp. 24–26. 24.  “Das Konzept Stadtguerilla, April 1971”; Über den bewaffneten Kampf in Westeuropa, Mai 1971”; and “Dem Volk Dienen. Stadtguerilla und Klassenkampf, April 1972” in RAF: Rote Armee Fraktion, pp. 27–48, 49–112, and 112–44. 25.  “Über den bewaffneten Kampf in Westeuropa, Mai 1971,” in RAF: Rote Armee Fraktion, pp. 49–111.



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“people’s war” in China. These events made clear that “armed struggle” was “a central problem of revolutionary theory” and was in fact the “highest form of class struggle.”26 In light of the fact that many commentators have suggested that West German terrorism was an effort to overcome past shortcomings regarding the Nazi past, it is important to note here that the RAF authors placed German history into a trans-national narrative of capitalism and international imperialism. In the authors’ words, “Auschwitz, Setif, Vietnam, Indonesia, Amman” demonstrated that “massacre does not belong to the past of systems of domination that have been overcome but rather now as before belong to the instruments of the dominant [rulers].”27 Far from addressing the distinctive features of the Holocaust, the RAF—fifteen years before the famous Historikersstreit—denied the uniqueness of the Final Solution and compared it to a variety of recent conflicts stemming from anti-colonial or communist insurgencies. Like the terrorist splinter groups in the United States, Italy, Japan, and France, the RAF authors found the new revolutionary vanguard is in the student and youth movements in the “metropoles,” which would form links with the revolutionaries in the third world. Meinhof brought Marighella to Germany without giving him due credit.28 Unlike the countryside, the big city offered anonymity. On the one hand, it was filled with sympathizers, safe houses, and apartments, and, on the other hand, it had many targets. As Marighella pointed out, “the enemy” never knew where an attack would come. He had to protect many targets but could not be everywhere at once. These targets, “the class enemy,” included things (businesses, government buildings) and persons (policemen, government officials, and judges). Hence, the authors noted, “a few fighters can hold down strong forces of the enemy.”29 Again, as Marighella pointed out, bombardment against urban guerillas is rarely successful. “On Armed Struggle in Western Europe” was thus a striking example of the flow of ideas from Brazil and Uruguay to Germany and Europe—that is, from what was then called the third world to the first world. Meinhof evoked a Lenin quite different from the one sure to emerge from leftists familiar with his famous criticisms of “infantile leftism.” Three decades before major studies by Richard Pipes, Orlando Figes, 26.  Ibid., p. 50. 27.  Ibid. 28.  Ibid., p. 72. 29.  Ibid., p. 73.

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and Nicholas Werth on terror in the Lenin era were published, the RAF authors drew on the letter and spirit of the public and well-known Lenin to underscore his own support for terror.30 “Lenin,” they wrote, “would be horrified” by use of quotations from his own works to suggest that he opposed the use of terror.31 They then cited two of Lenin’s early writings on the subject. First, his notes for the Second Party Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Party of 1905, in which he insisted that “Terror must in fact merge with the mass movement”;32 and second, his 1906 essay on “Partisan War,” in which he wrote that “Armed struggle has two different goals which must be kept separate from one another. The goal of this battle, first of all, is killing individual persons . . . subalterns in the police and army, and second, theft of money from the government and private persons.”33 The RAF authors concluded that “Lenin had especially advocated the first goal of armed struggle, that is, the liquidation of individual functionaries of the apparatus of oppression.”34 In view of their repeated and emphatic evocation of their communist convictions, it is interesting to note how infrequently the word “communist” is associated with the RAF in much of the literature. So I will restate what I said at the outset: the history of twentieth-century communism in Germany, Italy, Japan, France, or the United States includes movements like the RAF. They should not be studied only under the separate category called the history of terrorism. Albert Camus in The Rebel had explored the links between Lenin and terrorism, but it was safe to say that the radical Left was not preoccupied with what the former leader of the French Resistance against the Nazis had to say about the disastrous consequences of philosophical justifications for murder. (Camus’s anti-terrorist manifesto of 1951 was first published in German translation by Rowohlt in 1953, with the title Der Mensch in Revolte. Between 1953 and 1969, it had sold a modest 30,000 copies. The 30.  See Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1996); Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York: Penguin, 1996); Nicholas Werth, “A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union,” in Stéphane Courtois, ed. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999), pp. 33–268. 31.  “Über den bewaffneten Kampf in Westeuropa,” pp. 78–79. 32.  Ibid., p. 80. 33.  Ibid., p. 81. 34.  Ibid.



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decade of terror was good for sales. By the time the seventh Rowohlt edition was published in 1977, sales had almost tripled to 80,000 copies.)35 The RAF meant what they said. In 1970, “theory” became practice. RAF members robbed several banks in Berlin in October. The police found and arrested a number of them. In July, one of their members, Petra Schelm, was killed in a shoot-out with police. In October and December of that year, RAF members murdered two policemen, Norbert Schmid and Herbert Schoner. In 1972, the group set off bombs at U.S. Army headquarters in Heidelberg and other installations in Munich, Augsburg, and Hamburg, which caused four deaths and injured thirty people. Placed in solitary confinement, to prevent them from conspiring in prison with their lawyers to plan further attacks, they described this treatment as “isolation torture” and asked instead to be treated as prisoners of war. (It is interesting in retrospect that the West German government did not bring charges of war crimes against the RAF.) Periodic hunger strikes aroused sympathy from left-wing and some left-liberal circles, more sympathy apparently than these people expressed for those the RAF had killed and injured. In November 1972, Palestinian terrorists kidnaped Israeli Olympic athletes at the Munich Olympics. In the midst of efforts to free the hostages, the kidnappers murdered them. Following the murders, Meinhof wrote and the RAF issued “The Action of Black September in Munich: On the Strategy of Anti-Imperialist Struggle” (Die Aktion des Schwarzen September in München: Zur Strategie des Antiimperialistischen Kampfes).36 In this remarkable text, she again made clear how crucial anti-Zionism and antisemitism would be in the history of the RAF. Far from condemning the murders of the Israeli athletes, she celebrated the deed: “The action of Black September in Munich . . . was simultaneously anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and internationalist.” What she called the Munich “action”—note her avoidance of the word murder—drew attention to “Israel’s Nazi fascism” 35.  Albert Camus, Der Mensch in Revolte (Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1953). Figures on print runs and editions are from the German National Library. Based on his reading of these most famous of Lenin’s texts, Camus wrote: “Forsake of justice in faraway future, [Lenin’s doctrine of revolution] authorizes injustice throughout the entire course of history and becomes the type of mystification which Lenin detested more than anything else in the wold. It contrives the acceptance of injustice, crime, and falsehood by the promise of a miracle” (Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower [New York: Knopf, 1954], p. 233). 36.  “Die Aktion des Schwarzen September in München. Zur Strategie des Antiimperialistischen Kampfes,” in RAF: Rote Armee Fraktion, pp. 151–77.

28   Jeffrey Herf

and served as an example of “how practice pushes theory forward.”37 “Just as the essence of imperialism is fascist,” Mienhof continued, “so anti-fascism is, in its tendency, anti-imperialist.” Ergo, the attack on the Israeli athletes was anti-imperialist and hence anti-fascist. The RAF was thus part of this global anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, communist revolution and had nothing to do, as some of its critics suggested, with the anarchism inspired by Blanqui to Kropotkin. Meinhof expressed hatred at West Germany’s only recently elected left of center government. Chancellor Willy Brandt would have been surprised to learn that since he and the Social Democrats entered the Bonn government in 1966, “more democracy had been abolished in the Federal Republic than was the case in the seventeen years before under all CDU [conservative Christian Democratic Union] governments taken together.”38 The Social Liberal coalition had created a “schmackhafte Imperialismus,” a “tasteful or palatable imperialism.”39 The goal of the West German government was “not to be in any way inferior to the Moshe Dayan fascism—Dayan, this Himmler of Israel.”40 Following the death of its athletes, “Israel cries crocodile tears. It used its athletes as the Nazis used the Jews—as fuel to be burned for its imperialist policy of extermination.”41 The “action” of Black September in Munich was thus a great revolutionary accomplishment. It had “torn away [entlarvt] the character masks of the social liberal coalition and their propagandists” by pushing the contradictions of imperialism to their limit. “The Arab peoples have massively understood that in West Germany they face an imperialist strategy of extermination.”42 Of course, the deaths of the Israeli athletes were not the fault of the terrorist as it would be “idiotic to believe that the revolutionaries wanted it. They wanted the release of the prisoners.”43 The terrorists of Black September were in fact blameless for the deaths of the athletes: “They took hostages from a people that has pursued a policy of extermination against them. . . . They did not want to kill. . . . The German 37.  Ibid., p. 159. 38.  Ibid., p. 171. 39.  Ibid., p. 172. 40.  Ibid., p. 173. 41.  Ibid. The German reads as follows: “Israel vergießt Krokodilstränen. Es hat seine Sportler verheizt wie die Nazis die Juden–Brennmaterial für die imperialistische Ausrottungspolitik.” 42.  Ibid., p. 175. 43.  Ibid., p. 176.



An Age of Murder: ideology and terror in germany   29

police massacred the revolutionaries and their hostages.”44 The statement ended with a round of rousing communist slogans, including “The action of Black September in Munich will not be extinguished form the memory of anti-imperialist struggle. Solidarity with the liberation struggle of the Palestinian people! Solidarity with the revolution in Vietnam! Revolutionaries of all lands, unite!”45 As I noted earlier, Meinhof and her comrades deserve space in subsequent histories of European and German antisemitism. As a strategic document, it also made clear that the RAF was going to do all it could to make the Federal Republic pay as high a price as possible for its support for Israel. Far from coming to terms with the Nazi past, the RAF—like East Germany—took aim at West German forms of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, especially its diplomatic, military, and economic relations with Israel. Following a now minutely documented series of attacks and arrests, the leaders of what became known as “the first generation” (there were three) of the RAF were arrested in 1972. In April 1974 they were transferred to a high-security prison in Stammheim, not far from Stuttgart. They lived there preparing for their trials until, by October 1977, all but one had succeeded in committing suicide, following the successful liberation of hostages on a Lufthansa jet in Mogadishu and the end of their hopes that those hostages could be a bargaining chip to gain their release from prison. The conditions of their lives and deaths in Stammheim were soon surrounded with a cloud of lies, lies unfortunately believed by parts of a leftist and liberal public inside and outside the Federal Republic, which was willing to believe the worst about the Germans after Hitler, even in the era of Brandt and Schmidt. Butz Peters, in his important work Tödlicher Irrtum, draws on massive and numerous legal and parliamentary investigations to set many myths aside and restore the mundane though still awful truths that the RAF did its best to obscure.46 In fact, the RAF turned Stammheim Prison into an organizational center for the conduct of terrorist operations. 44.  Ibid., p. 177. 45.  Ibid. Note again that the essay rejected the notion that there was anything at all unique about the Holocaust. In the Federal Republic, efforts to dissolve the uniqueness of the Holocaust did not begin with Ernst Nolte and the conservative historians of the 1980s. As far as I recall and have read, the RAF’s comparisons did not meet with anywhere near this level of indignation. On the contrary, they entered into and reflected the moods of the radical Left. 46.  On the RAF in Stammheim, see Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, pp. 305–52.

30   Jeffrey Herf

In Stammheim, the RAF prisoners—Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Raspe—were not at all isolated. They were all together on the seventh floor of the prison, a floor reserved for them alone. They were able to meet, drink coffee, smoke, and discuss the political situation. Horst Bubeck, the prison warden, ordered guards to remain “15 to 18 meters” away from them. For eight hours during the day, the cell doors of the RAF prisoners were open so the prisoners could walk around the seventh floor at will. For the first and last time in the history of the Federal Republic, two basic rules of prison management were broken. First, those accused in a crime were allowed to have contact with one another—and thus coordinate their stories before trial. Second, men and women were not kept separate from one another. Each had a cell of up to 150 square feet. One floor below, where common criminals were placed, six men shared a cell that was intended for three. Each of the RAF prisoners had a television, radio, record player, typewriter, and a large number of books. The other “non-political” prisoners were only allowed television once a week. Moreover, the four RAF prisoners had access to fresh fruits and vegetables, yogurt, fresh meat, a “sports room” with exercise machines, a book room with over 300 volumes, and a trial room with about 300 Aktenordner, or German style bound files, related to their cases. Baader complained of back pains so—again according to detailed testimony taken by the Oberlandsgericht (comparable to a State Supreme Court) in Stuttgart—Bubeck approved visits three times each week by a masseuse to ease his aching back. Baader played his stereo so loud that it could be heard two floors below. Prisoners complained to Lubeck. One prisoner asked if “they are having parties up there.” Lubeck, in order to avoid a hassle with Baader, said that he could not hear a thing. A group representing the 800 common criminals in Stammheim sent a letter to Lubeck to protest the “privileges for the RAF.” The RAF prisoners repeatedly refused to have any contact with other prisoners—actually proletarians and lumpenproletarians—supposedly out of fear of informers. They also knew that if pictures of them together with other prisoners appeared in newspapers, then their theme of “isolation torture” would collapse. The RAF was able to convince their sympathizers, including a public outside of Germany that was always ready to believe the worst about a German prison, that they were being horribly mistreated. Meinhof, the former journalist, and Baader invited Jean-Paul Sartre to Stammheim. On December 4, 1974, the French philosopher arrived. He



An Age of Murder: ideology and terror in germany   31

spent an hour in the visitor’s room with a translator, Lubeck, and Baader. Afterwords, Sartre said at a press conference at the Stuttgart main train station that “Baader had the face of a man who’d been tortured. It’s not the torture of the Nazis. It’s another torture, one that leads to psychological disturbances. Baader and the others live in a white cell. In this cell they hear nothing other than three times a day the steps of their guards who bring them food. The light is on for 24 hours.”47 The following day, the German and European press ran front page stories about Sartre’s criticism of the RAF’s treatment in Stammheim. In fact, Sartre’s utterances added another chapter to the history of gullible intellectuals who served as front men for totalitarian regimes and movements. Lubeck pointed out that Sartre sat in the visitor’s room, but had not been in Baader’s cell. Had he done so, he would have see that Baader’s room was anything but all white. His walls were adorned with a poster of Che Guevara and multi-colored maps. He, like the other RAF prisoners, had a window. Lubeck called Sartre’s claims “sheer lies, nothing else.” The lights in the prisoners’ cells were not on twenty-four hours a day. They were turned off each night at 10 in the winter and 11 in the summer. Every day, the RAF prisoners sat together for several hours and talked. Prison officials were ordered to remain out of earshot. But for a leftwing public outside Stammheim, who knew only that Horst Lubeck was a German prison official, Sartre’s word to contrary was more convincing. The RAF had earlier demonstrated an ability to convince a circle of sympathizers and part of the media that it was being mistreated in prison. In 1974, Holger Meins, who been arrested in a shoot-out with police in 1971, went on a hunger strike for two months. He refused all efforts to feed him. He died on November 9, 1974. Otto Schilly was then one of the RAF’s lawyers. You will recall that he later became the Attorney General of a unified Germany. After 9/11 a famous photo was taken of him next to John Ashcroft, the conservative Attorney General of the United States and Schilly’s comrade in the recently declared “war on terror.” In 1977 a younger and different Otto Schilly declared that the RAF prisoners who engaged in hunger strikes had been “executed.”48 Hundreds of RAF sympathizers came to Mein’s funeral and burial in Hamburg, some carrying banners claiming that “the guerilla Holder Meins was murdered by the state security and justice officials.” Rudi Dutschke stood by Mein’s grave, 47.  Sartre, cited by Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, p. 330. 48.  Ibid., p. 321.

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raised his right arm and clenched fist, and yelled, “Holger, the struggle continues!” (Holger, der Kampf geht weiter!). Indeed it did. Mein’s long, extended suicide was turned into the myth of his murder at the hands of the “fascist state.” It became one of those key “facts” that led younger people such as Sigrid Sternebeck, Ralf Baptist Friedrich, Silke Maier-Witt, and Susanne Albrecht to join the RAF. On October 18, 1977, after learning that the GS-9 commandos had freed the hostages in Mogadishu and that therefore the only bargaining chip for getting out of prison was gone, Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Gudrin Ensslin committed suicide. Irmgard Möller tried but failed to kill herself with a knife.49 She was rushed to the hospital, where the doctors saved her life, a gift she repaid by spreading the lie that her associates had been murdered. Baader and Raspe killed themselves with self-inflicted gunshots to the head; Ensslin hanged herself. (Meinhof had sunk into depression due partly to conflicts with the other prisoners and had committed suicide a year earlier.) Of course the RAF sympathizers and the RAF lawyers claimed that they were all murdered. That legend continued into the 1990s, in the radical Left in West Germany and probably elsewhere. In 1990 on the thirteenth anniversary of the suicides, over five hundred RAF sympathizers marched through Berlin, shouting “Nichts ist vergessen, nichts ist vergeben” (“Nothing is forgotten, nothing is forgiven”).50 All of many subsequent investigations by medical experts came to the opposite conclusion: the RAF prisoners committed suicide. After hearing from ninety-seven witnesses, an investigation of the Baden-Württemberg state parliament (Landtag) also arrived at the same conclusion. In two trials in Stuttgart, several of the RAF lawyers were found guilty of smuggling the guns into the prison, which Baader and Raspe used. In 2002, eight years after her release from prison, Möller insisted that the German intelligence services, the government of the Federal Republic, NATO, and of course—who else—the CIA were all involved. As you might expect, the conspiracy theory found many adherents. Members of the RAF who observed events from a distance in their refuge in Saddam Hussein’s Bagdad knew better. As Peters points out, in one of the trials in Stuttgart, one of the RAF members, Monika Helbing, testified that Brigitte Mohnhaupt, the true iron lady of the RAF terrorist 49.  Peters, “Die Todesnacht in Stammheim,” in Tödlicher Irrtum, pp. 450–67. 50.  Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, p. 785.



An Age of Murder: ideology and terror in germany   33

scene in the 1980s, yelled at her comrades to stop crying and screaming when they heard the news of the Stammheim deaths. “What’s going on here, a funeral with weeping women [Klageweibern]? Can you really see the Stammheimer [the Stammheim prisoners] only as victims. That [the suicides] was an action [Aktion]. Do you understand? An action. You assholes can stop bawling.”51 Mohnhaupt continued that “the suicide action” was the prisoners’ means of advancing the RAF’s goals. Susanne Albrecht, who as a friend of the Ponto family rang the front door that made possible his killer’s unforced entry, testified that even within the RAF the “collective suicide” in Stammheim was a secret. “Behind the lie,” she said, “stood a corresponding political calculation. . . . Toward those outside the RAF, only that could be said which corresponded to the group’s ‘theoretical self-conception,’ but not that which corresponded with the reality.” Indeed, she continued that the suicides in Stammheim became the group’s “greatest taboo” because—again quoting her—“the claim that they had been murdered built a whole political movement from which the RAF gained legitimation as well as support.”52 Only the twelve members of the RAF then in Bagdad and members of the hard core elsewhere knew the truth. They kept it secret and were able to count on hundreds—and in the climate of 1977, thousands—of supporters to repeat the lies about their suicides in legal, above-ground political activities. In so doing, they could also count on intellectuals such as Sartre to repeat fictions about Stammheim as a symbol of the violation of human rights in the Federal Republic. As came out in subsequent judicial proceedings, the weapons used in the suicides were smuggled into the prison by their lawyers, Arendt Muller and Admin Gnarly. Metal detectors were rudimentary and, astonishingly, seldom used. The police never suspected that lawyers would smuggle weapons into a prison. But by hollowing out the inside of books, they did just that. After his death, the prison officials collected 470 books and 400 magazines from Baader’s cell. Ensslin had 450 books and 400 magazines and brochures and Raspe had 550 books and 280 magazines and brochures. It was a massive amount of paper and—as anyone who does serious work in a study knows—it was very difficult for anyone else to find anything. Again, the alleged “fascist” prison guards left the mass—and mess—of 51.  Ibid., p. 452. 52.  Ibid., pp. 452–53.

34   Jeffrey Herf

books and paper alone, and the guns were hidden within it. After the suicides, the prison officials also found 650 grams of explosives, cables, and no less than ten hiding places made with tools and carefully covered up with plaster, which the RAF prisoners had simply taken from materials during some renovations in the prison. Far from “isolation torture,” the RAF prisoners could simply talk to each other by sticking their heads out of their windows and turning right and left, but they also managed to use their stereos and radios to build an internal speaker system. They heard the news of the liberation of the hostages in Mogadishu on the evening news of ARD from Sender Freies Berlin around 12:40 am. They received the news and communicated it among themselves, and, in Mohnhaupt’s words, carried out “the action.”53 As I pointed out earlier, the second and third generation of the RAF continued to engage in murders and violent attacks until 1992. Conclusion First, the most important point to make about the West German terrorists is familiar. Like the terrorists that Fyodor Dostoyevsky described so well in The Devils or that Albert Camus examined so acutely in The Rebel,54 these people did evil things because they came to believe in the absolute righteousness of a set of wrong ideas. Their inhumanity was inseparable from the ideas of communism and armed revolution. To be sure, like all major political and intellectual traditions, the communist idea in the twentieth century took a variety of forms, some of which had nothing to do with terrorism and political murder. Yet some did, and they are too often left out of the history of European communism.55 In the polarized political climate of recent decades, such an insight is sometimes called conservative, or at times neo-conservative, and there is something to be said for the label. Yet doing so underestimates some of the self-reflection of West German leftists. In the midst of the German fall, Rudi Dutschke distanced himself from terror when he wrote in Die Zeit that “we know only too well what the despotism of capital is. We do not want to replace it with a despotism 53.  Ibid, pp. 453–60. 54.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons: A Novel in Three Parts, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1995). 55.  For an excellent synthetic history of the communist idea in the twentieth century, see Furet, The Passing of an Illusion. The German edition received the Hannah Arendt Prize in Germany, and one of the members of the jury was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the May revolt in 1968 in Paris and later an active member of the Green Party in Germany.



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of terror.”56 In view of those already murdered by the RAF, Dutschke’s second thoughts came rather late. Yet they were better late than never. Coming from Dutschke they helped to stimulate an impressive and important rethinking and deradicalization of the West German Left. Likewise it was, as they say, no accident that it was one of Adorno’s students, the social theorist Detlev Claussen, who in 1976 clearly and unequivocally denounced the antisemitism that led to Wilfried Bose’s “selection” of Jews and non-Jews in Entebbe, in an essay entitled “Terror in the Air, Counterrevolution on the Ground,” published in the leftist magazine Links.57 It was this, in many ways impressive and historically distinctive, deradicalizing and self-reflective Left that formed the Green Party and, at times in fits and starts but without political violence, accepted the rules of the game of liberal democracy. Just as the emergence of the RAF was a chapter in the history of communism, so its demise was due to this history of deradicalization with the West German Left as well as the all encompassing collapse of the Communist states in Europe in 1989–90.58 The romance and lure of the communist revolution was replaced for younger generations with realities about police states and economic failure. Moreover, after 1990, the Communist intelligence services that had offered money, weapons, and escape routes were now out of business. Second, there is much research to be done in the archives to find out what the West German government under Brandt, Schmidt, and Kohl knew about Soviet and East German support for the RAF. Is it really credible that they had no idea of their involvement until 1990, when ten RAF members being sought for crimes were arrested in East Germany? What did the West German government and its intelligence services know and when did it know it about foreign support for the RAF? Was there a reluctance 56.  Rudi Dutschke, “Kritik am Terror muß klarer werden,” Die Zeit, October 1977. See also Rudi Dutschke, “Toward Clarifying Criticism of Terrorism,” trans. Jeffrey Herf, New German Critique 12 (1977): 9–10. Available in German at the trend onlinezeitung website, http://www.trend.infopartisan.net/trd0407/t060407.html. The German reads: “Wir wissen nur zu gut, was die Despotie des Kapitals ist, wir wollen sie nicht ersetzen durch Terrordespotie.” 57.  Detlev Claussen, “Terror in der Luft: Konterrevolution auf der Erde,” in Links: Sozialistische Zeitung 80 (September 1976): 6ff. See also Detlev Claussen, Vom Judenhaß zum Antisemitismus: Materialien einer verleugneten Geschichte (Neuwied: Darmstadt, 1987). 58.  On the concept of deradicalization, see Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987).

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to discuss the issue publicly for fear of endangering the policy of détente? There is much research to be done in the archives of the former Communist governments. Perhaps files survived the chaos of 2003 in Baghdad and are in the archive of Kanan Makiya’s Iraq Memory Foundation. There is also much work to be done in the archives of the U.S. government, including those of the State Department and the American Embassy in Bonn, as well as those records of the CIA and the U.S. military in the Federal Republic. Hopefully, these records will now be opened, given that thirty years and more have passed since these events took place. This chapter of the cold war deserves attention from the Cold War International History Project based in Washington. There is a great deal of research to be done as our understanding of these events moves from the level of journalism to historical work in the archives. Third, the RAF made an unintended contribution to the collapse of the romance of revolution in Germany. Having fanatically pushed a set of assumptions to their absurdly logical conclusion, they demonstrated yet again how dangerous and destructive totalitarian ideas are. In this sense, again unintentionally, the RAF fostered the above-mentioned deradicalization evident in the now famous careers of former radical leftists such as Joschka Fischer and Otto Schilly. The RAF terrorists left a legacy of violence, destruction, and grief. They made no contribution whatsoever to understanding Germany’s past and succeeded only in ending the lives of thirty-four people who, at the time of their murders, were active contributors to a free and democratic society. They failed to turn Germany into a police state. The universities, the press, and intellectual life remained vital and pluralistic. In 1979, two years after the Stammheim suicides, a new left-wing party, the Greens, emerged and remains an important component of German politics. Third, while the RAF murders caused prominent West German leftists to step back from taking the leap to political murder, reflection on the horror of the RAF’s actions may have stiffened the resolve of the West German establishment to resist political and military pressures coming from the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, and Middle Eastern dictators. During the middle of the German Autumn, the chancellor gave a speech in London at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “The London Speech,” as it came to be known, was a complex, dry, technical analysis of medium range nuclear arms negotiations. It was the beginning of what became the NATO double-track decision of 1979. I thought then and believe to this



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day that the implementation of that decision—more than anything that happened in Afghanistan or Central America—was the decisive turning point in world history that marked the end of the global momentum to the radical Left and the beginning of the end of communism in Europe. When I interviewed Schmidt in 1985 while doing research for my history of the battle of the euromissiles, it did not occur to me to ask him if the experience of the years of terror had stiffened his resolve to resist Soviet pressures. Coincidence in time does not prove causality, but it does make it a possibility; and not only regarding Schmidt but also Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher, Helmut Kohl, Schmidt’s successor in the chancellor’s office, and many other West German government officials and people in public life. While the RAF members would certainly be unhappy to hear this, it may be that they made an important yet unintentional contribution to the collapse of communism in Europe.

Mohamed Atta on the Magic Mountain Sean M. McIntyre What we know of Mohamed Atta has become paradigmatic for the new breed of Islamic neo-fundamentalist terrorists. Before coming to the United States to organize and prepare the attack on civilians in New York and Washington, Atta was a student of urban planning at the Technical University of Hamburg–Harburg, situated in a suburb of the notably liberal and tolerant German port city of Hamburg. It was there that the young Egyptian completed a Masters in Urban Planning with a thesis in which he assails the corrupting influence of modern, Western architecture, particularly skyscrapers. It was also there, in a tiny mosque in the suburbs, that Atta became involved with the new, radical form of Salafi Islam. The generic profile of the jihadi terrorist that can be gleaned from his biography is both disconcerting and, in some respects, disturbingly familiar. The jihadi is frequently a young man. He is self-absorbed (Atta’s last will and testament, a rather curious document, demonstrates significant self-involvement, in addition to remarkable sexual phobias). Often he lives outside all established and traditional local communities. He is often filled with an indefinite rage at all that surrounds him. In the case of Atta, this rage was early on directed to his critique of globalization, in particular, Western architectural forms that encroached on traditional Arab spaces, such as the Aleppo Souk, a traditional Muslim commercial center with labyrinthine streets and crowded bazaars, situated in Syria. .  Mohamed Atta’s last will and testament, translated into English, can be found online at the American Memorial Tribute website, http://www.werismyki.com/artcls/atta_ will.html.

Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 39–51. www.telospress.com

39

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In the passage from disillusionment to murderous nihilism, Atta’s trajectory should remind us of countless young Europeans before him. The portrait of Atta’s path to terror appears familiar not only by virtue of its European setting and origins, but also by its affinities to the actions of past terrorists. We are confronted with the jarring and unpleasant suggestion that there is something in European life, something deeper than coincidence of location, that produces this kind of revolt, this particular rage. A European Problem No doubt there are those who will be content to view European society as the breeding ground for jihadi terrorism. They will see this as proof that there must be something fundamentally wrong with the West, either with its democratic traditions, with liberalism in general, with secularism—or with all of the above. And there are those that will extend their sympathies to the ideas and attitudes of the attackers by imagining that they can comprehend and feel some solidarity with their acute anti-cosmopolitanism, their all-encompassing rage against modernity. If these positions are plausible coming from comfortably situated Western intellectuals, then it is because these views have been a familiar part of the European and North American landscape of ideas and postures for at least two centuries. In his Globalized Islam, Olivier Roy views Islamic neo-fundamentalism as a negative form of Westernization. He does not present a “clash of civilizations” but an individualistic mode of recasting traditional Islam whereby established religion is replaced by personal religiosity, which in turn opens the way to spiritual militancy as a primary means of self and group identification. In the light of this well-trodden path to modernity, the moral universe and dispositions of the jihadi terrorists appear not so much as an outgrowth of Islamic religious or cultural values and forms, but as another variation on Camus’ nihilistic homme révolté. Alienated and cut off from any real collective, with no sense of human solidarity, the jihadi suicide bomber’s revolt is a total negation of all existing values and communities. His murder-suicide is the most emphatic denial of the definite ends that define politics as much as his “sacrifice” and “martyrdom” deny all real existing communities, and not just the universal community of humans. The “adolescent rage” of the contemporary jihadi comes to .  Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia UP, 2004).



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represent the new face for the kind of murderous antipolitics that Camus diagnosed more than fifty years ago as the outgrowth of European skepticism and alienation, the dead end of Romanticism. Jihadi Muslims share something essential with the fascists and Marxists with whom Camus was concerned: an orientation toward absolutes. Precisely this idealism of absolutes and yearning for the redemption of wholeness and totalities makes the jihadis, like the communists and fascists before them, antipolitical and nihilistic in their rebellion. Where the fascists would redeem the chosen group and the communists would redeem all of humanity, the jihadi terrorist is engaged in what Michael Ignatieff describes as “an eschatology of personal redemption through death.” From a political perspective, then, he commits violence gratuitously. Politics, as the realm of determinate and realizable ends, ceases where redemption and the absolute begins. Nihilist violence is a logical culmination of the orientation toward absolutes. Since the human condition is defined by limits that cannot be transcended, the neo-absolutist must become an advocate of total negation: nothing in this world of limitations can be affirmed. By contrast, liberalism is the politics of limits. In place of absolutes and totalities, liberalism offers us plurality, differentiation, and relative or limited freedoms. Precisely because the jihadi consciously rejects a politics of limits, we should look beyond politics and into the depths of European literature and thought in order to try to understand where this disdainful and violent rejection of politics originates. In looking west, however, we must not fail to distinguish between superficial similarities and deeper connections with romantic and reactionary anti-liberalisms. In Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit describe a number of striking affinities between modern jihadis, particularly within the romantic and the reactionary modernist intellectual and .  Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (1951; New York: Knopf, 1954), p. 273. .  Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005), p. 117. .  This is the argument that Camus pursues in The Rebel. A more recent and intellectual-historical exposition of this notion can be found in Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991). .  This contrast is nicely developed in Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003).

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artistic traditions. Among the patterns and similarities they describe are a virulently anti-philistine rejection of “cold” reason and calculation, an anti-commercialism of the Left and the Right, a hostility to the city as a focal point for cosmopolitan impurity and decadence, and an extreme anti-pluralism with its concomitant dream of purification. Atta’s hatred of skyscrapers and sexual phobias certainly indicate that he had similar conflicts with cosmopolitanism and pluralism. Buruma and Margalit further note a high estimation of great ideals: self-sacrifice, heroism, and martial virtues such as courage and fearlessness. Evidently, these virtues were consciously chosen to counter the more “philistine” and anti-heroic bourgeois values of security, repose, and the calculated attainment of measurable goods in the pursuit of private happiness. Although decidedly illiberal and hostile to many features of modernity, it is important to recall that many of these European rebellions were ultimately never a direct threat to the liberal politics of limits and consequently improbable paths to terror and murder. Few European literary works demonstrate a keener involvement with the rebellious mentalities described above than Thomas Mann’s magnificent novel The Magic Mountain. Set in an international sanitarium in Davos, Mann’s ponderous novel aims at finding a meaningful response to the nihilism that threatens to emerge out of an intense experience of disillusionment. The ethical Bildung of Mann’s “problem-child,” Hans Castorp, takes place largely in the confrontation between two dueling pedagogues, the republican humanist Settembrini and the ultrareactionary Jesuit Naphta. Although Naphta gleefully affirms the tag of “terrorist,” both men are absolutists inclined toward terror and willing to accept any sacrifice—even bloody murder—to achieve their absolutes. Beyond Nihilism: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain “What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is terror.” In this and similarly outrageous declarations from Naphta, Mann gives us an intriguing look into the mind of a European nihilist. “The .  Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (New York: Penguin, 2004). .  The central role of disillusionment in Mann’s fiction is most brilliantly argued in Erich Heller’s classic study Thomas Mann: The Ironic German (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958). .  Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 393.



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proletariat has taken up Gregory the Great’s task, his godly zeal burns within it, and its hands can no more refrain from shedding blood than could his. Its work is terror, that the world may be saved and the ultimate goal of redemption be achieved: the children of God living in a world without classes or laws.”10 Mann presents Naphta in an adventitious embrace of the communist fantasy of a universal proletariat as agent for the desired end-of-the-world salvation. But his declared enthusiasm for red terror reveals more than just zealous opportunism; his caustic disdain for unheroic “philistine” conventions and his fierce hatred of “bourgeois” commerce also reveal some of the reactionary’s more genuinely shared prejudices with the Bolsheviks. Although Naphta tries to present his opponent’s republican absolutism as equally nihilistic, the Italian humanist is significantly less misanthropic. “We [Freemasons] admit we are political, admit it frankly, openly. We discount the odium that a few fools—most of them residing in your native land, my good engineer, hardly any elsewhere—attach to that word. For the man who loves his fellow man, there can be no distinction between what is political and what is not. The apolitical does not exist—everything is politics.”11 The republican’s refusal to acknowledge a separation of public and private spheres is in fact a point of strong disagreement with Mann. Secure limits to the political are indispensable for the “unpolitical” German author dedicated to an almost Millian conception of the private space needed to develop and unfold individuality. Indeed, the chasm between Settembrini’s Jacobin political totality and Naphta’s antipolitics points to an essentially liberal space, a separation of spheres equally intolerable to both pedagogues in their neo-absolutist extremism. However similar Settembrini and Naphta are in their orientation toward absolutes, they also represent opposing attempts to transcend the limits of the human condition. The Italian pedant’s political absolutism is in fact a radicalized product of the Enlightenment’s liberal conception of the individual. In demanding total gratification of human needs, absolute plenitude, and a complete illumination of all the darkness and mystery in life, Settembrini transforms the liberal and Enlightenment principles of personal freedom and moral agency into absolutes. His is a radicalization of the liberal value of self-fulfillment. In other words, Settembrini seeks a positive transcendence of the limitations of humanity. 10.  Ibid., p. 396. 11.  Ibid., p. 505.

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By contrast, Naphta’s ascetic absolutism is based upon a complete rejection of this Enlightenment heritage. Unlike Settembrini’s idealism, no deep affinity with liberalism lies hidden within Naphta’s spiritualism. He seeks a negative transcendence of the human condition of limitation. Naphta’s self-mortifying asceticism constitutes a denial of the plenitude of needs and a rejection of the Enlightenment’s emancipation of desires. Instead of yearning for the total fulfillment of individual needs and desires—the Marxian utopia—his “mystical individualism” is a movement toward self-abnegation. Naphta would achieve totality neither by fulfilling the unlimited needs and desires of individuals nor by eliminating barriers to the unfolding of individual capabilities, but by eliminating those desires and needs together with their conditions. For Naphta, absolute self-fulfillment takes the form of self-annihilation. Is Naphta therefore a romantic? The romantic’s defiance of the “cold” calculation of commercial society and subsequent emphasis on inward turning interiority are often confused with antipolitics. However, the romantic actually needs the limit of liberal politics for self-creation and self-expression in order to continue to have meaning and provide fulfillment. Antipolitics, as political philosopher Nancy Rosenblum has shown, constitutes a serious threat to liberalism.12 Moreover, unlike an ascetic spirit such as Naphta’s, the restless romantic will tend to imagine happiness in infinite growth and transformation. The ascetic is, by contrast, fundamentally conservative. He tends to view absolute stasis of all desires as a point of perfection, completion, and bliss. Heinrich Heine tried to differentiate a “true” romantic spirit from the asceticism of materialists such as Börne as much as mystics such as Novalis. For Heine, the true spirit of Romanticism lay much closer to the sensual, pantheistic Hellenes than the ascetic Nazarenes.13 Even the apparently shared anti-capitalist prejudice rests upon antithetical grounds when viewed from the perspective of attitudes toward the fulfillment of individual needs and desires. Leftist anti-capitalism emerges out of a principle of human solidarity and 12.  Nancy L. Rosenblum, Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987). 13.  The epic animal poem Atta Troll is perhaps Heine’s most entertaining exposition of this basic distinction in the context of his polemical attempt to recuperate an emancipatory legacy for German Romanticism. Heinrich Heine, “Atta Troll,” in Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1968).



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the aim of plenitude.14 Its path becomes nihilistic because the demand is for absolute, positive freedom. Naphta’s anti-capitalism is, however, motivated by the wish to transcend needs and desires altogether through self-abnegation. Today’s jihadi terrorists have much more in common with Naphta than with Settembrini. They, too, are ascetic spirits: fundamentally conservative in their rejection of the Enlightenment’s emancipation of individual desires, they do not possess the deeper affinities with liberalism that romantics or even the absolutists of the Left do. Although the extreme leftist may indeed end up in self-contradiction by adopting an ascetic attitude, it is nonetheless significant that he begins at a more benevolent point with the positive and worldly emancipatory demand. When jihadis speak the language of leftist anti-imperialism, the similarities are deceptive and adventitious in the same sense that they are when Naphta utilizes this discourse. The vicious anti-philistinism of both the fictional Naphta and the real jihadis should not be confused with either romantic or leftist European traditions. Ethics Emerges From Horror Long before the rival pedants literally duel each other, young Hans concludes the pedagogical duel in the famous “Snow” chapter. More than at any other point in the novel, Mann picks up here where his novella “Death in Venice” left off. Aschenbach’s end, while gazing out upon the sea, is ambiguously situated between two kinds of metaphorical death established in the novella: on the one hand, the Apollinian death of sterile self-mastery, of too much form, refinement, self-discipline, and duty, leading to a loss of creative life; and, on the other hand, the Dionysian death of formlessness, represented by the mute, immense expanse of the sea. Castorp’s lonely skiing adventure in the mountains recalls for him memories of standing at the shore of the sea on a day with particularly tall and threatening waves crashing in. The republican Settembrini assumes the role of lifeguard in this comparison when, as Castorp leaves civilization behind to venture alone into the sea of pillowy whiteness, he believes that he hears Settembrini blowing his little horn as if it were the lifeguard’s whistle, warning the adventurous swimmer away from the waters. 14.  See for instance Agnes Heller’s insightful study of Marx’s theory of need in The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism, pp. 23–96.

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Once lost in the whiteness, the beauty and calm immensity of the snow entices the skier into lying down in its soft embrace. Giving in halfway to the temptation, Hans remains in a position somewhere between standing and lying down. He closes his eyes, and in the dream that follows he sees a bucolic, Mediterranean tableau of happy, sunny people, a “reasonable, genial community.” He sees, for instance, a woman breast-feeding her child. The peacefulness is conveyed by a sense of deference, mutual acknowledgement, and respect among the figures in the tableau. But then a serious look of “deathlike reserve” from a young boy standing on the shore gives Hans a sense of “horror” and directs his gaze behind him to a temple. Having followed the boy’s gaze and descended into this temple, Castorp sees two old women with their open breasts sagging down: “They were dismembering a child held above a basin, tearing it apart with their bare hands in savage silence.”15 It is a primal vision in a primal location: a vision of barbaric sacrifice and savagery, of Dionysian deindividuation inside a pagan temple of the mysteries. Shocked into semi-consciousness, he begins the second, lucid dream out of which will emerge an ethical resolution. He reflects now upon both parts of the dream, the lovely and the terrifying visions together, “both the icy horror of the bloody feast and the previous boundless joy, my joy in the happiness and gentle manners of that fair humanity.”16 Hans understands the tact and deference of the “sunny folk” as ensuing from a “silent regard for the bloody banquet” occurring inside the temple.17 This understanding leads to a decision that evokes a vague moral imperative: “I shall hold to their side, here in my soul, and not with Naphta, or for that matter with Settembrini—they’re both windbags.”18 This droll finish to his tutelage is followed by the only italicized sentence in the entire novel: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.”19 Death holds for Hans Castorp, as it did for Naphta, a powerful temptation to join the All of God and thereby efface the individual self. His resolution underscores the opposition of the realm of the ethical and 15.  Mann, The Magic Mountain, p. 485. 16.  Ibid., p. 486. 17.  Ibid., pp. 486–87. 18.  Ibid., p. 486. 19.  Ibid., p. 487. The “Magic Flute” vocabulary of “humanity,” “goodness,” “love,” and “death” may seem outdated and even a bit idolatrous. Yet one must note that Mann reiterated the central thought behind this sentence a great many times and in many different contexts, often describing this as the result of an ethical breakthrough.



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political (duty) from that of the spiritual and religious. Mann wants to keep these domains separate, not to transcend or resolve their opposition. Grant religious feeling no dominion over thought, not the heart, he says to himself. In other words, maintain the ethical and the spiritual in separate spheres. Moreover, this decision to side with life and humanity is undoubtedly a response to his confrontation with Dionysian horror; much like the courteous and charming sunny people that inspire him, the thought of the horror is an essential moment or condition for this ethics to emerge. Thus, the death of which this sentence speaks must be intimately known and experienced in order to be opposed by ethical duty in the sense that Mann/Castorp convey here. It might be necessary that one truly know the primal horror and terror of death, of self-annihilation, in order to resist it with a positive commitment to an ethical notion of humanity. To know death, as Camus claims for his nihilistic rebels, is ground zero for the recognition of absurdity and complete disillusionment. Even though one must acknowledge and perhaps even sympathize with death—with this disillusionment—one must also resist it. Although Castorp admits that he agrees more with Naphta’s perspectives than with Settembrini’s, for him to sympathize with death by holding on to those temptations and yearnings for “mystical community” and self-abnegation would indeed grant death dominion over his thoughts. To resist this he must exercise self-restraint or self-discipline. In other words, he must repress strong desires in the name of civilization. But this must also be done without any sentimental illusions about the human condition. Thus, not only does this sentence insist upon a separation of spheres between the spiritual and the ethical, but it is also a demand for self-restraint in holding to the boundaries of those spheres and resisting the zeal and extremism that might encourage one to wish to transcend this limit in search of a totality. Hans Castorp’s Homo Dei is, scandalously, a pluralistic middle position, Mann’s desired middle ground, comparable perhaps to Castorp’s practice of shaving one day with an open blade, the next with the modern safety razor. A Romantic Path Back to Liberalism The ethical imperative that Castorp perilously discovers in the blizzard constitutes for Mann an overcoming of the nihilism of pure disillusionment and the existential and moral challenge created by the differentiation of the particular from the general. Yet what grounds this ethics? The horror itself grounds the ethical imperative. Similar to Marlow’s dreadful

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path to redeem the idea of civilization in Heart of Darkness, out of his initiation into the mysteries, the detestable horror sparks the realization that beneath the social and the political is only an abyss of barbarism, of savage lust.20 It may seem counterintuitive that a substantive notion and conviction of human dignity would emerge out of this insight. As an ethics inspired by the recognition of human savagery, this movement from horror to an ethical idea of humanity seems to match what Judith Shklar called the “liberalism of fear.”21 Castorp’s ethical imperative is not grounded by any traditional authority but only by a universal limit concept of pain and cruelty.22 One might still ask what makes this ethics any more substantive or grounded than the abstract language of rights? The ethical challenge in “Death in Venice” rested in the sense that bourgeois social norms and conventions had proven empty and sterile for Aschenbach. An ethical imperative inspired by the experience of horror, even as negatively grounded, is an answer to barren or even idolatrous social norms and the merely formal and abstract language of rights. Castorp’s solitary vision in the snow is an exceptionally romantic path back to an endorsement of liberalism. He arrives at ethics through an adventure that is deeply antisocial, making this journey remarkably romantic. Castorp’s ethical reverie required that he leave society altogether, even the international Berghof Sanitarium, a hermetic and apolitical world of its own. His sublime vision comes to the isolated, half-awake, and morbidly curious adventurer temporarily severed from the social and political world, perilously beyond the reach of the whistles of civilization’s lifeguards. In presenting Castorp’s isolated and dangerous journey into the snow as a prerequisite for his ethical dream-poem of humanity, Mann justifies the kind of deeply private, solitary self-cultivation of the individual that is the hallmark of his share of the romantic tradition. But the danger of that journey and the horror of his vision, not to mention the ethical imperative it brings, also affirm the lifeguard’s whistle as a symbol of restraint. The lifeguard of civilization does not restrain nature; he is there ultimately to restrain the adventurer, to protect him from drowning in the temptations of self-annihilation. For without some restraints, the romantic individualist 20.  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness & Other Stories (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1995). 21.  See Shklar’s essay of the same title in Political Thought and Political Thinkers, ed. Stanley Hoffmann (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998). 22.  This ethical possibility is the central focus of Shklar’s essay “Putting Cruelty First,” Dædalus 111:3 (1982): 17–28.



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will carry his self-exploration too far and either drown (freeze to death) or descend into shocking barbarism. We can extrapolate from this to see that the negative basis for ethics in his dream-vision corresponds with a negatively grounded endorsement of liberal restraints on the whole. Typically, liberals justify their emphasis on individual rights as a protection against overweening authority. In other words, the negative liberties afforded by the public/private boundary are considered worth the loss of a totally cohesive community because of the many different ways that this allows individuals to flourish by choosing their preferences for the good life. That would be a typical positive, liberal’s defense of liberalism. By contrast, Hans Castorp takes a solitary, circular, and precarious path to arrive at a personal ethics of self-restraint that only implicitly validates the traditional liberal emphasis on restraining State powers. This type of negative ethics is only the central feature of what amounts to a romantic recasting of liberalism. Castorp’s notion that life is the “master of contradictions”—that is, sovereign over all the antinomies that organize Mann’s fiction, not least of which those represented by the dueling pedagogues Naphta and Settembrini—already suggests a rejection of monism in favor of value pluralism. In other words, in his reverie Castorp decides to abandon the search for absolutes and to accept the human condition as one of finite, conflicting values that cannot be synthesized or resolved. This is also consistent with a rejection of the search for a traditionally universal foundation for ethics. What emerges for the first time in Mann’s fiction is a resolution to the problem of meaninglessness and nihilism that this anti-foundationalism had for many years posed for him. The negatively derived ethical stance, “in silent regard for the horror” of the sacrificial human feast, is finally a substantive and even heroic way for Mann to affirm civilization’s role of creating norms and duties of restraint. In sum, the content of the bourgeois morality that Naphta views derisively as constituting no more than empty formalities and shallow philistinism is hereby validated in a purely negative manner as a restraint against the abyss, the nothingness of sheer barbarism that lies beneath the social and political order. It is an ethical standpoint that recognizes its duties as without grounding, constructed over an abyss of death, and affirms it for that very reason. One could fault Mann’s romantic, apolitical legitimation of liberal restraints by noting that the more serious threat to the individual comes from the State, especially in the genocidal twentieth century. Yet we should also consider the ambiguity of terror in terms of individual participation,

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because this points to where the traditional liberal concern with restraining state-sponsored violence may actually underestimate an equally serious need for self-restraint that is not merely formal and, therefore, not so easily inverted or harnessed and manipulated for other, destructive aims. This suggests a more traditionally conservative aspect to Mann’s thinking, one that is however not at cross-purposes with liberal concerns. The influence of this conservatism in Mann’s romantic recasting of liberalism can be seen most effectively in his use of irony. While a pluralist ethos has always been implicit to some extent in the affirmation of irresolution in irony, Mann suffered for some time under the anxiety that Kierkegaard may have been correct in seeing irony as “abrogat[ing] all ethics.”23 Mann’s irony was always conservative in the sense that the detachment from sincere sentiment and the aspirations that it expressed was in part out of recognition of human baseness. In a related sense, his irony was also “melancholic”—to use his own term from the discussion of irony in his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man—in that it also marked through that detachment a recognition of the same loss of immanence that the young Lukács bemoaned so thoroughly and consistently in his early writings.24 This is the knowledge of death that Mann’s novel explores and confronts. Missing, however, from Lukács’s account of the melancholic soul of irony is the life-affirming side of Mann’s irony, the aspect that transforms the melancholy of irony in a manner that opens up the possibility of ethics.25 Mann articulated this difference in the description of his irony as “anti-radical.” What makes Mann’s irony anti-radical is not merely the simultaneous movement in the direction of commitment and detachment, but the ethos of affirmative renunciation conveyed through irony’s pluralistic disavowal of all absolutes. Lukács recognized this ethos in Goethe and denounced it for its unheroic and philistine acceptance of the status quo of alienation.26 Yet Lukács’s own illiberal bias may have blinded him to the courage and strength involved in this ironic way of affirming the limited condition of life. Castorp arrives at a personal ethics only after acknowledging that it would rest upon primeval nothingness 23.  Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, trans. Lee M. Capel (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 306. 24.  See “Irony and Radicalism,” the final section of Mann’s Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (New York: F. Ungar, 1983). 25.  Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). 26.  Ibid., pp. 118–23.



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and is therefore a purely man-made imperative. Viewed in this manner, unheroic renunciation seems to be a more fitting description for the nihilist who sees the abyss and consequently rejects all values in the face of this singular absolute truth, as much as for the utopian who insists on transcending our abyss-bridging fictions and establishing the true, authentic life of organic, immanent meaning. This liberal recasting of Romanticism has consequences that resonate beyond Mann’s fiction. His romantic individualism could not recognize any limits to self-creation. For that reason, apolitical romantic Bildung would never arrive at an ethics on its own terms of limitless self-cultivation. The horror vision was necessary to inspire an affirmation of limits. It put the idea of limits, duties, and restraint into the otherwise infinite, limitless movement of freedom-seeking and self-creating romantic individuality. The affirmation of limits in Castorp’s ethical imperative consequently chastens the apolitical and ascetic-spiritualist tendencies of Mann’s romantic individualism by providing a necessary condition for the eventual reemergence from the civic absenteeism of self-development into the world of politics. In other words, the ethical dream-vision in the snow lays the groundwork not only for Hans Castorp’s eventual reemergence into the public world down below, but also for Thomas Mann’s own reemergence into politics from the bitter solitude of his days as an “unpolitical man.” At the same time that Mann’s novel depicts the strong appeal of the (largely romantic) European tradition of illiberalism leading in some cases to terrorism, he also illustrates for us a viable path back to liberalism. It is no doubt disturbing to consider that the European Bildung of a young man from Hamburg should end in an embrace with death. The novel’s final, lyrical image of Castorp, the volunteer soldier, storming out of a trench into a hail of bullets, eerily intimates a picture of Mohamed Atta piloting toward the New York skyscrapers. My purpose is not to encourage a facile comparison between the two adopted sons of Hamburg. Rather, if we are to preserve any elements of that romantic tradition, we must consider carefully, as Mann evidently did, what elements of this intellectual and cultural heritage are indeed truly perilous and, wherever possible, to devise ways to withstand and resist—to not allow death dominion over life.

“Death to the Enemies of the Revolution”: Heiner Müller’s Versuchsreihe Robert Buch The gunfire hurled the three bodies over the grassy slope into the quarry. Heiner Müller, Germania Death in Berlin

Violence seems to be the central preoccupation in the work of Heiner Müller: from the early plays on the painful birth of a new socialist state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), built on the ruins of one and overshadowed by the rise of another totalitarian system, to the political parables and allegories borrowed from Greek and Shakespearean tragedy; from his adaptations of some of the bloodiest episodes of the French, Russian, and German revolutions to the late dramatic experiments bent on shattering the theatrical form itself. The concern with violence is indeed so pervasive as to appear obsessive. Violence is not only the major subject matter of this writing; as a potential effect, it also seems to be one of its main objectives. Staging violence in shocking images, deadly serious and verging on the utterly grotesque, both celebrating and denouncing it, the theater of Heiner Müller inscribes itself in a long literary tradition of writers concerned and fascinated with the spectacles of destruction. Among the authors he has frequently invoked to situate his own work are Georg Büchner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Jünger, Jean Genet, et al. Yet the violence that features so prominently in Müller’s own production is not generic; it is neither an anonymous force staged for its own sake nor is it intended merely to .  “Die Salve wirbelte die drei Körper über den grasbewachsenen Hang in den Steinbruch.” Heiner Müller, Germania Tod in Berlin (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1977), p. 13. Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 52–65. www.telospress.com

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restore force and vitality to an art form in decline—as, for example, in Antonin Artaud’s avant-gardist call for a renewal and revitalization of the theater. (Müller’s work is almost routinely associated with Artaud’s theater of cruelty.) Instead, the playwright’s interventions need to be regarded as a sustained and unique confrontation, and critical engagement, with the terror waged and suffered in the name of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Müller himself lived through two dictatorships. Growing up under the Nazis, he spent most of his life in the GDR, where he had to suffer certain repressions: most of his plays were never performed; he was ostracized and excluded from the writers’ association; he was put under surveillance, publicly attacked as well as ignored. But later he came to enjoy certain privileges, chief among them the permission to travel to the West, where most of his works were produced; he also received the most important literary awards of his country. As much as the experience of fascism is crucial when it comes to understanding Müller’s aesthetic and political commitments, the central issue of his oeuvre is the violence exercised in the name of a political utopia that the author both endorsed and took to be discredited. His work is indeed an incessant attempt to recapitulate, assess, and reflect upon the human toll of the twentieth century’s epochal experiment in social engineering. It is a confrontation that has given rise to some of the most compelling and haunting episodes, scenes, and images of postwar German literature. The best place to study the characteristic entanglement of apologetics and critique is Müller’s so-called Versuchsreihe (experimental series), three plays written in the mid- to late 1960s, which, to many, constitute one of his lasting achievements. The three dramatic parables of Versuchreihe revolve around the aporias of violence: its inevitability and its inevitable fallout. Each of the plays centers on a situation of acute crisis in which violence seems both warranted and self-defeating. The predicaments featured are adapted from classical models. The first play, Philoctetes, is a rewriting of Sophocles’ Philoktetes; the second, The Horatian, adapts the story of an episode recounted in Livy’s Roman Histories, later put on the stage by Pierre Corneille (Horace, 1641); another more oblique reference of both The Horatian and Mauser, the third play in the series, is Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg. As is well known, Mauser itself is also a rewriting of Brecht’s notorious The Measures Taken. The form of the three works is indebted to these precursors as well, whose classical austerity they imitate

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to very great effect, both stylistically and tonally. Written in vers libre and making extensive use of patterns (rhythmic as well as semantic) of repetition, alternation, and variation, the language is reminiscent of Hölderlin’s translations from Sophocles (especially in Philoctetes), Brecht’s poetry, revolutionary political oratory (Danton, Robespierre, Lenin), as well as the semantic ambiguities of oracle. The terms “austerity” and “rigor” can also serve to characterize the stance taken vis-à-vis the conflicts that are unfolding. There is an unsettling sense of progression, a troubling and even agonistic “Zwangsläufigkeit,” the suggestion of an ineluctability of which it is difficult to tell whether it is staged to be admired or protested. In all three instances, the inevitability results in what seems to be the least acceptable outcome. The classical models’ reconciliatory and, as it were, “easy” solutions to the conflicts are supplanted by a disturbing sense of imbalance and intolerable contradiction. What is at stake in the three plays? What is being “tried” in them? A favorable reading sees them as an experimental and critical demonstration of the use (and abuse) of violence in politics. Müller himself has insisted on the paradigmatic character of the conflicts “on display,” claiming that the situations needed to be viewed as “models.” This remark extends the range covered by the different cases considerably, suggesting that the models put forth apply to all kinds of situations, obscuring their political references and historical circumstances. In the same vein, an endnote to Philoctetes suggests that projected images of modern warfare should conclude the final scene: Ulysses and Neoptolemos, Achilles’ son, dragging away the dead Philoctetes, whom they had meant to win back for the war and whom they end up killing instead. The author’s suggestion seems to have paved the way for reading the play, and as a consequence the whole series, as anti-war drama. But as we will see, the target of the plays’ criticism does not seem to be war as such nor some abstract kind of violence. It is rather both a certain excess of violence and its fallout that are at stake. Each of the three plays features a situation in which the exercise of violence seems to defeat the purpose or cause for which it has been deployed. Violence as a means of politics overtakes and eclipses the cause in whose service it is being deployed, triggering a dynamic that spins out of control. In Philoctetes, the eponymous character has once been marooned on an island because he was of no more use for the war. At the beginning of the play, ten years later, he is needed again. The representatives of power,



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who set him aside like a pawn, try to bring Philoctetes back into the game. As in Sophocles’ play, the hero cannot be convinced, he is intransigent; all of Ulysses’ schemes seem to fail, but ultimately the clever Greek succeeds in his mission. He will use the dead warrior, claiming that he was killed by the Trojans, in order to relaunch Philoctetes’ reluctant troops into the battle. In the cleverly constructed plot (departing only slightly but nonetheless significantly from its Sophoclean model), the subordination of everything to the cause of the Trojan War produces a repercussion, Philoctetes himself, that, at a later point, becomes indispensable for the winning of the war. But by that time it has also become impossible to reintegrate the doubly injured hero. The ruthless machinations of politics override their own purpose, jeopardizing the very achievement of the original goal. Philoctetes was sacrificed for the purpose of the war; Ulysses and Neoptolemos’s mission is to undo that sacrifice and to reintegrate the outcast. But they succeed in this task only by sacrificing Philoctetes once more. The past, it seems, cannot be undone. What seemed opportune and necessary at one time comes back to haunt the cause that the sacrifice was meant to advance. The Horatian presents us with a similar scenario. The violence exercised legitimately cannot be contained; as excessive violence it must be punished. Faced with an imminent attack from the Etruscans, the Romans decide to settle a dispute with their potential allies, the Albanians (like themselves, descendants of the Trojans), through a duel between two men. Incidentally, these two, the Horatian and the Curiatian, are brothers-inlaw. After having brought down his opponent, securing the unity of the alliance, the Horatian, “his arm still felt the sword’s thrust,” kills his own sister as she is mourning her murdered husband, placing family ties above her obligation to the city. The play is about the question of how to deal with this chain of events, the alternation between authorized and unauthorized violence, deployed with a purpose and with legitimacy at one moment and lashing out spontaneously and uncontrollably in the next—but still, we must note, in the same spirit, namely that of patriotic duty. Given .  “And the Horatian—his arm still felt the sword’s thrust / He had killed the Curiatian with in combat / The man saw his sister weeping for now— / Thrust the sword—the blood of the man she wept for / Wasn’t dry on it— / Into the breast of the weeping girl / So that her blood dropped to the earth. He said: / Go join him, whom you love more than Rome.” Heiner Müller, The Horatian, in The Battle: Plays, Prose, Poems, trans. Carl Weber (New York, PAJ Publications, 1989), p. 108.

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the dangerous proximity (and indeed similarity) between the noble and ignoble killing, the city, Rome, is at great pains to maintain the distinction between the two. The only solution she finds is to honor the victor who saved the city from internal conflict and to punish the murderer of his own sister, who by slaughtering a Roman woman has in fact increased the possibility of internal strife, of civil war. The Horatian is first celebrated, solemnly and ceremoniously, and then put to death, again accompanied by all the relevant symbolic gestures: he is decapitated, his corpse is desecrated, dismembered, and fed to the dogs. Even more than the preceding plays of the series, Mauser—openly acknowledging its debt to Brecht’s notorious The Measures Taken, a precursor that it seeks to overcome and to critique at the same time—brings into sharp focus the disastrous fallout of the unconditional and unflinching commitment to violence. The play is based on an episode from Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel And Quiet Flows the Don, which dealt with the “red terror” in the Soviet Union. “A” is in charge of organizing the elimination of peasants and other people suspected of counterrevolutionary activities. As if to foreshadow his own fate, the first man on A’s list is his predecessor, who, in a moment of pity, released some of the suspects that were to be executed. After a period of doing his “work,” A asks to be relieved of his duty. The request is denied. Seized by madness, he does not merely execute the suspects; in a kind of ritualistic killing frenzy, he desecrates their bodies. This transgression cannot be tolerated, and A is put before the firing squad. The violence exercised in the name of the revolution is indiscriminate and unrelenting. It finally claims the executioner himself, who, at the close of the play, is shown consenting to his own death, pronouncing the very command that he used to speak to the firing squad: “Death to the enemies of the revolution!” Violence has become the order of the day—another kind of “work,” a form of production even—but it cannot be held at bay. It overwhelms and consumes even those who “dispense” it (to use one of the play’s own terms). On this view, Versuchsreihe articulates a critique of a violence run amok. Yet, this would be a rather conventional “reading” of the three works: conventional and also insufficient, not only because such a reading would not be in keeping with Müller’s rather caustic humor, but also because it omits a major characteristic of the series. It fails to account for the unsettling character of the plays, which are clearly about more than just the indignation over the unforeseen consequences of the use of violence.



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In a number of comments, as in the essays and notes appended to the book edition of Versuchsreihe but also in various interviews and his autobiography, the author has stressed his commitment to the very positions that the plays seem to call into question. But even if we were not aware of Müller’s somewhat flirtatious (and one would hope ironic) relationship to apocalyptic thinking, the point of the Versuchsreihe is precisely to chastise the stance that purports to occupy the moral high ground, the position that presupposes one could renounce or forgo the use of violence in a struggle for political survival. At the same time, the works do not propose an uncritically affirmative attitude toward violence but rather one that maintains—and exhibits—a clear awareness of its dilemmas and risks. Notwithstanding the author’s dismissal of the learning play, the Brechtian Lehrstück and its pedagogical agenda, Versuchsreihe is itself driven by an underlying moral purpose, but it is difficult, if not impossible, to square its “morality” with our received notions of what is morally acceptable. What is targeted in Versuchsreihe is a certain moral doxa, a morality derived from the ideals of humanism, which, to the extent that we find the plays’ solutions hard to stomach, is still ours. One of the ways of striking at this doxa is by systematically demolishing the emotional response that is most likely to impose itself in view of the events staged: compassion or pity for the victims of the violence. Obviously these are two terms with a long history in the poetological tradition. In fact, they sound a bit old-fashioned, and one may wonder why we should be at all surprised to see a post-avant-garde author, writing in the late twentieth century, dismiss them. I want to suggest that they are key to understanding the unsettling effect of Versuchsreihe: their demolition is one of the principal objectives of the series, and, indeed, that is part of the “experiment” that these three works propose. The plays, in different ways, hinge upon these two concepts, which they dismantle and redeploy at the same time. In other words, “pity” and “compassion” are neither entirely dismissed nor completely discarded. The compassion for the victims of violence is replaced by a sublime feeling of moral sacrifice on the part of the perpetrators. Their crimes come to resemble sacrificial acts and acquire an almost sacred aura. He who takes it upon himself to sacrifice his own humanity by “dispensing death” to others is the one who claims our pity and admiration. Compassion for the immediate victims of his violence is replaced by a form of piety, a violent act, both cursed and sacred, performed for the sake of overcoming all violence. Catharsis is replaced by the “Schauder der Entfremdung,” the frisson of alienation.

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(The expression is used by Müller in a commentary on Ulysses, the least likely of the three protagonists, or rather antagonists, of Philoctetes to elicit our sympathies, let alone our admiration, but the one who, as we will see, is supposed to announce a new kind of political subject.) Philoctetes In Philoctetes, the centrality of “pity” is evident in the choice of the material itself. Sophocles’ Philoctetes is the central paradigm of the representation of suffering in Lessing’s Laocoön. Unlike representations of pain in the visual arts, the dramatic staging of Philoctetes’ pain is acceptable, in Lessing’s view, because our sense of compassion is mixed with admiration. We see the injured hero not only succumbing to his physical pain but also standing by his moral principles, and we are moved to put ourselves in his place. The expression of Philoctetes’ suffering is tempered by the hero’s indestructible virtue. It is this combination that appeals to (and elicits) our humanity. By contrast, the spectacle of sheer pain, the sight of wounds and the cries of agony, would affect us too strongly. They would produce discomfort, disgust even, because a repellent subject matter prompts repulsion, whether it is real or just a representation. In their effect the two are indistinguishable. Philoctetes revokes the enlightened desire for reconciliation and unity under the auspices of a common humanity; the feeling of compassion is systematically thwarted if not derided. The sense of crisis in this play is acute. The irreconcilable positions of the three protagonists clash relentlessly. Ending the war has absolute priority for Ulysses, who keeps reminding the other two of what losing the struggle would entail: the devastation of their own hometowns. Ulysses is the pragmatist, the representative of the raison d’état: victory over Troy trumps all other concerns, and time is pressing. Abandoned on the island of Lemnos ten years earlier, time is all that Philoctetes has, and yet he has lost all sense of time. Driven to the verge of madness by his infected wound, a stigma and a continual reminder of the injustice done to him, he rages and rants, wallowing in the disgust over his own rotting body and relishing in fantasies of slowly putting to death his archenemy, Ulysses. The notion of the human, along with that of the Greek, prompts his scorn and anger; he is driven by a hatred of universal scope, but at the same time it is a private, personal affect that has become the decisive feature of his identity. Philoctetes is forever unwilling to compromise, to be co-opted for any venture that does not have to



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do with himself and the satisfaction of his vengefulness. Cast out, he has assumed a position of radical self-interest, a position that is grounded in the constant and all-consuming pain and resentment over the treatment he has suffered. This position cannot be mediated with the exigencies of the community, represented by Ulysses. Reclaiming Philoctetes has become all but impossible. Müller has pointed out that the success of the play depended on preventing any kind of identification or empathy with the tormented hero: “The play can only be performed if the audience is kept from empathizing with Philoctetes, at the latest, when his hatred of Greeks turns into a universal hatred of mankind because he can’t see any alternative.” The figure who tries to mediate between the two positions is Neoptolemos—but to no avail. He is the idealist who fails in the most devastating manner. Neoptolemos tries to side with both Philoctetes and with the cause of the Greeks. He sees in Philoctetes one of the legendary warriors to whose rank he himself aspires. Moreover, like Philoctetes, he bears a grudge against Ulysses, who has tricked him out of his slain father’s armory. At the same time, Neoptolemos is dedicated to the Greek cause, in whose service his father has met his death. Despite his lofty ideals, Neoptolemos submits to Ulysses’ machinations in order to win back Philoctetes. When he tries to undo his lies, he sets off a series of events, at the end of which he runs his sword into Philoctetes’ back in order to save Ulysses’ life. It is precisely Neoptolemos’s youthful investment in the ideal of heroism, his compassion for the agonizing Philoctetes, tormented by his wound, that brings about the least desirable outcome. Ulysses had even anticipated this turn of events, admonishing his resistant pupil: “Get rid of your compassion it tastes like blood / no room for virtue now nor time.” In the words of the author: “Because he did not want to lie, he has to kill.” Once again it will only be through Ulysses’ proverbial ingenuity that the predicament can be salvaged. Müller’s own explanations of his play varied over the years. In an attempt to counter the charge of pessimism (raised by the East German cultural bureaucracy), he claimed that the story was set in “prehistory” (in the Marxist sense of the term) and had nothing to do with the realities of the socialist German state. As Werner Mittenzwei had suggested in one of the first reviews, Philoctetes was an anti-war drama, a play about the barbarity of times past. Müller later conceded that the subtext of his drama .  Heiner Müller, Geschichten aus der Produktion (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag 1974), 1:145.

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was in fact Stalinism, pointing out that, at the time, such issues could not be addressed openly. Despite the mythological “costume,” it would have been quite clear to the contemporary audience that the play was actually about the impossible rehabilitation of political renegades, about the difficult reintegration of the victims of political persecutions. In other comments, Müller suggested viewing the work as a kind of parable of the dialectic of enlightenment. Reminiscent of Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous speculation about the origins of modernity and modern totalitarianism, the play formulates a critique of “instrumental reason” and the ruthless domination of nature (both inner and outer) by humans, with Ulysses as its chief proponent (very much as in the philosophers’ account of things). But in what is perhaps the most prominent explication of his play, a letter to the Bulgarian director Mitko Gotscheff, the author undertook a puzzling reevaluation of the figure of Ulysses, departing from his earlier view according to which the three positions were equally untenable. In his programmatic letter to Gotscheff, he clearly privileges Ulysses over the other two characters. A true “political animal,” he is the antithesis not only of the plasticity of Hegel’s Greek (“die Gegenfigur zum Plastischen Griechen Hegels”), whose representative, Neoptolemos, fails so terrifically, but also of the tragic hero’s “proud stupidity.” At the same time, Ulysses himself is said to have a tragic dimension. He too had to renounce home and family before joining “Operation Helena,” as it is called in the letter. As he tells his “pupil” Neoptolemos: “You are not the first in this affair to do what you do not like.” The letter describes him as a liminal and transgressive figure. The harbinger of the transition from clan to statehood, he is himself traversed (and torn apart) by the boundary, by the dividing line that he is the first to pass. The first to undo the work of fate, “Macher und Liquidator der Tragödie,” he overcomes the world of mythic doom entering the era of rational domination and manipulation, the world of politics. His near total identification with the given assignment foreshadows the fervor of the later executioners, especially of Mauser, where the identification with the mission is symbolized in the merging of the executioner with his weapon. The letter speaks of Ulysses as “the tool.” The reading of the play as a critique of instrumental reason (apparently shared by the author himself, at least for a while) is thus replaced by one that champions the clever Greek, precisely because of his unscrupulous “instrumentalization” .  Heiner Müller, Herzstück (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1983), pp. 102–10.



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of Philoctetes’ dead body, his breathtakingly quick adaptation to the new situation, and his utter disregard for principles or moral considerations. The Horatian As in Philoctetes, the eponymous character of The Horatian is a hero and an outcast: distinguished through the highest merit, having secured the unity of the alliance; and stigmatized for the killing of his sister, a fellow citizen, thereby putting at risk the very unity he has achieved. The skillfully patterned play can be read as reiterating the same gesture, that of denied mercy. Killing his opponent, the Horatian is impervious to the latter’s plea for mercy; he then kills his sister whose outcry at the sight of her slain husband seems to be as much pain over her loss as it is indignation over her brother’s gratuitous cruelty; the Horatian’s father’s plea for his son’s life is overruled by the city; finally, the city’s own hesitations about adding another victim to the chain of death are outweighed by her sense of justice. Compared to the first mention of the episode in Livy and to the later adaptation by Corneille, the absence of a merciful solution in Müller’s version of the story becomes even more evident. In Corneille, it is the ruler who pardons the Horatian. In Livy, it is the people who absolve the Horatian “more in view of his bravery than out of legal considerations.” In both of the earlier renderings, the episode served precisely to illustrate how a rift is overcome, how an irreconcilable contradiction is resolved, aufgehoben, so to speak. By contrast, Müller’s paradoxical solution to the predicament—honoring the victor and punishing the murderer—is remarkable in its refusal of any dialectical sublation of the contradiction. As in Philoctetes, where the murdered hero is taken away on the shoulders of his henchmen, the most gruesome image of The Horatian is that of the dismembered body that has been stitched together in order to honor the dead fighter. The image of a body whose integrity has been restored but whose mutilation remains visible epitomizes the impossible solution. The antithesis of merit (Verdienst) and guilt (Schuld), of the murderer (Mörder) and victor (Sieger), structures the tribunal’s deliberations, which at times seem closer to declamation or even incantation than to the actual weighing of different arguments. The negotiation pits sentence against sentence, judgment against judgment. Nearly every act and every .  Livy, Roman Histories, 1.26.

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utterance is repeated, but with the opposite sense, creating a peculiar effect of symmetry and balance; yet, it is a balance that seems slightly odd, skewed, as it were. The text’s repetitions, alternations, and slight variations result in a rare rhythmic quality but also give it an oddly mechanical character; its paratactical constructions effect both a certain monotony and liturgy-like insistence. Repetition governs the text not only on the sentence level but also in its larger segments, as in the depiction of the two subsequent rituals, the tribute paid to the hero and his punishment. The curious doubling is repeated even after the sentence has been executed: the dead man is first honored and then given over to the scavengers (all of which is rendered with a loving attention to the bloody details of these acts). Notwithstanding the liturgical and quasi-mechanical character of the discourse that describes and accompanies the execution of the tribunal’s paradoxical decision, there is a demonstrative insistence on distinguishing and keeping separate the two deeds and their consequences (their fallout). The ideal invoked at the end of the play—an ideal that seems to be the outcome of their solution as well as the underlying guiding principle—is that of “reinliche Scheidung.” The tribunal’s insistence on such “neat separation” (also “clear distinction”) combines the idea of distinctness, in a cognitive sense (“Deadly to humans is what they cannot understand”), with that of purity in a moral and linguistic sense (“the words must be kept pure”). The antithetical parts of the sentence are not allowed to eclipse each other to then reappear in a synthesis on a higher level. Instead, they need to be kept separate, and, no less importantly, the contradiction must be kept in mind. Its memory has to be kept alive: “not hiding the rest / That was not resolved in the unceasing change of things” (“nicht verbergend den Rest / Der nicht aufging im unaufhaltbaren Wandel”). Mauser As The Horatian, Mauser is about coming to terms with the contradictions of violence deployed to battle violence: the necessity of killing to end all killing. This stance is epitomized in the phrase that is echoed throughout the play, like a refrain: “The daily bread of the Revolution / Is the death of its enemies, knowing, even the grass / We must tear up so it will stay .  “And the laurel bearer said: / His merit cancels his guilt / And the sword bearer said: / His guilt cancels his merit / And the laurel bearer asked: / Shall the conqueror be executed? / And the sword bearer asked: / Shall the murderer be honored?” Müller, The Battle, p. 111.



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green.” As the tribunal in The Horatian, the chorus in Mauser is at pains to uphold the distinction between authorized and unauthorized killing, legitimate and illegitimate slaughter. As in Philoctetes (but in reverse order), the main character of the play, A, was once useful to the revolution and ends up being a liability (“used up by his work”). Once instrumental in the revolution’s plan he has become detrimental to the cause and needs to be eliminated himself: “Then we knew that his work had used him up / And his time had passed and we led him away.” After liquidating his predecessor, B, who succumbed to doubts about the rightfulness of his “work,” A is himself affected by the same weakness: “doubt / Lodged itself between finger and trigger.” But doubt is unacceptable. B’s pity for the peasants was countered unequivocally and apodictically: “there was / Against doubt in the Revolution no / Other remedy but the death of the doubter.” Although A tries to tell himself that the killings are “work like any other work,” soon enough he is burnt out. He reminds himself that the enemy before his gun needs to be killed in order to put a stop to the violence against the oppressed that has lasted for centuries. But the enemy becomes a man, a human being: “before my revolver a man” (“vor meinem Revolver ein Mensch”). The revolution vehemently refutes this vision, decreeing that “Man is unknown.” He will only be known once the revolution has prevailed. The compassionate identification with the enemy, with the victim as fellow man, is impermissible, premature, and indeed groundless, for “man” is the goal, that which the revolution has yet to uncover, to bring into being. The killing, “a work like any other work and like no other work,” is a form of production. Dispensing death, killing “enemies,” is preparing the birth of man, a form of giving life. Consequently, A’s claim to human weakness is rejected: “Your weakness is our weakness / Your conscience is the breach in our consciousness / Which is a breach in our front.” Weakness is not a personal matter but is the weakness of the collective itself. A is the personification of the revolution’s own hesitation, her wavering faith in the process upon which she has embarked. Therefore the revolution cannot release A. Killing the enemy is also killing—and overcoming—the enemy within. A’s call for reassurance (“Will the killing end when the Revolution has triumphed? / Will the Revolution triumph. How much longer”) is met with sibylline equanimity: “You know what we know, we know what you know / The Revolution will triumph or Man will not be / But disappear in .  English translations are from Mauser, in Müller, The Battle.

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the increasing mass of mankind.” There is no alternative to the struggle that is being fought. The only answer to A’s question is the continuation of the struggle. Thus disabused, A continues his mandate. For a while the hangman manages to carry out his task, in a quasi-automatic, mechanical manner. The enemies he has to execute are not men but “something you shoot into / Until Man will rise from the ruins of man” (emphasis mine). But the protest against the dizzying logic of the killing cannot be suppressed for very long. At the constant sight of the bodies ripped apart by his bullets, the shots hurling them into the quarry, the doubts return as their opposite: in the form of a frantic and exuberant killing, as madness. A takes the dead under his feet, stomping on the corpses in a kind of dance of death, giving free rein to his sadistic and atavistic impulses. He has been incapable of walking the line between not letting his “work,” the killing, affect him too much, between carrying out his task in a quasi-mechanical manner and completely surrendering himself to his gruesome assignment. Unable to maintain the proper distance, he has become one with his task, killing for pleasure, in an insane kind of jouissance. Put before a revolutionary tribunal, he questions the revolution’s temporary abdication of its own ideals, its avowed self-alienation (“the Revolution itself isn’t one with itself”), and the indefinite deferral of its promises. The answer to his defiant question about “man” (“I ask the Revolution about Man”) is short: “You ask too early.” Unperturbed by the outburst of A’s “creaturely humanity”—he throws himself to the ground, clinging to the earth, screaming—the chorus not only insists that he has forsaken his life, but it also demands his acquiescence. Once again invoking self-sacrifice, the revolution appeals to A: We have to give up ourselves, each one of us But we shouldn’t give up one another. You are the one and you are the other Whom you have mangled under your boot Who has mangled you under your boot You gave yourself up the one the other

.  See Müller, The Battle, p. 132: “I don’t want to die. I throw myself on the ground. / I hold on to the earth with all my hands. / I bite with my teeth into the earth to hold on / To what I don’t want to leave. I scream.” The term “creaturely humanity” is suggested by Peter von Matt’s in his brief discussion of Mauser in his Verkommene Söhne, mißratene Töchter (Munich: Hanser, 1995), pp. 96–100. For a more recent appropriation of the term, see Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006).



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The revolution won’t give you up. Learn to die What you learn will increase our experience.

Consenting to his own death, A can be reintegrated into the collective, for “what counts is the example, death means nothing.” What is the example? And does death really mean nothing? A number of commentators have maintained the contrary. In Mauser, as in many other works by Müller, dying is a form of transfiguration, preparing the ground for something new, in accordance with the author’s cryptic pronouncement, “so that something can arrive something has to go the first shape of hope is fear the first appearance of the new is terror.” The only objection to this—largely compelling—description is that the thanatological pathos is not as unqualified as it appears. It is indeed impossible to determine whether we are seriously asked to endorse the logic of sacrifice that continuously inverts the positions of executioner and victim; between the perpetrators of violence and those suffering and dying from it (the difference is erased in the most literal fashion imaginable in Mauser), or whether A’s “creaturely” protest is stronger, unassimilable, unintegrable, “as the rest that can’t be resolved.” As troubling as it might be, the two positions are advanced as not mutually exclusive. Not losing consciousness of the fallout of violence is the only tenable position in “the increasing noise of the battle” that forms the backdrop to Mauser and which is the condition of (and reason for) the urgency of the depicted actions. However, as the author has put it himself: the eschatological horizon is gone (“die Endzeit der Maßnahme ist abgelaufen”), the expectation of imminent upheaval has passed, and the extreme measures advocated and the pathos of that advocacy seem exceedingly strange. If the plays of Versuchsreihe were meant as an experiment and a sort of training for those committed to the utopian dream, an opportunity to “work through,” to embrace, and to brace themselves against, the inevitable fallout of violence, today they seem more like an atonement that does not afford itself absolution. .  Müller, The Battle, p. 133. Cf. Wolfgang Rothe, “Heiner Müller: Mauser,” in Deutsche Revolutionsdramatik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), pp. 234–56; Richard Herzinger, Masken der Lebensrevolution: Vitalistische Zivilisations- und Humanismuskritik in Texten Heiner Müllers (Munich: Fink, 1992), pp. 135–44; Horst Domdey, Produktivkraft Tod: Das Drama Heiner Müllers (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998). For a more sympathetic reading, see Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick, “Producing Revolution: Heiner Müller’s Mauser as Learning Play,” in New German Critique 8 (1976): 110–21.

The Sovereignty of the Individual in Ernst Jünger’s The Worker David Pan Individualism and nationalism are often held to be competing or even mutually exclusive concepts. Hannah Arendt, for instance, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, argues that a focus on the rights of the individual could have provided an antidote to the kind of racist nationalism established by the Nazis. According to this logic, the more firmly individual rights are defended, the less dangerously nationalist the resulting society will be, because individuals’ goals and desires will not be subordinated to those of a larger group. Studies of the work of Ernst Jünger have confirmed this assessment of the importance of the individual as a defense against nationalist forms of repression. Critics who have alleged the complicity of his work with the rise of National Socialism typically point to the ways in which his work eradicates the individual. Yet, the status of the individual subject, both in Jünger’s work and within the cultural history leading up to National Socialism, may not be so clear-cut. The critique of the subject, leading to a recognition of the limitations of the individual, is a broader phenomenon that is arguably the fundamental unifying basis of European modernism and not just an element of right-wing movements. At the same time, the defense of the individual may actually be compatible with Jünger’s nationalism, indicating that individualism and nationalism might in fact be linked projects within a larger process of identity construction. .  Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 235. .  Klaus Gauger, “Zur Modernedeutung in Ernst Jüngers Der Arbeiter,” Sprachkunst 25, no. 2 (1998): 277, 282; Anton Kaes, “The Cold Gaze: Notes on Mobilization and Modernity,” New German Critique 59 (1993): 111. Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 66–74. www.telospress.com

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The link between individualism and nationalism is a key issue in Jünger’s 1932 The Worker, an extended essay that attempts to establish a new form of subjectivity that is suited to a total mobilization for a national project. Jünger uses the “worker type” as a model for subjectivity that has replaced the bourgeois concept of the individual, indicating for Marcus Bullock that in this text “individual sovereignty has no place.” Yet, Jünger’s worker type, though it is explicitly distinguished from the bourgeois individual, in fact takes up the structure of subjectivity developed in the bourgeois individual and extends it. The worker type does not result from a simple setting of constraints on the individual but from a focus on the individual as the sole source of sovereign authority. Paradoxically, this exclusive valorization of the individual brings with it an intensification of a nationalist project as the apotheosis of individual sovereignty. Jünger’s construction of a new form of subjectivity in the worker type fits within a larger modernist response to the disenchantment of the world in modernity. Jünger justifies his critique of the bourgeois concept of the individual by describing a broad process of modernization in which the individual’s character and qualities are no longer so important in their particularity: “The abandonment that has become the tragic fate of the individual is paradigmatic for the abandonment of the human in a new, unexplored world, whose iron law is felt to be meaningless.” Here, Jünger shares a more general modernist sense of the disjunction between nineteenth-century forms of individuation and the social and technological forces of the twentieth century, which are perceived as impersonal, meaningless, and impervious to individual engagement. He attempts to provide an objective description of a historical change, and, in fact, his description is similar to other accounts of the period, for example, by Walter Benjamin, who argues that modernization has changed the parameters for the development of “the tiny, fragile human body.” Andreas Huyssen argues that Jünger’s writing is to be differentiated from Benjamin’s because Jünger attempts either to forget the body “or rather to equip it with an impenetrable armor protecting it against the memory of the traumatic experience .  Marcus Paul Bullock, The Violent Eye: Ernst Jünger’s Visions and Revisions on the European Right (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 1992), p. 141. .  Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1932), p. 105. Subsequent references will be documented parenthetically within the text. .  Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 84.

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of the trenches.” Yet, Jünger’s war writings, far from forgetting or armoring the body, directly confront its fragility in order to overcome it through an act of courage that establishes “the devotion of the individual person with the force of an iron commitment, the positing of the idea against the material, without regard for what might happen.” Jünger does not define courage here as a protection of the body from harm, but as an acceptance of this possibility, leading to a sovereignty of the individual will over this possible threat to the body. Jünger’s focus on individual sovereignty, though it does not forget the body, does indeed establish what Huyssen calls “an aristocratic, stoical self,” except that this self follows the model of the worker rather than the aristocrat. Jünger’s conception of the worker type does not completely break with an individualist ethic but rather refers back to a view of the individual established by Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, in which “it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won.” Just as for Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage the attainment of freedom has two steps—the first in which consciousness experiences “the fear of death,” and the second in which “consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence”10—for Jünger the facing of death is accompanied by work as the key to individual freedom. Work is not merely the task of a social class of workers, as opposed to owners or aristocrats, but is the primary existential way in which humans relate to both the natural and the social world: “Every claim to freedom within the working world is therefore only possible to the extent that it appears as a claim to work. This means that the measure of an individual’s freedom corresponds precisely to the extent to which this individual is a worker” (65). The link between freedom and work places the development of individual capabilities at the center of Jünger’s conception of the subject. Although Jünger thereby extends a Hegelian approach to the subject and consequently continues, in aesthetic form, a modernizing, Hegelian .  Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 134. .  Ernst Jünger, “Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis” (1922), in Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980), 7:49. .  Huyssen, Twilight Memories, p. 143. .  G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), p. 114. 10.  Ibid., pp. 117–18.



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project to synthesize world history into a unity and totality,11 it would be false to conclude with Peter Koslowski that Jünger establishes a “myth of modernity” that gathers philosophical and aesthetic forms into a unifying epos of modernity.12 If Jünger does indeed try to establish a totality, he also criticizes a Hegelian totality for claiming a universal status when it is in point of fact a particular totality. The main focus of Jünger’s political argument is after all to demonstrate that the idea of a universal reason grounded in bourgeois values and defended by France and England in World War I is in fact a particular culture that is masquerading as a universal one in order to demonize its enemies. Jünger’s response to the idea of a universal, rational culture is to insist that the call to reason is a sham intended to “ban the opponent from the realm of society and thus from the realm of humanity and the law” (18). Rather than establishing a unitary movement grounded in a hyper-modern project,13 Jünger’s construction of subjectivity, though extending the Hegelian notion of a development of the individual consciousness through work, also opposes the unity of the modern project in order to insist on the particular national character of a totality. This focus on a particular whole outside the individual then leads him to describe a new type of subjectivity, arising out of a “will to race development,” and which results in the “production of a certain type” (102). With the model of the type, Jünger both embraces the modern transformation of subjective experience and makes a prescriptive judgment about the type of subject he wishes to see. The difference between the bourgeois individual and Jünger’s type is that the former enters into voluntary associations and the latter is bound to certain groups and “suited to tasks within an order” (102). The new phenomenon that Jünger describes is the extent to which a person’s role in society in the twentieth century has defining consequences for that person’s identity and social bonds. He sets this modern situation, first, against older feudal forms in which birth and tradition are defining for identity and, second, against bourgeois forms in which there is a presumed universality of condition combined with an emphasis on individual decision and freedom that create the possibility of particularity for individuals but not for groups. 11.  Peter Koslowski, Der Mythos der Moderne: Die dichterische Philosophie Ernst Jüngers (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1991), pp. 29–31. 12.  Ibid., p. 11. 13.  Ibid., pp. 29–31.

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Because Jünger’s worker is defined through the group and not as an individual, the worker’s social associations are not voluntary ones. Rather, using organic, naturalistic language, Jünger describes the worker as belonging to a group that is an “organic construction” to which individuals are bound due to a “factual linkage [tatsächliche Verflechtung]” (114). Yet, unlike the feudal aristocrat, the worker is not born into a position but develops into it based on individual capabilities and role in society. One of his examples of a type is the air force pilot, who does not enter into his role through his military-aristocratic upbringing but through the rare gift of being able to successfully fly a plane and engage in air combat (108). This aspect of individual affinity and achievement in determining the worker type maintains an important link between Jünger’s worker and the bourgeois individual in the extent to which both are meant to develop their own individual capacities as far as possible. The key difference that Jünger identifies is that the bourgeois individual strives for a general cultivation that is meant to develop individuality of expression within a universal humanity, whereas the worker strives for a specialized education that makes him suitable for a particular function in society that must mobilize for modern warfare (109). Different groups distinguish themselves as a consequence of specialization, and Jünger locates particularity in the group rather than in the individual. His particular construction of the relation of the subject to the national totality links the sovereignty of the individual to a larger whole in the form of the Gestalt. This idea allows Jünger to focus on the individual struggle for life and death as the key experience that in itself demonstrates the sovereignty of the individual yet also links the individual to a totality through the relationship to a world of elemental and violent forces. He praises “a sort of human who can blow himself up with pleasure and can even see in this act a confirmation of order,” because the individual confronts in violence an intensity of experience that justifies the individual will as part of a greater pattern that is not fundamentally differentiated from the individual but is rather the overarching structure within which individual life exists (34). Although the individual is being mobilized as part of a national project, there is paradoxically no other authority outside the individual to which the individual is to be subordinated. Instead, the individual accepts the possibility of death as part of the individual’s preservation within a Gestalt that is the essence of that individual’s existence. “Of the highest importance however is the fact that the Gestalt is not subordinate to the



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elements of fire and earth and that consequently the human belongs to the form of eternity. In his Gestalt, completely separate from any simply moral judgment, any redemption, and any ‘striving effort,’ lies his inherent, unchanging, and immortal achievement, his highest existence, and his deepest confirmation” (34). The Gestalt is not just an aesthetic quality, an image, or a tool for understanding the character of a culture. Rather, it justifies individual existence in an unchanging and permanent way. Because Jünger’s Gestalt consists of the structure of the individual’s existence, the individual looks to no higher authority than his own self in order to set up a relationship to the “eternal.” At the same time, the Gestalt still establishes the framework within which the preservation of the individual is also the functionalization of the individual within a total mobilization of a nation for war. Jünger sees the experience of war and violence as constitutive for human subjectivity because in this experience the subject affirms its own disdain for its material existence. This sacrifice of the individual serves to affirm the primacy of the individual’s Gestalt as the nation. While the individual should “see his highest freedom in destruction,” Jünger also interprets war as “a space in which to die, that is, to live in such a way that the Gestalt of the empire might be confirmed—this empire that is left to us, even when they take away our body” (38). The nation becomes the Gestalt through which the individual attains meaning in a sacrifice that ultimately still preserves the individual in the affirmation of the nation. The merging of the individual with the nation occurs by means of Jünger’s depiction of individual experience as a direct and unmediated encounter with intense moments. The subject finds its measure in its own self and its own intensity of experience. There is no other authority than subjective experience for the affirmation of the individual, and there is no cultural mediation of this intensity. Indeed, this intensity of experience becomes for Jünger the source and basis of culture because the individual (der Einzelne) “takes his own self to be his measure. Herein lies the pride and the mourning of his life. All the great moments of life, the glowing dreams of youth, the intoxication of love, the fire of battle, fall together with a deeper consciousness of the Gestalt and the memory of the magical return of the Gestalt that moves the heart and convinces it of the immortality of these moments” (35). Intense subjective experiences of the individual subject and the return of these experiences in the memory guarantee the permanence of these experiences as an ultimate reality preserved in the

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Gestalt. The Gestalt does not subordinate the individual but only the body, allowing the individual to have his measure within himself by way of his most intense experiences, without the need for any cultural mediation of these experiences. As a consequence, Jünger’s understanding of experience leaves out language and concentrates on the elemental and the dangerous as those characteristics that lend intensity and permanence to individual experience.14 But without any linguistic or cultural marking, these experiences remain completely undifferentiable. The only characteristic is a proximity to the pure and featureless elemental force of violence, and the fundamental source of intensity is the approach of death: It is only in this moment that he declares a life-and-death struggle. It is then that the individual, who is in the end nothing more than an employee, becomes a warrior, the mass becomes an army, and the establishment of a new order of command takes the place of the revision of a social contract. This pushes the worker out of the sphere of negotiations, pity, and literature and raises him into the sphere of action, it transforms his juridical ties into military ones, which is to say that, instead of lawyers, he will have leaders, and his existence will become the measure, instead of being in need of interpretation. . . . For what have programs been up to now besides commentaries to an original text that has not yet been written? (25–26)

By focusing on the life-and-death struggle, Jünger seeks to shift the emphasis from the word to the deed. In so doing, he feels that he is shifting from the abstraction of negotiations, pity, and literature to the hard and certain world of orders, war, and soldiers.15 Because Jünger rejects the primacy of the word and focuses on pure intensity of experience in the encounter with death, he does not understand the Gestalt as a cultural structure but as a part of an elemental reality. This means that the intense aesthetic experience of the world that he imagines does not set up a cultural relationship to violence. Rather, the reaction to an overwhelming of the human by an intensity of violence is the positing of the sovereignty of 14.  Russell Berman describes this suppression of language as a turn to visuality, in “Written Right Across Their Faces: Ernst Jünger’s Fascist Modernism,” in Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism, ed. Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick (New York: Columbia UP, 1989), pp. 71–74. 15.  For a detailed description of Jünger’s focus on “perceptual acuity,” see Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2002), pp. 147–48.



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the individual will against this violence. This violence in action becomes then the “original text” in terms of which all language is reduced to the status of commentary. As a result of his opposition to language as the structuring element for the individual, Jünger ends up opposing a traditionalist project that would subordinate the individual to ideological and collective structures that are defined within a specific cultural tradition. A key characteristic of Jünger’s worker type is that it allows for a smoother integration into a national project than the bourgeois individual. But this ease of integration of the individual is not a result of a flat subordination of the individual but of a thoroughgoing insistence on the primacy and sovereignty of the individual, to the exclusion of all symbolic limitations on this individual. Jünger criticizes the bourgeois subject for being caught up in a false world of cultural refinement and literature and sets up the worker as a figure who directly confronts an underlying reality of violence. Yet, the structure of the worker’s subjectivity is still based on his status as an individual without context, facing an ultimate reality of violence. The key move in Jünger is consequently not a rejection of individuality but a rejection of the last vestiges of a traditional cultural determination of the subject that is still maintained in the bourgeois idea of the individual. By peeling off this last layer of tradition, Jünger is not arguing for an abandonment of the individual but for a more thorough and consistent focus on the individual than in the bourgeois subject. This is because the ideal of freedom and self-determination in the bourgeois subject was in fact never carried out consistently. Instead, the bourgeois subject was always hemmed in and constrained by a complex set of rules and conventions that governed the subject’s actions and thoughts in a way that made nineteenth-century bourgeois society highly conventionalized and thus not at all universal. This conventionality of bourgeois society becomes the object of critique for Jünger because he sees the bourgeois as alienated from an underlying reality of violence and elemental forces. Because Jünger expresses this opposition to bourgeois culture by criticizing the word and ideology in favor of action and a direct facing of horror and violence, Karl Heinz Bohrer reads Jünger’s work as “one of the last attempts to break with the concept of reason through the pure intuition of beauty.”16 But the opposition to reason is in fact an opposition to a specific nineteenth-century bourgeois culture that sets itself up to be 16.  Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die Ästhetik des Schreckens: Die pessimistische Romantik und Ernst Jüngers Frühwerk (Munich: Karl Hanser Verlag, 1978), p. 19.

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a universal one. As such, the critique of reason is actually a critique of a specific culture’s claim to universal value. The difficulty with Jünger’s critique is that it does not stop at insisting on the specificity of bourgeois culture. Instead, Jünger uncovers this specificity in order to then reject all specificity based on language and ideology, while only affirming a Gestalt that is taken to be eternal and thus unattached to a cultural tradition. In contrast to Jünger’s turn to a pure beauty based in the unmediated sensation and detached from the word (which includes reason but also the link to a specific cultural tradition), the conventionality of bourgeois society might have been its most endearing aspect from the point of view of a perspective that seeks to limit the excesses of a hyper-modern subject unconstrained by any outside rules. The conventionality and artificiality made it into a particular society with its own unique rituals. Problems arose when this society mistook its own conventions for universal ones that could and should be applied to all of humanity. Jünger’s critique points to this universal claim and debunks it, without, however, recognizing the cultural and moral advantages of maintaining the conventions precisely as particular and contingent ones. Without a sense of the importance of specific traditions and values, Jünger’s individual must establish itself based on the purity of violence as a universal experience outside of any reflection on the goals of war and sacrifice. Consequently, there is ultimately no subordination of the individual to a collective that would establish limitations on the individual and its pursuit of its own sovereignty. Instead, the affirmation of individual development that Jünger emphasizes can be integrated with the nation to the extent that this nation consists of linguistically and ethnically similar individuals, all pursuing similar individual developments within a private experience of sovereignty over death. In this merging of individual and nation, the individual’s most violent whims can be affirmed and merged with those of a group of like-minded individuals linked together not on the basis of shared values, but of shared affinities. The only value affirmed in this progress of the nation is the right of its members to continue to develop according to their own private desires, regardless of the violence this development might engender. Within this context, the death of the individual within a nationalist project does not represent a subordination of the individual but its apotheosis.

The Subject in the Danger Zone* Helmut Lethen Already in 1934, the poet Gottfried Benn had sketched the outline of a certain type of warrior befitting the new Third Reich. In a surrealistic style, he invoked the image of a Spartan as representative of a “white race” suitable for and capable of dictatorship. All feminine characteristics were expunged from this figure. He represented a prototype of biological virility with a steely torso and a relatively small head designed solely for the reception of orders. In 1941, once German paratroopers had finally conquered the island of Crete after “battles with heavy losses,” Erhart Kästner, a soldier in the pursuing infantry, recognized that the phantom of this Doric warrior had become reality in an even more simplified form. His troupe encountered paratroop units: between the heavy guns, anchored solidly to flat railroad wagons, he saw “the heroes of the battle”: Magnificent figures. They all wore nothing but shorts, some sun-helmets for the tropics, and blinked their eyes at the bright morning through their sunglasses. Their bodies were burned copper-brown from the Greek sun, their hair white-blond. There they were: the “blond Achaeans” of Homer, the heroes of the Iliad. Like [the Acheans], [the Germans] hailed from the North. Like them, these were tall, fair, young: a race radiating the splendor of its members.

Kästner praised the heroism of the German paratrooper “in battles far more bitter than all of the Trojan Wars.” As the transport came to a standstill, the *   Translated by Andrew Stuart Bergerson.

Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 75–81. www.telospress.com

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infantrymen and the paratroopers ran across the white beach and into the ocean together. And as if wanted by a secret law inherent in the landscape itself, it came to hardly anyone’s mind to wear a swimsuit: that symbol of Christian and contemporary shame toward one’s own body. Suddenly and unawares, a typically classical image arose. Sparkling in the light of the morning and in the gleam of their youthful nakedness, this conqueror romped around in the foreign sea.

Kästner’s book, Greece: A Book from the War, appeared in 1942. In the Federal Republic of Germany, it later enjoyed a large resonance—but with this introductory chapter excised. What was Kästner showing us? Completely comprehensible in the pure visibility of his external contours, a heathen type has made his triumphant entrance: a flattened form of what it means to be a person that radically simplifies the complex reality of human subjectivity. In this archetype-like figure was reflected not only the idol of the Spartan hero as it had been conceptualized by the German classicists since the nineteenth century. The image is equally reminiscent of the idols of the avant-garde. Agents of mobility navigate through spaces free from laws, as if they were completely released from the images and values of bourgeois liberalism. In this essay I would like to investigate the degree to which these figures of reduced complexity [unterkomplexen Figuren] are related to the designs for types within the avant-garde literature from the end phase of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Third Reich. The Dutch ecologist van Leeuwen studied habitats characterized by what he called “high dynamism.” Dunes on the seacoast are time and again besieged by floods and destroyed by wind. In these kinds of habitats, the circumstances are constantly changing. Such dynamic ecosystems include the detritus banks of rivers, the freshly heaped-up spoil piles from mines, and even overpopulated livestock pastures. In terms of the number of species and the complexity of their relations to one another, the structure of this ecology is simple. By contrast, living communities abiding in constant conditions are richly structured and complex. The most speciesrich ecosystems of the earth are in the tropical rain forests. The simplest ecosystems are, by contrast, attuned to “living with catastrophe.” .  Erhart Kästner, Griechenland: Ein Buch aus dem Kriege (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1942), pp. 9ff. Thanks to Michael Großheim for this reference.



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Radical authors experienced the years toward the end of the Weimar Republic as catastrophic in this way. All phenomena in this space were branded with the seal “nothing is more constant than change.” Both Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Jünger spoke of “earthquake landscapes.” They sketched society as a “provisional space” that reckoned with catastrophic eruptions. As a result, their society assumed the form of a military camp in which the pitching of tents necessarily took place already with a view to breaking camp. How must a person be supplied in order to hold one’s own in such an “earthquake landscape”? Brecht, Jünger, and in the end Benn all outline figures who could be made mobile at any moment. In place of a complex individual encased in hard-to-realize values, out steps the simplified “type.” Wherever typologizing is booming, the world of the body becomes alphabetized. Type does not serve as an object for epistemological reflection, as in Max Weber, for whom type encourages reflection precisely because it holds the potential of realizing itself of its own accord; rather this type finds its ontological meaning by grasping at an ascertainable external state of affairs. The seductive power of thinking in typologies—whether in the ideological language of “workers,” “Trotskyists,” and “bourgeoisie,” or in Ernst Kretschmer’s classifications of “asthenic” and “pyknic” body types—is understandable. It disencumbers one’s efforts at orientation within this dynamic landscape from the burden of ambivalence. It makes easier the passing of judgment and the building of clear fronts. It accelerates the act of deciding. The complicated rules and paradoxes of psychology are herewith jettisoned as so much ballast from the nineteenth century. The type is set free from what Walter Benjamin called the “horrible complication of the indebted person.” Jünger called this Gepäckerleichterung in military jargon: relieving a soldier from some of the weight in his backpack. The aesthetic allure of this device is considerable. In opposition to the impressionistic dissolution of the limits of the body and the unity of the subject, the “calendrical objectivity” of types as both perceptual silhouettes and ideal standards exercises a particularly strong appeal. Viewed .  Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter (1932; Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1941), p. 172. .  Ibid., p. 164. .  Ibid. .  Walter Benjamin, “Schicksal und Charakter,” in Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965), p. 76.

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psychologically, they are flat but have the benefit of an enormously wide scope for agency. They are politically indifferent but still have the virtue of being able to be loaded with any racist or nationalist norms that one might wish. Still, the appearance of this new type scared people on all fronts. In his “heraldic expression”—whether it is as a Bolshevist “comrade” or as national-revolutionary “worker”—one reads a certain determination to destroy. “Abandoning individuality,” as Jünger wrote in The Worker, “represented a process of impoverishment only to the individual who saw in that individuality death. For the type it meant the key to another world.” In fact this metamorphosis into the ideal of a “New Man,” as formulated by the avant-garde in Russia, Italy, France, and Germany in the first two decades of the twentieth century, took the most evil turn imaginable. In the different political camps within the radical German intelligentsia, one could view variants of this new kind of man on stage and in literature. In his didactic plays, Brecht demonstrated the socialization of this new type through rituals of death. The individual must die, he believed, in order to make space for a new collective nature. He even named the pieces from the period 1929 to 1933 “Instruction for Dying [Sterbelehren].” That is, the ideal of absolute selflessness for the communist comrade was realized over the corpse of the individual. Jünger similarly contrived the person as “an organic construction”: like a manned torpedo or the composite flying machine that was the kamikaze pilot, he either conflated his body into the technical apparatus or was interested in the human being only as the interface for electrical networks. In 1934 Benn had added to this image of reduced-complexity human beings that of the Doric warrior. This typology becomes explosive once it gets caught in the spell of political existentialism. The axiom of this current is as simple as it is uncanny. For avant-garde thinkers like Jünger, the sphere of “true seriousness” is perceptible only in deadly danger; in everyday life it lay hidden under a layer of “endless palaver” and the will to compromise. Hygiene, insurance, and the need for security prevail in democracy. Along with telephone networks and print media, they all ensure the “de-realization” [Entwirklichung] of reality. All of that distances the person from the .  Jünger, Der Arbeiter. .  Ibid., p. 219. .  Michael Großheim, Politischer Existentialismus: Subjektivität zwischen Entfremdung und Engagement (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002). .  Jünger, Der Arbeiter, p. 236.



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danger zone. The illustrated book The Moment of Danger appeared in 1931, and in it Jünger welcomed “the intrusion of the dangerous into the life-world.”10 Photographs from the barricades in the Berlin newspaper district, of a railroad crash in New Jersey, and of the fall of a trapeze artist, as well as of trench warfare on the Western Front and of trade-union struggles: they were supposed to document the disguised ubiquity of danger. “The secret that lies hidden behind the quiet surface of modern society,” according to Jünger, “is a new and different return to nature, is the fact that we are both civilized and barbaric at the same time, that we have come closer to the elemental without having lost the sharpness of our awareness.”11 A readiness to die is necessary to participate in the intensity of life. The political—which assumes the existential necessity to kill the “enemy”—is the “guarantor of the seriousness of life.”12 This readiness to die is what one can read in Carl Schmitt, and Benn will repeat it after him in 1933. Contact with this elemental gravity makes the “evil” people stand out; for “the evil person, the endangered person, is at the same time—and to us it appears, is essentially—the person to whom it is serious, who has something for which he is ready to kill.”13 It is common to all radical constructions of this particular type—this New Being—that they eliminate the middle zone of a society in which exchange and compromise take place. They all obey the dictates of the hard form. They design these ideal figures and then force themselves into those forms long enough that the last traits of individuality have been extinguished. One had to get oneself “into shape” during war, which meant assuming a kind of psychological body armor. In the Weimar Republic, “form” was supposed to protect you from being absorbed by the “amorphous” mass consumer society. Now they made you ready for dictatorship. How does Benn extradite his image of the New Man from the extremes of 1933? In the 1920s he stylized himself as Diogenes in his barrel. His 10.  Jünger, “Über die Gefahr,” in Ferdinand Buchholtz, ed., Der gefährliche Augenblick: Eine Sammlung von Bildern und Berichten (Berlin: Junker and Dünnhaupt, 1931), p. 11. 11.  Ibid., p. 15 (my emphasis). 12.  Michael Großheim, “Politischer Existentialismus,” in Günter Meuter and Henrique Ricardo Otten, eds., Der Aufstand gegen den Bürger (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1999), p. 136. Cf. Großheim, Politischer Existentialismus (2002). 13.  Helmuth Kuhn, “Rezension von Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen,” Kant-Studien 38 (1933): 191. Thanks to Michael Großheim for this reference.

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ideals feature love for the amorphous and blurred. A constitutional weariness insulated him from adventures in activism of a political color. His preference was for sketching figures of sluggishness. Nothing hints at the fact that Benn is dreaming of a world of total mobilization. Yet with the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the point of departure for him seemed to change completely. The Nazi movement had generated a “new biological type.” Benn took the pattern of the New Man from nineteenth-century archival images in which Sparta was represented as a breeding site. Sparta, the “man’s camp on Europe’s right bank,”14 stood out against feminine Greece. There, even children were already subjected to a severe pedagogy. “The boys slept naked on reeds that they had to rip out of the Eurotas [Sparta’s river] without a knife; [they] ate little and quickly.”15 Spartan child-rearing guaranteed toughened bodies, accustomed to the air, gleaming with oil, beautifully tinted—like the paratroopers on Crete. Eugenic measures ensured the breeding of ideal body types: “one acts like one was on a stud farm: one annihilates the unsuccessful progeny.”16 Statues of the sculptors on Sparta’s plazas, “where the head had not larger marking than the trunk,”17 are the guiding principles for training the body: “Such an ornamental column is solid, its members and its trunk have a weightiness. One can walk around them and the viewer begins to appreciate their material composition. . . . They are naked. Here comes a band from bathing and from the [fresh] air, also naked. One compares—it accumulates, it educates.”18 Only under the draconian conditions of Sparta could the warrior caste’s “cold world of forms” emerge that was once again in vogue during the Nazi regime. “Power purifies the individual, filters its excitability, makes it cubic, flattens its surfaces, prepares it for art.”19 That is how Gottfried Benn fabricated his surrealistic collage. In it linger elements of Carl Einstein’s cubic Negro Sculptures20 as well as the phantom of Wilhelmine citizens purified in the “steel bath” of war. In the immediate neighborhood we find Leni Riefenstahl lighting the Olympic fire on the stump 14.  Gottfried Benn, “Dorische Welt,” in Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 4 (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1986–2003), p. 135. 15.  Ibid., p. 136. 16.  Ibid., p. 138. 17.  Ibid., p. 142. 18.  Ibid. 19.  Ibid., p. 150. 20.  Carl Einstein, Negerplastik (Leipzig: Verlag der weißen Bücher, 1915).



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of a Doric column.21 She shows us athletes with the same metallic skin over which Jünger waxed lyrical. That is the first simplification of Benn’s surrealistic image of Doric warriors. Kästner’s Cretan beach scenes from 1942, of copper-brown paratroopers with sunglasses, represent the second simplification. In the spheres of power, models must always be reduced in complexity [immer unterkomplex]. The perception of diverse members of the avant-garde like Jünger, Brecht, and Benn had a common denominator. They eliminated the middle sphere of the Republic. With the removal of humanistic criteria from their program for viewing the world, they extinguished all processes of exchange and compromise. In the harshness of the cold form, they sought to live at the point of greatest intensity. These forms were indifferent to political content. They could be applied all around and were typically employed in such a way that their inventors could no longer recognize them anymore, least of all when they met them again in the guise of National Socialism. Jünger saw his “worker” type incarnate on the Eastern front in 1942–43. In his Records of the Caucuses, he described the horror that seized him when he encountered the type of the new “techno-race,” as Werner Hamacher called them, in the Nazi officer corps. For Benn, his design of a mobility agent for a “cold world of forms” remained an episode from 1934. When Kästner sighted his pantless conquerors, he turned once again to the love of the amorphous in the bodily world. By this time Benn had already distanced himself from the Third Reich. Forbidden to publish, his letters starting around 1935 reveal a radical enemy of the Nazi regime. The tired figure reappears in his works, whose preoccupation with dissolution makes him ill-suited for mobilization. For him, the Doric warrior from the year 1934 had really become a surreal sketch.

21.  Thorsten Hinz, “Dorischer Film,” Benn Jahrbuch 1 (2003): 194.

From Folk to Ummah: A Genealogy of Islamofascism Russell A. Berman The “nation” has been the primary unit of political membership in modernity, typically stronger than “region” (the American 1865) and almost always stronger than “class” (the European 1914). Membership in the nation has meant citizenship, the basis of civil rights and civic responsibility within the rule of law. However “nation” is also related to the “people,” the source of all democratic power. The “people” was the population in the age of the democratic revolutions before anything like contemporary mass immigration. While the Enlightenment notion of “the people” was not an ethnic definition, the romanticization of the term and its metamorphosis into the “nation” or “Volk” initiated an ethnic metamorphosis, leading to a fundamental instability in political categories: citizenship, as civic membership in the political community surrounding the state, stood at odds with nationality, as membership in a cultural or ethnic group. This tension underlies the introductory passages of Mein Kampf, for example, where contempt for the state coincides with loyalty to the Volk. This implies an antipolitical feature inherent to ethnic nationality because it is precisely the opposite of citizenship. Such cultural identity, outside of the realm of politics, might be treated in parallel to other non-civic terms of identification: economic class, for example, in the sense of Lukács’s famous playing out of Bürger against citoyen. However, it is one thing when non-political identity dimensions remain external to politics, e.g., a private sector. It is quite another when the ethno-cultural loyalties surpass and displace citizenship. The antipolitical becomes the political. The concern here involves a hybrid deformation of political life: when the community around the state is defined less in civic and more in ethnoTelos 144 (Fall 2008): 82–88. www.telospress.com

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cultural terms, i.e., the denigration of citizenship and its replacement by a politicized folkhood. This is precisely the issue that Arendt addresses in Origins of Totalitarianism with regard to pan-Germanism and panSlavism. While overseas imperialism involved the establishment of (for Arendt, existentially irresponsible) mechanisms of administration over other peoples, the pan-movements mobilized loyalties across national boundaries, subverting the states that they defined. Both processes, she claims, are indicative of the expansionist predisposition of the bourgeoisie—her version of Bürger vs. citoyen—and corrode the viability of the state. The ambitious expansionism that starts as an expression of modern bourgeois greed becomes the precursor of Communist and Nazi fantasies of world conquest; and world conquest is, by definition, a category that explodes nationhood. It indicates an explicit disregard for the limitations of national interests, and—Arendt would say, therefore—it denigrates the citizen as the carrier of rights. The expansionist destruction of the nation implies the abolition of the civic individual, and that “end of man” is the genuine totalitarian goal. Against the backdrop of Nazism and Communism, the two totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, we should consider the neo-totalitarianisms of the present: for example, the jihadist radicalism that occupies so much of contemporary public attention. To date, there is no consensus on the precise designation. “Islamism” feigns a precision that is somewhat forced in its neologic distinction from “Islam.” A competing term, “Islamic fascism,” explored here, leaves open the question as to whether fascism, as distinct from Nazism, is the appropriate reference point. Some oppose the term with the claim that the adjective “Islamic” can have nothing to do with “fascism,” let alone terrorism. Yet the terrorists define themselves, rightly or wrongly, in terms of Islamic identity and invoke Islamic teaching. More significantly, the objection that a denominational adjective should not be attached to any political tendency is simply misplaced, since it occurs regularly: Christian Socialism, Jewish Nationalism, Hindu Conservatism—these terms do not suggest that all Christians are socialists, all Jews nationalists, or all Hindus conservatives, but that within those religious-cultural traditions, these political tendencies exist along with others. Hence: Islamic fascism, as opposed to Islamic liberalism, Islamic conservativism, and so forth. .  In an August 14, 2006, article titled “They Are Fascists” in the London daily Asharq Al-Awsat, the paper’s former editor-in-chief and current director general of Al Arabiya TV,

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A parallel objection claims that “Islamic fascism” as a term is redundant, in the sense that the various repressive, anti-modern, and violent tendencies implied by “fascism” are in fact central to Islam, which, according to this account, is not at all a “religion of peace,” as Bush insistently defends it, but its very opposite. Ironically this criticism is identical with the radical Islamic interpretation: both view Islam as mandating a violent war against non-believers. Opponents and adherents engage in the same reduction of textual meaning to an unchanging core, which is, of course, historically not tenable, since little is more unstable than the interpretations of texts. Habent sua fata libelli, including the Koran. In lieu of a full theory of Islamic fascism, noting some tentative points of comparison with the German experience is useful. The metanational character of pan-Germanism, thus Arendt, contributes to the dismantling of the political entity and its institutions, replacing citizenship with ethno-racial identification, and paves the way for an unlimited expansionist agenda: the aspiration to empire surpasses the (Weimar) republic. In parts of North Africa and the Middle East, parts of the anti-colonial movement drew less inspiration from the classic national unification processes in Europe (Garibaldi, Bismarck) than from the pan-movements of ethnic empire. This expansionist agenda overshadows simple nation-building and explains the relative underdevelopment of specifically national political processes and institutions, which are typically instrumentalized to serve larger agenda: pan-Arabism overpowers Palestinian nationalism or other national tendencies, and with deleterious consequences. Potential citizenship in a set of national institutions that might guarantee rights is overshadowed by the loyalty demands of pan-Arabic solidarity or, more recently, pan-Islamic aspirations for the Ummah, the community of believers. This is precisely the critique that political representatives of the old PLO direct at Hamas and Hezbollah, as paramilitary movements that undermine the viability of the respective state structures. In this framework, they become structurally Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, defended President George W. Bush’s description of individuals who were arrested before they could carry out their plan to blow up passenger airplanes: “The strange thing is that the protesting groups, which held a press conference, would have done better to have held it to denounce the deeds of those affiliated to Islam, who harmed all Muslims and Islam.” Excerpts from this article are available online at the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) website, in Special Dispatch no. 1248, August 15, 2006, at http://memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD124806. .  Yahya Rabbah, former PLO Ambassador to Yemen and columnist for the Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, wrote: “The Palestinian resistance forces [i.e., Hamas]



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homologous to the pre-1933 SA, combining illegal violence that discredited the “system” with a public face of social or charity initiatives. The racialized Volk overshadowed the civic community. Significant aspects of Islamic radicalism have roots traceable to German imperial and National Socialist ambitions. Part of this history includes the biographies of the various Nazi notables who found safe haven after 1945 in Syria and Egypt; but the bigger portion involves the standing of the Middle East in German geopolitics, and the central figure in this story is undoubtedly the “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, the leading figure in Palestinian nationalism during the British mandate. In the 1920s, al-Husseini initially tried to cooperate with the British but eventually—unlike competing Palestinian groups—staked out a rejectionist position that led him into exile: instead of pursuing Palestinian national goals, he rapidly subordinated them to a pan-Arab agenda, which he also linked to appeals to Germany after 1933. The German response was positive but rarely more than lukewarm, since at the time Palestine counted less for German foreign policy than did efforts to keep channels open to England and, later, the interest to avoid conflicts with Italy, which had its own Mediterranean ambitions. Nonetheless al-Husseini made the enormously destructive political miscalculation of linking his agenda to the Nazis, and he got little in return. After 1941 he ended up in Berlin, broadcasting pro-Axis propaganda to the Arab world. He actively lobbied against the few arrangements when the Nazis considered allowing groups of Jews to emigrate in exchange for German prisoners—al-Husseini indicated that it would be better to send the Jews to Poland, i.e., to extermination camps. took political decision[-making] hostage from the Palestinian political framework [i.e., the PLO]; the Lebanese resistance forces—Hizbullah—took political decision[-making] hostage from the Lebanese [government]. The resistance forces here [in the PA] and there [in Lebanon] led to both of the political regimes, the Palestinian and Lebanese, having to pay a high price, even though they did not know what was going on, and even though they were not given even the smallest chance to manage the crisis that was caused by the two actions. “In other words, the roles of the two regimes were expropriated, their legitimacy was sidestepped, and they were left irrelevant to what was going on. The resistance forces here and there took hostage the role of the regimes in the Arab states, and left them [i.e., the regimes] standing confused and impotent, almost completely paralyzed. . . . All of this [was carried out] via a regional coalition axis, stretching from Gaza to southern Lebanon, to Damascus, to Tehran.” This document is available at the MEMRI website, in Special Dispatch no. 1234, August 7, 2006, at http://memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD123406. .  Amin al-Husseini, letter to the Hungarian Foreign Minister of June 28, 1943: “C’est pourquoi je prie votre Excellence de bien vouloir me permettre d’attirer votre haute

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He was also centrally involved in establishing a division of the Waffen-SS made up of Bosnian Muslims, for which he developed a specific ideological justification, a detailed account of the compatibility of Islam and National Socialism. Moreover, his Nazi collaboration extended well past the point in time when he could have hoped for a Nazi victory, in other words, this was not a matter of tactical opportunism but the expression of sincere ideological commitment. The German components of this connection therefore contribute to Islamic fascism on two levels: (1) in order to appeal to what he perceived to be German interests, al-Husseini expanded the local Palestinian question into a regional pan-Arabism; and (2) he provided the ideology for an Islamic fascism through the articulation of the compatibility of Islam and Nazism. The second level of analysis involves the eradication of individual rights. Nineteenth-century national unification movements typologically established normative civil rights (Germany, Italy, and, as a distant parallel, the United States through the Civil War and Reconstruction). The transition from civic nationalism to the ethnic pan-movements undermined these rights, a process that, for Arendt, leads to the totalitarian dictatorships and the camps. In her account, the specificity of totalitarianism is not simply the withholding of rights from certain individuals or groups but the eradication of the very notion of that individuality which might claim a right to rights. The ideological expression of this agenda includes (but is hardly limited to) the trivialized collectivism of Rudolf Jung’s phrase “Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz” (collective interest over individual interest) from his programmatic exposition Der Nationale Sozialismus (1919) and which al-Husseini adapted as a core Islamic teaching in his address to the imams of the Bosnian Waffen-SS. More than a platitudinous exhortation to selflessness, the rhetorical act represents an effort to retrofit Nazi tropes as Islamic dogma. attention sur la nécessité d’empêcher ces Juifs de quitter votre pays pour la Palestine; et, s’il y a là des raisons qui rendent leur éloignement nécessaire, il serait indispensable et infiniment préférable qu’ils quittent le Pays à destination d’autres pays où ils se trouveraient sous une surveillance active comme en Pologne par exemple, de façon à se garder de leurs dangers et en éviter les dommages.” In Mufti-Papiere: Briefe, Memoranden, Reden und Aufrufe Amin al-Husainis aus dem Exil, 1940–1945, ed. Gerhard Höpp (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2001), p. 181. .  Amin al-Husseini, “Rede vor den Imamen der bosnischen SS-Division, 4.10, 1944,” in ibid., pp. 219–22. .  Ibid., p. 221



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This displacement of the individual by collective obligation is part of the distinctively illiberal character of the pan-movements, including panArabism. The primacy of the collective moves toward the homogenization which Carl Schmitt labeled “Artgleichheit.” This structural ethnic collectivism means the elimination of diversity; in pan-Arabism it took the form of the programmatic discrimination against non-Arab minorities, from the prohibition against the use of the Berber language Tamizight in Algeria, to the attacks on the Kurds under Saddam and the violence of the Janjaweed militia in Darfur. The complex slide from pan-Arabism (in which Christian Arabs still played prominent roles) to pan-Islamic identity needs nuanced exploration, particularly with regard to the comparative trajectory of pan-Germanism. However both in pan-Arabism and in pan-Islamism, there is little evidence of normative expectations of civil rights. Thus, for example, the Hamas Charter only mentions “right” in article 7, but there it is the movement that has “right,” in contrast to individuals who might fail to recognize it. From the priority of the movement, it follows that women, in article 18, are only described in terms of family and household responsibilities, albeit with a particular access to politics: “good mothers . . . aware of their role in the battle of liberation.” The statement is a logical consequence of the precedence of common interest over individual interest. Finally, the totalizing movements stands in a taut rhetorical relationship to chiliastic conclusivness. The “pan-movements” are linked to a quasi-religious aspiration to transform the world or (in totalitarianism) to end it with final solutions. In both Nazism and pan-Arabism, the chiliastic agenda plays out as eliminationist antisemitism, a programmatic goal given consistent full priority over other agenda. The Nazi allocation of resources to transport Jews to the camps sapped the war effort on the front. The Mufti advocated that the Germans bomb Jerusalem, despite the inescapable scope of likely collateral damage of Palestinian casualties. Moreover, rather than grounding his stance in terms of pragmatic Palestinian national interests, he invoked the Koran, especially the trope of the battle of Khaibar, .  The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, August 18, 1988, available online at the website of the Avalon Project at Yale Law School, http://www.yale.edu/ lawweb/avalon/mideast/hamas.htm. .  Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem: Amin el-Husseini und die Nationalsozialisten (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1988), pp. 225–32. See also arguments that the Mufti and the Nazis planned an invasion of Palestine to eliminate the Jewish population. Klaus Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers, Deutsche-Juden-Völkermord: Der Holocaust als Geschichte und Gegenwart (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).

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a Jewish settlement conquered by Mohammed in 624. This same rhetoric recurs in the present when Hezbollah designates some of its Iran-supplied missiles as “Khaibar,” as if they were continuing an archaic battle, also evident in Ahmadenijad’s vocabulary of extermination. In the face of a new totalitarian movement, oriented toward world-conquest, antithetical to individual life, and enamored with death, modernity is struggling to name and understand the radicality of its opponent. The examples of the twentieth century, the anti-individual internationalisms of race and class, may not be directly identical—analogies are always only approximate—but our knowledge of them provides useful first steps toward an understanding.

.  Al-Husseini, Mufti-Papiere, p. 221.

Response Ability: A Commentary on Berman, Lethen, and Pan Andrew Stuart Bergerson My comments will focus on the problem of the fascist self. All three essays—correctly to my mind—imply that it holds the key to a better understanding of the nature of fascism. It is disturbing enough to study people so enamored with death. Fascism remakes the nineteenth-century bourgeois individual into a type of “reduced complexity” who cultivates the role of a conquering hero through sacrifice and murder. Even worse, Helmut Lethen provocatively suggests that fascists share this affection for typologizing human beings with other modern avant-garde movements. I would push this argument further. Postmodern intellectuals share with fascism an affection for criticizing liberal society. For instance, I agree with the common criticism that the allegedly universal categories of citizenship, reason, sanity, and so on exclude and oppress those many “others” who do not fit into the rigid mold of the bourgeois individual or have access to the rights of citizenship. Read together, these three essays remind us to be careful in determining what it is that distinguishes “our” sense of self from “theirs.” Russell Berman shows convincingly that Islamic fascists learned their antipathy for democracy in part from Nazi predecessors. What the former derided as the “Weimar” Republic, the latter criticize in “the West”: an open society of individual citizens whose rights to cultivate themselves freely are constrained only when they infringe on the liberties of their .  These comments are informed by a rich interdisciplinary interaction, for which I am most grateful, relating to a book that I am writing with K. Scott Baker, Clancy Martin, and Steve Ostovich, tentatively titled The German Sisyphus, or The Happy Burden of History. I owe many of the ideas outlined here to them. Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 89–93. www.telospress.com

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fellow citizens. The individual is given cult-like status in Western societies as if it were the cornerstone of human liberty; Western states establish their legitimacy by guaranteeing our rights as individuals. Yet where Hannah Arendt emphasizes the way in which totalitarianism subsumes the individual into a homogeneous mass, Berman seems more interested in the ways in which a fascist self can never fit into that liberal polity. The rule of law is designed to resolve conflicts without resorting to violence. Groups like al-Qaeda and the Freikorps threaten liberal polities because an ethno-religious mode of identification does not correspond to either the boundaries of existing states or the rule of law. Whether as extra-governmental terrorists or ensconced in revolutionary regimes, fascists seek to unite all members of their “folk” into a single political entity. Wars of unification descend naturally, Berman implies, into wars for Lebensraum: first to dominate, like Mussolini’s empire, but ultimately to eradicate, as in Hitler’s. At the core of the fascist self is thus an intense identification with violence. As David Pan explains, violence is present not only in the form of state-sponsored murder, as Ernst Jünger experienced during the Great War, but also in the manifold ways that modern society does violence to the individual by forcing him into culturally predetermined molds. For Jünger, this violence is not circumstantial, like bad choices or behavior; it is an element of the very order of things. Jünger is correct in this: the systematic destruction of authentic human beings is inherent in our everyday life. The myths of normalcy only disguise this violence in the interests of the privileged few who benefit from those systems. Pan reads Jünger in this way: as a sincere critic of the bourgeois subject. Jünger cannot abide being constrained by social conventions or determined by language, whether ideological or everyday. He revolts against it. Still, Jünger’s romantic notion of a “sovereign” self revives another set of myths from the nineteenth century: of a historic subject able to act heroically in everyday life, even commanding a right to strive toward individual achievement, without fear of dissolution. Lethen reads fascism in the same vein: as one of many post-individualist models of the self. From their articles I conclude that each modernism rejected some aspects of the bourgeois individual in order to salvage others; what they share in common was the goal of reconstructing some semblance of a coherent self from the wrecking ball of modernity. Modernisms of many varieties also share a cultic affection for decisive action and nonconformity. In a



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desire to break free from the norms of bourgeois individualism, fascism aestheticizes unruliness as a political ontology. Fascists (German, Islamic, or otherwise) like to see themselves as rebels against egalitarianism. The fascist fantasy of sovereignty appeals today as it did in the 1920s: as a radical rejection of the seeming inertia of democracy and the ambiguities of a fragmented self. Yet from Erhart Kästner’s blond Spartans, bathing in the waters of imperial conquest, to Hamas’s revolutionary mothers, raising sons for martyrdom, where fascists go horribly wrong is in trying to salvage the remnants of a coherent self through a direct confrontation with death. Pan’s analysis of sovereignty suggests that fascists search for a perfect realm of human agency beyond the limitations of ambiguity and free from constraint. “Sovereign immunity” absolves heads of states from the jurisdiction of higher authorities from divine to international law; sovereignty as a model of the self affords the fascist the right to act without fear of retribution—to act like a god. This is the appeal of Gepäckerleichterung. Fascism disencumbers the self from the ambivalence that unnecessarily complicates murder. Murder follows logically, psychologically, and biographically from this dystopic combination of iconoclastic nonconformity, a discomfort with ambiguity, and a desire for action for its own sake. Murder is the ultimate measure and fate of the outsider once his struggle for sovereignty descends into nihilism. It is this misguided search for the right to act with impunity that ensures the chilling reincarnation of armored bodies—aestheticized by Gottfried Benn and advocated by Jünger—in young generations of mujahideen. Burnishing a metallic exterior, exuding heroic masculinity, suicide bombers welcome the explosion in violence against the forces that constrain them. Indeed murder is a necessity for the cultivation of a fascist self. Our selves are intersubjective: on our own there is no way for us to know if the claims we make about ourselves are true; we can know ourselves only in the effect we have on others. To verify to himself his claim of sovereignty, the fascist must therefore direct violence at the other. But at great cost: the fascist must abandon his capacity to respond empathically to his victims—and with it, his humanity. So Pan is disturbingly correct in emphasizing the voluntary nature of the fascist’s choice to cultivate a self through sacrifice and violence. Totalitarianism does not begin with an ideology, a leader, or a dictatorship—though that all helps. Fascist social contracts are constructed intersubjectively, but “from within” the self, as variously defined “folks”

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cultivate expanding degrees of mastery over “others” through incremental experiments with violence. Such embodied performances certainly presume an epistemology of the self that reduces human beings, in all their wonderful, fractured complexity, to a type. But determining the specific catalog of types, from “Trotskyist” to “pyknic,” is part and parcel of the process of research and development by which each modernist dystopia sculpts types that fit it best. My point is that the responsibility for this deception lies with the fascist himself, who claims the right to sovereign impunity and makes himself into the “martyr.” What I am arguing, too, is that fascists perform these roles at first as parody: only half convinced of their own hubris. I am following Pan here in suggesting that it is only at the very end, in the final act of murder, that the fascist completely believes his own lies about a sovereign self. Self-deception, a flat affect, and an obsession with intensity are an explosive combination, as the victims of fascism have experienced from 1917 to 9/11. But we get the fascist dead wrong if we think that he wants to lose himself in an Arendtian mass of conformity. Fascism offers its adherents a way to insist resolutely on individual sovereignty: by subordinating himself to the cause as necessary, but really through a terrible identification with violence. Fascists do have ethical obligations, but not to humankind. They sacrifice solely for their kind. They are liberated from all “indebtedness” to others, especially their victims. Similarly, fascists insist that they are the party of law and order: they act as if they are responding—with decisive action! with leadership!—to terror on the part of their enemy. In fact, fascists create the very catastrophic environments, described by Lethen and idealized as a Hobbesean state of nature by Jünger, that justify ever more violent solutions. These ironies here would be rich if this distortion of responsibility was not the tragic cause of unprecedented reigns of modern and postmodern terror. Don’t get me wrong. I too am frustrated by the slow progress made because compromise is necessary in democracies. I often fantasize about decisive, heroic action, particularly when lives are at stake. I also like to cultivate a posture of disobedient unruliness vis-à-vis the inherited traditions of the past by resisting the compulsion to conform to the violent norms of society. But to solve these problems, I cannot turn back to the dialectical magic of Hegelianisms, Right or Left, which justifies revolutionary terror with the promise of unrealizable utopias. Moreover, the difference between “me” and “them” is not that “I” am an individual and



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“they” are collectives—demonized in our popular culture as Borg drones, Sauron’s orcs, or masked “jihadists.” The language of propaganda is itself a modernism of types that flattens out the fractured ambiguities of what it means to be human. Its emphasis on ontological states forestalls independent action according to our own ethical judgment. What determines our identities is not what we are but how we are: the choices we make in response to life in the twenty-first-century “danger zone.” Here is where these articles help. Contrary to the convenient, heroic narratives written by the Allies after they defeated the Axis, Berman forces us to face the fact that fascism never became history. Fascism cannot be so easily contained. Nor can we be misled by the public face of fascism that seems to appeal to the Herderian uniqueness of their particular culture and nation. As Pan senses, hidden in the fascist self is a universality that allows it to spread, virus-like, to other “folks” by producing what it presumes: cycles of terror and counter-terror expanding geographically and logarithmically. What they exterminate in the process is not only their enemies but, as Lethen understands, all that is authentically human about both victim and perpetrator. What then am I to do when faced with people whose preferred mode of self-cultivation is murder? I respond by publicly denouncing the dehumanization that allows the fascist to feel sovereign over his victims and kill them with impunity. All of life, human and non-human, is my “folk,” nothing less. I also dispute the posture of sovereignty as a way to recover one’s agency. I assume instead what impunity denies: responsibility. To do so I must abandon the false hope of restoring some antediluvian, coherent self. A humble, critical interrogation of the self will no doubt discover a fascist lurking in me too. But authenticity, like responsibility, thrives in a fragmented self, precisely because its ambiguity allows for personal growth. Responsibility does not immobilize me. By definition it reminds me of my ability to respond. Above all, responsibility insists that the work of peace and justice can be done by no one other than me. Only I can determine how I should respond—and I chose empathy. Responsibility refutes the violent terms in which fascists try to colonize my world. I am not obliged to live a life in the fascist danger zone. I can insist on peace and justice. When fascists kill for the sake of impunity, my response is to welcome the happy burdens of history.

Why Are They So Happy? Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Local Context Arden Pennell This essay proposes that the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe serves a primary function other than its eponymous one. Using a site-specific, local historical context rather than memorial or Holocaust discourse, it presents the Memorial as a spot of psychic unity for once-divided Berlin and as a physically appropriate heir to the land upon which it was built. This approach is motivated by the apparent incongruity of local response to an explicitly somber structure: Why did the public react not only positively but even joyfully to the Memorial after its dedication? And why were behaviors such as playing, sunbathing, and picnicking greeted with enthusiasm rather than criticism in the press? In the following, I argue that these responses are a celebration of the Memorial’s correspondence to the spatial needs of the historic city center. Popular Reception: A Popular Memorial A seemingly strange phenomenon developed in the days following the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’s May 2005 dedication: the monument to approximately six million victims was treated like any other central public square in a European city, not as a differentiated space with distinguishing psychic concerns. Visitors sat casually on the lower-lying stelae, some rolling up their T-shirts and sunbathing in the spring sunshine. Others treated the 2,711 stone pillars as a playground by jumping across the tops, an act so common and so remarked upon by the local press that these figures were anointed “stele-springers” (Stelenspringer). Children played hide-and-seek between the stelae, and fast-food trucks lined 95 Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 95–105. www.telospress.com

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up alongside the Holocaust Memorial, as it is commonly called. Visitors munched sausages as they relaxed on the structure. Such activities undermine the Memorial’s implied goal of respectful commemoration and all but eliminate the site’s gravitas, but newspapers declined to suggest any damage to the Memorial’s function, preferring, if they expressed doubt at all, to say that only time would tell. Die Zeit asked cautiously, “They run, smile, and picnic. Are they too happy?” but declined to definitively say “yes.” Rather, the press treated the public outpouring with daily diaries that clocked comings-and-goings, reporting on the unfolding scene as though it were writing a gossip column. “Punks hop from stele to stele. . . . Tourists spread out maps. Families picnic,” narrated one newspaper. Although scant space was allotted to criticism from local historians, the harshest journalistic commentary was a mocking report on the new romantic custom wherein couples visit the monument at night when “the shrill, loud noises of earlier hours” subside. The monument’s stone blocks “retain the heat of the summer day,” and the couples “hug, kiss, and forget the world.” Yet the author ultimately declines to blame these visitors, concluding instead that such behavior results from the Memorial’s permissively abstract design. The people-watching leitmotif of these diaries was accompanied by an excessive photography of the space of the Memorial. In reproduction, its uneven, geometric planes produced an M. C. Escher–like alternation of darks and lights, ideal for the newspaper’s square, flat format. Even architect Peter Eisenman expressed pleasure at the clever images that the press used to increase stylistic hype of the Memorial’s fashionable bustle. When asked how he how felt about the stele-jumpers who were turning his site into a playground, he responded, “I think it’s great. There’s a photograph on the Internet that has four columns and a person in flight with their arms .  One example is Werner van Bebber, “Das Stelenfeld als Spielplatz,” Der Tagesspiegel, May 17, 2005. Bebber focused on childlike behavior but reserved judgment, merely listing, in a skeptical tone, the activities of the circus-like atmosphere. .  Henning Sussebach, “Ein weites Feld,” Die Zeit, June 2, 2005. .  See Lothar Heinke, “Der Feldversuch,” Der Tagesspiegel, May 29, 2005. See also Heinke’s gossipy “Leben zwischen den Stelen,” Der Tagesspiegel, May 13, 2005; Sussebach, “Ein weites Feld.” .  Sussebach, “Ein weites Feld.” .  Kai Ritzmann, “Größte Heiterkeit im Stelenfeld,” Berliner Morgenpost, May 30, 2005.



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akimbo and legs out between the four columns.” He responded to a question about the practical use of the space with praise for its media image. While Eisenman found such behavior laudable for its attractiveness and reproducibility, art critics from abroad did not even mention it; they focused their attention instead on the Memorial’s success in addressing the aesthetic challenge of representing the Holocaust. The discussion of Eisenman’s distinctly abstract, non-mimetic design in relation to the problems of commemoration did not coincide with a consideration of the Memorial’s practical, local functioning. The concern of the academic press with questions of how to physically address the Holocaust is a natural result of the decade-long debate about which architectural plan to choose for the Memorial. However, since this debate also stamped the Memorial as a contentious structure in German public memory, and since the subject matter is cause for somber reflection or at least respect of the integral structure, the Berlin public’s jubilation and the accompanying media levity are surprising. These apparent contrasts can be reconciled by examining the Memorial through the lens of local, spatial history. Reshaping the Split City The political legacy of division continues to play a major role in public debates about how to rebuild and transform Berlin eighteen years after Germany’s reunification. The demolition of the Palace of the Republic and discussion about how the municipal government should commemorate the Berlin Wall are two recent examples wherein citizens identify themselves as Easterners or Westerners and then accuse the other side of short-sightedness or close-mindedness. Yet the Holocaust Memorial, an enormous memory-field the size of two football stadiums directly south of the Brandenburg Gate, has met with no such anger. Like other debated structures, it is geographically central and forms a part of the city’s public face and iconic architectural lexicon. And as with other spaces, the land upon which .  Peter Eisenman, interview by Ross Benjamin, “Collective Memory and the Holocaust,” The Nation, May 31 2005, available online at http://www.thenation.com/doc/ 20050613/benjamin. .  A few examples are: Juli Carson, “On Atrocity and Empathy: Reading Virilio through Eisenman.” artUS, September/October 2005, pp. 48–51; Esther da Costa Meyer, “Speak, Memory,” ArtForum, January 2006, pp. 47–48; Suzanne Stephens, “Peter Eisenman’s Vision for Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” Architectural Record 7 (July 2005): 120–27.

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it was built has been through several reincarnations over the course of Berlin’s history of expansion and destruction, thus making its use a prime candidate for disagreement among competing factions. Criticism of the Memorial, however, rarely attacks its right to existence vis-à-vis its location and never invokes East-West tensions. Rather, it is precisely because it is so centrally located and because the land’s history is so pivotal to Berlin’s overall story that the Memorial is not criticized. It is an urban planning solution par excellence to the conundrum of the divided metropolis: how to sew the space back together with minimal scarring, how to re-model an attractive city without too obviously sweeping its ugly history under the rug. This conundrum took shape in Berlin immediately following German reunification. Intense real estate development engulfed the city, as former marginal areas alongside the Berlin Wall once again became central zones, and buyers and builders created mega-projects with such fury that Berlin became known as “Europe’s largest construction site,” with a skyline of looming cranes. Many “former” Easterners voiced a feeling of absorption during the spread of financial and corporate development, identifying this real estate transformation as the gloating triumph of one system over another. Rising discontent was matched by rising unemployment in the former East, and a T-shirt appeared that became popular in both the East and the West: “I want my wall back.” Such tensions inevitably affected the shaping of central space. Coupled with a demand to give form to a city along lines of memory that were only partially erased by sixty years of division, these concerns made urban planning a problematic and sometimes partisan endeavor. For example, the government-sponsored contest for the design of Potsdamer Platz resulted in civic dismay when citizens argued that the chosen winner, a complex of corporate headquarters, would destroy the site’s legacy as a public hub, a legacy disfigured by division but now recoverable. Again, some saw the city’s courting of corporate funds as a clearly Western attitude. .  As Peter Schneider predicted in 1982: “It will take us longer to tear down the wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the Wall we can see.” The Wall Jumper: A Berlin Story, trans. Leigh Hafrey (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 119. .  The former centrality of Potsdamer Platz and the psychic dislocation caused by its division-era disfiguration is poignant in Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire (1987), where an old man searches for what is physically absent yet mentally veracious, wandering



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In response, municipal officials asked architects to re-submit plans that would include mixed-use space in which the population could stroll, shop, and enjoy the public sphere. The public argument and ensuing compromise about Potsdamer Platz dramatically exposed the difficulty of reconstructing a metropolis situated in the middle of a dialogue between the real and the once-real. Andreas Huyssen has suggested that we view cities as partially erased and rewritten, as “urban palimpsests.”10 With that in mind, I will now examine the Memorial’s plot of land as a palimpsest unto itself as well as the resulting parameters of its post-reunification planning challenge. From Wall to Memorial The memorial’s plot11 moved from border to center during the city’s expansion, industrialization, and modernization over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alongside southern neighbor Potsdamer Platz, it formed a focal point of activity and exchange, and it was selected as the site for Hitler’s Reich Chancellery Gardens shortly before World War II. After heavy wartime bombing, the site became a rubble field as well as the new border between East and West and, in 1961, the site of the Berlin Wall. After erecting the Wall, the German Democratic Republic leveled the eastern side to create a wide “death strip” to discourage crossing. The Federal Republic of Germany likewise allowed once-vital areas on the western side to simply lose their bustle, even changing the course of streets to make them appear less directly aimed toward the center. The former center of town became a negative space on city maps. By 1990, this space in the very center of the city had come to symbolize the Wall, at once a symbol of division and, paradoxically, the only symbol upon which East and West could agree. The spot was a site of division and psychic suffering for both halves. Though invoked by competing governments, its rhetorical use remained the same: whether as an antifascist rampart or as a concrete stretch of the Iron Curtain, the Wall was a through the trash-specked field and asking himself, “Where is Potsdamer Platz? I can’t find it.” 10.  Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 2003). 11.  The site is approximately defined as the area hemmed in by Behrenstraße to the north, Cora-Berliner-Straße to the east, Hannah-Arendt-Straße to the south, and Eberstraße to the west.

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physical embodiment of the wrongness of the other side. This allowed for a psychic transference of blame from a government, people, or divergent culture, to an icon. As West German author Peter Schneider explains: “For it was the Wall alone that preserved the illusion that the Wall was the only thing separating the Germans.”12 Thus, the Wall was also an implied symbol of unity, in that its removal was the only thing standing in the way of a reunited Germany. The source of division became a paradoxical source of psychological cohesion, an effect that caused one East Berlin observer to call it a “zipper.” 13 Post-reunification, the Wall, as a shared burden, could also symbolize the strength of the German people, as a weight borne under stress and overcome. The Wall became what Jan Assman has called a “fixed point.” Such points refer to ideas or experiences beyond the everyday, creating “retrospective contemplativeness” among those who share them and, in turn, common memory and cohesive identity.14 Yet, a divided society lacks these fixed points, except for that very source of division. As the case of Potsdamer Platz shows, rebuilding in post-reunification Germany would need to honor the mental ghosts of what came before, the previous texts on the palimpsest. The Memorial’s plot, as a shared site and a singular fixed point, would need a particularly specific structure. Whatever would be created on the famous stretch of Wall and no-man’s-land extending south from the Brandenburg Gate would have to be neither too obviously partisan nor too insignificant. Something was needed that retained a sense of history but that did not threaten the emotional connection to this spot felt by both of the city’s halves. The structure that could meet these goals while helping heal the psychological scarring of division would be ideal. Lea Rosh, the chairwoman of the citizen’s group Association for the Promotion of the Establishment of a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which she founded two days before the Wall “fell,” was the woman who proposed a suitable use for the site.15 Her suggestion came 12.  Schneider, The Wall Jumper, p. 13. 13.  Lutz Ratenow and Harald Hauswald, Ostberlin: Die andere Seite der Stadt in Texten und Bildern (Munich: Piper, 1987), p. 154, quoted in Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting Germany History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 30. 14.  Jan Assman, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–33. 15.  Rosh, a West German television journalist, had originally proposed the idea during a panel discussion in Berlin in summer 1988, and she began to suggest that the memorial



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in January 1990, in the midst of the political and social turmoil accompanying reunification. She and her Association began to lobby heavily for the monument, gaining pledges of support from a number of politicians, including Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Before the Wall was even physically gone from the cityscape, the Association that Rosh spearheaded had gained political support for their idea to put the Memorial in the very center of the East-West divide. Kohl’s support, as well as a government pledge of the land, was made official not long after, in a 1992 declaration. The decade-long argument about how to design the Memorial should not obscure a central fact: the decision to build a Holocaust Memorial was a relatively quick and painless one, with little outcry or turmoil. For Berlin, with its emotional public debates, the initial step was taken quickly and simply: a citizen’s group lobbied publicly for a cause, gained publicity as well as government approval, and attained its ends in less than two years. The process was neither long nor tortured, because what Rosh was lobbying for fit into the cityscape in an essential manner. Her call for a memorial was a suggestion to rebuild a shared vocabulary of commemorated suffering, starting in the spot that undoubtedly symbolized “suffering” to everyone. The plan that she put forth allowed the spot’s common history to continue, but with a gesture that belonged to neither East nor West, but to both. The Memorial, as presented through her heavy-handed publicity campaign, did not shrink from the weight of history, but it did transfer the psychic weight of recent wrongs to a relievingly remote past. The memorial idea corresponded not just to the geographical needs of the divided city but also to the larger program of a government attempting to reunite two peoples. Although certain voices, like Günter Grass, invoked the Holocaust in order to express their doubts about reunification, it was not central to the political rhetoric of 1990. One contemporary observer lamented that the consideration of the Holocaust seemed lost be built on the former Prince Albert grounds, or area of the Gestapo headquarters, located alongside the Wall. To further her cause, she had founded the citizens’ group Perspective Berlin, of which she was chairwoman, and it was on November 7 that she formed the Association from this group of co-campaigners. For more chronological information, see the skeptical time line in Thomas Holl, “Chronik eines Mahnmals,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung May 11, 2005. The “official” version, which excerpts some controversies, is on the website of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the later incarnation of Rosh’s Association, under “Chronology,” available online at http://www. holocaust-mahnmal.de/en/fromideatorealisation/chronology.

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in the debate about how to reconstruct the nation and predicted that it would remain a fringe issue set apart from larger mainstream consciousness in the future reunited Germany.16 And despite the East’s and West’s differing official histories regarding the Holocaust, it was a relatively non-contentious subject compared to the contemporary cold war debates; as a pre-division event, it remained largely outside the realm of immediate animosities. The governmental priority to which the building of Rosh’s suggested memorial corresponded was therefore not a sense of urgency about integrating the Holocaust into larger consciousness, but rather a desire to reconstruct collective German identity without a geographical qualifier. The role that a large, central memorial could play for a torn state would be to help manifest the shared memory that was sorely lacking. The comments of Bundestag President Wolfgang Thierse at the Memorial’s 2005 dedication ceremony confirm this goal: “The decision for this monument was one of the last that the former government in Bonn made before its move [to Berlin]. It was the decision for the first unified memory-project of reunified Germany, [and a] recognition that this united Germany acknowledged its history.” 17 Thierse’s speech envisions the Memorial as a reconciliatory gesture between East and West, the first such reconciliatory gesture between the divided cultural memory fields. The Memorial as Heir and Solution The monument that was conceived as an appropriate spatial heir and uniting memory gesture, as an ultimate Assmannian “fixed point,” was realized thirteen years after its full federal approval. Despite the Memorial’s rather contentious gestation phase, it was embraced by a jubilant public and press. Reading the Memorial as a spatial successor and response to earlier texts on the urban palimpsest explains why Berliners in particular were happy to picnic, sunbathe, or canoodle on the monument when it opened. The Memorial gives the city center back to its inhabitants in a way that simultaneously corresponds to their deepest familiarity with the site and 16.  Frank Stern, “The ‘Jewish Question’ in the ‘German Question’ 1945–1990: Reflections in Light of November 9, 1989,” New German Critique 53 (1991): 171. 17.  Quoted in “Das Denkmal wird Anstoß bleiben,” excerpted speeches of Paul Spiegel and Wolfgang Thierse, Der Tagesspiegel, May 11, 2005.



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empties it of distress. Maintaining the premise of sober engagement with past mistakes, the spot is nonetheless liberated from actual, contemporary suffering: it is starkly inert compared to the Wall. It refers to, yet neither causes nor invokes, suffering. In commemorating a past horror, the Memorial underscores a government decision not to perpetrate horror again—including against its own people, by reconstructing a barrier or ripping up the urban fabric. It removes the East/West contention of the space; indeed, it stands forever apart from such arguments. It takes a great source of misery (division) and neutralizes it, suggesting that attention be turned to something much more oblique (the idea of the Holocaust, intentionally not referenced by Eisenman’s design). Despite the projections of visitors and reviewers who think the structure resembles a graveyard, Eisenman insists that his design was intentionally “non-symbolic and non-iconic.” He states, “it has no intended meaning, it has no inscription, it is not a representation, it just is.”18 He and his Memorial emphatically refuse to force meaning or interpretation upon visitors: “You get what you see,” he has said.19 Rather than imposed meaning, he wants “the experience of walking in the field” to affect visitors and sees the space as three-dimensional architecture, “a piece of the fabric of the city,” rather than as representational art.20 Since the design is not mimetic, visitors must activate their own engagement, perhaps by intentionally reflecting on history or visiting the underground Information Center. Otherwise, the Memorial remains an inert field of freshly poured concrete. While the Wall was enforced on all but truly belonged to no one, the Memorial is enforced on none but belongs to all. Indeed, outside of its name, the Memorial is empty of official explanations and rhetoric. Although interpretations abound, none are imposed: the visitor is not told to read the spot through government dictum, but is invited to think whatever they want. “Remembrance is free!” proclaimed one newspaper.21 In this historical incarnation, the physical site’s multivalency does not ask one to choose sides but instead suggests, quite literally, 18.  Peter Eisenman, interview by Eve Lucas, “We are all a product of our time,” Ex-Berliner, December 2004, pp. 8–10. 19.  Peter Eisenman, interview by Claudia Keller and Christiane Petz, “Ich will geliebt werden,” Der Tagesspiegel, April 24, 2005. 20.  Eisenman, “We are all a product of our time.” 21.  “Das Gedenken ist frei,” Der Tagesspiegel, May 13, 2005.

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that remembrance is an open field—a pun that more than one headline invoked soon after the opening.22 In fact, the designation “Holocaust Memorial” allows the “wide field” to retain a greater sense of common use than even typical public sphere spaces, like parks or plazas. By giving the space a certain function, nomenclature underscores a unity absent in parks, insofar as visitors are all ostensibly there to “visit the Holocaust Memorial,” rather than for activities that would reveal differing social backgrounds. The stelae also prohibit total visibility across the space, allowing citizens to enjoy the area without being watched by others and avoiding the imposed openness of a field like that near the Reichstag. This limited visibility further blocks expression of difference among users and maintains a silent unity. Both the stated purpose and the construction of space contribute to a sense of non-division absent from other public spaces. As Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung editor Patrick Bahners described it, “The visitor . . . feels like a citizen who is alone with his thoughts—and with his people, who are all around him, often unseen, but nearly always heard.” The community aspect is a vital part of the experience: “Alone, the visitor would be lost . . . [the social feel] is necessary for the work.”23 Again, this special nature has little to do with the Memorial’s stated subject; Bahners points out that “the visitor . . . [feels] above all not like a persecuted Jew.” Rather, in the sole media example I found, he connects the site to its heritage, discussing its new incarnation as “people’s property” with the statement that “No one is trying to build a Wall [anymore].” As so aptly encapsulated by Bahners’s emphatic declaration of ownership, the Memorial affords not only psychological but also physical freedom. Citizens transform perambulation into an articulation of cohesion with their fellow visitors.24 One is also free to lean back and simply soak in the sense of societal solidity, which so many sitting on the stelae do: the Memorial is a superb spot from which to take in scenes of the unified city. The new glass cupola of the Reichstag rises just to the north, 22.  Sussebach, “Ein weites Feld”; Bernhard Schulz, “Ein weites Feld,” Der Tagesspiegel, May 10, 2005. 23.  Patrick Bahners, “Denkt mal. Betreten geboten: Eisenmans Werk ist jetzt Volkseigentum,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 14, 2005. 24.  For elaboration of walking-as-speech, see Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), pp. 91–110.



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while all around, the bustling foot traffic between Unter den Linden and Potsdamer Platz flows by.25 These views of the united government and populace provide a panoramic sense of urban engagement while suggesting normalcy and cohesion. Sitting on the fault line of the once-broken metropolis, the Memorial is instead an ideal spot to view, and even to experience, a reanimated city organism. As Bahners proudly concludes his overview of citizens swarming around the stone pillars: “We are the people.” Reading the Memorial as a particular piece of Berlin shaped at a particular time reveals it as a memory-gesture meant to signify the unity of the capital city and the German nation. In occupying the former path of the Berlin Wall, the Memorial corresponds to earlier physical legacies of the site while simultaneously giving Berliners back their city. The incongruously light-hearted behavior of the German press and public are ultimately to be understood as a celebration of the Memorial’s fit and function as they relate to nation and city.

25.  The July 2008 opening of the completed American embassy on Pariser Platz adjacent to the Memorial partially obscures some of the clear vistas that existed when the Memorial opened in 2005.

Jewish Cannibalism: The History of an Antisemitic Myth Pieter W. van der Horst In this essay an attempt will be made to trace the origins and history of the accusation that Jews are cannibals. Its origins go back much further into history than most people know, and for that reason it is this aspect of our topic that will receive the most attention. At the same time, it will be demonstrated that this anti-Jewish myth has an unprecedented tenacity, since it is still readily believed in by millions up until the present day. Part I: Antiquity First Encounters The encounters between Jews, on the one hand, and Greeks and Romans, on the other, left among the pagans a wide variety of impressions, ranging from great admiration to blind hatred. From the beginning of the Hellenistic era (the final decades of the fourth century BCE) until the end of antiquity, this wide range of reactions to Jews and Judaism on the part of pagan intellectuals remains a constant factor. One of the earliest testimonies is a passage in the work of Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus, in which, toward the end of the fourth century BCE, he calls the Jews “philosophers.” And not long afterward (about 300 BCE), the same sentiments .  The first part of this paper was also published (in a slightly modified form) as “The Myth of Jewish Cannibalism: A Chapter in the History of Antisemitism,” in Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, vol. 8, no. 3 (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2008), pp. 43–56. .  In a fragment from his De pietate quoted by Porphyry in De abstinentia 2.26. This is no. 4 in the great collection, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, ed. and trans. Menahem Stern, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 106–28. www.telospress.com

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are expressed again by another pupil of Aristotle, Clearchus of Soli, who tells us that Aristotle had told him that he had met a Jew who had a remarkably philosophical mind. This man, said Aristotle, not only spoke Greek, but he also had a Greek soul. He then goes on to say: “During my stay in Asia, he visited the same places as I did and came to converse with me and some other scholars, to test our learning. But as one who had been intimate with many cultivated persons, it was rather he who imparted to us something of his own.” There are good reasons to doubt the historical trustworthiness of a story about a meeting between Aristotle and a learned Jewish philosopher, but that is irrelevant. The point at issue is the fact that at the beginning of the Hellenistic era, Greek intellectuals were not reluctant to speak about Jews in a positive tone. Still relatively free from anti-Jewish sentiments are the passages in the work of Hecataeus of Abdera in which, also at the beginning of the Hellenistic era, he describes the origins and early history of the Jewish people and does not hide his admiration for Moses, whom he calls a man that excelled in wisdom and courage. However, halfway through his excursus on the Jews, Hecataeus remarks that, due to their experience of having been expelled as foreigners from Egypt, they do foster a somewhat asocial way of life that is characterized in a sense by xenophobia. So a first critical note is already present. 1974–84), 1:10. Henceforth I will refer to this work with the abbreviation GLAJJ followed by the number of the fragment. .  Quoted by Josephus, Contra Apionem 1.176–81 (GLAJJ no. 15). .  Also from the beginning of the 3rd century BCE is a passage from the Indika by Megasthenes in which he says that what the Brahmans are in India, the Jews are in Syria (GLAJJ no. 14). Clearchus, too, has Aristotle say (in the fragment rendered in an abbreviated form above) that what the Kalani are in India, the Jews are in Syria. See Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), pp. 201–7. .  Quoted by Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica 40.3.3 (GLAJJ no. 11). On the question of which of the fragments preserved as authored by Hecataeus are authentic, see, among others, Bezalel Bar-Kochva, Pseudo-Hecataeus, On the Jews: Legitimizing the Jewish Diaspora (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996), and Daniel R. Schwartz, “Diodorus Siculus 40.3—Hecataeus or Pseudo-Hecataeus?” in Menachem Mor et al. , eds., Jews and Gentiles in the Holy Land in the Days of the Second Temple, the Mishnah and the Talmud (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2003), pp. 181–97. The authenticity of the fragments remains a matter of debate, but even if the passage referred to above were not authentic, that would not change the overall picture of sympathy for the Jews on the part of Greeks in the early Hellenistic period.

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Positive and Negative Voices It is important, for that reason, to point out that right from the beginning of the Hellenistic era, anti-Jewish voices are to be heard alongside positive voices. It is true that the phenomenon of sympathy for Jews and Judaism on the part of Greeks and Romans continues to exist through the end of antiquity—the best proof being the well-attested groups of pagan sympathizers called “Godfearers,” that is, gentiles who were in close contact with local synagogues without becoming members but nonetheless supporting the Jewish community in various ways. But this phenomenon was accompanied constantly by a never-ending stream of anti-Jewish propaganda on the part of Greek and Roman authors. Anti-Jewish Propaganda The starting point of this anti-Jewish propaganda literature is to be found in the work of Manetho, an Egyptian priest from Alexandria who wrote a history of Egypt in Greek around the beginning of the third century BCE; and the zenith—or rather, nadir—of this literature is reached when, in the first century CE, Apion, again an Egyptian from Alexandria, launches an utterly venomous defamation campaign against the Jewish people, which most probably contributed to the great outburst of physical violence against the Jews of Alexandria in the year 38 CE, thus constituting the first pogrom in history. His contemporary and fellow-citizen Chaeremon, again an Egyptian scholar and Jew-hater, whose work I published many years ago, is from Alexandria as well. Some of the other anti-Jewish authors from the three centuries in between were also of Egyptian descent. What is the background of this remarkable fact? Here it should be kept in mind that at the beginning of the third century BCE, in Manetho’s days, the first Greek translation of the most .  The scholarly literature is vast. See, e.g., Bernd Wander, Gottesfürchtige und Sympathisanten: Studien zum heidnischen Umfeld von Diasporasynagogen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998). .  A good survey of the motifs in this literature is available in Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997). .  See Pieter W. van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus: The First Pogrom (Leiden: Brill, 2003). .  Pieter W. van der Horst, Chaeremon: Egyptian Priest and Stoic Philosopher: The Fragments Collected and Translated with Explanatory Notes (Leiden: Brill, 1984; 2nd rev. ed. 1987).



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important part of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, was made in Alexandria.10 It also contained the book of Exodus with the story of Israel’s liberation from bondage in Egypt. In that story the Egyptians play the role of God’s enemies. Whether Greek-speaking Egyptians knew this story because they had read the book of Exodus in Greek or whether they knew it only by hearsay, we do not know; but the fact is that they immediately launched a counterattack by retelling this story in an anti-Jewish sense. Manetho set the tone. This priest paid ample attention to the story of the exodus in his history of Egypt, but in his version things are markedly different than in the Bible.11 To summarize it briefly: Pharaoh Amenophis wanted to have a vision of the gods. He is advised that, in order to attain that goal, he should rid the country of lepers and other contaminated persons. He collects some eighty thousand of them, including former priests, and sets them to work in the quarries of the Nile valley. At their request they are later transferred to Avaris, the old and now abandoned capital of the Hyksos, where one of the former priests appoints himself their leader. This leader, named Osarsiph but later renamed Moses, decrees that the gods of Egypt should no longer be worshipped, that the sacred animals should be butchered, and that the members of the group should avoid contact with anyone outside the group. He himself does contact the inhabitants of Jerusalem, inveterate enemies of the Egyptians, and requests that they collaborate with his group in an attack on Egypt, which indeed takes place. Pharaoh Amenophis then withdraws with his army to Ethiopia. Thereafter a real reign of terror is exercised in Egypt by the victors: villages and cities are set on fire, temples are plundered, sacred animals are roasted, the priests of these animals are forced to slaughter and eat their own gods, after which they are thrown naked out of their temples. When finally this group of criminals are driven out of the country, they found their own villain state in and around Jerusalem.12 All this sounds already bad enough as a downright distortion of the biblical story, but this is only the beginning of a long process of demonization of the Jewish people, which will become more and more grim in the 10.  This Greek translation is usually called the Septuagint. See Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2000). 11.  There is much debate on the question of whether the anti-Jewish elements in Manetho’s story go back to himself or are later interpolations. In my opinion, Menachem Stern has convincingly defended the authenticity of these elements in GLAJJ 1.62–65. 12.  This fragment is found in Josephus, Contra Apionem 1.228–52 (GLAJJ no. 21).

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centuries that follow. The most conspicuous trait in that process is that of a generalization in which dislike of Egypt and its gods is broadened into hatred of humankind in general and a total denial of the divine world. To put it succinctly: misanthropy and atheism have become the hallmark of the Jewish people.13 Hatred of humankind and godlessness thus became the standard elements in the anti-Jewish propaganda in Alexandria and elsewhere. What kind of consequences that had for the relations between Jews, on the one hand, and Greeks and Egyptians in that city, on the other hand, becomes painfully clear in a revealing papyrus from circa 20 BCE, in which a Greek-Alexandrian official expresses the wish, on behalf of his Greek fellow citizens, that the city council “will take care that the pure citizen body of Alexandria is not corrupted by people who are uncultured and uneducated.”14 To put it simply, Jews should not be allowed to become citizens of Alexandria because the citizen body has to be kept “Judenrein.” The “people without culture and education” here are almost certainly the Jews. I will come back to that motif presently.15 Apion I have to refrain here from sketching the development of Jew-hatred (or Judeophobia) in the centuries after Manethon, and so I now jump immediately to its nadir in the work of Apion, the Alexandrian scholar already mentioned. This extreme Jew-hater was a highly respected scholar who had earned fame with a wide-ranging oeuvre concerning fields such as Homeric exegesis, grammar, and many other subjects.16 His attacks on the Jewish people in his work on Egypt were so vicious and influential that, several decades after his death, the Jewish historian Josephus still found it necessary to devote a whole book to the refutation of the slander of this arch-antisemite (and others), in his work Contra Apionem. The story Apion tells is as follows:

13.  See, e.g., Katell Berthelot, Philanthrôpia Judaica: le débat autour de la “misanthropie” des lois juives dans l’antiquité (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 79–184. 14.  Victor A. Tcherikover and Alexander Fuks, eds., Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1957–64), vol. 2, no. 150, ll. 5–6. 15.  That “people without culture and education” is a reference to Jews here is a widely accepted interpretation; contra Katherine Blouin, Le conflit judéo-alexandrin de 38–41: l’identité juive à l’épreuve (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), pp. 109–10. 16.  See Pieter W. van der Horst, “Who Was Apion?” in Japheth in the Tents of Shem: Studies on Jewish Hellenism in Antiquity (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), pp. 207–22.



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The Seleucid king Antiochus IV entered the Jerusalem temple and found there a man reclining on a couch and looking with bewilderment at a sumptuous banquet of meat and fish on the table before him. As soon as the king came in, the man hailed him as his liberator. Prostrating himself before the king, he stretched out his hands and begged for his help. The king assured him that he would help him and asked who he was, why he was in this place, and what was the meaning of the rich dish. Thereupon the man told him in tears his sad story. He said that he was a Greek and that travelling through this country he had suddenly been kidnapped and locked up in this temple. He was seen by nobody except servants, who fattened him up with meals of extreme luxuriousness. Initially, he derived some pleasure from this bit of luck, but gradually he began to be suspicious and finally alarmed. He then asked the servants what was going on here, and they told him that all of this was done in fulfilment of a secret law of the Jews. Annually, at a fixed time, they caught a Greek, whom they fattened up over the course of a year. Then they led him into a forest where they killed him and sacrificed his body with the customary ritual of eating his entrails. While sacrificing the Greek, they would swear an oath of enmity to all Greeks.17 In evaluating this horror story by Apion, we should bear in mind that the author was a man who, during the reign of Caligula (37–41 CE), was not only honored by the citizens of Alexandria with the grant of citizenship of this city—an exceptional honor for an Egyptian!—but was also asked by the city to act as the leader and spokesman of the AlexandrianGreek delegation to Rome after the conflict between Jews and Greeks, the pogrom that had caused so much suffering to the Jews in 38 CE. If this man was so prestigious that he received citizenship from the Greeks in Alexandria, then it should not surprise us that his incredible accusations of an annual cannibalistic rite among the Jews, in which—nota bene—a Greek was slaughtered and eaten, were believed by these Greeks.18 And that will certainly have evoked intense hatred and contributed to the outburst of violence in 38 CE. 17.  Quoted by Josephus, Contra Apionem 2.91–96 (GLAJJ no. 171). An excellent commentary on this passage is John M. G. Barclay, Flavius Josephus, Translation and Commentary, vol. 10, Against Apion (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 216–20. 18.  The same accusation is repeated later(?) in the first century CE by a certain Damocritus, but with some differences: according to this author, the cannibalistic ritual did not take place annually but once every seven years, and it was not a Greek but a “foreigner” that was eaten. See GLAJJ no. 247.

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Cannibalism and the Goddess Isis But why cannibalism? Were misanthropy and atheism not serious enough accusations? One could of course say that cannibalism would always and everywhere count as the most devastating accusation possible, so there is no need to adduce a special motive for it. Also is it well known that the combination of eating human entrails and swearing an oath is a topos in ancient propaganda literature that served to convey the message that the opponents were criminal conspirators.19 But if one were to think that this is sufficient as an explanation—the Jews as conspirators against the paragons of civilization, the Greeks20—one overlooks the fact that this accusation, although phrased in Greek, has been thought up by an Egyptian. What serves as the background here is, in my opinion, an Egyptian motif related to the cult of the goddess Isis.21 Until late antiquity, the goddess Isis remained the most popular Egyptian deity, not only in her homeland but also far beyond it. In practically every country of the ancient world, traces of the spread of her cult have been found.22 One of the more specific manifestations of the Isis cult in the 19.  Elias Bickerman, “Ritual Murder and the Worship of an Ass,” in Studies in Jewish and Christian History (1927; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 1:497–527. That Jews could also level this accusation against non-Jews is proved by Sapientia Salomonis 12.3–7, with the commentary by David Winston, The Wisdom of Solomon: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), pp. 239–40. 20.  Almost identical accusations were levelled against Christians in the second century CE by Greeks and Romans. See Andrew McGowan, “Eating People: Accusations of Cannibalism Against Christians in the Second Century,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 413–42. From the older literature, see especially F. J. Dölger, “‘Sacramentum infanticidii’: Die Schlachtung eines Kindes und der Genuß seines Fleisches als vermeintlicher Einweihungsakt im ältesten Christentum,” in Antike und Christentum (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1934), 4:188–228. 21.  Bickerman’s theory (“Ritual Murder,” pp. 512–16) that Apion here uses an element from Seleucid political propaganda cannot be ruled out, but it takes insufficiently into account that the only version of this horror story is from the pen of an Egyptian and that also another element in Apion’s anti-Jewish polemic, namely, that the Jews worship the head of an ass (Contra Apionem 2.80), has an Egyptian background. See Jan Willem van Henten and Ra’anan Abusch, “The Depiction of the Jews as Typhonians and Josephus’ Strategy of Refutation in Contra Apionem,” in Louis H. Feldman and John R. Levison, eds., Josephus’ Contra Apionem: Studies in its Character and Context with a Latin Concordance to the Portion Missing in Greek (Leiden: Brill, 1996), pp. 271–309. 22.  Ladislav Vidman, Isis und Sarapis bei den Griechen und Römern (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970); Françoise Dunand, Le culte d’Isis dans le bassin oriental de la Méditerranée (Leiden: Brill, 1973); Friedrich Solmsen, Isis among the Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979); R. E. Witt, Isis in the Ancient World (Baltimore,



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Greco-Roman world is the so-called Isis aretalogies, that is, texts, either as inscriptions on stone or written on papyrus, in which the great feats and qualities of this goddess are praised, either by herself in the first person or by one of her worshippers in the third person. A number of copies of these propagandistic texts are extant, all of them from the centuries around the turn of the era (from the second century BCE to the third century CE).23 They have an Egyptian background, possibly in the priestly theology of the city of Memphis, which was the center of her cult. In order to give an impression of such texts, I will quote here some passages from a long aretalogy in a Greek papyrus from Oxyrhynchus (Egypt), where Isis is praised as ruler of the world, guardian and guide, lady of the mouths of seas and rivers, . . . who also bringest back the Nile over all of the country, . . . allruling in the procession of the gods, enmity-hating, true jewel of the wind and diadem of life, . . . O lady Isis, greatest of the gods, first of names, . . . thou rulest over the mid-air and the immeasurable; . . . thou MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997); Reinhold Merkelbach, Isis Regina, Zeus Sarapis: Die griechisch-ägyptische Religion nach den Quellen dargestellt (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2001). For a general survey of the spread and diffusion of Egyptian cults outside Egypt see Michel Malaise, “La diffusion des cultes égyptiennes dans les provinces européennes de l’empire romain,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, pt. 2, vol. 17, no. 3 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984): 1615–91; Jean Leclant, “Aegyptiaca et milieux isiaques: recherches sur la diffusion du matériel et des idées égyptiennes,” in ibid., pp. 1692–1709; Robert Turcan, Les cultes orientaux dans le monde romain (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1989), pp. 77–128; Sarolta A. Takács, Isis and Sarapis in the Roman World (Leiden: Brill, 1995); Laurent Bricault, Atlas de la diffusion des cultes isiaques (Paris: Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 2001). 23.  Werner Peek, Der Isishymnus von Andros und verwandte Texte (Berlin: Weidmann, 1930); R. Harder, Karpokrates von Chalkis und die memphitische Isispropaganda (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1944); Jan Bergman, Ich bin Isis: Studien zum memphitischen Hintergrund der griechischen Isis-Aretalogien (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1968); Yves Grandjean, Une nouvelle arétalogie d’Isis à Maronée (Leiden: Brill, 1975); Helmut Engelmann, The Delian Aretalogy of Sarapis (Leiden: Brill, 1975); Helmut Engelmann, ed., Die Inschriften von Kyme (Bonn: Habelt, 1976), pp. 97–108. The text from Chalkis (on Euboia) published by Harder has been reprinted in Ladislaus Vidman, Sylloge inscriptionum religionis Isiacae et Sarapiacae (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969), no. 88; the text from Kyme published by Engelmann is also in Grandjean, Nouvelle arétalogie, pp. 122–24, and in Merkelbach, Isis Regina, pp. 115–18. For a complete survey of the material see Grandjean, Nouvelle arétalogie, pp. 8–11. For the propagandistic character of these texts see A. D. Nock, “Graeco-Egyptian Religious Propaganda,” in his Essays on Religion and the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1972), 2:703–11; and Witt, Isis, pp. 100–10.

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bringest the sun from rising unto setting, and all the gods are glad; at the risings of the stars the people of the country worship thee unceasingly; . . . the demons become thy subjects; . . . thou didst establish shrines for Isis in all cities for all time and didst deliver to all humans laws and a perfect year; . . . thou didst make the power of women equal to that of men; . . . thou art the mistress of all things forever!24

Also the first-person format is used (e.g., in the aretalogy of Kyme): With Hermes I have invented writing; . . . I have posited laws for humanity; . . . I am the one who has invented agriculture for humans; . . . I have separated the earth from heaven; . . . I have decreed the orbit of sun and moon; . . . I have bound men and women together; . . . I have ended the rule of tyrants and stopped the killing.25

And thus it goes on at length. The most important issue in the present context is that a number of these aretalogies contain a motif that is phrased as follows: “Together with my brother Osiris, I have put an end to cannibalism [anthrôpophagia].”26 In the context it is always emphasized that Isis brought civilization to humans who initially lived like wild animals and knew no laws or rules and, for that reason, tried to kill each other in order to consume one another. Isis introduced laws and taught humankind to eat fruits, the products of the earth, instead of each other, putting an end to the mutual killing. She instructed people to live with each other in a civilized manner, and she taught them writing so that culture could come into being. In brief, Isis is the goddess of the first great campaign to civilize the world.27 The transition from a wild and beastly existence to a fully human life had become possible only due to her goodness. It is the end of murdering each other for consumption and the beginning of eating the products of the earth that marks the transition from a total absence of civilization to a civilized 24.  Oxyrhynchus Papyri 1380.122–233 (excerpts). Impressive parallels are found in the Isis hymns of Isidorus; see Vera F. Vanderlip, The Four Greek Hymns of Isidorus and the Cult of Isis (Toronto: A. M. Hakkert, 1972). 25.  Engelmann, Inschriften, p. 98. 26.  Kyme 21 (Engelmann, Inschriften, p. 98; Bergmann, Ich bin Isis, p. 302); Ios 18 (Peek, Isishymnus, pp. 123–24; Witt, Isis, p. 155); Andros 45–46 (Peek, Isishymnus, p. 17); Diodorus Siculus 1.14.1. 27.  See A. J. Festugière, “À propos des arétalogies d’Isis,” in Études de religion grecque et hellénistique (Paris: J. Vrin 1972), pp. 138–63.



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human existence. This end to an animal-like existence has become possible only thanks to the gracious gifts of Isis. A salient detail, however, is that while, in the Isis texts, it is the laws of this goddess that bring civilization to humanity, according to Apion it is the laws of the god of the Jews that keep these outside the orbit of civilization. Apparently, the Jewish god does not have the civilizing potential that Isis has. It is for that reason, so implies Apion, that the Jews have missed this decisive turn toward a civilized existence. The implicit question is therefore whether Jews are actually fully human. The suggestion that Apion wanted to imprint upon the minds of his Greek and Egyptian readers is certainly that such was not the case. Everyone in the Alexandrian milieu who knew this theory of the origins of civilization as a gift of Isis—and there were very many of them—could come to no other conclusion than that Jews were “Untermenschen.” No wonder that they murdered them with eagerness and pleasure in the year 38, probably shortly after the publication of Apion’s work.28 Greek Ideas about the Origins of Civilization It should be stressed that this thesis does not stand or fall with the theory of an Egyptian origin to this idea about the beginnings of civilization.29 In Greek milieus outside of the circles of Isis adepts, similar thoughts were also current.30 To mention only a few of the most relevant witnesses, in Homer’s Odyssey we already find the motif of a man-eater as a wild barbarian in the figure of the cyclops Polyphemus, called “men-eater” 28.  See note 8. 29.  For that reason it is also not of great importance whether or not Apion was an Egyptian or a Greek, although I do not share the extreme skepticism of some scholars who argue that Josephus’s assertion that Apion was an Egyptian is only an instance of cultural stigmatization and discrediting; see, e.g., K. R. Jones, “The Figure of Apion in Josephus’ Contra Apionem,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 36 (2005): 278–315. 30.  See especially Festugière, “À propos des arétalogies d’Isis,” pp. 145–49; also Fritz Graf, “Kannibalismus,” Neue Pauly 6 (1999): 247; most recently Benjamin H. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2004), pp. 207–11. On the question of whether human sacrifice was indeed practiced in the GrecoRoman world, see Friedrich Schwenn, Die Menschenopfer bei den Griechen und Römern (Giessen: A. Töpelmann, 1915); Dennis D. Hughes, Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 1991); Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983). The best known document in which cannibalistic scenes are depicted is Juvenal’s Satire 15; the most elaborate literary treatment of cannibalistic nations is Pliny’s Natural History 7.9–12.

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(10.200) and “no bread-eating man” (9.191) in the poem; and the same poem also recognizes whole tribes who live on human meat such as the wild Laistrygones (10.116). Aristotle speaks about barbarian nations near the Black Sea who guzzle human meat (Nicomachean Ethics 7.4.1148b22; Politics 8.4.1338b19–20). Herodotus had preceded him, calling the Scythians, who lived in the same region, the wildest of all humans, barbaric men-eaters (The Histories 4.106; see also 1.216, 3.38, 3.99, and 4.26). Later, Pliny the Elder and others do so as well (Natural History 6.54, 7.11– 12).31 In his description of African tribes, Pliny also mentions a nation called the Anthropophagi or “men-eaters” (Natural History 4.88, 6.53). The tragedian Euripides has Theseus say that he praises the god who has raised humans from their original animal-like state by giving them brains, speech, the art of agriculture, and other forms of civilized life (The Suppliants 201ff.). Plato, or one of his pupils, refers in his Epinomis (975a–b) to the tradition that humanity has been freed from the necessity of devouring each other by the discovery of agriculture (cf. Laws 782a–c). Elsewhere, however, in his Statesman (271d–e), he depicts the primeval age of Cronos as an idyllic vegetarian period in which peace and harmony were predominant. By contrast, the philosopher Euhemeros (ca. 300 BCE) states that the primordial period (i.e., Cronos’s era) was a time of cruel cannibalism, to which an end was put only by Zeus, who taught humanity laws and civilization (Lactantius, The Divine Institutions 1.13.2).32 Plutarch transmits the tradition that Osiris freed humanity from its primitive and beastly way of life by teaching them agriculture and laws (On Isis and Osiris 13.356a); here cannibalism is not mentioned explicitly, but the close parallel with the Isis hymns suggests that it is implied.33 The notorious nephew of Plato’s mother, Critias, speaks in his famous fragment on the manipulated origins of religious belief about the animal-like state in which humanity lived before laws were invented, most probably hinting at cannibalism as well.34 In a passage on the evolution of culture, the tragedian Moschion 31.  Cf. also Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 9.4.6; Strabo, Geographica 15.1.56 (on peoples in the Caucasus). 32.  On this inconsistency in the image of the era of Cronos in Greek literature, see H. S. Versnel, Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion, vol. 2, Transition and Reversal in Myth and Ritual (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 106–14. 33.  J. Gwyn Griffiths, Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 1970), p. 309. 34.  Fragment 88B25 Diels-Kranz. On this passage see my article “The First Atheist,” in Jews and Christians in Their Graeco-Roman Context: Selected Essays on Early



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(fourth to third century BCE) says that in its original state humanity was cannibalistic until the invention of agriculture introduced civilization.35 Theophrastus, however, was of the conviction that the original form of sacrifice was purely vegetarian but that lack of vegetal food was the reason why at a certain moment people began to sacrifice each other to the gods; thus cannibalism came into being, but, because of its social disadvantages, it was succeeded in its turn by consumption of animal meat.36 A special tradition is mentioned by the geographer Pausanias: in an oracle, the goddess Demeter threatened the inhabitants of Arcadia that she would have them fall back into their original state of cannibalistic nomads, from which she had liberated them previously, if they do not worship her (Description of Greece 8.42.6). Finally, Athenaeus cites a parody by Athenion on all these theories about the evolution of culture, in which someone asserts that the real saviors of humankind are the cooks, since it is their delicious meals that have put humans off eating each other raw (Deipnosophistae 14.660e). Many more texts could be mentioned, but these suffice for the present purpose.37 In many of the Greek texts, one repeatedly comes across the terms thêriôdês (animal-like, savage, brutal) and agriôdês (wild, ferocious) to indicate the uninhibited and violent way of life of humanity in its cannibalistic phase. From the passages referred to above, however briefly mentioned, it is clear that there was more than just one theory about the place of this inhumane form of life in the development of humanity. There were those according to whom it was an initial stage that has happily been outgrown; to others it was a phenomenon of degeneration as compared to a better primeval situation; for others still, it was a motif that played a role only in their descriptions of nations that lived at great distances, at the

Judaism, Samaritanism, Hellenism, and Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), pp. 242–49. 35.  See Bruno Snell, ed., Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), pp. 265–66 (97F6). The text is identical with Orphic fragment 292 Kern. 36.  De pietate fr. 584A Fortenbaugh, quoted by Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, 2.27. Empedocles, too, seems to have adhered to a theory of the decline of humanity from a vegetarian existence to a cannibalistic way of life; see M. R. Wright, Empedocles: The Extant Fragments, 2nd ed. (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1995), pp. 284–88. 37.  More material in Festugière, “À propos des arétalogies d’Isis,” pp. 145–49.

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edge of or outside the civilized world.38 The implication of these Greek theories for the formation of an image of the Jews in the text of Apion under discussion is in any case the same as when an Egyptian background is assumed:39 in both cases the conclusion is inevitable that the Jews got bogged down in a stage of development that precedes the coming into being of civilization or have degenerated into a way of life that is on an animal level. So again: Jews are “Untermenschen.” They do have laws, but those laws command them to perform rituals that make clear that they still live the lives of animals (thêriôdeis bioi). As cannibals they are in fact lawless, primitive, immoral, and violent creatures.40 It should be pointed out here that this extreme form of defamation, stemming from an intense hatred of the Jews, already existed before Christianity arose and before theories about the racial inferiority of the Jewish nation were developed.41 Part II: The Middle Ages and Modern Times Medieval Blood Libels The motif of Jewish cannibalism, whether or not preceded by a ritual murder, turned out to be very long-lived. In the Christian Middle Ages, it is revivified in a variety of ways. I must again be brief about this and mention only a portion of the relevant data.42 The medieval anti-Jewish discourse is 38.  See, e.g., Sue Blundell, The Origins of Civilization in Greek and Roman Thought (Dover, NH: Croom Helm, 1986); Thomas Cole, Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990); Bodo Gatz, Weltalter, goldene Zeit und sinnverwandte Vorstellungen (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1967), pp. 144–74. Much material can also be found in the older work of Johannes Haussleiter, Der Vegetarismus in der Antike (Berlin: Töpelmann, 1935). 39.  With Festugière, I think it is not impossible that the motif of the triumph over cannibalism in the Isis aretalogies has been borrowed from Greek theories about the origins of civilization. 40.  Almost two centuries after Apion, we find the accusation of Jewish cannibalism again in the work of the historian Cassius Dio when he recounts that the Jews of Cyrene, under the leadership of a certain Andreas, wreaked havoc among the Greeks and Romans in the war of 115–117 CE: “They would eat the flesh of their victims, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood, and wear their skins for clothing; many they sawed in two, from the head downward; others they gave to wild beasts, and still others they forced to fight as gladiators” (Roman History 68.32.1–2). This has all features of ancient war propaganda. See Isaac, The Invention of Racism, p. 475. 41.  The accusation of Jewish cannibalism is not found in the vast Christian literature from antiquity, as far as I know. 42.  See especially Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (1943; Philadelphia: Jewish



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different from that of pre-Christian antiquity, since Christianity introduced as a new and dominant motif, deicide: the Jews have killed Jesus, who is God, and they are for that very reason a doomed nation. And here again the element of Jewish cannibalism comes to the fore. But this time it is, of course, not a pagan Greek who is their victim, but a Christian—and even worse, a Christian child (see below). In the background here is the Christian conviction, adhered to throughout the Middle Ages, that Jews were followers of the devil, with whom they had a pact, and for that very reason their goal was the destruction of Christianity. No wonder that a wide variety of stories about deeds of horror practiced by the Jews were brought into circulation and found ready believers—a classic example of the diabolization of an entire nation.43 There were numerous cases, e.g., of accusations that Jews, by poisoning wells, tried to kill as many Christians as possible. For that reason, in 1348, when Europe was struck by the Black Death, the plague epidemic that killed a great part of the European population, it was immediately clear who was behind this: the Jews! Tens of thousands of them were killed as alleged perpetrators of this catastrophe, except in Avignon where they enjoyed the protection of the Pope.44 But nothing in medieval times contributed more to the continuation of a deeply rooted and intense hatred of Jews than the many stories about Jewish ritual slaughter of Christian children.45 These horrific accusations, of which we know numerous cases, were usually brought into circulation by the clergy. They seized upon random cases of disappearance or sudden death in order to accuse the Jews of having murdered Christians because they needed their blood, and often their entrails, for diabolic rituals, i.e., magical practices. In the later versions of these stories, it is often said that the blood, hearts, and livers of these children were needed for the Publication Society of America, 1983); also Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York: Columbia UP, 1967), pp. 122–91. In the separate Index volume to Baron’s work one finds under the entry “Blood accusation” a list of other references. Also R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1988). 43.  See Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, “The Diabolization of Jews,” in Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Palgrave 2002), pp. 73–117. 44.  Trachtenberg, Devil, pp. 97–108. 45.  Hermann L. Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice (London: Cope & Fenwick, 1909); Cecil Roth, The Ritual Murder Libel and the Jews (London: Woburn, 1935); Perry and Schweitzer, “Ritual Murderers: Christian Blood and Jewish Matzos,” in their Antisemitism, pp. 43–72.

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preparation of matzot and other parts of the Pesach meal.46 Sometimes it was added that the children were fattened in the period preceding their crucifixion! Such incriminating accusations usually ended in massive massacres. The Modern Period: Nazism After the Middle Ages, the myth still received a warm welcome on the part of several Christian scholars. To mention just the most notorious examples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one finds the accusation in J. A. Eisenmenger’s Entdecktes Judentum of 1711 and in A. Rohling’s Der Talmudjude of 1871.47 These influential works were partly responsible for the fact that up until the first decades of the twentieth century, many charges of ritual murder against Jews were tried in Germany and elsewhere.48 This myth has turned out to be ineradicable even in the last century and our own time. Not only was it exploited in the Nazi period by German fascists, such as Julius Streicher in his monthly Der Stürmer,49 but—as we will see presently—in the twenty-first century, this horror story is still alive and finds a ready market. It is a well-known fact that in Nazi propaganda Jews were demonized and dehumanized to such a degree that in the long run a majority of the Germans (but also Austrians, Poles, Ukrainians, and others) could not view the Jews as anything other than dirty vermin that had to be destroyed. The mass murderers of the concentration camps could go home at the end of every day with the pleasant feeling that they had done a great service to humanity by killing as many of these dangerous creatures as possible.50 46.  It is interesting to see that there are versions in which Christian blood and entrails are said to be needed every year, and others in which that was the case only once every seven years. This same variation between one and seven years can already be found in preChristian Greek texts in the diverging versions of Apion and Damocritus (see note 17). 47.  On these two scholars see the articles in the Encyclopaedia Judaica (1972), 6:545–46 and 15:224. 48.  Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites (New York: Norton, 1986), pp. 105–7. 49.  Trachtenberg, Devil, p. 243n6. In May 1934, Der Stürmer even devoted a complete issue to the topic of Jewish cannibalism. 50.  See, e.g., Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London: Collins, 1986); Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Holocaust: A History (New York: Norton, 2002); Léon Poliakov, Der arische Mythos (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1977); Stephen Eric Bronner, Rumor about the Jews: Antisemitism, Conspiracy, and the Protocols of Zion (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000).



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After World War II If one has the optimistic expectation that after World War II this poisonous form of thought has disappeared, one is bound to be heavily disappointed. In 1946 in Poland, dozens of Jews were killed after having been accused of ritual cannibalism.51 Less than 10 years later, this accusation was repeated in a Romanian newspaper and on Belorussian television.52 Very recently, in the Winter of 2005–6, Syrian state television broadcast a program in which Jews were portrayed as cannibals. This comes as no surprise when one realizes that in 1983 Mustafa Tlass, who was later the Syrian minister of defence, published a book with the title The Matza of Sion, in which the blood libel is dealt with as a historically proved fact. This book reached a very large audience, it remained on the best-seller lists in Syria and elsewhere for many years, and it has been translated into several languages. Also recently Hizbullah’s television station, Al-Manar, broadcast a series that purported to show Jews murdering Christian children in order to use their blood for the preparation of Passover bread.53 The Islamization of Jew-Hatred With this topic we touch upon a growing global problem, namely, that the Islamic world has taken over the torch of Jew-hatred from the Nazis and carries it forward fervently. The islamization of European antisemitism is one of the most horrifying developments of the last few decades. In almost the entire Islamic world, an incredible amount of anti-Jewish propaganda of the worst kind is poured out over the heads of hundreds of millions of believers in newspapers, weeklies, schoolbooks, radio and TV programs, sermons of imams, courses at the universities, etc. Likewise in numerous cartoons, which sometimes have been clearly based on Nazi propaganda, an image of the Jewish people is created that is unparalleled in its negativity. Recently, the Dutch theologian Hans Jansen collected some 1500 of these cartoons from only the last five years. In them, Jews are always depicted as bloodthirsty monsters, if not worse. Recently the Israeli media watcher Aryeh Stav remarked that the anti-Jewish propaganda in the Islamic media surpasses that of the Nazi propaganda in both tenor 51.  Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, p. 29. 52.  Perry and Schweitzer, “Ritual Murderers: Christian Blood and Jewish Matzos,” in their Antisemitism, p. 69. 53.  See The Economist, August 19, 2006, p. 9.

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and quantity.54 That he is right can be established by anyone who makes the effort to follow what appears in the Arab media, for instance, via the website of the MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute,55 or else by reading the disconcerting book Van jodenhaat naar zelfmoordterrorisme (From Jew-Hatred to Suicide Terrorism) by Hans Jansen and by having a look at the 1500 cartoons on his CD-ROM.56 Then it becomes more than clear that a bitter hatred of Jews exists at a large scale in the Islamic world.57 Arabic readers have at their disposal “a wide range of anti-Semitic literature, most of it of Christian and European or American origin. It includes the products of clerical and anti-clerical, right-wing and left-wing, socialist and fascist anti-Semitism. Some of these books were translated several times, and went through many editions.”58 These books and articles familiarize their readers with “the Jew as ritual murderer, as Freemason, as capitalist, as communist, as reactionary, as subversive, and as the center of an evil conspiracy aiming at the domination of the world.”59 54.  “In terms of time and space, the Arab caricature exceeds anything previously known in the annals of the hatred of Israel over the ages. Never before has an entire civilization, spread over 22 countries, constantly, day after day for decades, in hundreds of newspapers, denigrated the image of the Jew and his country. Moreover, if we judge the Arab caricature in terms of virulence, we will find that it exceeds anything that preceded it, including the Nazi caricature, hitherto adjudged as embodying the nadir of the hatred of Israel.” Cited from his article “Arab Antisemitism in Cartoons,” which has been included on the CD-ROM with the caricatures collected by Hans Jansen in his Van jodenhaat naar zelfmoordterrorisme: Islamisering van het Europees antisemitisme in het Midden-Oosten (Heerenveen: Groen, 2006). See also Arieh Stav, Peace: The Arabian Caricature: A Study in Anti-Semitic Imagery (New York: Gefen Pub. House, 1999). 55.  On the MEMRI website, at http://www.memri.org/. 56.  See note 53. I have not been able to consult Joël and Dan Kotek, Au nom de l’antisionisme: l’image des Juifs et d’Israël dans la caricature depuis la seconde intifada (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 2003). 57.  Note that as early as 1986, Bernard Lewis already wrote about “the present tidal proportions” of Arab antisemitism; see Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, p. 139. He further remarks: “The level of hostility, and the ubiquity of its expression, are rarely equalled even in the European literature of anti-Semitism” (p. 195). 58.  Ibid., p. 199. Lewis writes: “The volume of anti-Semitic books and articles published, the size and number of editions and impressions, the eminence and authority of those who write, publish, and sponsor them, their place in school and college curricula, their role in the mass media, would all seem to suggest that classical anti-Semitism is an essential part of Arab intellectual life at the present time” (p. 256). 59.  Ibid., p. 200.



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As has already been said, the theme of Jews as cannibals is not lacking in this intensive campaign of hate. In many newspaper cartoons, one sees Jews swallowing Islamic children alive, and the motif also shows up in books, television documentaries, internet websites, and movies—even in “scholarly” publications. Apart from cannibalism, there are many other things, which the rest of humankind knows that Jews have nothing to do with, but which the Jews are nevertheless accused of in Muslim propaganda: the Jews are responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers, the Danish cartoons, the AIDS epidemic, the tsunami of December 2004, the outbreak of bird flu, the attack on the Shi’ite golden mosque of Samarra in 2005, etc.60 And when it is irrefutably demonstrated that one or another of these accusations is totally untrue, for instance, when Osama bin Laden himself claims responsibility for the attack on the Twin Towers, it makes only few Muslims rethink the matter; on the contrary, many of them bring in all possible arguments to cope with this cognitive dissonance and conclude that this can only mean that bin Laden himself works for the Israeli secret service.61 Nothing seems capable of enfeebling or negating these grotesque images of “the enemy” in the Islamic world, and many people are simply unwilling to believe anything else.62 This unwillingness is nurtured by religious fanaticism in a most dangerous form. One of the saddening aspects is that we are not talking here about minor groups of extremist radicals, but about great masses of ordinary Islamic believers who are being continuously brainwashed by their spiritual and political leaders. The worst cases of anti-Jewish hate propaganda are from Syria, Iran, and the Palestinian territories. I already briefly mentioned Syria, and I do not need to dwell long on Iran and its rabidly anti-Jewish leadership, which—as many understandably fear—wants to wipe Israel off the map with a nuclear bomb. This regime, which suffers from an extreme form of religious fanaticism,63 denies the Holocaust but strives to bring one about 60.  For evidence see Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Anti-Israelism and Anti-Semitism: Common Characteristics and Motifs,” Jewish Political Studies Review 19 (2007): 94–96. 61.  This is reminiscent of the claim in a Syrian newspaper that Yassir Arafat must be a Jew because he was trying to make peace with Israel (Al-Thawra, October 4, 1995). 62.  See Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Antisemitism from Ancient Times to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), pp. 191–206. 63.  On the apocalyptic worldview of Ahmadinejad and his fanatical Iranian government, see Bernard Lewis, “Does Iran have something in store?” Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2006.

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itself, and hence it is the greatest threat to Israel’s existence since 1948. It undisguisedly works toward an “Endlösung.” But with regard to our topic—the propagation of Jew-hatred—the situation in the Palestinian territories is at least as bad as in Iran. The insulting nature of the anti-Jewish brainwashing evident in various media exceeds one’s worst imagination. In many Palestinian schoolbooks, children are taught year after year that it is a holy duty to destroy the Jewish people, because the Jews, being children of Satan, resist God and humanity and conspire against Islam.64 They are taught that Jews have no historical roots in Palestine whatsoever, they are newcomers as compared to the Palestinians, they occupy Islamic soil, and hence they should be regarded as an aggressive colonial power that aims at the destruction of Islam and should be destroyed for that very reason. And much of this “educational” material is heavily subsidized by the European Union.65 One of the most saddening aspects of this matter is that intellectuals and scholars at Palestinian universities do little or nothing to unmask these lies, although they certainly know better. It is a primary task of scholars to remedy ignorance, to expose nonsense, to unmask prejudices, and to criticize that which will not pass muster from either a historical or an ethical point of view. But hardly any Palestinian scholar raises his or her voice against this kind of poisonous slander; on the contrary, they often endeavor to make things worse. (This also applies to the much overrated Edward Said.)66 In other Islamic countries as well, one sees that “scholars” have degenerated into lackeys of the spiritual and political leaders. Many have blamed me for drawing a direct line from Nazi propaganda to the Islamic and especially Palestinian hatred of the Jews. After all, in the case of the Palestinians everything is different—or so one thinks—because the hatred is caused by the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. But that is simply not true. Leaving aside the telling fact that as early as the 64.  Jansen, Van jodenhaat naar zelfmoordterrorisme, pp. 426–543. 65.  In a response to the Dutch version of this article, a Dutch journalist argued that an official of the Palestinian Authorities had assured him that my assertions were totally untrue (Oscar Garschagen in NRC Handelsblad, June 24, 2006). When the historian and theologian Hans Jansen, the author of the book on Islamic antisemitism (see note 53), adduced material which conclusively refuted these assertions on the basis of inspection of the most recent versions of Palestinian schoolbooks, this newspaper refused to publish his findings! 66.  On the lamentable level of his Orientalism (1978), see Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006).



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nineteenth century a series of accusations of Jewish ritual murder resulted in massacres in various Islamic countries, I restrict myself to the following important issue. Haj Amin al-Husseini Long before the occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967—yes, even long before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, i.e., from the 1920s—the Palestinians had a leader named Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Islamic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who forged close ties with Hitler’s regime from the time of the latter’s rise to power in 1933.67 He spent most of World War II in Berlin in order to support Hitler in his plans to exterminate the Jews.68 When one reads the minutes of the talks between these two men and sees to what degree they agreed that “das Weltjudentum” and democracy should be extirpated once and for all, one cannot suppress a shiver. This Palestinian leader was so enthusiastic about the efficiency of the murder factories in the concentration camps that he decided to build such a camp in Palestine as well in order to make the whole country “judenrein.”69 After the war he regretted that his plans had been thwarted, and in 1948, just before the establishment of the state of Israel, he called upon all Palestinians to kill as many Jews as they could and not to leave any Jewish prisoner of war alive. Because of his relentless hatred of Jews, al-Husseini became immensely popular far beyond the borders of his own country; 67.  J. B. Schlechtman, The Mufti and the Führer (London, 1965); Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem Amin el-Husseini und die Nationalsozialisten (Frankfurt: Lang, 1988); also the completely revised and updated version of this book, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten: Eine politische Biographie Amin el-Husseinis (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007); Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2007). For an extensive bibliography, see Jansen, Van jodenhaat naar zelfmoordterrorisme, p. 105n45. 68.  Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), pp. 40–44. Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, ch. 6. Lewis calls Amin al-Husseini “the principal architect of the wartime alliance between German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Arab nationalism” (pp. 146–47). He also writes: “The close and at times active relationship that developed between Nazi Germany and sections of the Arab leadership, in the years from 1933 to 1945, was due not to a German attempt to win over the Arabs, but rather to a series of Arab approaches to the Germans” (p. 140). 69.  In his efforts to help Hitler, al-Husseini had even recruited a special division of the Waffen SS consisting of 20,000 Bosnian Muslims (called the “Handschar”), who played a part in the destruction of Yugoslav Jewry. See Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, p. 154, and Gensicke, Mufti, pp. 127–34.

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in fact, he became famous and influential across the whole Islamic Arab world.70 This islamofascist and nazistic war criminal was always been praised by Yassir Arafat as “the great hero of the Palestinian people” and is still regarded by the leaders of Hamas as a shining example for all Palestinians. The author of the Hamas charter, Ahmed Yassin, who saw himself as the most important successor of al-Husseini, makes clear in that charter that the struggle against the state of Israel is only the first stage of a worldwide war of extermination against all Jews.71 So, in Palestinian resistance against Israel, there has always been a strong islamofascist undercurrent. No wonder that Hamas, after its rise to power in early 2006, immediately forged close ties with Iran (and with the Iranian-backed Hizbullah), for they share the same ideal, which is the ideal of Nazi Germany, an “Endlösung.” No wonder, too, that immediately after World War II, thousands of Nazi criminals could easily find a safe haven in the Arab countries of the Middle East.72 The government offices in Cairo bristled with SS men. And elsewhere in the Islamic world they were welcome as well, for many Islamic rulers were very well disposed toward Hitler, and many still are.73 When Hitler promulgated the Neurenberger racial laws in 1935, he received congratulations from all over the Islamic world. The very high sales of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in that part of the world up until the present day—it was translated into Arabic as early as the 1930s—confirm this picture. It is bizarre, to say the least, that it is exactly from this part of the world that one hears most often the accusation that Israelis are the new Nazis.74 70.  Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, pp. 154–60. Lewis speaks of “the vast barrage of propaganda which he addressed to the Arab world and more generally to the world of Islam” (p. 154). After the war, Amin al-Husseini’s pro-Nazi stance did not fade away, nor did he conceal it. On the contrary, “his pro-Nazi past was a source of pride, not shame” (p. 160). 71.  Jansen, Van jodenhaat naar zelfmoordterrorisme, pp. 735–40. One is reminded here of the 2002 statement by Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, to the effect that it would be very helpful if all Jews in the world would emigrate to Israel so that the islamists would not need to chase them in every corner of the world. 72.  See Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2005), p. 42. 73.  Jansen, Van jodenhaat naar zelfmoordterrorisme, pp. 136–39. On p. 146 we find the following incredible quote from an article in the Egyptian (state-controlled) newspaper Al-Akhbar of April 20, 2001(!): “We have to thank Hitler, blessed be his name, because on behalf of the Palestinians he took vengeance on the most horrible criminals on earth. But what he did was not enough—he should have taken vengeance also on the Jews in Israel and the Middle East, and that is regrettable.” 74.  In the Netherlands, this accusation is repeatedly voiced by the highly controversial wife of the former president of the European Bank, Gretta Duisenberg, and by the



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If one takes into account the fact that more and more Muslims are being influenced on a daily basis by the intensive anti-Jewish hate campaigns in the Islamic media, one can hardly escape the conclusion that there have never been as many Jew-haters in history as there are now.75 This is also apparent in the steady increase of antisemitic incidents worldwide. In my country (the Netherlands), it is still limited to harassment and intimidation of Jews; in Poland, the new regime feels free to reinvigorate old and long-standing anti-Jewish sentiments; in Sweden, the government recently removed from the internet a website with a cartoon of Muhammed whereas the same government allowed to remain an Islamist website that incited its readers to kill Jews; in France, the first Jews have already been killed in recent years;76 on quite a number American campuses, intellectuals (or pseudo-intellectuals) conduct smear campaigns against Israel;77 and the state of Israel is regularly threatened with destruction by Iran. All over the globe, Jewish communities live in fear and do not feel safe anymore. Long ago, the philosopher Karl Popper taught us never to be tolerant toward the intolerant, but Europe with its trembling knees has forgotten this lesson and seems to be yielding to terror on the street.78 Again, as in the 1930s, Europe is too naïve to face up to this “clash of civilizations,”79 and again it is blind to the lurking danger of fascism—this time, in the form of islamofascism. The Duty of Churches and Universities What do the churches and universities do in this threatening situation? Apart from some minor churches with a pro-Israel stance, the global World Council of Churches miserably fails in doing its duty by continually concocting one-sided condemnations of Israel. This useless and self-serving institution serves neither Christianity nor Judaism well. As to the universities, in many places, especially in the United Kingdom, former prime minister Dries van Agt, who proudly calls himself “an Aryan”! 75.  See for statistics and a recent survey The Pew Global Attitudes Survey 13: The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other (June 2006). Some experts estimate the total number of radicalized Muslims at 150 million. 76.  See Ye’or, Eurabia, pp. 26–28, 126, 325. 77.  See Manfred Gerstenfeld, ed., Academics against Israel and the Jews (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2007). 78.  See especially Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (New York: Broadway Books, 2006); and Ye’or, Eurabia. 79.  Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

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attempts are being made to boycott Israeli universities, not Palestinian or other Arabic universities, although it is in the latter that the rules of scholarship are often trodden under foot. Whereas Eli Wiesel has taught us time and again that there is only one remedy against antisemitism—that is, information, information, and more information, which can help to correct bizarre distortions of reality—we see that, at least in my country, Jewish studies are increasingly being marginalized. In the present circumstances, that is a totally irresponsible policy. Marginalization of Judaic studies is the opposite of what is required, since the world of scholarship has an particularly urgent responsibility at present. If neither the churches nor the academic world—let alone the world of politics—counterbalance the worldwide growth of antisemitism, who is going to do this? I wish to state here emphatically that universities that refuse to recognize their responsibility in the fight against growing antisemitism by means of teaching and research are imperilling their moral right of existence. That also implies that, in the case of appointments of islamologists, extra attention should be paid to the “signature” of the candidates. It is of great importance that islamologists who are appointed do not adhere to the extreme political correctness that characterizes so many of them today, at least in my country. They should be critical scholars who have the courage to make their students aware of the dark aspects of present day Islam. Many readers, especially those on the politically correct left, will accuse me of islamophobia. That does not surprise me, since I know that in those circles it is common to make use of this convenient term in order to back out of the scholarly duty of weighing the validity of the arguments. It is a form of intellectual laziness that enables them to declare the debate closed once and for all. I do not suffer from islamophobia, but I do have the strong conviction that we should never close our eyes to matters that we do not like to see or that do not fit into a worldview that is distorted by an oversimplified and often blinkered leftist orthodoxy.80

80.  The final part of this article (the section on Islamic Jew-hatred) is the part the author was forced by the board of his university to delete from the valedictory lecture he gave as retiring Professor of Early Christian and Early Jewish studies at Utrecht University (The Netherlands). This act of academic censorship evoked a wide international protest.

A. R. L. Gurland, the Frankfurt School, and the Critical Theory of Antisemitism Kevin S. Amidon and Mark P. Worrell I. The Institute of Social Research and the Empirical Study of Antisemitism in the American Working Class “Just for the record, however: I don’t hate Communists.” So wrote Arcadius Rudolph Lang Gurland to his longtime friend, colleague, and collaborator Otto Kirchheimer in 1958. Behind this straightforward statement lay over thirty years of Gurland’s experience as a passionate scholar, spokesperson, and advocate of that most dialectical of the many forms of socialist politics, revolutionary social democracy. Throughout his peripatetic life of near-constant exile in Russia, Germany, France, and the United States as student, journalist, theoretician, researcher, writer, teacher, and translator in the service of political organizations, newspapers, research institutions, universities, governments, publishers, and his own political and scholarly priorities, Gurland never wavered in his commitment to a vision of political reality that could incorporate both effective democracy and the revolutionary overcoming of the exploitative and alienating institutions and practices of modern capitalism. He sought to support this theoretical commitment with extensive and sophisticated scholarly investigation of particularly the economic and political, but also the social and cultural aspects of the nations in which he lived. Over the course of his career, .  Gurland to Kirchheimer, January 24, 1958, Otto Kirchheimer Papers, Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, State Univ. of New York at Albany Library, GER-006, ser. 2, box 1, folder 68. Hereafter cited as Kirchheimer Papers. The first page of this letter appears to be missing from the collection; the date is from a handwritten annotation by Gurland on page 4. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by Kevin Amidon. .  After he failed to receive a number of academic positions in Germany, Gurland explained to Kirchheimer (in his irony-saturated mixture of German and English) that “my Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 129–47. www.telospress.com

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he wrote tirelessly and extensively, producing not only scholarly books, articles, introductions, and translations, but also journalistic articles and revealing correspondence. Still, one particular aspect of Gurland’s scholarly activity—an aspect that has heretofore received only the most limited attention—forms the intellectual fulcrum of his vast body of work. This was the problem of antisemitism, particularly the way in which it was manifested among the working class and refracted in class consciousness. Beginning in early 1939, the Institute of Social Research, under the direction of Max Horkheimer and in exile in New York City, began to consider research into antisemitism, both as part of its critique of Nazi ideology and politics and as a means of earning a living. Horkheimer, for example, wrote to Edward S. Greenbaum about financial support from the American Jewish Committee (AJC) on June 18, 1940. Nonetheless it was Franz Neumann who apparently played the most significant part in securing AJC support for the Institute’s antisemitism work in the summer of 1942. first choice was, is, and remains the newspaper business plus political engagement. . . . There are quite a number of other activities that I accept more or less happily as second choice: office work of all types, technical jobs in printing of any sort, translation, even research (precisely in this order of preference). . . . It makes no sense to make a teacher out of me.” Gurland to Kirchheimer, April 18, 1958, Kirchheimer Papers. .  Gurland wrote under a number of different versions of his own name and also under numerous pseudonyms. In his early years in Germany, he used the Russian transliteration “Arkadij Gurland.” In exile in France he sometimes used “A. Gurland.” Upon his naturalization as a U.S. citizen in 1946, he settled on Arcadius Rudolph Lang Gurland, usually abbreviated A. R. L. Gurland. Pseudonyms over the years included Rudolf Lang, W. Grundal, and Felix Graham. See Hubertus Buchstein, Dieter Emig, and Rüdiger Zimmermann, “Zur Einführung,” in A. R. L. Gurland, Sozialdemokratische Kampfpositionen 1925–53, ed. Dieter Emig and Hubertus Buchstein (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1991), p. 7. .  See Max Horkheimer to Juliette Favez (April 25, 1939) and Ernst Simmel to Max Horkheimer (May 8, 1939) in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1996), 16:596–97, 602–3. The published result of the preparation of the antisemitism work is the prospectus of the “Research Project on AntiSemitism,” published in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. 9, no. 1 (1941): 124–43. Some of the scholarly inattention to the significance of antisemitism research for the Institute must be attributed to the organization of Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996). Jay’s limited discussion of the many antisemitism projects is divided between three chapters on other aspects of the Institute’s work. .  Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 295, 353–55, 366. Despite his own efforts to gain AJC support, Horkheimer was apparently skeptical of



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Gurland’s efforts also resulted in new financial resources that finally liberated Horkheimer from his anxieties about the Institute’s financial condition, and allowed all of the major Institute members to pursue the work that would put the problem of antisemitism at the center of their inquiry. Gurland initiated contacts with the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) in December 1943, and these efforts resulted in important new funds for what became a central part of the Institute’s antisemitism work: an extensive study of the prevalence of antisemitism among the American workingclass and labor movement. The labor study was an integral component of contemporaneous and subsequent studies of prejudice and authoritarian social psychology produced by figures associated with the Institute. Its methods and conclusions were particularly relevant to the work on the “authoritarian personality” and the various manifestations of antisemitism Neumann’s AJC contacts. Nonetheless, Horkheimer eventually held the title of “Research Director” for the AJC. .  One of the most fascinating aspects of the Institute’s antisemitism research, the unrealized 1943–47 project to produce a film (entitled Below the Surface) representing prejudicial and violent acts as a way to measure empirically an audience’s level of antisemitic prejudice, indicates that Adorno was far more involved and interested in working directly with the institutions of the “culture industry” than most commentators have recognized. See David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 125–45. .  Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, pp. 367, 694n247 (based on materials in the Horkheimer-Pollock correspondence). On the Jewish Labor Committee, see Jack Jacobs, “Ein Freund in Not: Das jüdische Arbeiterkommitee in New York und die Flüchtlinge aus den deutschsprachigen Ländern, 1933–1945” (Bonn: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 1993), esp. pp. 4–6. The AJC and the JLC were completely separate organizations, despite their separate support for the Institute’s various antisemitism projects. See Mark P. Worrell, Dialectic of Solidarity: Labor, Antisemitism, and the Frankfurt School, Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Kansas (2003), appendix K, for details on AJC funding for various research assistants and associates. The AJC was a bourgeois organization founded in the United States in 1906 to combat antisemitic violence around the world. The relations between the AJC and the Institute could easily be described as tense. See Mark P. Worrell, “Joseph Freeman and the Frankfurt School,” Rethinking Marxism (forthcoming). The JLC was founded in 1934 specifically by exiled German and Austrian social democrats to protect their interests and those of their compatriots still in Europe. The two organizations did work together in 1942 and 1943 as part of the Joint Emergency Committee on European Jewish Affairs. The minutes of the Joint Emergency Committee are available online at AJC archive website, http://www.ajcarchives.org/main.php?GroupingId=3360. .  Referred to hereafter as “labor study.” On the historical details of the transactions surrounding the study see: Jay, Dialectical Imagination, pp. 224–26; Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, pp. 367–69; and Worrell, Dialectic of Solidarity.

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pursued by Theodor Adorno in the United States between 1945 and 1950, as well as, most importantly, the first volume of the Institute’s Studies in Prejudice series, Paul Massing’s Rehearsal for Destruction. Nonetheless, the labor study was never published, due both to its size (some 1450 manuscript pages) and to numerous institutional, political, and personal conflicts. Despite its obscurity, the study represents, arguably, the most innovative and intellectually fertile product of the Institute’s American exile, providing the site where the better known arguments and methods of Dialectic of Enlightenment and The Authoritarian Personality were first contentiously hammered out.10 Gurland authored exactly half of the massive study, and Paul Massing, Leo Lowenthal, and Frederick Pollock contributed the remainder.11 Adorno then collaborated extensively—and finally unsuccessfully—between 1947 and 1949 on cutting and reorganizing the study for publication with Paul Lazarsfeld (who delegated some of the work to Seymour Fiddle, his young colleague at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University).12 .  Paul Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (New York: Harper, 1949). See Jay, Dialectical Imagination, p. 235. The recently published Adorno-Horkheimer correspondence, Theodor W. Adorno—Max Horkheimer: Briefwechsel, 4 vols., ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003–6), contains extensive and fascinating evidence of Adorno’s energetic engagement with the labor antisemitism work and its sister studies. Cited hereafter as Adorno-Horkheimer Briefwechsel. 10.  There is some variance in the titles used by various scholars to refer to this report, and this variance apparently exists among the various archival versions available. The Horkheimer-Pollock Archive, Frankfurt am Main, contains a version titled Anti-Semitism among Labor (Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, pp. 367–69, 694, 718). Jay (Dialectical Imagination, p. 355), likely erroneously, calls this version of the study Anti-Semitism within American Labor. Also available is a version entitled Anti-Semitism among American Labor, 1944–45 in the Jewish Labor Committee Collection, Tamiment Library, Robert F. Wagner Archives, New York Univ. The Paul F. Lazarsfeld Archive of the Univ. of Vienna contains a 102-page version listed as “Jewish Labor Study” (Bureau of Applied Social Research B-0320). 11.  The portion of the study written by Leo Lowenthal (referred to as Anti-Semitism Among American Labor) was eventually revised, translated, and published as “Vorurteilsbilder. Anti-Semitismus unter amerikanischen Arbeitern,” in Lowenthal, Falsche Propheten: Studien zum Autoritarismus [Schriften 3], ed. Helmut Dubiel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), pp. 175ff. 12.  See Adorno, “Memorandum to Max Horkheimer, Frederick Pollock, Leo Lowenthal . . . re: Anti-Semitism among American Labor as edited by the Bureau of Applied Social Research,” Adorno-Horkheimer Briefwechsel, 3:540–48. See also Adorno-Horkheimer Briefwechsel, 3:193, 226, 229, 263, 277, 433; Mark P. Worrell, “The Other Frankfurt School,” Fast Capitalism 2.1 (2006), available online at http://www.fastcapitalism.com.



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The short selection from Gurland’s portion of the labor study that follows this article demonstrates the depth of his theoretical engagement with the problem of antisemitism and with the stakes and methods of empirical social research. It shows that antisemitic prejudice formed a grave threat to both democratic and revolutionary goals, especially when found within the working class, because antisemitic claims shifted the source of the exploitation of the working class from capital onto Jews and therefore had the potential not only to defuse revolutionary intent derived from economic exploitation but also to activate reactionary, ethnic hatred that was emptied of real economic or political content. In short, the Institute saw antisemitism as the advance guard or “spearhead” of fascism. The extent to which labor was debilitated by antisemitism was the extent to which it was susceptible to authoritarian movements or the authoritarian reorganization of the state. The problems of labor antisemitism were therefore widely implicated in the dialectic of academic, socialist, and Jewish identity shared by Gurland, Neumann, Kirchheimer, Adorno, Horkheimer, Lowenthal, and Pollock. Gurland’s extensive attempts to analyze them in collaboration with his colleagues thus constituted the fulcrum not only in Gurland’s own career, but also in the history of the Frankfurt School’s dialectical exploration of economic, political, and cultural modernity. Both Dialectic of Enlightenment and The Authoritarian Personality represent the problems of antisemitism and “the Jew” as identical with the antinomies of modernity itself. The prevalence of antisemitism in the working class—especially in the United States, where manifold diversities were readily apparent—struck at the heart of the theoretical, practical, and personal commitments valued by these men, and they therefore perceived that their theoretical work was incomplete if it could not explain the problem. Resonances of Gurland’s analysis of antisemitism in American labor can therefore be found in all of his later work that sought to critique totalitarian and restorationist tendencies in Germany and reactionary currents in the United States, as well as in much of the later work of all of the major figures associated with the Institute, especially Adorno. II. A. R. L. Gurland, Revolutionary Social Democracy, and Scholarly Inquiry Gurland’s career had five stages, repeatedly punctuated by forced relocations.13 Born in Moscow on September 1, 1904, he left the Soviet Union 13.  One of Gurland’s students from Darmstadt, Dieter Emig, has done the most to bring Gurland’s biography and scholarly work to greater prominence for a German-

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with his parents, arriving in Berlin in 1920. After contact with the revolutionary social democrat Paul Levi and doctoral studies with the Leipzig sociologist Hans Freyer, he worked as a social democratic journalist and theoretician in Leipzig, Chemnitz, and Berlin between 1923 and 1933. After narrowly escaping arrest by the Nazis, he supported himself from 1933 to early 1940 as a journalist in Paris while studying political economy. For a second time, however, he fled a capital city barely ahead of the Nazis, spending the period between 1940 and 1950 in New York and Washington, DC, after Frederick Pollock and Joseph Maier assisted him in gaining a research position at the Institute in New York. He also worked for a number of offices in the U.S. government during and immediately following the war.14 The AJC continued to fund his independent research until 1950. Between 1950 and 1962, he struggled to reestablish himself as a scholar and a journalist with positions in Berlin and New York. In 1962 he finally achieved, despite his own personal ambivalence about his skills speaking audience. The best biographical article on Gurland, which includes a useful and largely complete bibliography of Gurland’s independently published scholarly writings, is Buchstein, Emig, and Zimmermann, “Zur Einführung.” The essay is based on an earlier biographical article that focuses on the Weimar period: Dieter Emig and Rüdiger Zimmermann, “Arkadij Gurland (1904–1979),” in Vor dem Vergessesen bewahren: Lebenswege Weimarer Sozialdemokraten, ed. Peter Lösche, Michael Scholing, and Franz Walter (Berlin: Colloquium, 1988), pp. 81–98. Emig also edited and published two major works by Gurland: Arkadij Gurland, Marxismus und Diktatur (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1981), which was Gurland’s Leipzig doctoral dissertation, originally published in 1928; and A. R. L. Gurland, Die CDU/CSU: Ursprünge und Entwicklung bis 1953 (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1980), previously unpublished. 14.  The most thorough treatment of the activity of the Institute-affiliated scholars in the Office of Strategic Services and the Department of State between 1942 and 1945 is Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989), esp. chap. 2, “The Frankfurt School Goes to War.” In recommending further Institute scholars for OSS posts, Franz Neumann apparently wrote that Gurland’s “knowledge of the ramifications between business and politics exceeds my own,” doubtless from their collaboration on analysis of the Nazi economy. Katz, Foreign Intelligence, p. 10. Katz also indicates that Gurland provided “occasional services” to the OSS, and held a consulting position with the Board of Economic Warfare (ibid., p. 33). Between 1942 and 1957, Gurland also produced reports for the U.S. Senate, including a report (with Neumann and Kirchheimer) on “The Fate of Small Business in Germany” (1943); for the Office of European Economic Research, including a monograph on “Germany’s Potash Economy” (1942); and work for the Department of Labor/Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Office of the Military Government of the United States (OMGUS) in Germany, the Library of Congress, and the RAND Corporation. Buchstein, Emig, and Zimmermann, “Zur Einführung,” pp. 430–33.



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and talents as a teacher, a secure academic position in Germany. He died in Darmstadt on March 27, 1979. In the past twenty years, Gurland’s postwar work in Germany as a political scientist with a careful, critical, and empirical approach to the constitutional and political party system of the Federal Republic has achieved increasing recognition. From 1950 to 1954, he was research director of the independent Institute for Political Science in West Berlin;15 in 1957 he was nearly appointed to a professorship of political science in Marburg;16 from 1962 until his retirement in 1972 he served as a professor of political science at the Technical University in Darmstadt. In the postwar years, he produced a range of studies of wide scope and empirical depth that addressed what he perceived to be “restorationist” tendencies in postwar German politics. Already in 1949, when the Federal Republic of Germany was just months old, he was unsparing with his criticism in a Commentary article: To be specific: today the administration of Germany is more firmly than ever in the hands of a conservative and unimaginative bureaucracy; the 15.  Gurland clearly did not enjoy the administrative and persuasive work necessary to support and finance research. He explains to Kirchheimer in a letter of April 18, 1958, that it had been a mistake for him to take on this position in Berlin—especially because he had been required to refrain completely from his accustomed political activity in support of revolutionary social democracy, which had caused him to suffer depression and illness (Kirchheimer Papers). Interestingly, he makes no such complaints with respect to the work with the Institute in New York. 16.  This potential appointment, apparently mediated by the Marburg sociologist Wolfgang Abendroth, meant renewed contact between Gurland, Adorno, and Horkheimer. Horkheimer provided a letter of recommendation/evaluation (Gutachten) to Marburg for the appointment (preserved in the Adorno archive). On November 18, 1957, Adorno gave Horkheimer this estimation of Gurland’s motivations: “The poor chap of course passionately would like to come, even though he acts as if he wouldn’t out of psychological obstinacy.” Gurland himself reported to Kirchheimer on April 1, 1958, (Kirchheimer Papers) that Abendroth had written him and indicated that Horkheimer had been unwilling to help him for “political reasons,” but that Adorno had made substantial efforts to do so, including recommending him for a professorship in Heidelberg. This impression of Horkheimer’s attitude likely refers to Horkheimer’s self-described recommendation strategy: “In order to strengthen the effect, I even wrote something negative into it—so that it doesn’t appear only to be a service to a friend.” See Adorno-Horkheimer Briefwechsel, 4:470, 475, 481. Abendroth, a later supporter of the German SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), developed a reputation for supporting scholars deemed too radical by Horkheimer. He also intervened in the early 1960s to revive Jürgen Habermas’s flagging career after Horkheimer refused to accept Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere as a Habilitation thesis in Frankfurt. See Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, p. 563.

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political power of the churches is greater than under the Empire, the [Weimar] Republic, or the Nazi dictatorship; the economy is in the hands of more or less the same people who ran it for Hitler.17

Gurland blamed opportunistic American military rule in the occupation years for failing to establish a clear framework for the development of democracy in Germany. He believed that German-based democratic groups and parties would have been up to the job of doing so after the war, but they had been thwarted because the occupation government misunderstood the failure of the Weimar Republic as a failure of the parliamentary political parties, rather than as the “encroachment of appointed bureaucracies upon the powers of elected parliaments.”18 Gurland’s theoretical understanding of fascism and its aftermath in Germany clearly bore the marks of his unshakable faith in the power of independent, constitutionally secure democratic institutions.19 This faith, however, remained to the end of his career mapped in Marxist terms that privileged economic categories and class analyses.20 III. Gurland and the Institute of Social Research, 1940–1945 Employed by the Institute between 1940 and 1945, Gurland’s work focused on two central issues: the empirical exploration of worker antisemitism and the Marxist critique of monopoly capitalism in the economic structure of the Nazi state. Commentators have noted both streams, but they have emphasized the analysis of Nazi political economy at the expense of his contributions to the labor study. Martin Jay, for example, grants Gurland his due as a collaborator with Neumann and Kirchheimer on the economic and political analysis of the monopoly-character of the Nazi state, but mentions him only in passing when referring to the “ambitious” and

17.  Gurland, “Why Democracy is Losing in Germany,” in Sozialdemokratische Kampfpositionen, pp. 299–314; here p. 299. 18.  Ibid., p. 300. 19.  Gurland’s most significant published work from his time as research director of the Institute for Political Science in West Berlin (1950–54) demonstrates how his concerns about totalitarian—including Stalinist—institutions continued vigorously in the Cold War era: it is his 28-page introduction to M. G. Lange’s Totalitäre Erziehung: Das Erziehungssystem der Sowjetzone Deutschlands (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Frankfurter Hefte, 1954). 20.  Buchstein, Emig, and Zimmermann, “Zur Einführung,” p. 39.



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“massive” labor antisemitism study.21 Hubertus Buchstein, Dieter Emig, and Rüdiger Zimmermann note that the AJC remained Gurland’s primary means of support in the years between 1945 and 1950, but they pass over the labor study in one short clause and refer to antisemitism as his “second” area of research.22 Stefan Müller-Doohm’s recent biography of Adorno perhaps best illustrates how scholars have unwittingly ignored the significance of the labor study: he gives Adorno’s extensive engagement with the study only one short clause, which unjustifiably characterizes the Institute’s other antisemitism studies as “much larger” than the labor study.23 Curiously, Müller-Doohm’s assertion is based on the work of the one scholar, Wolfgang Bonss, who is unique among this group of scholars for allowing the labor study its appropriate measure of significance within the Institute’s wide-ranging investigations.24 Despite the fact that he made contact with the Institute through its indefatigable and fiercely loyal manager, Frederick Pollock, Gurland was initially kept at a distance by Horkheimer and Adorno.25 This estrangement was based largely on two factors: intellectual differences over method and interpretation in the analysis of the fascist economy; and the difficult financial situation of the Institute.26 Gurland had indeed arrived in New 21.  Jay, Dialectical Imagination, pp. 150–52, 160–67, 225. 22.  Buchstein, Emig, and Zimmermann, “Zur Einführung,” p. 27. 23.  Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2005), p. 288. Jenemann, Adorno in America, provides a remarkably lucid and perspicacious analysis of Adorno’s work in exile, including his extensive collaboration with Lazarsfeld, that nonetheless misses the significance of the labor antisemitism work. 24.  Wolfgang Bonss, Die Einübung des Tatsachenblicks: zur Struktur und Veränderung empirischer Sozialforschung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), esp. p. 301n851: “It must be noted that the two projects were in no way independent. There was no influence of the AJC staff on the JLC study, but nonetheless materials from the labor study were worked into the report for the AJC, and were used later in the study of authoritarian personality.” 25.  Gurland did not retain a charitable impression of Pollock’s intellectual prowess. He wrote to Kirchheimer in an undated letter (first page missing) after the Institute’s return to Frankfurt, “our dear friend Frederick, who continues to be carried as a Privatdozent, teaches his student listeners about the ‘new research method’ (‘group interviews’) pursued by him and his lord and master with the exactly the same touching ignorance that he displayed way back when to the New York Jewish executives.” 26.  For the most recent critical discussions of these frictions, see Worrell, “The Other Frankfurt School,” and James Schmidt, “The Eclipse of Reason and the End of the Frankfurt School in America,” New German Critique 100 (Winter 2007): 49–76. There is little evidence that personal animosities came to dominate relations between the Institute groups

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York (apparently after the German invasion of France) at the low point in the Institute’s financial fortunes. Nonetheless he quickly integrated himself into the Institute’s work.27 Gurland wrote at least twice to Horkheimer in June 1940, discussing at length manuscripts that Horkheimer had given him to read, and expressing pleasure at the stipend that the Institute was paying him.28 Yet Horkheimer was hardly enthusiastic about Gurland’s work. He wrote to Theodor and Gretel Adorno in early August 1940: “I fear that Gurland works by himself (I don’t know him at all) under F.’s [Frederick Pollock’s] direction too economistically and journalistically [feuilletonistisch].”29 Horkheimer and Gurland were hardly friends, but Horkheimer’s claim not to know Gurland must have been an ironic (and characteristic) overstatement. Not only had they corresponded and apparently spoken in person, but the editors of Horkheimer’s published papers conclude that Horkheimer must have first heard the details, if not the original news, of Walter Benjamin’s suicide in Port Bou from Gurland. Gurland’s cousin by marriage, Henny Gurland, was acquainted with Benjamin, had been accompanying him on the risky flight through France and into Spain, and wrote to Gurland on October 11, 1940, with a narrative of Benjamin’s final hours.30 As the Institute’s financial crisis of 1940–41 worsened, Gurland drifted to the center of personal and institutional conflict. He appears directly in the inner circle’s expressed desire to pursue “dialectics” work without the (apart from the displeasure of Erich Fromm, Karl August Wittfogel, and Henry Pachter with their treatment, and the famous exchange in 1942 in which Pollock told Neumann that the Institute would no longer support him, and Neumann appealed to Horkheimer; see Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, pp. 293–94; Jay, Dialectical Imagination, pp. 115, 169, 331n115). Nonetheless the frictions were real: as early as August 6, 1939, Kirchheimer wrote Pollock about concerns pertaining to “the judgment of my activities,” the “extraordinarily small” possibilities of finding an academic position, and the continuation of his salary (Kirchheimer papers). Jay does emphasize that Horkheimer, despite his occasional displeasure with Neumann, Gurland, and Kirchheimer, did show some sympathy in an unpublished manuscript on “The Authoritarian State” (1942) for a “Luxemburgist” approach to Critical Theory that retained focus on revolutionary transformation (Dialectical Imagination, pp. 158; 329n60). It is perhaps not an insignificant detail that the “Luxemburgist” Paul Frölich was on the Institute’s research staff in 1943. Ultimately, one has to marvel at the heterodox spirit of the wartime Institute. 27.  Buchstein, Emig, and Zimmermann, “Zur Einführung,” p. 24. 28.  Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, 16:713–16, 727–30. 29.  Adorno-Horkheimer Briefwechsel, 2:81. 30.  Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, 16:775–79.



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burden of managing the Institute’s affairs: in Adorno’s letter to Horkheimer of July 2, 1941, Gurland was portrayed as a problem: After our oaths of fealty, remaining here [in New York] would only be worthy of consideration if the flow of gold could guarantee both your trip and your accustomed standard in New York as well as considerably better material conditions for both of us. The idea that you would stay in Hollywood and I in New York, simply so that Gurland and Kirchheimer can be kept away from the Institute, is a nightmare [cauchemar].31

Gurland’s activity also served to generate concerns for Horkheimer that he expressed in a similarly emotionally laden and ironic tone to Lowenthal on August 30, 1941: I am still unsettled about the role that you have granted Mr. G[urland] in this entire volume [of the Institute’s journal]. . . . Through intensified cooperation of this sort you really do provoke future demands, and make the conclusion of affairs more difficult. I myself am convinced to invest everything in creating our future as positively as it is even possible to imagine. There are little signs, though, that bring me to doubt whether this highest responsibility for our communal fate is currently present in you in the way it is in your most aware moments.32

Furthermore, Gurland’s primary contribution to the Institute’s journal, the article “Technological Trends and Economic Structure under National Socialism,” which appeared in the 1941 volume of Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, generated a controversy within the Institute. Gurland, along with Neumann and Kirchheimer, developed an analysis of the Nazi economy that emphasized the continuities between monopoly capitalism and fascism.33 Frederick Pollock, on the other hand, cultivated the concept of “State Capitalism,” which focused on the political dominance of the Nazi economy. Pollock’s article with that title directly preceded Gurland’s 31.  Adorno-Horkheimer Briefwechsel, 2:163. 32.  Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, 17:155. A further lengthy letter to Lowenthal on November 29, 1941 expresses Horkheimer’s concern that the Institute’s “rapid decline” will not change if “we continue operations with Neumann, Grossmann, Kirchheimer, Gurland . . .” Ibid., 17:223–30; here 225. 33.  The best-known product of this collaboration became Franz Neumann’s masterpiece Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 1944). Neumann extensively acknowledges Gurland’s contributions to the economic portions of the book.

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in the 1941 volume.34 Despite their initial support for Pollock’s conceptualization, Horkheimer and Adorno had by 1944 incorporated much of Neumann, Gurland, and Kirchheimer’s monopoly formulation into their analyses—most remarkably because they found that it helped them to better explain the problem of antisemitism.35 Nonetheless, once the Institute’s work on antisemitism began to take shape, Horkheimer and Adorno revised their opinions of Gurland and recognized his contributions as an innovative direction in the Institute’s program. By October 1942, Horkheimer was delegating work to Kirchheimer and Gurland, regretting that “my conversations with him [Gurland] have been rather fragmentary.”36 Gurland’s contributions promised a new approach to dealing with perhaps the most significant threat to democracy. On July 17, 1943, Horkheimer expressed his new appreciation to Herbert Marcuse in his stilted English: “I also would like that my theoretical ideas on Antisemitism have developed so far that I can be of real help to Kirchheimer, Massing, and Gurland. The problem of Antisemitism is much more complicated than I thought in the beginning.”37 After the labor study had taken clear shape, Horkheimer was thus in a position to write to Lowenthal on July 26, 1944, with substantial praise for the study and reflections on its successful management: Speaking of the Labor Project, we must naturally expect some resistance from those forces which the project tends to expose. . . . It would be easy to criticize a “bunch of foreign-born intellectuals sticking their noses into the private affairs of American workers.” . . . I do not think that these eventualities should hamper our efforts to deliver an excellent study. I had thought of them when we started the project, and I still thought we should go ahead, because the study itself is good pioneering, and once it is published in the proper form it will certainly be considered a real achievement of the Institute.38 34.  For a discussion of the details of this interpretive controversy, see Jay, Dialectical Imagination, pp. 152–69; Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, pp. 277–91. 35.  See esp. Adorno to Horkheimer, November 3, 1944, and Horkheimer to Adorno, November 13, 1944, in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, 17:601–6. 36.  Horkheimer to Lowenthal, in ibid., 17:342. 37.  Horkheimer to Marcuse, in ibid., 17:463. 38.  Ibid., 17:576–77. Lowenthal recalls being pleased when he had the opportunity to return from Washington, DC, to the Institute in 1944 to work on the labor study. Martin Jay, ed., An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Lowenthal (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), p. 82.



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Horkheimer had clearly been reconciled to the study, its methods, and its authors—although perhaps not their political affiliations. There has been much discussion of how and why Horkheimer and Adorno chose to distance themselves from overtly Marxist categories and vocabulary in the course of the exile period. It would therefore seem reasonable to conclude that Gurland’s commitments to revolutionary social democracy might have raised Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s hackles. Apparently, however, they did not, at least not intellectually.39 Adorno voiced concerns to Horkheimer about Gurland’s work but still held him in enough esteem to consider him qualified to edit other work by Institute members, and he never mentioned Gurland’s political ideas and activities.40 Gurland’s relations with other exiled German socialists and social democrats outside the Institute caused him far more difficulty. Gurland always held democratic processes in the highest esteem, and he was vocally skeptical of anything that he perceived as authoritarian. His approach to democratic legitimacy through individual expression was more overtly political and less dialectically theoretical than Horkheimer’s or Adorno’s. Yet despite the inevitable clashes in the practices of all three men, their intellectual approaches to institutional activity and discourse clearly ran in parallel during the 1940s. These parallel concerns show up most clearly in the encounters that all three men had with the interest groups that sought to defend and perpetuate German socialist and social democratic thought and action in exile in the United States during the 1940s. All three distanced themselves from these groups—and Gurland most demonstratively. The groups included the underground action subgroup of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), known in exile as “Neu Beginnen” (“Begin Anew”) and managed largely by Karl Frank under the pseudonym “Paul Hagen”; the German Labor Delegation, the quasi-official branch of the SPD in American exile, led by Friedrich Stampfer and others; the less politically oriented “Neu Beginnen” offshoot, the American Friends of German Freedom (AFGF), which was founded in 1935 under the chairmanship of Reinhold Niebuhr, 39.  See Worrell, “The Other Frankfurt School,” for an examination of Horkheimer’s fear of being implicated in the real political intrigues among the fringe members of the Institute. 40.  In typically cryptic and ambiguous fashion, Adorno concluded his letter of December 12, 1947, to Horkheimer with the phrase “Der Gurland ist armselig!” which can mean both “Gurland is pathetic” and “The Gurland [work] is pathetic.” Adorno-Horkheimer Briefwechsel, 3:191.

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and in which Karl Frank was also highly active; and the Council for a Democratic Germany (CDG), which emerged from the AFGF in 1944 as an ostensibly apolitical group under the leadership of one-time Institute advisory board member Paul Tillich.41 Horkheimer, despite his established working relationship with Tillich, avoided any association with the AFGF and the CDG. Only Pollock attended AFGF meetings for a few months.42 Gurland had been active in the “German-Language Group” of the AFGF in the early 1940s, but he broke conclusively with the group on February 10, 1944, in a typically dense and thorough three-page letter to Paul Hertz, a leader in the AFGF and a former left-SPD German politician whom Gurland had known for twenty-two years and who had become close to Karl Frank and “Neu Beginnen.” Gurland was incensed that Hertz had refused to let Gurland and others speak at a meeting. Gurland felt this to be—and could have chosen no stronger words—“undemocratic, unsocialistic, and catastrophic in its political consequences.” Moreover, Hertz had publicly excluded some fifty people from AFGF meetings on political grounds, including the outspoken but anti-Stalinist communist Ruth Fischer (born Elfriede Eisler, sister of Hanns and Gerhart, both of whom would attract the attention of HUAC), but without openly mentioning her name or the reasons for her exclusion. Gurland thus accused Hertz of behavior that was “the natural reserve of Stalinist defamation campaigns.”43 This episode ironically underscores the consistency of Gurland’s democratic approach to political commitments, activity, and expression, for he found himself 41.  German and American scholars have provided immense and fascinating documentary and interpretive work on these many groups, but there is unfortunately no monographic treatment. The scope and complexity of the literature is therefore daunting. A superb recent summary treatment with excellent references is Marjorie Lamberti, “German Antifascist Refugees in America and the Public Debate on ‘What Should be Done After Hitler,’ 1941–1945,” Central European History 40 (2007): 279–305. Particularly thorough are Bernd Stöver, “Einleitung,” in Berichte über die Lage in Deutschland: Die Lagemeldungen der Gruppe Neu Beginnen aus dem Dritten Reich 1933–1936, ed. Bernd Söver (Bonn: Dietz, 1996), pp. xix–lxvi; Hans J. Reichardt, “Neu Beginnen: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung gegen den Nationalsozialismus,” Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 12 (1963): 150–88; Claus-Dieter Krohn, “Der Council for a Democratic Germany,” in Was soll aus Deutschland werden? Der Council for a Democratic Germany in New York 1944–1945: Aufsätze und Dokumente, ed. Ursula Langkau-Alex and Thomas M. Ruprecht (Frankfurt: Campus, 1995), pp. 17–48. 42.  See Krohn, “Der Council for a Democratic Germany,” pp. 28, 31. 43.  Gurland to Paul Hertz, February 10, 1944, The German And Jewish Intellectual Émigré Collection, Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, State Univ. of New York at Albany Library.



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here defending a communist with whom he differed substantially on theoretical and political grounds.44 IV. The Study of Antisemitism Among American Labor 45 Gurland’s work on the labor study was, arguably, not only his own most important work but also one of the twentieth century’s most innovative contributions to Marxist sociology. The bulk of the labor study was written by Gurland (who was basically responsible for the first two volumes) and Massing; between the two of them, they authored exactly seventyfive percent of the final report. Lowenthal made significant and interesting contributions, published decades later in a completely rewritten form, and Pollock was responsible for an analysis of labor organizers and leaders.46 With special interest in the celebrated Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the Institute gathered data from large metropolitan areas, including New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Their targets were both organized (CIO and AFL) as well as unorganized workers. Their trained interviewers collected data on skilled, semi-skilled, and manual laborers, as well as professionals and office workers, i.e., non-factory employees. It 44.  The Ruth Fischer Papers in the Houghton Library, Harvard Univ., contain a number of letters from early 1944 that attest to the subtleties of the theoretical and practical relationships between revolutionary social democracy and communism among German exiles. On January 24, 1944, Fischer wrote to Gurland, sending him a manuscript by her late husband Arkady Maslow and suggesting that he avoid association with Frank/Hagen, whom she considered an opportunist who cynically maneuvered between American and Soviet exile groups. (Fischer’s attacks on Frank/Hagen in the pages of “The Network” were nothing short of a denunciation of “Neu Beginnen” as a Stalinist front group. And, indeed, Frank seemed to be willing, at least in principle, to cooperate with Stalinist groups on anti-fascist grounds). On March 25, 1944, Gurland replied to Fischer, delivering a dense, six-page discussion of the valences of Leninist conceptions of the labor movement. Further correspondence in the Fischer collection between Gurland and Carola Weingarten (from February 15 and 17, 1944) clarifies the situation and the grounds for Gurland’s break with the AFGF. Only the January letter is published in Ruth Fischer and Arkadij Maslow, Abtrünnig wider Willen: Aus Briefen und Manuskripten des Exils, ed. Peter Lübbe (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1990), pp. 157–58. On Fischer’s life and thought, see the introduction to this volume as well as Sabine Hering and Kurt Schilde, Kampfname Ruth Fischer: Wandlungen einer deutschen Kommunistin (Frankfurt: dipa, 1995). 45.  All quotations from the labor study in this section are drawn from the manuscript version Anti-Semitism among American Labor, 1944–45 in the Jewish Labor Committee Collection, Tamiment Library, Robert F. Wagner Archives, New York Univ. 46.  A portion of Pollock’s contribution, “Ideas and Notions on Jews,” is forthcoming in The New York Journal of Sociology, available online at http://www.newyorksociology. org.

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was assumed that the CIO represented the anti-fascist labor vanguard. Was labor capable of a vigorous defense of democracy against an authoritarian onslaught on the domestic front? In these investigative goals, the project harkened back to the Institute’s pre-war study of the Weimar proletariat. Data were gathered by utilizing a new method that they called “screened” interviews whereby 270 volunteer, undercover, participant observers (acquainted with the subjects) were recruited from shop floors to study nearly 600 workers. The observers memorized a battery of questions, engaged in open-ended interviews (and follow-up interviews), and transcribed field notes afterward.47 The Institute then categorized workers into eight basic types: Type A: Exterminatory (10.6 percent): “Actively violent, vicious antisemites who openly favor the extermination of all Jews.” Type B: Intense Hatred (10.2 percent): “Definitely and unwaveringly hostile toward Jews but avoid openly advocating the extermination of Jews or would prefer if Nazis exterminated Jews on a smaller scale or just deported them en masse. Taken together, Type A and B constitute beliefs that are essentially fascist or “Nazi-like.” Workers in the B category were glad that Jews were killed by the Nazi regime but hesitated to recommend that the same methods of dealing with Jews should be adopted in the U.S.” Type C: Inconsistently Hostile (3.7 percent): “Outspokenly hostile to Jews; desire to see Jews regulated or controlled but inconsistent in this attitude; exhibit an inner conflict over how Jews should be controlled and regulated. Prone to rhetorical violence more than actual violence. Potentially an easy convert to fascism within the right social conditions.” Type D: Intolerant (6.2 percent): “Wants to avoid Jews, get away from them, and to see legislative action taken to separate Jews from everyone else. Discrimination against Jews should be organized and enforced.” Types A and B (20.8 percent) represented pro-fascist or Nazi-like sentiments; Types C and D (9.9 percent) represented sharply anti-Jewish 47.  For details on data and methods, see Worrell, Dialectic of Solidarity; Worrell, “The Other Frankfurt School”; and Worrell, “The Frankfurt School’s Innovative Methods” (unpublished manuscript presented at the Rethinking Marxism conference, Amherst, MA, October 27, 2006).



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feelings; Taken together, types A through D constituted 30.7 percent of the sample. The remainder of the sample fell into categories E through H: Type E: Ambivalent (19.1 percent): “These people can’t make up their mind. While they are potentially anti-Semitic, they can go both ways in terms of their tolerance of Jews. This type feels that Jews have too much power or money, and that something ought to be done about it, but they don’t know what should be done. They are undecided.” Type F: Consciously Tolerant/Emotionally Inconsistent (19.3 percent): “These types are opposed to anti-Semitism at the level of humanitarian ideals and distaste for injustice. Type F may be mildly intolerant of Jews but are opposed to it at the level of ‘conscious intentions’ so they try hard to control any prejudice they may have at the level of emotions.” Type G: Anti-discriminatory/Tolerant (10.8 percent): “These people do not harbor any dislike of Jews, are opposed to discrimination but do criticize some character traits commonly ascribed to Jews. Their criticism is based on reasoning if not in facts.” Type H: Absolutely not anti-Semitic (20.1 percent): “No resentment, no criticism whatsoever.” Including the “ambivalent” workers, those that harbored milder forms of anti-Jewish prejudice but who could potentially be swayed toward more extreme positions, the number of affected workers was exactly 50 percent. Typologies are always problematic, but as Gurland wrote: Generally speaking . . . it could be carried through on the basis of different criteria. People can be classified according to their opinions on Jews, or according to their emotional propensity to like or dislike Jews, or according to the action they want taken with respect to Jews. For the purposes of a general survey of our sample, it seemed advisable to combine these three criteria for classifying the workers interviewed. But how should such a combination be designed to fit statistical requirements?

Such were the difficulties. However, the method of “screened” interviewing—troublesome, if not impossible, as it would be by today’s standards

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of informed consent enforced by Institutional Review Boards48—allowed for the interviewees to “state, develop, and illustrate their opinions” rather than restricting them to a pre-selected and “rigid pattern of single ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ or ‘Maybe-some’ answers to which the analyst could assign score values.” The central point of Gurland’s analysis is that, on the one hand, American workers were as confused as Europeans when it came to “the Jew.” As Gurland put it: “Rationalized on the surface, their thinking is as irrational as that of their more romantic European brethren.” On the other hand, the fairy-tale aspects of European antisemitism had no correlate in the American context: “Concepts created by the inventors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had to be brought down to earth for American consumption.” In other words, “In the everyday thinking of the average working man, events must have reasons that can be translated into everyday terms.” An extra moment of transfiguration was involved by which “Jewish power” was transformed from pure myth into mundane business terms and routine exchange dynamics. After all, legends of Jews dwelling in enchanted forests, ritually murdering Christian children, and poisoning wells might fly among the most delusional, backward European peasants but not among aviation workers in Inglewood, California, or auto workers in Flint, Michigan. Overall, the Institute concluded that there were only slight attitudinal differences between organized and unorganized workers (though their interpretation downplayed the differences) and, likewise, between members of the AFL and CIO. A non-dialectical interpretation could have led to a high level of pessimism. Yet a close examination of the data led to “good news.” While the representatives of the American working class sampled in the study apparently possessed little capacity for genuine radical thought and were deeply afflicted by antisemitism, Gurland and Massing also contended that the future was democratic, not fascist. The labor movement, they believed, would continue to reflect growing participation by women and younger workers, groups virtually immune from antisemitism, and by workers possessing increasingly higher levels of education. And the “amazingly liberal” attitudes held by white-collar workers pointed toward crucial differences between American workers and their European counterparts. The future may not have been exactly “bright” in a revolutionary 48.  A recent attempt was made by Worrell and Jamie Dangler, who sought approval to duplicate the Institute’s labor study. The SUNY Cortland IRB rejected it unanimously.



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sense, but it was also not the moral and political abyss that Horkheimer and Adorno seemed to posit in their Dialectic of Enlightenment or in, say, Horkheimer’s bleak “Academy” article from the same period. V. Conclusion: The Exit Sign on the Grand Hotel Abyss The cautious optimism expressed by Gurland and Massing was vindicated, at least in good measure, by the realities of late Fordist America. The labor report was politically out of step with the orientation of Horkheimer’s ever-dwindling “inner circle,” and it was ultimately—even if not fully intentionally—abandoned or suppressed, despite Adorno’s extensive work on it. Undoubtedly, the contributing factors were many and included the gathering storm clouds of McCarthyism, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s increasing interest in returning to Germany, and conflicts with Lazarsfeld over empirical methods. The political attacks against The Authoritarian Personality, veiled as a critique of methods, further stifled any potential optimism on the part of the Institute that the labor study was the right book at the right time. Consequently, one of—if not the—most provocative and innovative research projects in the history of Marxist sociology slipped, rather like Benjamin’s Arcades Project, barely noticed onto the dark and dusty shelves of the archives. A generation later, as the New Left constructed and deconstructed the myth of “The Frankfurt School,” it failed, in its conflicted attempts to surmount and surpass Horkheimer and Adorno, to pay attention to the fringe members of the Institute of Social Research, such as Gurland, who did so much to advance our understanding of working-class dynamics and consciousness.49

49.  The authors wish to thank Nathan Meier for rapid and thorough research assistance, Stacey Weber-Fève for help with Gurland’s and Adorno’s cryptic and often ironic deployments of French, and also the many helpful librarians and archivists from the collections enumerated above.

Social Power and the Fetishization of Jews: American Labor Antisemitism During the Second World War* A. R. L. Gurland 1. International Power in Business Terms A considerable number of workers interviewed have stated their belief that Jews have too much power. The notion of power in this context has a wide range. It covers the most diversified phenomena—from holding minor positions in administration or business to dominating everything and wielding unchecked power over the world. The idea of Jewish power as it fascinates our interviewees is vague and hazy. To establish its real contents, it seems advisable to discuss these statements first that refer to the widest and most comprehensive concept of universal Jewish domination. In statements made by our interviewees, references to Jews as ruling, controlling, and shaping the destinies of the world are less widespread and less conspicuous than they were at any time in any European sphere of Nazi influence. Still, the ideas of some workers we interviewed verge on the mystical concept of Jewish world domination. World Conspiracy—Elders of Zion “The Jew absolutely owns and controls the world,” says a middle-aged Irish fireman in Detroit, a member of an AFL union for fifteen years. A *  “Social Power and the Fetishization of Jews: American Labor Antisemitism during the Second World War” (editor’s title) represents a fragment of A. R. L. Gurland’s contribution to “Antisemitism Among American Labor, 1944–45: Report on a Research Project conducted by the Institute of Social Research (Columbia University) in 1944–1945.” Specifically, this piece, included here by permission of the Tamiment Library, is derived from vol. 2, pt. 2 (“The American Worker Looks at the Jew”), chap. 4 (“Jewish Power”), pp. 232–77. Jewish Labor Committee Collection, Tamiment Library, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 149–71. www.telospress.com

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timekeeper in a San Francisco machine shop comments on the power wielded by “Roosevelt and the international bankers.” A 48-year-old joiner’s helper in a New York shipyard, for two years a member of a CIO union, says: “If you let them go, they’d have the upper hand. They’re running the world now.” An Irish waiter in an industrial town in Pennsylvania, an AFL member of long standing, believes in a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. This conspiracy is so manifest that he can watch it operate. Like a genuine mystery fan he relates how he succeeded in overhearing what was said at a Zionist meeting in a hotel room where he had to wait upon those attending. He records: “The speaker began to tell how the Jews were better than the Gentiles and how they would get control of things.” This man sincerely believes to have heard what he relates. To him, this is factually enough to assume that a universal conspiracy [has been] plotted by the Jews. What underlies his nightmarish fear of the Jewish world plot is not, however, his own conviction and experience. He has listened to Father Coughlin and accepted a good deal of Coughlinite ideas. As long as Coughlin supplies him with mysterious notions about the Jews, he is all right. Yet, Coughlin used to present his anti-Jewish propaganda in political terms. This was too realistic for our debunker of the Jewish conspiracy. He says: “Coughlin? He hated the Jews, but he was too mixed up in Washington politics. That’s why I didn’t like him.” In spite of his violent antisemitism, this working man, a Catholic and a unionist of long standing, loves President Roosevelt: “I think Roosevelt is the best thing that ever happened to this country. He’s a great man.” And he goes on to say: “I’m for some sort of Communism provided there’s not too much politics involved.” Politics is a rational thing and this is why our antisemitic dreamer dislikes and distrusts politics. He does not bother to analyze actual configurations of political power. Nor does he bother to discover the real basis of the prevailing political setup. But somehow he has to combine his love for Roosevelt and his non-political “Communism” with his hatred of Jews. He falls back on Hitler. He wants to justify in general terms what Hitler did. But he is unable to do it in a rational way. The only thing that is left is the appeal to divine justice. He says: I’ve often said the one good thing Hitler did was to drive the Jews out of Germany. A man asked me how could I justify the massacre of innocent children? And I replied that God sometimes has to punish everyone—



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good and bad—in order to save people. Say, in a group of one hundred, ninety-nine might have been good and only one bad. But still the others must suffer. That’s God’s way. Or maybe out of one hundred only one was a good Jew.

If out of a hundred Jews only one is good, it is easy to imagine a real international conspiracy organized by the remaining ninety-nine percent. Then it is easy to conclude that Jews have a grip on everything and actually run the world. Alliance of Jewish and British Bankers But to form such an idea without having divine, supernatural powers intervene, the American worker—who usually does not presume that politics is made in heaven—needs a more realistic interpretation of Jewish influence. Even those among our interviewees who believe in a Jewish world conspiracy do not think of Jewish power in terms of a demoniac Jewish spirit that out of an invisible center of domination rules the world. The irrational appeal of the idea of Jewish world domination is strong, but it is not sufficient to overcome the American worker’s distrust of ideologies. Concepts created by the inventors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had to be brought down to earth for American consumption. Originally intended for the use of confused romantics who thought of power and domination in purely ideological terms, they have adapted themselves to the mental makeup of those who read either detective stories or financial dope sheets, or both. People reason about Jewish control in terms of economic transactions more often than they do in terms of “Elders of Zion.” A shipping clerk in a New York bread factory, 21, Episcopalian, and a member of an AFL union for two years, says: All [Jews] want is to make money at the expense of others. They’ve got connections all over the world [and] they have their people in every government. They want to control everything not only in America but in all other countries too. There is that Jewish control which you might call a Jewish International. We want to win this war so we can destroy both the Nazis and the Jewish International.

This is how the Jews rule the world. But how does Jewish control operate? How is world domination organized under the Jewish International? In

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more specific terms the Jewish plot dissolves into a business proposition: “Look how they try to control everything everywhere. Look how the Jews in Britain have been preventing the Bank of England for years from issuing financial statements.” Although the interest of the Jewish International in suppressing information on the financial status of the Bank of England is not quite transparent, it at least demonstrates, in the mind of the speaker, the technique used by Jews to establish international connections. At the same time Jewish influence suddenly becomes British influence. Yet, this well-informed man also wants to destroy the Nazis. Why? Are Nazis, too, under the influence of Jewish wirepullers? Whatever the case, this interviewee is convinced that the Nazis have not solved “the Jewish problem.” It “concerns all countries and it will have to be solved internationally.” He declares with severity: “I think when this war is over, we’ll have to find means to check the Jewish influence.” Behind the “Reds” or Backing the Nazis The “world conspiracy” functions as a business arrangement of bankers that operates through regular business channels. But contrary to what Nazi mysticism in Europe made them out to be, the Jewish bankers are not powerful enough—in the American version—to silence the good people. The wife of a metal engraver and a long-time AFL member, who is indignant over the conspiracy of “Roosevelt and the American and British Jew-bankers,” still believes that right is upheld within the framework of democratic institutions. “People,” she says, “have a right to express the truth about the Jews. . . . It is the true Americans, those who love this country and want to save it,” who are against the Jews and want to warn others. As long as people believe that they are free to express their thoughts and take care of their interests, they are hard pressed to conceive of a universal, all-pervasive conspiracy, of a mysterious power behind the screen. Even in the fertile imaginations of these outspoken antisemites, the Jews still fail to be the superpower, the mysterious menace that lurks everywhere—although “they control all the money in the world—that is, their international bankers do.” This is the opinion of an Italian longshoreman, 32, an ex-barber who has become a hatch boss on the waterfront and has been a member of AFL unions for several years. This Italian knows about Jewish international power. “Russia,” he explicitly says, “is ruled by Jews.” But he does not speak for all workers. The link between Russia and the Jews is not as obvious to the antisemites today as it was a few years



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ago. The idea has lost its attractiveness, in spite of Coughlinite and Nazi efforts. Another notion crops up: a 62-year-old Cuban electrical repairman, who has gotten some “revolutionary” education in his home country and who hates capitalists and fascists, has a different story to tell. Far from ruling Russia, the Jews, dispossessed by the revolution, had to flee and settle down in Germany: “The situation in Germany was created by big Jewish capitalists who fled Russia when the Russian revolution started. They set up in Germany, helped Hitler come to power so that he would destroy workers’ organizations and if possible the Soviet government.” “The Jews are paying for what they have done,” he concludes. They have sown the wind and now they reap the whirlwind. Elements of anti-Soviet propaganda put out by certain Catholic fascist groups are transformed here into “leftist” slogans. This Cuban revolutionist, though anti-clerical, has absorbed some of the ideas wherein godless Jewish capitalism combines with totalitarian domination. This, however, is a more or less isolated case. Russia is hardly ever referred to by our interviewees, and only a few identify Jews as “Reds.” The “Jewish International” does not seem to have impressed many as a political institution. To most of our interviewees who speak of Jewish power, economic influence is its sole expression, and some of them seem to know a great deal about it. Power Seen as Control of Business A Wisconsin electrician, Catholic, CIO member, attacks Jews as “international bankers” and offers “statistics” to support his charge. “Did you know,” he asks, “that 79 percent of the world’s wealth is controlled by that many people—79 people. And most of them are Jews! Have you ever heard of the House of Rothschild? They own most of the world’s money and they’re Jews.” What does it matter that international connections of the House of Rothschild are a long-forgotten reminiscence of times past? They still serve to provide “statistical information” on present-day events. A cannery engineer in Camden, New Jersey, and CIO member, is no less explicit: “Did you know that out of a population of 180 million there are 18 million Jews in this country? And those 18 million control 85 percent of the property. I know that for a fact.” Well, we did not know that. We imagine that the U.S. Bureau of the Census will be surprised to learn that the U.S. population increased from 132 million in 1940 to 180 million in 1944. It also will be a major surprise to the Jewish Statistical Bureau

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to register an increase of the Jewish population from 4.8 million in 1937 to 18 million in 1944. Too bad for them, our interviewee “knows that for a fact”! He can get away with his “facts” because statistical facts are largely unknown to the average worker—if we are to judge by those we interviewed. When international financial control allegedly operated by Jews can be expressed in terms of facts and figures—Coughlinite publications amply used this device—the idea is apt to stick even in the minds of moderately prejudiced people. A man who is against any kind of discrimination, a highly skilled Pittsburgh steelworker who has been a member of the United Steelworkers CIO for eight years, has his mind all made up about the Jews: “The main objection of Jews is power, such as government, money, on a national and international basis. He loves money and power and nothing else. He loves power and other Jews and no one else.” An Irish-born rigger in a New York shipyard, a member of the CIO’s Marine and Shipbuilding Workers since the war, seconds him: “Jews haven’t any use for us—why in hell should we love them? Jews are the cause of all evil. Why not wipe them out?” And another, a Polish-born Ford worker in Detroit, member of the UAW-CIO for three years: “[Hitler] didn’t do enough. He should have exterminated all of them. . . . They are a menace to society and should be exterminated. Their aggressiveness soon brings [them] to a place of influence and power that is a threat to Gentiles.” The conclusion is clear. “The Jew must, in any country, be prevented from taking leadership in society and the economy of the nation,” says a shipfitter leadman in Los Angeles, a 24-year-old Arizonian, member AFL’s Boilermakers for one year, and a man with two years of college education. Nazi Propaganda Successful The desire to prevent or eliminate Jewish “leadership” can well be expressed in more or less realistic terms. It does not necessarily presuppose fantastic ideas about innate demoniac qualities inherent in “Jewish world control.” In many instances, Jews are felt to be an annoyance, an obstacle, a specific nuisance rather than a general menace in spite of the high-sounding words that some interviewees use when they say that Jewish power jeopardizes the very existence of the American worker. True, some people think that Jews are to blame for the war. “The Jews are all for Roosevelt, and he got us into the war,” says the previously quoted Italian longshoreman. But



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even this Jewish responsibility for the war is presented as “strictly business” when it is pictured as the result of conspicuous banking transactions, as does the shipping clerk whom we quoted at length and as do a few others. Another critic of the “Jewish war” goes so far as to indict the whole international conflagration as an operational device of Jewish charities. This 58-year-old Catholic cabinetmaker (foreman) in a Camden shipyard (incidentally, a Republican ward politician) has this to say about the Jews and the war: The Jews throughout the world, when their own kind were persecuted by Nazis in Germany, through their friends and newspaper tie-up started a gigantic campaign to impress people over here as to the way Jews were persecuted in Germany. The issue wasn’t the Jew at all. They falsified it. They tried to get us into war to help their own kind in Germany.

The war as an affair of Jewish philanthropy looks plausible to some, but it is not enough to convince many. The issue is too clouded to be made palatable to large sections of the working people. They need more meat to put their teeth in. Of course, international complications become instantly clarified when it can be shown who or what brought them about. In the everyday thinking of the average working man, events must have reasons that can be translated into everyday terms. This is not the place to examine the extent of indoctrination achieved by Nazi propaganda. Elsewhere in the present report it will be shown that the explanation offered by the Nazis has served its purpose. It has made many workers believe that the Jews in Germany had concrete, specific, tangible reasons—reasons of material gain—to do what the Nazis say they have done. This then suffices to make reasonable, intelligent Americans accept the idea that Jews had to be “punished”; no mysterious concepts of sinister Jewish power are required. The reason why Jews should be hated can be expressed in everyday business language. Power Attributed to German Jews This is what the German example is being used for. To quote only a few statements: a machinist in New Jersey, 22, Italian descent, member of the UE-CIO: “Before Hitler they owned everything. Then when Hitler came to power, both of them could not run things so the Jews had to go.” A clerk in Camden shipyard, 40, Irish-German descent, non-union: “In latter part

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of 1900s, Jews bought their way into the military circles by having their daughters marry German officers. That’s one reason why Hitler tried to get rid of them.” An Irish waiter in Pennsylvania, 38, member of long standing, Hotel and Restaurant Employees International Alliance, AFL: “After the last war, the Jews bought up all the property, robbing the Germans out of their last cent. The Jews controlled everything in Germany, and Hitler had to drive them away in order to keep the Jews from owning Germany.” A timekeeper in a Los Angeles machine shop, Irish, Bostonian, former teacher and businessman: “Hitler had to do something drastic because of the way the Jews controlled Germany after the last war.” A shipfitter in a Los Angeles shipyard, 24, from Arizona, member, Boilermakers AFL: “Hitler was correct, at least, in defining the Jew as the reason for Germany’s impoverished position after the last war.” Irish shipfitter in Camden, 48, Philadelphian, member, Marine and Shipbuilding Workers, CIO: “I’m not in favor of physical harm, but Hitler used correct measures in separating them from their money. As a group the Jews represented financial strength and ruled Germany by controlling money.” A Michiganborn machinist in a Detroit Ford plant of Scotch descent and a member of the UAW-CIO: “The Nazis did the right thing in imposing heavy taxes on the Jews because they controlled the finances of Germany . . .” The extermination of the Jews is reduced to “heavy taxation” and “separating them from their wealth.” The giant scope of terroristic violence, which is beyond the range of the average American’s imagination, is minimized and given a rational interpretation. Now the Jews’ obnoxious power can be described in realistic and rational terms. Jews are depicted as financial and business magnates who bought up Germany’s wealth so as to exploit the German people. The implication—whether expressly stated or not stated at all—is that the charge be extended to cover American Jews. The international cohesion of the Jews, instead of being a mere symbol of powers beyond rational explanation, is concretized in business transactions that American Jews are said to have conducted with their German-Jewish partners by sending money overseas for the wholesale purchase of the riches of German soil. Thus, on the international level, Jewish power, once people start talking about it in simple, concrete terms, is divested of all its mystery and reduced to purely economic influence. What does this influence amount to? In the final reckoning the Jews’ power was just about the right size to achieve the Jews’ extermination.



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2. Power and Politics How does Jewish power look on the national level? As the sum total of easily explainable commercial and financial transactions, manipulation of “international” power has come within the range of what the average worker can figure out by himself. We shall see that on the national level the opaqueness of “Power” is even to a higher degree replaced by the transparent and ostensible functioning of business operations. Who Pays for What? Sometimes the complex intricacies of power are simplified to the extreme. In a rather clumsy way, Jewish power is explained as taking care of the destitute Jewish refugee. A 50-year-old Italian warehouse man in San Francisco, a churchgoing Catholic and for several years a member of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, CIO, is willing to admit that what Hitler did “maybe wasn’t just right.” But he is incensed about the refugee aspect of the problem: “Why did Roosevelt have to bring them here?” Another San Franciscan, a timekeeper in a machine shop, is more specific. Asked about people who would want to see feelings against the Jews grow in this country, he said: “Oh yes, the American Legion is trying to do something about the refugee doctors who are in this country establishing practices while our own doctors are in the armed forces.” The idea that ten thousand Jewish refugees (with a couple of thousand doctors among them) should deprive Americans of their livelihood may sound fantastic. But at least it has an advantage for the antisemite. Vague notions of Jewish power, too abstract and too remote from everyday life to be accepted, are tied up with individual experiences and easily generalized. An Irish fireman in Detroit whom we quoted before tries to plead the case against the Jewish refugee as representatives of Jewish power in still more mercantile and down-to-earth terms. He says: They control all the hay and expect us to take care of it for them. A good demonstration of this is the Jews that have been driven out of Europe and came to the United States. . . . When Hitler started the war, he dumped all the Jews on us, and although the Jews have all the money in the United States, they dump them into the lap of the common people and the workingman to take care of, getting charity to take care of the castoff. They take the hay, we take the grief.

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To be able to reduce the issue of Jewish power to the question of who is going to pay for what is a boon to antisemitic propaganda. Once it can be said that the taxpayer’s money is being used to support scores of Jewish refugees whom the Jews brought here but refuse to feed, the taxpayer will be willing to put his foot down and demand the elimination of the Jews. The “Jewish” Administration Still, even in this specified form, the issue of Jewish power does not seem to have made headway among our interviewees. There still is some reluctance to accept overall statements that are hard to substantiate by facts or by allegations bearing resemblance to facts. Only a few are able to submit their generalized indictment of Jewish power in an articulate manner, as does this Swedish welder leaderman in a San Francisco shipyard, an AFL member for five years: “The money of the country is in the hands of the Jews, the government is in the hands of the Jews, most federal agencies are administered by Jews, and Jews are taking over the cabinet [Brandeis, Frankfurter, and Ickes were cited as examples]. . . . Jewish financiers have government working at their beck and call.” This man is more articulate than others. But as a rule, all our interviewees become more articulate when they leave the domain of international power and turn to domestic issues. Vague notions certainly also occur in the domestic field. People talk vaguely about “Jewish influence in the present administration” as does the San Francisco timekeeper mentioned before. And there also is a multitude of vague and nebulous statements about political influence exercised by Jews through Franklin D. Roosevelt. A Syrian-born sheet metal worker in Los Angeles, a man who studied to become a priest, says: “Roosevelt is half-Jewish, and if we elect Roosevelt, you’ll be electing the damn Jews.” A Texan Negro working in an arsenal in Philadelphia is more explicit: “We need a Hitler here to chase them out. Roosevelt isn’t running this country. It’s the Jews in Washington. I read in the Reader’s Digest that Roosevelt himself is a Jew.” A Wisconsin-born carpenter of Scotch-English descent and an AFL member for thirty-five years elaborates: “Sure, I know the Administration is pro-Jewish. I know Roosevelt’s name was originally Rosenfeld, I know all about it.” Josef Goebbels’s discovery that the president’s real name is Rosenfeld has an astoundingly fascinating effect on many people. Who really speaks



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Dutch and would know that the discovery is no discovery at all? That a Dutchman would pronounce Rosenfeld exactly like he would Roosevelt or Roosenveldt (the original Dutch spelling), and that a German, listening to a Dutchman say Roosevelt, probably would spell it out Rosenfeld? What does it matter to the antisemite that family names derived from names of cities, villages, and manorial estates are as frequent among Jews as they are among non-Jews who can trace back their ancestry to feudal lords some ten centuries ago? What does it matter that the name Rosenfeld is as Jewish or non-Jewish as is Lilienthal or Schneidemuehl or even Hitler? Yet, it seems important for many of our interviewees to “prove” the president’s Jewish descent. They need this “proof” to substitute for the impossible corroboration of such statements as the following, made by a warehouseman in San Francisco, a member of CIO’s International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union: “Roosevelt has fifty Jewish people of importance either on important boards or in an advisory capacity. They dictate every thing or move he makes.” The statement that Jews “try to control the country” is too general. So the 32-year-old toolmaker of Polish descent working in Detroit who makes it has to add: “All Jews take important places in governmental positions.” And a foreman in a record manufacturing plant in Los Angeles, for six years a member of the United Electrical, Machine, and Radio Workers, CIO, seconds: “I think there are too many [Jews] in the present Administration who are throwing their weight around and exerting undue influence.” Machine Patronage Quite a few people seem to be afraid lest “the Jews will eventually control the politics of this country as they now control business.” To make people at large share this apprehension, it has to be made plausible; again, what looks like factual information must be added. In the domestic field, as with international politics, the exercise of power boils down to charity and securing of jobs. Job insurance operates through the Jews’ “intrusion” into political machines. This intrusion may be resented on merely personal grounds, as in the case of a Republican ward politician in Philadelphia, 40, shipyard clerk of Irish-German descent: “Did you ever see them at Atlantic City? They strut like they owned the boardwalk. I was running for committeeman . . . and two Jews who were as distant as Atlantic and Pacific

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Oceans worked together to defeat me.” In other instances, people may have had trouble with individual government agencies that they then brand as Jewish-influenced. Such is the case of a pipe fitter in an oil refinery, an active member of the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians, CIO, who is dissatisfied with the results of his activity on the shop grievance committee. He says the Jews “dominate . . . the War Labor Board.” In this particular case the allegation that Jewish “control” of the WLB caused a decision unfavorable to the workers is disproved by information provided by the shop steward in the same department of the plant. What does it matter? If you are disappointed with the money you make or the hours you work, you just will blame the Jews on the WLB, and everything will be fine. More often than not general political ideas are translated into terms of political jobs, patronage, etc. The American political tradition is bound up with the rule of political machines that entail the distribution of political jobs to reward faithful service. In the framework of this tradition, it is easy to make people believe that whoever holds a government job also in a decisive way wields political power. Thus, an Italian longshoreman, AFL member, says: “In government or business you find Jews get the best jobs where they can run things.” An Armenian secretary, a woman with a college degree, exclaims: “But look at Washington. Boy, they certainly streamed into that town when the government was handing out the soft jobs with big pay.” And a Dutch-born seaman, for five years a member of the International Maritime Union, melancholically complains that Jews “control too much capital” and are “soft-job seekers.” This complaint, which probably reflects the complainant’s general dissatisfaction with his lot, comes close in its exaggeration to those unfounded complaints about refugees taking all the jobs that we referred to previously. This situation is identical. People who have a real “grief” to complain about easily come to the conclusion that Jews “take the hay” while they have nothing left but to “take the grief.” Political “Pull” Reverts to Philanthropy Possible remedies to genuine grievances often are beyond the workers’ control. This applies in particular to all specific grievances that originate in the wartime situation. Complaints about the good jobs Jews allegedly hold in the administration naturally flow from the dissatisfaction of many who think they or relatives or friends of theirs have been unjustly treated



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by government war agencies. The “good jobs” the Jews have conquered are viewed as positions on draft boards, ration boards, etc. An AFL carpenter quoted before says: “They will buy their way out of the draft and get into the best positions. No, there aren’t many Jews in the army, they have all gotten good jobs with the government, they have something to do with all the government alphabets—as long as they don’t have to work.” Another version is that Jews get deferments because all of them are in business. A metal engraver’s wife says: “I know plenty of Jews who got sons, etc., deferred because they were needed to carry on business. Others, who had to go, got safe jobs.” But how does one go about securing deferments? “Not the right way. They have political pull. They’re in the Merchant Marine—the Jewish Navy—‘cause it’s soft. All the Jewish officers I know were there ‘cause of pull.” To have pull you have to be in a position to offer something palpable. Holding a government job may not be enough. So Jews are accused of working with or though rackets of all kinds. A shipfitter, member of the Marines and Shipbuilding Workers, CIO, explains: “I believe most of them are draft dodgers and those in the army are smart enough to get in little rackets to make army life easy and profitable.” The combination of pull, influential jobs, and rackets on which one can capitalize is readily extended to all spheres in which the government might interfere with an individual’s business. The war has brought about shortages and rationing. Those who are convinced of the importance of Jewish power take it for granted that Jews have something to do with rationing and wartime regulation of business. Accusations leveled at Jewish “war profiteers” go to the extremes of absurdity. A foreman, UE member, figures that Jewish influence on wartime regulations pertaining to the flow of commodities extends considerably beyond the scope of individual ration boards. He has found that “all the canned fruit requires a lot of ration points because most of it is being shipped to the Jews in Europe.” He believes that there are enough Jews left in Europe to consume the canned fruit that in previous times were eaten by 140 million Americans. Though what this man says is sheer nonsense, it is remarkable that with him, too, mysterious Jewish power boils down to philanthropy. Jewish charities seem to be resented more than are the “little rackets” Jews are accused of operating. To the extent that there is any factual element at all in such accusations, this emphasis on different aspects of Jewish “misdeeds” is understandable. Jewish charities are visible even to the individual outsider; additionally,

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they are given a great deal of publicity. Conversely, the “rackets” occur so seldom and are so far remote from the worker’s actual experience that they acquire a mythical, irrational aspect. They are much less distinct in the complainant’s perception than the benefits some Jews he knows may have derived from Jewish charitable institutions. All said, it appears that even those grievances that are related to wartime conditions, and are more acutely felt by the worker than traditional peacetime complaints about Jews, dissolve into accusations aimed at the more efficient setup of Jewish charities as compared with social services provided by non-Jewish organizations. In fact, these grievances against Jews reflect the workers’ genuine grievances that have nothing to do with any real or imaginary Jewish influence. They result from social shortcomings and inefficiencies that can be improved by organized effort. That no remedy is being applied creates resentment that those who fail to find a solution take out on Jews. Manipulation of Public Opinion The workers’ notions of Jewish power are rather primitive commercialized notions. What the complex of power implies is not different to them from what could be expressed in terms of buying and selling. Only a few have discovered that power in human society expresses more than being able to buy or sell commodities and services. Power, in the traditional pattern of American politics, is something that can be bought—provided you are in a position to afford the price. Used to regarding politics in terms of machines, jobs, rackets, and graft, people rarely believe in the power of opinions and ideas. They are not concerned with how power operates and with what ideological screening or highlighting it requires. But they have been told, and some have believed, that amusement and entertainment have a political function, and that controlling them means having power. So Jews are accused of political machinations because of their participation in amusement industries. “They control all nightclubs, amusement places, and gambling establishments. Also most nightclub performers are Jews,” says a Detroit toolmaker. Others have discovered a specific purpose behind this alleged Jewish control of amusements. A shipyard carpenter quotes others as saying: “The Jew is trying to take the people. The Jew has everything tied up, like radio, movies, newspapers, clothing, groceries, etc.” Another interviewee knows that “the Jews control most of the newspapers.” Another again suspects the Jews of using this monopoly on the manipulation of public opinion for furthering particular interests. This



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Irish ship’s carpenter, born in Philadelphia, Catholic, member of a CIO union, doubts the veracity of the reports on Nazi atrocities. “After all,” he says, “the Jews control the radio, the newspapers, and it’s probably propaganda. Propaganda for sympathy for the Jews.” Another shipyard worker, this one in Los Angeles, has so fertile an imagination as to imagine a whole network of Jewish infiltration: There are powerful forces at work to insinuate the Jew into complete control of the life of our country. Unbelievable amounts of money are spent to ingratiate the nation regarding the Jews, and in every city there are funds provided by Jewish bankers to educate Jewish artists, doctors, lawyers, newspapermen, actors, writers, and launch them into success. Every field in America is becoming discolored with the threat of financially backed, highly educated Jews.

This colorful picture of Jewish infiltration into power through financing those who mold public opinion certainly is comprehensive. Yet, it is nothing but a highly imaginative account of achievements of Jewish charities. Are not more issues involved and more important ones than the more distribution of funds collected by charitable institutions—with or without the support of those ubiquitous Jewish bankers? The role of public opinion in the intricate setup of power relationships in modern society has hardly attracted the attention of our interviewees. 3. Do Jews Run the Country? The charges so far reviewed with respect to “Jewish power” in present-day society are not particularly impressive. Our interviewees’ attention is not focused on the crucial configurations of social, political, and economic power. Their critique aims at marginal occurrences, at trifles that do not affect the actual distribution of power. How, then, do they view current political events? Where does “nefarious Jewish influence” come in when concrete political issues have to be settled? How does it act upon political combinations that determine how the country will be run? Are Jews being accused of running the country? Does the average worker believe such accusations? Jews and “Radicals” Only a few of the workers who answered our questions on political issues thought of taking up the old slogan about all Jews being Communists. It

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is interesting to note in what context this slogan is brought up. Most of our interviewees, though they profusely answered the question referring to their attitude toward working with Negroes, fail to realize the importance of the Negro problem in America today—the problem of integrating into a nation at war, a disinherited minority comprising many million people. Like everything else, the problem of the Negro’s integration into political life is relegated to the narrow filed of machine combinations. Also the Negro’s attempt at acquiring the place that is his due in national life is conceived of in terms of operating a political machine. But throughout the last ten or fifteen years, no political machine except for the Communist Party accepted or promoted participation of Negroes in political life. Logically, some of our interviewees identify the Communist Party as the Negro instrument of political influence. The Communist Party machine—for reasons partly beyond its control—never operated in the open. To the average citizen, the workings of the Communist machine always were, and still are, shrouded in mystery. By reason of this mysterious tinge, those who suspect secret Jewish influence on political life are inclined to identify this influence with that of the Communist machine, and in addition lump it together with imaginary and obscure machinations of the Negro minority. Says one of our interviewees, a leader of ship carpenters in Camden, member of labor unions for fifteen years, now with the Marine and Shipbuilding Workers, CIO: “Average working man is suspicious of the Jews’ alliance with the Commies and the niggers.” Another one elaborates: “The Negroes should be kept down south where they have all the privileges they need. We never would have had this war if not for the Communists. . . . We never would have all this trouble with the Jews and the Negroes if not for Communism. . . . Who are the Communists? Roosevelt, Negroes, and Jews.” This identification of Jews, Communists, and Negroes clearly can be traced back to propaganda put out by Christian Mobilizers, Christian Fronters, and similar organizations. It is not quite clear, though, who runs whom: do the Jews control the Communists or do the Communists control the Jews? The man who discloses that the Communists are “Roosevelt, Negroes, and the Jews” also emphasizes, “They are all against big business.” Why should a workingman resent that some group or another is against big business? This country has a renowned tradition of fighting big business combinations and monopolies for the sake of the little people. There is the nativist tradition, the populist tradition, the



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greenback tradition, the Anti-Trust-Act tradition—all of them converging upon the defense of the little man from the infringements of big-business monopoly. Why should a worker in our time resent efforts to prevent big business from monopolizing the wealth and riches of the country? Why should these efforts be branded as “Jewish”? In the particular case cited, there might be some explanation. The man we quoted has had some higher education, and although he works as a semi-skilled shipyard worker today, he still harbors the hope that it will be possible for him to go into business when the war is over. He identifies himself with “business” although it is unlikely that the business he may succeed in setting up will be anything but small or that it will escape being threatened in its very foundations by trusts and monopolies. Our material does not bear out the contention that the “average working man” is suspicious of assaults on big business. What he is suspicious of is something entirely different. He thinks that the chance for him to go into business is slim. Yet, he does not want to renounce this chance. In consequence, it is nearly impossible for him to attack a social and economic system that does not openly bar him from access to business ventures. The smaller in reality the chance, the greater his resentment, and the more he is inclined to blame his misfortune on someone who “gums up the works.” But who is the one that does that? For quite some time it was easy to blame the Communists for the disruption in the functioning of the capitalistic system and to believe that this disruption alone robbed the individual worker of the opportunity to become a success in business. But to a large extent this kind of “Red Menace” has evaporated. A new scarecrow is needed. The interviewee who complains about the “little rackets” the Jews are operating also “has objections to ‘clear it with Sidney.’” Another one, who is afraid of Jews “controlling the politics of this country,” sees the “growing influence of Jews in politics” shown “by Hillman’s prominence at the Democratic Party Convention.” Another assails Hillman “as a Communist and a Jew attempting to bring Jews in control of government in Washington.” Finally, it is the Administration that is being identified as the “Red Menace”: “This Roosevelt has to be stopped. Roosevelt gangs up with all the Communists and Hillman, and I’m not going to vote for any Communist anymore. . . . Wait till the boys come home. They’ll take care of the Jews. . . . They want to run everything. You look into this country and see who is running things. The Jews run everything and that’s why they’re backing Roosevelt.”

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Communists, Negroes, Roosevelt, Hillman—everything is taken to express Jewish influence on politics. In reality, the term “Jewish” only serves to indicate that the object of reference is not to the interviewees’ taste. They hate the Administration, they hate labor unions, they hate the democratic process once it shatters the special privileges they claim as their eternal right. Who are these potential fascists to whom antisemitism is a handy political instrument? Of the interviewees we quoted, two are foremen; one is a former company-union stooge; one is a prospective businessman whom only wartime conditions have made accept a job in a war plant; and one is a German-American of strong pro-Nazi inclinations. Power of Business Indicted The average worker in our sample—even the one who does not reject antisemitism—does not share in this fascist game of labeling “Jewish” everything he dislikes in politics or elsewhere. His idea of Jews “running everything” does not become tangible and meaningful until it is tied up with the notion of material gain and financial profit. It is only then that the disjointed elements of the picture seem to fall into place. The Jews’ power to control money is at last something that can be measured, counted, sized up. Even an entirely non-prejudiced man who thinks the Nazi extermination of Jews was “a disgrace to the German people as a whole” is of the opinion that Jews have “financial power” that the non-Jewish “wealthy group” wants to “take away.” Other interviewees are more definite. A Missouri-born electrician in a Los Angeles shipyard, member of the Marine and Shipbuilding Workers, CIO, declares: “Wall Street is running this country, and a great many of these people are Jews.” An Irish-born rigger who works in a shipyard in New York, also belonging to the Marine and Shipbuilding Workers, thinks: “New York State and this country are run by the Jews. Jewish wealth—Jewish bankers—runs the country. Jews control the wealth, and the Irish guard it for the Jews. The Jews need to be punished.” A woman cartoon-painter, member of the Film Technicians Union, AFL, “has heard and believes that the Jews control all the capital in the United States.” A delivery chauffeur for a Newark department store, of German-American descent, member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, AFL, claims: “The Jews are getting control of all the money in this country, and I do not think this is right. They should be clamped down on.” A Scotch machinist in one of Ford’s plants in Detroit says the Jews “control the finances of the country”; he adds as an afterthought:



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“Tricky businessmen—won’t deal fair.” His is a more specific idea of how the political power transmission mechanism works. There must be some connection between business and politics, and this worker only expresses what other feel about the operation of this secret mechanism. It is through “tricky,” “unfair” dealings that Jews manage to monopolize business from the bottom. An Italian machinist in a small New Jersey community, a member of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, is sure that in his town Jews “own everything.” He claims “they run this city.” He illustrates the Jews’ particular road to success, saying that they are as small as tiny letter print when they come to a city, but “after they are here six months they get to be as big as that”—and he points to large headlines on a magazine cover. He announces: “After this war we are going to run them out. . . . We don’t want them to run things.” He is not sure, however, whether Jews really are running the country, and he hesitates to commit himself when asked this question. Another man, who agrees with the Italian machinist as to the methods the Jews use to achieve control, is more outspoken: “They own all the money, all the business, and they are trying to destroy the country.” A Missourian, carpenter in San Francisco, for five years a member of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, not only says that Jews “are all in business” but also elaborates to the extent of stating, “They run the business of the country.” Is it a comfort to know that he would not “condone such tactics as the Germans use”? Another carpenter in San Francisco, a Kansan, who has been a member of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners for twenty-five years, agrees with the Nazis. He would like to see feelings against the Jews grow in this country—“to take business control out of the hands of Jews.” Attempting to Explain Operation of “Jewish Control” From what has been said thus far, the reader may rightly assume that not one of our interviewees who assail “Jewish control” really would be able to describe how this control operates, nor how it achieves the miraculous performance with which they credit it. In reality, heavy Jewish participation in business, or even sharing in the control of city politics, may be visible in smaller townships where Jews happen to be largely represented among the well-to-do group. It cannot be visible on a larger scale—because on a larger scale no such control exists, not even in any restricted form. A nation-wide picture of Jewish control cannot be constructed but by mere implication.

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People seldom take the time to think about how this fairy-tale system of Jewish power works, functions, or operates. They refrain from doing so for the simple reason that they neither know nor try to find out how the whole system of social power, of power distribution and power transmission, is organized, what keeps it going, and how it can be influenced or guided. Usually they are not inclined to accept fantastic notions as to the general setup of society. Accordingly, they speak of Jewish power in seemingly concrete terms. But while they reject myth as a general explanation, their ideas about the economic system, and the part the Jews play within it, are so confused that it satisfies them to take mere hearsay on Jewish influence for factual truth. It is in terms of business that they conceive of the workings of the social system. In consequence, it is also in terms of business that they conceive of the disrupting, falsifying, or discoloring influence that they imagine the Jews have on the system. The terms in which they couch their indictment of Jews are rational, but the contents of the indictment are not. They name concrete business transactions through which they say Jews exercise control, but they do not know what these transactions consist of or what they imply. Rationalized on the surface, their thinking is as irrational as that of their more romantic European brethren. The difference is only in that they simplify the underlying mystic idea by reducing it to the level of small-time business transactions. And those among them who are aware of the basic irrationality of their approach shift the burden of the proof onto others. It is not the Jewish power that is a myth, they say, it is the power of non-Jews, non-Jewish groups, non-Jewish organizations. The reasoning of a fireman, AFL member in Detroit, is a case in point. He would like to see the Jew “out of finance altogether.” He is convinced that “the working man” is against the Jews and would like to see anti-Jewish feelings grow in America—“because he [the working man] knows, if he has any knowledge of conditions whatever, he knows the Jew is the cause of it. General Motors, DuPont, General Electric are only a myth. All Jews.” A fellow-believer of his, a CIO member in Wisconsin, goes a step farther. He explains how Jews succeed in making people believe that big business is not Jewish, that big corporations are neither run nor controlled by Jews. Confronted with statements of fact concerning the ownership of big corporations, he replies: “Maybe, but in every company I bet there is a Jew who is a secretary or vice-president. They always get in somewhere.” A stationary engineer in Camden, whom we quoted before, advances a



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similar theory. He says: “Well, maybe Ford and Du Pont aren’t Jews, but there’s a Jew in their company.” There is a notable effort here to provide the charges preferred against Jews with a semblance of credibility. An explanation is offered that is designed to make the fantastic appear rationally probable and intelligible. These antisemites try hard to show that Jews really have an opportunity to do what they are said to have attempted, to have done, or to be doing. Irrational belief in Jewish power and constant efforts to explain this power in rational terms are interlocked. Jews Attacked as the Ruling Class This very interlock of irrational notions and rationalizing efforts is characteristic of the specific brand of antisemitism displayed by American workers. It is at the base of all their thinking. They believe in “equality of opportunity,” in everybody’s chance of “getting to the top,” “becoming a success in business.” But they also know that this opportunity, this chance, is a dream far remote from real everyday experience. When they try to express power relationships in business terms, they merely attempt to create a rational justification for their own irrational dream. The same mechanism operates in their antisemitic reasoning. There are some people among our interviewees who realize that the society they live in is based on economic inequality and social stratification. For reasons that need not be discovered here, they stop short of drawing any conclusions that would commit them to concerted action. How then do they face society? They provide themselves with the necessary rationalization in a very simple process. They identify the Jews as the ruling class that has to be fought by labor. An Italian aircraft worker in Los Angeles, questioned whether he knows of people who would like to see feelings against Jews grow in this country, replies: “Yes—the working class—to curb their activities.” The “working class” thus appears in opposition to Jews, presented as the ruling class. A plumber in Bayonne, for several years a member of AFL’s Plumbers, distinguishes, in addition, between working Jews and capital Jews. Nonetheless, he is inclined to see all Jews as part, or even as the spearhead of, ruling-class policies. He says: “Capital started this war. They owned too much. It’s this way. There was an over-accumulation of money in banks, people didn’t invest, and then men were laid off. That was the trouble. Sure, the Jews own most everything. And they won’t share it.” In addition, the man is emphatic about the Jews’ political power: “Sure, they

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run Washington.” What is the effect of this impact of Jewish power on the country’s economy and politics: “This country is headed for civil war. Between whom? Capital and labor. Just wait and see. Roosevelt? Well, he did a lot of good, but he did a lot of harm, too. He’s compromised with capital too much, don’t trust him.” In the same breath, this labor-conscious worker says he did not like Wendell Willkie because he “was too radical, would try to run things his own way.” He adds: “I’d vote for [Thomas] Dewey—he is fairer.” Is this how “compromising with capital” is avoided? This peculiar mentality, which reflects a fragmentary, lopsided insight into the basically unjust setup of present-day society, but which shuns any logical consequences, is fit to be exploited by fascist movements. This attitude makes the Nazi solution particularly attractive to many of our interviewees. Money, Not Power, Target of Resentment These American workers have their grievances; they have a lot to complain about. Vaguely they sense that the cause of all that which they resent is connected with the prevailing social setup. However, they do not engage in sociological theories, nor do they devote any time and effort to thinking about the intricacies of the social setup or of power relationships between social groups. Their thinking still is focused on the individual’s chance to get ahead, to acquire a just share in wealth and power that now are monopolized by privileged groups, to make good by obtaining admission to one or the other “in-group” that participates in rule and power. When they fail to succeed, they automatically blame everything on a group upon which they bestow a particular ability to “get in somewhere,” to “get ahead” in terms of money and business success. Even those who do not want to appear prejudiced or unjust find plausible explanations for the phenomenal success attributed to Jews. To have a rational explanation for the alleged fact that the Jews “control all the money,” they may accept the version offered by an Irish shipfitter in Philadelphia, a member of CIO’s Marine and Shipbuilding Workers. The Jews, he says, “seem to me to be oppressed, so that gives them the feeling that they must dominate all business to be recognized.” A levelheaded person who accepts this version will feel free to blame the Jews without experiencing any pangs of bad conscience. Once the notion of “Jewish control” is granted the title of factual truth, solutions for social problems do not need to have anything to do with basic



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economic and power relationships. As Jewish power is nothing but “control of money,” there is a simple way to do away with it. Wealth unduly acquired can be confiscated. This is why Hitler’s measures were “correct”; why Hitler “was right about taking away their money and property”; why he “should have confiscated their property and done something about it that would have put them out of control without war and bloodshed”; why “heavy taxes on the Jews” are perfectly in order. This also is the reason why a Swedish-American welder in a San Francisco shipyard, for five years a member of AFL’s International Brotherhood of Boilermakers and Shipbuilders, thinks the Jews “should be sent to Jerusalem, leaving their money here.” “Extermination of Jews,” says another member of the same union, “is not the solution—but economic and social control.” The first lesson taught by the European experience—that taking away the Jews’ money does not solve any economic or social problems—has not reached the consciousness of most American workers. The individual worker, it is true, has not much of a chance left to make the American pioneer dream come true. But while as an individual he may realize the barrier that separates him from success, he is not ready to renounce the dream. He is even less ready to blame society for his lack of success. Many are those who go on blaming the other fellow who made out better, who succeeded as a “pioneer,” where they have failed. The other fellow has to be “punished.” Take away his money, and everything will be all right. But it is not General Motors’ or DuPont’s money that the worker who has listened to antisemitism wants to expropriate. He does not want to destroy the foundations of the economic setup on which he bases his chance to indulge in pioneer daydreaming. Why, then, not “punish the Jew”? At first sight, punishment inflicted upon the Jew would not seem to undermine the traditional setup. It would give the dreamer satisfaction and preserve his dream. This prospect is the true reason for the attractiveness of the antisemitic attack on “Jewish power.” The notion of “Jewish power” stands for nothing but “money,” “finance,” and “business.”

Notes and Commentary

Critique Today: The University and Literature around 1968* Christoph König Berlin has become the German place of remembrance for 1968. In other cities, too, students, artists, and professors rose up against authoritarian ways of life and institutions, pointing to the “fascism” of the Nazi period that their parents wished to repress. But remembrance likes the beauty of appearances, and the revolt in Berlin was initially colored by something unreal and playful, a counterpoint led to its conclusion, something both bounded and experimental. This something was lost between 1967 and 1969, though it was even less present outside of Berlin, perhaps because of the delay with which the revolt spread beyond the city. The “fictive element of Berlin” of which Hans Magnus Enzensberger spoke lay within a temporary delimitation of its space—perhaps, and paradoxically so, because paths were especially short within the politically imposed limits of West Berlin. In this Berlin, one single large public sphere arose for a short period of time in a tight space. Berlin could become, in its remembrance, a symbol for “1968” precisely because the politicization of social spaces dominated the kinds of thinking that would abolish old borders. The great auditorium of the Free University of Berlin, called “Audimax” for short, became the paradigmatic symbol of this “Berlin.” It was an agora, a public space in which students and poets, professors, revolutionaries, and politicians met: Erich Fried, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Reinhard Lettau, Peter Schneider, F. C. Delius, and Horst Christoph Buch were often seen here. Neither before nor after this time did a university auditorium acquire such importance. The old boundary between the university and the outside world seemed to have been suspended. I would like also to begin, however, with a second observation. Hardly ever in history did literature, a certain literature, inspire so much trust in its power to change things as it did in the years around 1968. It was admitted into public space. This trust created a demand that authors met in different ways. The young poets of the revolt were not the first engaged authors of the Left. They were preceded *   Translated by Michael Thomas Taylor. .  Christoph König, “Berliner Gemeinplätze,” in Protest! Literatur um 1968 (Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1998), pp. 87–180. Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 173–79. www.telospress.com

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by writers who mostly attended meetings of the Gruppe 47, including Günter Grass and Alfred Andersch. But these engaged, older writers were soon joined by younger individuals who saw a positive future exclusively in terms of a revolutionary change of society in the Federal Republic. Enzensberger was certainly the smartest and most prominent among them. The authors of the Gruppe 47, by contrast, were politically engaged as citizens—for example, in the 1965 election campaign for the Social Democratic Party. But they separated how they wrote from their political activities. When Hans Mayer equated good literature with engaged literature, as he did at the meeting of the Gruppe 47 in 1966 in Princeton, he was greeted with laughter. Today, we know from Grass’s example that his style derived from the attempt to remain elegantly silent about his own brown history— precisely in order to maintain his political freedom of action. To me, this seems to be the basic meaning of his recently published autobiography, Peeling the Onion. The truth that strove to come to light in Grass’s novels for the very reason that they were—as literary works—personal was not meant to interfere with the author’s politics. That is why Grass integrated his resistance to the truth into the works themselves. But Enzensberger and those like him wanted to join theory and practice: literature should itself be political action. Their position, which they shared with the raging students, was sworn to serve reason and argumentation. Among their icons was Theodor W. Adorno, against whose theory they ultimately—and theoretically—developed their aesthetics. Something else should also be mentioned: instances of spontaneous, subversive, often playful actions without any further theoretical justification that occasionally demanded aesthetic dignity as action. These were associated with the name of Dieter Kunzelmann, among others, as well as with the American underground poetry that was often read and imitated in Germany. The wit of action thus conversely found its way into poetry. Literature provided options that its interpreters exploited. As author and editor, Enzensberger joined two central options of the time in a kind of “double bind.” These correspond to his roles as editor and poet: on the one hand, analysis under the pull of Marxism; and on the other, hope for a flash of critical insight. Especially in his role as an editor, Enzensberger was also an author; he documented analyses and composed documents so that their sense came to light in the composition. This is the raison d’être for the journal Das Kursbuch, which Enzensberger began editing in 1965. This journal quickly became the most important publication in the protest movement. “The journal,” one reads in a leaflet, “is open to new prose and poetry,” but where literary mediation fails the Kursbuch will try to grasp the immediate precipitation of realia: in protocols, evaluations, .  Christoph König, Häme als literarisches Verfahren: Günter Grass, Walter Jens und die Mühen des Erinnerns (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2008). .  Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Ankündigung einer neuen Zeitschrift,” Kursbuch 1 (1965), p. 2.



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reports, files, polemical and unpolemical discussions. The hope of the monteur expresses itself in these lines: if the right things have been brought together, then this montage creates a “moment . . . unrevised and enigmatic, about which I could not say what it means.” In such instants, the sense of this tumult of paper can nevertheless reveal itself. But the montage gains truth only under certain circumstances. The artist wants to protest and only uses materials that themselves sustain forms of protest. Via these materials, the artist stands in direct connection with the revolutionary movement, and it is the order of this movement that guarantees the truth of poetic meaning. Enzensberger thus collected documents of others that have a particular orientation—a critical orientation, which should spare him the task of writing an explicit commentary. Berlin as a place of remembrance and literature as a form of political practice were thus closely aligned in 1968. The spatial opening for which this Berlin still stands expresses a conviction shared by scholars and poets—a theoretical position or thought that demands, as it becomes clear, to be critically interrogated. The question that I would like to pose, and from the perspective of the present, is of a scientific-theoretical nature: Which institutional and methodological paths are necessary to preserve the critical potential of literary criticism, especially while maintaining distance from the creativity of critical poets, which is a creativity that principally overwhelms critical reflection and thus founds a form of aesthetic reflection that goes beyond philosophy? Or, to put it more precisely, how did literary criticism take up the options of “analysis” and “instantaneousness” that Enzensberger practiced? How can these paths be continued into the present? This question concerns the university’s understanding of itself and the poetics practiced by scholars. From its conception, the German university was opposed to the sphere of politics. In accordance with the Protestant doctrine of two kingdoms, which allows the prince to be reprimanded from the safety of the pulpit by the very pastor whom he pays, the university always understood itself to be an autonomous institution, whose independence from politics is threatened only when its own members renounce the scientifically required distance from both politics and their own values. Yet almost all the professors in the Nazi period did just this, thereby creating the impression that the institution was itself socially dependent. By contrast, examples such as that of Walther Rehm—a Germanist who began teaching in Freiburg under the Nazis—show that not much happened to scholars who remained unruly and criticized those in power, as long as they were not Jewish. Yet the university could be a protective space. In 1968, the necessary boundary between science and politics became truly blurred, and willfully so. The .  For more information, cf. Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950, ed. and intro. Christoph König, 3 vols. and CD-ROM (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003).

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Nazi past of university fathers was brought to light, but inasmuch as the students believed the university to be dependent upon the forces of capital, they thought that university reform could take place only as sociopolitical reform, meaning that the mere politicization of the university would solve all problems. In this, they agreed with the politicized poets and scholars of the day. Within the Free University of Berlin, the AStA, or General Student Committee, sought to create a so-called “critical university” with the aim of “intensifying political practice” that would reflect the political function of poetic, cultural, or disciplinary knowledge. This did not sit well with most professors: the conservative reactionaries did not like it because they did not want to see their values exposed; the liberal-progressive professors did not like it because they saw the only possibility of improving their science to lie in a critique of knowledge, and this meant in the best sense a historical critique of knowledge. A transfer of democratic procedures to the university seemed all too simple, because the students lacked the knowledge necessary for scholarly discourse. In this situation, there was a professor who raised his voice—a professor who was born in 1929 to an assimilated Jewish family in Budapest but barely avoided being murdered by National Socialists in escaping to Switzerland, where he studied in Zurich after the war; a professor who did not come from within the institution, though he had directed the Institute for General and Comparative Literature at the Free University since 1965. His name was Peter Szondi. In his Institute, he hung a poster that read: “Egoism. Asked what he thinks of the ‘Critical University,’ Professor S. responded: ‘A lot. That’s why I’ll do it myself.’” Szondi’s goal was to create an institutional position within the institution of the university that would avoid understanding itself in terms of the institution. He might have imagined a writing desk rather than an institute. Szondi’s “egoism” is theoretically anchored in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. In this enlightened sense, Szondi understands comparative literary criticism as a discipline that would dissolve itself. In principle, this would be an ideal discipline for him: “Anyone who for himself ignores the boundaries that have been passed down by traditional philologies and thus contributes to the abolition of comparative criticism does, on his own account, just what the discipline invited him to do in the first place.” .  Cf. König, “Berliner Gemeinplätze,” p. 153. .  Cf. Telos 140 (Fall 2007), a special issue on Peter Szondi and Critical Hermeneutics. For a general introduction, see Christoph König, Engführungen: Peter Szondi und die Literatur (Marbacher Magazin 108), 2nd rev. ed. (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schiller Gesellschaft, 2005). For Szondi’s political statements concerning the university, see Peter Szondi, Über eine “Freie (d.h. freie) Universität”: Stellungnahmen eines Philologen, ed. Jean Bollack et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973). .  König, Engführungen, p. 77.



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On July 7, 1967, Adorno delivered, on the invitation of Peter Szondi, a lecture entitled “On the Classicism of Goethe’s Iphigenie.” In a sketch for the lecture, one reads: “Form shifts into the center as medium in order to do justice to civilization. Against what is raw.” Adorno’s classicism lecture is aimed from the beginning against that which is raw. At first sight, civilization seems to be the solution. Yet Adorno knows that forms of civilization can ossify and annihilate their original purpose of liberating the subject. He interprets classicism as a style of which the subject takes control so as to wield it against that which has ossified. This style can thus be natural, but it has no staying power because the aristocracy that formed it was a merely historical appearance: Goethe’s drama rests upon this tension. Goethe thus reduces the antinomy of classicism to membership in a certain social class. Yet for Szondi, this style becomes the ethical foundation of a philological practice that, from the writing desk, turns against the Institute or the University that it has already defended against a penetrating politicization. Szondi possessed a unique style, a genre of scholarly essay, dialectically sharpened, that he himself created. Philology as a form of life. In this sense, Szondi could say to the students who wanted to interrupt Adorno’s lecture: “I ask those among you, ladies and gentlemen, who don’t want to hear the talk as you have announced— or more precisely, as the SDS [Socialist Student Association] recommended to you—to leave the room. After a few minutes, Professor Adorno will then speak, and he will say something about Goethe’s classicism that is less classical than would ever be admitted by those who quote Mao’s sayings today no differently than their grandfathers quoted the sayings of Weimar’s Princes of Poetry.”10 Today, the controversy surrounding 1968 reveals itself to be a disagreement about Adorno that had already begun in 1968, in which Adorno’s editorial engagement for Walter Benjamin also played an important role. Criticism concentrated on Adorno’s selection of texts and mistakenly recognized a devaluation of the Marxist core of Benjamin’s writings in favor of those historical-theological theses of Benjamin that these same critics today take up as central. This can be traced to an understanding of Marxism held by the students, which went unrecognized at the time, according to which political action growing out of the moment sufficed. By contrast, Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment fought against a position outside .  Theodor W. Adorno, “Zum Klassizismus von Goethes Iphigenie,” in Noten zur Literatur, vol. 11 of Gesammelte Schriften, 4th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996), pp. 495ff; published in English as “On the Classicism of Goethe’s Iphigenie,” in Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), 2:153–70. .  Rolf Tiedemann, “‘Gegen das Rohe’: Ein Schema zu Adornos Vortrag ‘Zum Klassizismus von Goethes Iphigenie’,” Geschichte der Germanistik 15/16 (1999): 64–71; here, p. 68. 10.  König, “Berliner Gemeinplätze,” pp. 135f.

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of reason, which, as was thought at the time, could be reached spontaneously. The opposition between analysis and immediacy that Enzensberger so perceptively exploited determines the controversy regarding Adorno. For many who base their position on Benjamin, the state of emergency, theoretically bound up with the present moment, counts today as the arch-instance of critique; for them, it is the “trace”—not analysis—that shows the way. One cannot invoke Adorno to legitimize this tradition of critique. It is for this reason that the word “critique” hardly plays any role in memories of 1968. Instead, one speaks of “authenticity” (as does Klaus R. Scherpe) or “anti-differentiation” (as does Jürgen Link).11 Wherein lies today the critical potential of the philologies, meaning the disciplines concerned with literature and language? How can the unsurpassable insight of 1968 into social interests and values be kept meaningful in the present, apart from stubborn ideology-critique and theology? In closing, I would like to sketch two possibilities. They concern the estimation of the institution of the university and the interpretation of literary texts. In 1968, critique focused upon the university because it passed on social values with a devastating effect that can be seen in German history. One looked for possibilities to eliminate the power of reactionary research. Szondi could, in a way, identify with this critique, which concerned methodology as well as the construction of a canon. But the institution itself was, in the name of democratization, soon called into question. The foundation for a critique of values was thus lost, for the necessary knowledge and reflective capacity can be trained best within the protection of the institution. Two goals opposed each other: first, the aim of changing monopolies of power; and second, the hope that Szondi shared with Adorno, and which was later continued by Jean Bollack in France, for a concrete space of utopia within an autonomous university.12 Today, of course, this usually means something completely different, namely, an institution that is independent from the state so that it can function according to economic principles. But 1968 provokes a different understanding of the university as an autonomous institution. Limits were placed upon a delimiting critique in order to make critique that much more effective. This thought must be realized today against a general consensus that does not question the institution and uncouples it from scientific work, both theoretically and practically. Finally, literature was seen to possess a rationality that founds understanding, a hermeneutic premise. According to this position, literature owes its rationality 11.  Cf. Klaus R. Scherpe, “Belles lettres/Graffiti,” and Jürgen Link, “Intensität, Entdifferenzierung, Kulturrevolution und Normalismus: Zur Spezifizität der ‘Bewegung von Achtundsechzig’,” in Belles lettres/Graffiti: Soziale Phantasien und Ausdrucksformen der Achtundsechziger, ed. Ulrich Ott and Romann Luckscheiter (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2001), pp. 9–15 and 69–78 respectively. 12.  Cf. Jean Bollack, Sens contre sens: comment lit-on? Entretiens avec Patrick Llored (Lyon: Éditions La Passe du Vent, 2000).



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to a critical analysis of the relationships structuring a capitalist society; yet of all deviations, only a critique of domination was allowed, be it profanely Marxist or melancholically engrossed in a history of catastrophes. In both cases, one diagnosed one’s way through the work to arrive at an external construction. Ever since then, aesthetic critique has been emphatically expanded to mean the destruction of sense as authority. Within modernity, this position is opposed by the idea that the subject successively and rationally permeates its own world. This also belongs to the legacy of 1968. What matters now is to free the production of sense, and the critique this makes possible, from external constructions and to seek it out within an aesthetically motivated succession of ideas within the work. The thoughts themselves are thus nothing but critical acts of separation, even liberation. The unbiased perspective of interpretation necessary for such a view can be granted by the style won at the writing desk.

American Antigone: Hegelian Reflections on the Sheehan-Bush Conflict Jim Vernon Now that she has retired from public life, philosophers can begin to understand the cultural phenomenon that was Cindy Sheehan, the generally recognized (and self-professed) “‘Face’ of the American anti-war movement.” Why did the Iraq War produce domestic resistance led by someone whose moral credentials consisted solely in being a mother? Why was the cartoon-cowboy masculinity of the war president opposed by the equally hyperbolic familial femininity of the “eternally grieving mother of Casey Sheehan”? In what follows, I seek to comprehend the emergence of both the Iraq War and the “face” of its opposition through the most notorious account of gender and war in the history of philosophy: Hegel’s analysis of Antigone. I contend that this conflict reflects a return to social forms whose origin, essential contradictions and destructive destiny Hegel diagnosed two hundred years ago. This analysis will demonstrate the poverty of an anti-war movement that opposes the essential goodness of families to the essential evil of governments that send children to war, and it will use the Sheehan-Bush debacle as a revealing foil to a Hegelian approach to opposing war.

.  Cindy Sheehan, “‘Good Riddance Attention Whore’,” Daily Kos website, May 27, 2008, http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/5/28/12530/1525. While there were assuredly doves whose actions against the war bore little relation to Sheehan’s, my focus is the mainstream opposition that Sheehan symbolized. .  G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). Further references will be documented parenthetically within the text and will use paragraph numbers. This analysis has been subject to potent feminist critiques, many of which are now collected in Patricia Jagentiwicz Mills, ed., Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel (University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1996). I will not be addressing the many (often valid) concerns regarding Hegel’s comments on women. Rather, I will use Hegel’s account to grasp the conditions under which patriarchal views regarding gender come to dominate social and political discourse. Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 180–92. www.telospress.com

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9/11 and Immediate Spirit Hegel’s analysis of “Spirit” articulates the historical development of the relations between individuals and their community. Hegel begins by examining the least developed, most immediate form that this relationship could take, i.e., that wherein all citizens immediately identify with their community. In “immediate Spirit,” each “individual [simply] is [their] world” (441), i.e., each counts as self-conscious (for both themselves and others) only through determinate identification with the universal, communal substance. While Hegel identifies this ethical relation with the Greek polis, we must grasp how American democracy, from its highly complex state, regressed to this form. We are almost too far removed from 9/11 to recall its immediate impact on American society. However, as the New York Times declared the day after the attack, it was widely and instantly recognized as “one of those moments in which history splits, and we define the world as ‘before’ and ‘after’.” Of course, as President Bush noted in his official statements that day, the “substance” of American life had not changed: its Spiritual foundation was untouched, government activities continued uninterrupted, and, infamously, America remained open for business. Rather, what had fundamentally changed was the ethical self-consciousness of citizens. Rudy Giuliani arose as the “Mayor of America” under whose leadership all Americans were “simultaneously, collectively, thunderously, united.” Congressional leaders appeared on the Capitol steps to sing “God Bless America,” a phrase, alongside “We are all New Yorkers” and “United We Stand,” that was placed on car bumpers throughout the nation. Candlelight vigils filled stadiums, donations of money and volunteer-hours were overwhelming, and civil servants were hailed as heroes. Former press gadfly Dan Rather appeared on the eventually anti-war Late Show with David Letterman to declare: “George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions, and, you know, as just one American, wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where,” challenging all to demonstrate their commitment to the nation that the president embodies. Of course, there also arose civil strife, directed against those (falsely) perceived to be “outside the community.” These incidents, however, were widely condemned by politicians and celebrities, who declared that all citizens were vital to the nation. In short, the .  George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President Upon Arrival at Barksdale Air Force Base,” September 11, 2001, transcript available online at the White House website, http:// www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-1.html. .  Ellen Goodman, “All In This Together,” Boston Globe, September 23, 2001. .  For polling data on national unity after the attacks, see the information collected at the PollingReport.com website, http://www.pollingreport.com/terror10.htm. .  Dan Rather, interview by David Letterman, Late Show with David Letterman, September 17, 2001, transcript reproduced at the New York Jewish Times website, http://www. nyjtimes.com/cover/terror/DaveandDan.htm.

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trauma of the attacks largely transformed formerly isolated individuals into selfconscious “Americans,” united in support of the nation and its principles. Of course, a nation is not truly unified unless its members determinately actualize their unity with it through their actions. Thus, immediate Spirit poses the question: what action “brings into existence the unity of [particular] self and [universal] substance” (444)? The most obvious answer would appear to be one that upholds the laws of the land, for these posit the formal institutions of the whole community. Hegel unifies these publicly recognized, institutional laws under the heading “Human Law” (448). While there are many branches of civil service that work to uphold the human law (e.g., the military, police forces, fire brigades, etc.), Hegel claims that it is chiefly represented by “the government” (455). Government is, after all, the official body through which laws are not only created, but (through the direction of the civil service) enforced. Thus, issuing and enforcing governmental directives is ethically acting for the universal community by actualizing the institutions required for the communal whole to function. However, as Bush acknowledged in his post-attack address to Congress, such actions are not the only, or even the primary, way to unify universal Spirit: “Americans are asking: What is expected of us?  I ask you to live your lives and hug your children.” This is not simply one more of Bush’s clumsy attempts at being folksy, for the human law essentially brings the immediate, “unconscious” lived content of social life into deliberate, institutional, “conscious” form (e.g., land that families inhabit by custom is secured through publicly recognized property rights; concern one customarily has for the safety of their loved ones is secured through laws prohibiting assault). The human law alone cannot ground social ties, for this would amount to unlawful dictatorship. In democracies, it is the lived behavior of the majority of individuals—what Hegel calls the “Divine Law” (450)—that both founds the human law and is secured through it. While there are assuredly many actions that create these “divine laws,” Hegel rightly notes that the most immediate, and important, of such actions promote the flourishing of the family (450). The tie one has to family is an immediate, unconscious bond within which individual members identify their ethical selfconsciousness with the good of the family as a group. Acting for the good of other family members constitutes an ethical act; however, the immediacy of the family bond places one’s particular family above the social collective. Thus, while .  George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,” September 20, 2001, transcript available at the White House website, http://www. whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html. .  See the rewarding discussion of the divine/human relation in H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder II: The Odyssey of Spirit (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), pp. 171–77.



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actions for the family are ethical (i.e., universal) actions, they are also marked by personal (i.e., particular) prejudice. Of course, in their immediately lived ethical behavior, the families of post-9/11 America presume access to property, safety, goods, services, and, above all, the natural resources and national security necessary to secure all of the above. Because most individuals immediately act to ensure that their particular family is rich in the above qualities, the governmental mandate is focused on acquiring and maintaining security and resources. Thus, when Bush, during a speech concerning government actions undertaken to provide security, asks people to live their lives (i.e., to act upon the prevailing ethical customs from which human laws arise) and hug their children (i.e., to reinforce the fundamental “divine” bond with the family), he is acknowledging, even if unconsciously, that “human law proceeds . . . from the divine” (460). Reciprocally, however, without the unifying, universalizing function of the government, the immediate customs of family life could not exist. Thus, while distinct, “[n]either of the two [laws] is by itself absolutely valid” (460), for the divine law justifies the human law, while the human law preserves the divine law. As such, it is only as long as neither individual families nor the government who unifies them forgets this necessary intertwining of laws, that immediate Spirit remains “a stable equilibrium of all the parts” (462). The strength of Hegel’s analysis, however, lies in its revelation of the tensions that ultimately destroy this peaceful whole. Choosing (and Sexing) One’s Law We have seen that individuals in immediate Spirit only have ethical self-consciousness if they are determinately identified with the communal universal through action; and we have posited two ethical laws that express this substance (the divine, unconscious family ties and the human, governmental institutions). Thus, in order to count as ethically self-conscious, all individuals must choose to act for one of these laws. However, because all must act for the universal in a manner that is “immediate, unwavering, without contradiction,” etc. (465), all are compelled to act in accordance with their most immediate understanding of universal law. Each individual, then, (usually) chooses the law with which they are most immediately familiar, i.e., each “knows what it has to do [because it] has already decided whether to belong to the divine or the human law” (465). Of course, some individuals choose the law from which they are relatively distant, as when officials retire to spend more time with family or when parents abandon their family for the sake of public service. This explains Hegel’s focus on individual decision rather than nature. However, the circumstances that demand this decision strip it of its deliberative character. In a sense, we decide as though we were not deciding, i.e., as though we

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were simply expressing our preexistent character. In Hegel’s formulation, because the “immediate firmness of [this] decision is something implicit, [it] therefore has at the same time the significance of a natural being” (465). This unconscious, yet firm, decision to act as if from nature has two consequences. First, the law for which one decides becomes identical with the self-consciousness of the actor, i.e., for the ethical “consciousness [there is] essentially only one law” (466). As such, when one locates duty in service to the family, one inevitably suppresses their knowledge of the ethical role that government plays in ensuring the flourishing of all families, as well as the effects that the lived behavior of families has on government policy. Therefore, the sacrifices families are called upon to make by government are widely seen as the arbitrary “violence of human caprice” (466), rather than the expression of communal duty. Similarly, in choosing the human law, governmental actors inevitably ignore the sacrifices that policy decisions demand of individual families, and understand popular dissent as “only the self-will and disobedience of the individual who insists on being his own authority” (466). Thus, through the actions of individuals, immediate Spirit essentially breaks into two distinct and opposed groups: those who act for the divine law and thus ignore the effects that their actions have upon the policy of their government; and those who act for the human one and thus ignore the sacrifices that their actions demand of individual families. A split develops between the lived actions of individuals and their explicit self-knowledge, and those acting for one law fail to grasp the ethical nature of those on the other side. Thus, “the opposition between them appears as an unfortunate [i.e., unnecessary] collision of duty merely with a reality which possesses no rights of its own” (466). In sum, the first consequence of ethical action is that the laws fall into opposition in the form of polarized social groups who are no longer conscious of the role that they play in producing the very actions they decry. Second, and more controversially, because the decision is understood as the expression of natural character, Hegel argues that the laws themselves become identified with natural categories. Specifically, because there are two laws, they become identified with the most immediately graspable natural duality, i.e., “the two ethical powers [i.e., laws] . . . actualize themselves in the two sexes” (465). Nothing in this argument, however, indicates that women actually are naturally familial or men naturally governmental (although Hegel may have personally held this to be true). To the contrary, one chooses a law, and the freedom implied by choice rules out the possibility of “natural” ethics. Even within the play that Hegel cites, Antigone is the female symbol of the divine law despite having a sister who rejects family to obey State commands, and Creon embodies the masculine State .  This curious fact is noted in Patricia Jagentiwicz Mills, “Hegel’s Antigone,” in Mills, Feminist Interpretations, pp. 59–88.



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despite punishing Polynices for betraying Thebes. The lack of uniformity across a single sex that results inevitably from choice should warn us against necessarily connecting laws with sexes. As Hegel draws upon the dramatization of a myth cycle, his account might best be read as explaining how patriarchal views regarding the ethical characters of the sexes come to dominate a political discourse that opposes government and family, i.e., as an account of the social symbolization of the laws through the sexes, “as if by their nature.” On this reading, the claim would be that it is not accidental, but (almost) inevitable that this opposition is socially symbolized through the universal familialism of women (or, more precisely, a woman who symbolizes the duty to family in opposition to the government) and the universal abstract will of men (or, more precisely, a man who symbolizes the duty to government that stands against the family). Admittedly, the patriarchal association of the sexes with their particular laws remains one of the least-defended (and, if read as an account of their “ethical natures,” defensible) points in all of Hegel. However, if it is read as an account of social symbolization, we can appeal to mainstream political discourse as it manifests itself historically. On this reading, it is not accidental, for example, that Michael Moore dedicated much of his anti-Bush film to a grieving mother, or that “Fort Qualls,” the “patriotic” camp erected by pro-Bush forces in reaction Camp Casey, was led by the father of a fallen soldier. While there is no necessity in individuals of either sex choosing either law, social representation of the conflict tends to follow the division between “woman/divine” and “man/human.” Hegel’s account, then, can be read not so much an apology for patriarchal culture but as an account of how a patriarchal interpretation of the natural difference between the sexes comes to dominate the ethical self-representation of the community.10 In sum, immediate Spirit produces a social order wherein two valid ethical laws come into conflict through social groups that lack full consciousness of the effects of their actions and whose ethical characters are socially represented by members of the two sexes. We must now grasp (a) why this opposition specifically arose after 9/11, and (b) why it led both to an aggressive war in Iraq and to the rise of an “American Antigone.”11 10.  Cf., John Russon, The Self and its Body in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997): “As character-types . . . ‘man’ and ‘woman’ clearly are ethical categories, not natural ones. . . . This is not, however, apparent to the members of the ethical community [for whom] the identification of these roles with the natural sex division seems to be not a mapping on, but just a specification of the natural determination itself” (p. 165n24). 11.  Understanding apparently little of the play’s nuance, Jan Harman positively compares the two for “speaking truth to power,” in “Cindy Sheehan: American Antigone,” CommonDreams.org website, August 18, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/views05/ 0818-21.htm.

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The March to War and the Rise of Camp Casey We began by describing a post-9/11 America wherein all individuals identify with their communal substance. As Bush’s words demonstrated, within this Spiritual form, government “does indeed allow the Family [to become] an enduring being and being-for-self of its own” (455), encouraging individuals to act ethically for “Ends which are in the first instance particular Ends” (455). These ends are, of course, varied, and it would be senseless to list, let alone rank, them. What we must grasp are the overarching demands that these lived actions place on governmental policy. As suggested above, in post-9/11 America, all actions taken to protect and promote particular families require and presuppose two essential “universal” goods: security against the threat of terror and access to cheap oil. The former allows for the mere existence of families, while the latter facilitates the production of most of the goods and services required within the American economy.12 Accordingly, the post-attack actions of the government focused on bolstering national security and ensuring access to energy reserves. However, as per the above analysis regarding the self-knowledge of those that act for the human law, governmental policy in these areas has often reflected a lack of concern for the actual well-being of citizens. For those in government, ensuring national security and resources alone constitute ethical action, and thus their ethical actions inevitably take on an autocratic cast. This trend is reflected not only in the adoption of formal institutions concerned solely with security at the expense of the particular interests of families (e.g., the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping), but also in the self-understanding of the government (as when the president moves from being the “uniter” to the “decider”). Moreover, in accordance with our analysis of social representation, the president has come to be identified more closely with his sex, both by his critics (e.g., the frequent epithets of “cowboy” or “frat boy”) and by himself (the brush-cutting, the cowboy hats and jeans, the “dead or alive” warnings, etc.). Thus, as Hegel would expect, the customs of the post-9/11 populace implicitly demanded that the government act to protect the national security and resources necessary for the flourishing of families. In acting, however, the government increasingly abstracted itself from the lived experience of its citizens, developing an isolated and autocratic character that has come to be socially symbolized by the cocksure masculinity of the president. On the other side, choosing to act for the “special and independent associations” (455) of immediate family life has lead individuals to suppress their knowledge of the role that their actions play in producing the governmental 12.  On the once-conscious post-9/11 demand for more security, see, e.g., the Harris poll from September 2001, available at http://www.pollingreport.com/terror9.htm. On the role that the “American way of life” plays in increasing oil demands, see Gregory Greene’s film The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream (2004).



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mandate. As such, it is not surprising that—while initially most Americans backed legislation such as the Patriot Act and institutions such as the Department of Homeland Security, and overwhelmingly supported the “revenge” war in Afghanistan—over time the populace has increasingly come to view their government as an authoritarian institution run by and for elites. Rather than considering the role their own oil consumption plays in determining foreign policy, many contend that the administration’s fixation on petroleum reflects private, rather than public, interests (e.g., the increasing public scorn toward the Halliburton/Cheney connection, the apparently un-ironic proliferation of “No Blood for Oil” bumper stickers).13 Over time, the populace gradually disrupts the immediate unity of Spirit by calling into question the ethicality of the government whose actions transform particular families and citizens into a constant threat to national unity. When popular support slips away, the chief interest of the government lies in retrieving the unity that has been lost. Thus, Hegel argues, that in order not to let [families] become rooted and set in [their] isolation, thereby breaking up the whole and letting [communal] spirit evaporate, government has from time to time to shake them to the core by war. (455)

War, of course, is the governmental action par excellence, for it places the collective human, monetary, and material resources of the community under centralized authority for reasons of national interest. War forcibly draws back into the fold individuals who have drifted from unity with their government. As such, the fragmentation of immediate Spirit leads to aggressive wars, through which government “violates [the family’s] right to independence,” “checks [its] tendency to fall away from the ethical order,” and “shows [government] to be the real power of the community and force of its self-preservation” (455). However, government is not the real power of the community unless its war also serves the human law. Given the context, such a war would have to be launched against a nation that (a) was a sponsor of international terrorism and thus a risk to security, and (b) was in possession of significant oil reserves. Thus, Iraq constituted a perfect target14 for an aggressive war, both to reinstate popular 13.  Thus, although polling can help in determining the one-sided self-knowledge of the population, Noam Chomsky’s Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York: Metropolitan, 2006) is wrong to locate a “democracy deficit” in the split between expressed opinion and policy. There is no more reason to believe that the public statements of citizens are indicative of their actual, lived priorities than there is for those of the Bush administration. 14.  A false connection between Iraq and 9/11 was, of course, implied by various administration officials. However, the Hussein regime long supported terrorists both within Iraq’s borders (Nidal, Yassin, Zarqawi) and without (payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, involvement in the nuclear black market, etc.).

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support for the government and to fulfill the government’s self-understood obligation to the populace. In other words, given the unconsciously lived customs of the populace, a security- and oil-obsessed, autocratic administration, and the need for an aggressive war to re-unify American Spirit, war with (a country like) Iraq became historically inevitable. What sacrifices does such a war demand of families? There are assuredly many, from further restrictions upon civil liberties to tax increases or spending cuts to cover the war costs and beyond. However, war serves primarily to remind the people, in Hegel’s slightly unhelpful formulation, of “the task laid on them by their lord and master, death” (455). There is no war without casualties, and thus the inevitable, and most deeply felt, sacrifice imposed upon families by their government is the death of particular family members. Thus, the unity produced by war in Iraq was destined to have a limited life­ span, for the state called upon families to make a sacrifice that violates in the worst way the law with which most individuals immediately identify. As such, it was only to be expected that (a) a domestic anti-war movement would arise, decrying the war as a manifestation of the arbitrary will of an autocratic elite; (b) this opposition would focus on the sacrifices made by individual families, in particular, the ultimate sacrifice demanded by war—the death of a family member;15 and (c) that this opposition and the law that it breaks would come to be socially represented by a woman whose family had made it. In other words, it is historically necessary that the anti-war movement found its “face” in (someone like) Cindy Sheehan. In fact, what is most striking about the Sheehan-led opposition is its embrace of the patriarchal association of woman with family service. It is nearly impossible to find a defense of her work that does not focus on her parental role, and often her maternity alone is invoked as granting her moral superiority.16 Sheehan herself has called into question the very femininity of women who supported the war.17 Thus, just as Bush’s autocracy seems a match for his cowboy act, the divine opposition to it seems to demand Sheehan’s patriarchal maternity. 15.  Of course, Hegel offers a complex account of why the divine law is connected with burial. See Phenomenology of Spirit, pars. 451–54. 16.  Maureen Dowd, in “Why No Tea and Sympathy,” New York Times, August 10, 2005, chastises Bush and his backers for failing to “understand that the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.” One presumes she would not side with the moral stance of the grieving father who erected “Camp Qualls,” and thus we are probably safe in reading “parent” as “mother.” 17.  In “Supporting Hillary,” a message posted on Michael Moore’s website, Sheehan argues that “many American moms” oppose Clinton’s presidential campaign, because she is not a “passionate” woman but rather “a political animal who believes she has to be a war hawk to keep up with the big boys,” and expressed her disdain at pro-war “Gold Star Mothers” as follows: “I don’t want our loved ones to be used as political pawns to justify the killing spree in Iraq. I can’t believe any mother who has had her heart and soul torn



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Guilt, Destiny, and Self-Criticism The historical trajectory of immediate Spirit is essentially determined by the fact that (a) both sides act for a law that is ethically valid for the community; and (b) each side suppresses its knowledge of the ethicality of the other, and thus has only a one-sided grasp of the whole. As such, the actualization of this undivided attitude towards the law . . . qua action, turns this one-sidedness into guilt by seizing on only one side of the [whole Spiritual] essence, and adopting a negative attitude towards the other, i.e., violating it. (468)

All who act (consciously) in immediate identity with one law act against another law that they (unconsciously) justify, and as such they are (by the standard set by their own ethical behavior) guilty. Moreover, because one acts in specific opposition to another (equally valid) law, supported by another (equally one-sided) group, each side “calls [the other side] forth as a violated and now hostile entity demanding revenge” (469). Thus, the unconscious guilt of actors on each side inevitably leads to the reciprocal and hostile condemnation of the actions of others as evil and selfish, explaining why, e.g., mainstream political discourse in America has slid to the level of mere ad hominem attacks (Coulter, Moore, et al.) and occasionally degraded to vengeful violence. The reciprocal violence is justified, however, because neither side has the ethical right over the other. Drawing upon the myth cycle, Hegel suggests that this cycle of mutual guilt and revenge might lead to “the removal of the antithesis between the knowing self and the actuality confronting it” (469), thus bringing both aspects of individual behavior—“the conscious . . . bound up with the unconscious” (469)—into the knowledge of all actors. At least presently, however, this seems unlikely. On the one hand, as the war surges forward, the administration appears increasingly indifferent to the sacrifices that families (American and Iraqi) must make in the abstract pursuit of security and oil; and on the other, despite increasing anti-war sentiment (to say nothing of increasing petroleum prices), domestic energy consumption shows no signs of decreasing and is increasingly accompanied by the belief in a 9/11 conspiracy, which mainly testifies to the public’s strong presumption of national security as a “natural” given (“there couldn’t have been a real attack; they don’t happen here”). Moreover, neither side can ethically resolve the opposition by simply winning victory for its “immediate” law, for neither has right over the other. Ultimately, then, immediate Spirit is internally and essentially bound to collapse. Immediate Spirit divided against itself cannot stand, and yet its unity is always bound to fragment; thus, if nothing within American Spirit

out would wish that on another mother” (emphasis mine). Available at Michael Moore’s website, http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/index.php?id=519.

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changes, its future will be determined by a “negative power which engulfs both sides, that is, omnipotent and righteous Destiny” (472). Those who know Hegel know how this destiny unfolds. The guilt and hypocrisy rampant on both sides will reveal that the social structures of both government and family derive not from right but from the social power won by contingent individuals. No law (private or public) will be able to unify the populace in duty, and no successful ethical actors (governmental or grassroots) will be treated as anything more than singular personages who secured social power or determined social policy through contingent effort and sheer luck. With no ethical principle, law, institution, or symbolic personality to ethically unify Spirit, the community will be “shattered into a multitude of separate atoms” (476), whose only “duty” is service to themselves. Thus, we can expect a rise in greed and individualism and a drop in solidarity and activism. Widespread social and political apathy (to say nothing of potential future wars to “reunify Spirit”) is the destiny of an America whose mainstream political movements are populated and led by hypocrites who persist in seeing guilt only in others. There is, of course, another path that America can take.18 Each side is as guilty as the other of breaking and condemning a law that it unconsciously validates, and thus each side is essentially hypocritical: regardless of their actions against the government, families still demand cheap oil and tight security, and even as they act to stifle domestic dissent, government directives still require popular support. As such, neither side can expect the other to change just because it has been condemned by guilty hypocrites, for each is actualizing the ethical laws of the community. Thus, the collective guilt that destines American Spirit for ruin can only be exposed if actors on both sides voluntarily grasp the one-sidedness of their own ethical self-consciousness, i.e., if all actors freely confess their own hypocrisy. All must freely engage in the self-criticism19 requisite to becoming conscious of their implicit ethical justification for the actions they condemn. This self-criticism is not required for mere self-consistency or to secure the moral high-ground. It is a matter of recognizing that (a) one’s unconscious behavior ethically authorizes the laws and actions of one’s opponents; (b) therefore, one’s opponents are not simply selfishly “evil” but dutiful actors who seek to perform the good as they grasp it within the social conditions that both sides help create; and (c) as such, one can only hope to bring others to alter their actions by both confessing one’s own guilt 18.  This concluding sketch draws upon Hegel’s later discussion of forgiveness in “Morality” (661–71). This path is open to America because it can learn from Spirit’s previous historical developments and thus can avoid the pitfalls of earlier nations. 19.  I owe the term “self-criticism” to Heidi M. Ravven, “Has Hegel Anything to Say to Feminists?” in Mills, Feminist Interpretations, pp. 225–52.



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for (part of) their actions and acting to bring one’s own unconscious behavior in line with their conscious moral claims, thus inducing the other to do the same. Political apathy and potential future wars can only be avoided, then, through selfcritical confession and action directed toward others whose dutifulness (as well as guilt) is admitted. On the side of the government, this would clearly begin with admitting that the actions undertaken to acquire oil and security have both endangered and harmed those meant to be served by them. Oil must be publicly acknowledged as one of the motives for the war, the full extent of the torture and detention programs must be detailed, the manipulation of intelligence and public opinion must be confessed, etc., for only this full disclosure allows the populace to decide if they are content to continue to (implicitly) justify these actions. However, as few readers are likely to join the Bush administration, we should close by focusing on a few self-critical tasks for the mainstream anti-war movement. First, we must recognize the demands placed upon governmental policy by our energy consumption. When wars are fought for oil, it is not simply to raise profit margins for elites, but also to cheaply fill our cars with gas, to bring our families goods and services, etc. If we are horrified at the actions undertaken to secure our lifestyle, as we should be, then there must be an extensive alteration of lived customs in the West. Such an alteration is only deferred indefinitely by obsessing over Cheney’s oil cronies. Second, in demanding the reinstatement of civil liberties, we must accept whatever increase in the risk of terror (however small or great) this will produce. While we are right to charge that government policy increases terror’s likelihood, we should not be misled into thinking that policy alterations will eliminate it. If we condemn the extreme measures undertaken to provide security, as we no doubt should, then we must consciously accept the enhanced risks that a more open society entails, and expressly forgive our government for leaving us open to them, both in the past and future. Third, we must acknowledge that all government actions have an ethical as well as a guilty side, and thus we must forgive the government of its past evils, for we too bear partial responsibility for the social circumstances that have made security and oil overriding political duties. We only defer our own confessions and embolden the autocratic resolve of the government by embracing the increasingly popular “Bush=Hitler” style of protest. Self-criticism must not mislead us into craving “moral piety,” i.e., into striving to cleanse ourselves of the guilt that will finally belong only to others; we must rather appeal to the dutiful side of the Bush administration—however distasteful that might be—for we have been, and are, as hypocritical as them. Finally, we should condemn all sexual representation of ethical laws. While the Iraq war has occasioned the strongest opposition since Vietnam, the Sheehan-

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led movement eagerly embraced sexual stereotypes whose critique was part and parcel of that previous, endlessly self-critical opposition.20 Self-critical opposition can only be launched by condemning the expression of moral claims through the cheap, visceral appeal of a “cowboy” joke or a weeping mother in a Michael Moore close-up. Of course, nothing in such a confession implies that the government actually will reciprocate. All guilty actors live in one-sided ignorance, and no particular confession necessitates that others will join in self-criticism. Moreover, while our actions (implicitly and only partially) justified the Iraq War, confessions and reformed actions may not stop it or prevent future ones. Ethical action, grounded in freedom, has no guarantees. However, no genuine pressure to change the human law will arise unless the populace alters the divine law that justifies it, and no government will admit its hypocrisy unless it is recognized as dutiful. Thus, in order to avoid future wars for security and resources as well as the political apathy of an individualistic populace, we must begin the endless and laborious process of self-criticism, confession, and change of custom. Only then do we have any hope of forgiving the autocratic hawks in power for the horrors we have helped them to put us through.

20.  Whatever one may think of his implausible defense of the war (to say nothing of his incomprehensible take on women and humor), Christopher Hitchens is to be credited with drawing our attention to the creeping sexism directed at Shaha Ali Riza during the Wolfowitz/World Bank scandal (e.g., the frequent dismissal of her as his “girlfriend” or even “mistress” instead of “partner” in the anti-war press; the absence of any discussion of the role sex played in her dismissal, etc.). See, Christopher Hitchens, interview by Virginia Trioli, Lateline (Australia Broadcasting Corp.), May 18, 2007, transcript available online at http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s1927334.htm.