Joseph Roth: The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind
14. February 2008 14:00
Very few observers anywhere in the world seem to have understood what the Third Reich’s burning of books, the expulsion of Jewish writers, and all its other crazy assaults on the intellect actually mean. The technical apotheosis of the barbarians, the terrible march of the mechanized orangutans, armed with hand grenades, poison gas, ammonia, and nitroglycerine, with gas masks and airplanes, the return of the spiritual (if not the actual) descendants of the Cimbri and Teutoni—all this means far more than the threatened and terrorized world seems to realize: It must be understood.
(1933)
Very few observers anywhere in the world seem to have understood what the Third Reich’s burning of books, the expulsion of Jewish writers, and all its other crazy assaults on the intellect actually mean. The technical apotheosis of the barbarians, the terrible march of the mechanized orangutans, armed with hand grenades, poison gas, ammonia, and nitroglycerine, with gas masks and airplanes, the return of the spiritual (if not the actual) descendants of the Cimbri and Teutoni—all this means far more than the threatened and terrorized world seems to realize: It must be understood. Let me say it loud and clear: The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination (it will be the task of some future generation to establish the reasons for this disgraceful capitulation).
Now, as the smoke of our burned books rises into the sky, we German writers of Jewish descent must acknowledge above all that we have been defeated. Let us, who were fighting on the front line, under the banner of the European mind, let us fulfill the noblest duty of the defeated warrior: Let us concede our defeat.
Yes, we have been beaten.
Now is not the time to reach for the laurels that will one day be ours. It would be childish to predict the ultimate victory of the human spirit over the rampant denizens of the Leuna-Werke, the I.G. Farbenwerke”and other chemical and industrial giants. We are proud of our defeat. We stood in the front row of the defenders of Europe, and we were the first to be defeated. Our comrades “of Aryan descent” can still hope to be pardoned (always assuming that they will be prepared to make some concession to the language of Goebbels and Göring). There is even a chance that the vandals of the Third Reich will try to exploit such “Aryan” writers of great renown as Thomas Mann and Gerhart Hauptmann (currently persecuted) for a while, in order to trick mankind into believing that National Socialism has some respect for the human spirit. But we writers of Jewish descent are, thank God, safe from any temptation to take the side of the barbarians in any way. We are the only representatives of Europe who are debarred from returning to Germany. Even if there were in our ranks a traitor, who, from personal ambition, stupidity, and blindness, wanted to conclude a shameful peace with the destroyers of Europe—he couldn’t do it! That “Asiatic” and “Oriental” blood which the current wielders of power in the German Reich hold against us will quite certainly not permit us to desert from the noble ranks of the European army. God himself—and we are proud of the fact—will not allow us to betray Europe, Christendom, and Judaism. God is with the vanquished, not with the victors! At a time when His Holiness, the infallible Pope of Christendom, is concluding a peace agreement, a Concordat, with the enemies of Christ, when the Protestants are establishing a “German church” and censoring the Bible, we descendants of the old Jews, the forefathers of European culture, are the only legitimate German representatives of that culture. Thanks to inscrutable divine wisdom, we are physically incapable of betraying it to the heathen civilization of poison gases, to the ammonia-breathing Germanic war god.
Have German writers of Jewish extraction—or for that matter German writers—ever felt at home in the German Reich? There is a justifiable sense that German authors, of Jewish or non-Jewish origins, have at all times been strangers in Germany, immigrants on home ground, consumed with longing for their real fatherland even when they were within its borders. From the time that Bismarck’s Second Reich gave physical, materialist, and military forces precedence over the life of the intellect, when the character of the drill sergeant was proposed and recognized by the world as the typical representative of Germany, from that time German writers have felt they were living in moral banishment and exile. Behind the sergeant stood the engineer who supplied him with weapons, the chemist who brewed poison gas to destroy the human brain, and at the same time formulated the drug to relieve his migraine; the German professor, falsely depicted in German humorous satirical magazines as an absent-minded dreamer who forgets his umbrella, but who is in fact the most dangerous (the most dogmatic) enemy of European civilization: the inventor of the philological equivalent of poison gas, who is paid to disseminate the idea of Prussian superiority, the non-commissioned officer of the university, which in the time of Wilhelm II became a barracks.
In the new German Reich the only free and independent people, the only revolutionaries in the proper sense, were the writers. Which is why, long before the advent of Hitler, they felt themselves to be émigrés and expatriates in that empire of technology, of corporals, of parades, and of standing at attention. If you want to understand the burning of the books, you must understand that the current Third Reich is a logical extension of the Prussian empire of Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns, and not any sort of reaction to the poor German republic with its feeble German Democrats and Social Democrats. Prussia, the ruler of Germany, was always an enemy of the intellect, of books, of the Book of Books—that is, the Bible—of Jews and Christians, of humanism and Europe. Hitler’s Third Reich is only so alarming to the rest of Europe because it sets itself to put into action what was always the Prussian project anyway: to burn the books, to murder the Jews, and to revise Christianity.
The great historical error of the younger generation in Germany was that it subjected itself to the Prussian drill sergeant, instead of joining forces with the German intellect. About 1900 Jews started to appear in Germany who were classified as “Kaiser Wilhelm’s Jews,” or “Jewish Prussians,” or “Jewish lieutenants of the reserve,” or even “Sunday Jews.” Without setting aside their religion, they tried to transform it into a kind of Protestantism, and their temples into Prussian barracks. They referred to themselves as “German citizens of the Jewish faith” and the fact that they chose the term “German citizens” instead of merely “Germans” goes to show that they themselves sensed that citizenship was a different category from people and nation. They had just about enough willpower not to repudiate the thousand-year-old tradition of their forefathers, but they lacked the strength not to falsify this tradition. Because they didn’t have the courage to convert, they preferred instead to have the entire Jewish religion baptized. The result was Jewish priests with a Protestant bearing and in Protestant costume; “Reformed Israelite communities” that worshiped on Sundays instead of the Sabbath; Jews who had themselves driven to temple—the house of a betrayed God—on Yom Kippur in luxurious carriages, dressed in the uniforms of Prussian lieutenants of the reserve; Jews who eventually came to view the “Jewish confession” as a state-authorized concession to Jehovah as a kind of twin of the Prussian god…. They felt entitled to take out a lease on “German civilization”; inconstant and fickle as they were, to introduce and to support literary and other “fashions”; undiscriminating as they had become, novarum rerum cupidissimi, to admire every version of corruption in literature, in the visual arts, in the theater, because they had forgotten Jehovah; to profess liberalism and freethinking.
It would be true to say that, from about 1900, German cultural life was largely defined, if not dominated by this “top class” of German Jews. To be fair, what they did was not wholly bad. Even their errors were sometimes salutary. In the whole of that large kingdom with a population of sixty million, among all those industrialists, there was—individual exceptions aside—no class that was actively interested in art and intellect. As far as the Prussian Junkers are concerned, the civilized world will know that they were just about able to read and write. One of their representatives, President Hindenburg, openly admitted that he had never read a book in his life. And, incidentally, it was this icon, ancient from early youth, that the workers, Social Democrats, journalists, artists, and Jews worshipped during the war, and that the German people (workers, Jews, journalists, artists, Social Democrats, and the rest of them) then reelected president. Is a people that elects as its president an icon that has never read a book all that far away from burning books itself? And are the Jewish writers, scholars, and philosophers who voted for Hindenburg really entitled to complain about the bonfire in which our thoughts are consumed?
As for the industrialists—their minds were taken up by iron and steel, by guns and “Big Berthas”; they were smelting the modern version of “Siegfried’s sword.” The big businesspeople were producing the cheap junk labeled “Made in Germany” with which they flooded an unhappy world. Only the German Jews (doctors, lawyers, tradesmen, department store owners, artisans, or manufacturers) were interested in books, theater, museums, music. Even if they were occasionally guilty of bad taste, it remains a fact that there was no one else in the whole of Germany capable of pointing out and correcting their errors. The magazines and newspapers were edited by Jews, managed by Jews, read by Jews! A swarm of intellectual Jewish critics and reviewers discovered and promoted numerous “pure Aryan” poets, writers, and actors! Does there exist—now that theater and literature have been “cleansed”—a single outstanding actor or writer who was not recognized and praised at a time when reviewing and public opinion were in the hands of Jews? I challenge the Third Reich to come up with a single example of a gifted “Pure Aryan” poet, actor, or musician who was kept down by the Jews and emancipated by Herr Goebbels! It’s only the feeblest dilettantes who flourish in the swastika’s shadow, in the bloody glow cast by the ash heaps in which we are consumed….
From the beginning of the twentieth century, the following writers—Jews, half Jews, and quarter Jews (“of Semitic origin,” to adopt the parlance of the Third Reich)—have made their contribution to German literature!
The Viennese Peter Altenberg, a twentieth-century troubadour, a sensitive singer of female elegance and beauty, long vilified as a “decadent pornographer” by the barbarians of racial theory; Oscar Blumenthal, the author of clever comedies without any grandeur but full of taste; Richard Beer-Hoffman, a noble makar of German, an inheritor and interpreter of the biblical tradition; Max Brod, the selfless friend of Franz Kafka, a storyteller from a great tradition, full of zest and erudition, who brought back to life the great figure of Tycho Brahe; Alfred Dublin, the writer whose contribution to German literature was the character of the lower-class Berliner, one of the most original creations of the intellectual world; Bruno Frank, a conscientious wielder of words, an experienced playwright, pacifist, and singer of Prussia’s history; Ludwig Fulda, a lyric poet and author of comedies full of charm and wit; the tireless Maximilian Harden, perhaps the only authentic German man of letters; Walter Hasenclever, one of the most intense dramatists; Georg Hermann, a plain and truthful novelist of the petit bourgeoisie; Paul Heyse (half Jew), the first German Novel laureate; Hugo von Hofmannsthal, one of the noblest writers in verse and prose, the classical heir to the Catholic treasures of old Austria; Alfred Kerr, a theater reviewer of abundant imagination; Karl Kraus, the great polemicist, a master of German letters, a fanatical purist of language, an almost unassailable apostle of style; Else Lasker-Schüher, a poet: what need of an epithet, the word itself is enough; Klaus Mann (half Jew, the son of Thomas Mann), a promising young novelist, with considerable stylistic gifts; Alfred and Robert Neumann, impressive epic writers both; Rainer Maria Rilke (quarter Jew), one of the greatest European poets; Peter Panter, a witty firework of a polemicist; Carl Sternheim, one of the most acute writers of prose and drama; Ernst Toller, the poet of The Swallow Book, a revolutionary dramatist, who, for love of the freedom of the German people spent seven years in a Bavarian fortress; Jakob Wassermann, one of the leading European novelists; Franz Werfel, a lyrical playwright and novelist, and a wonderful poet; Karl Wolfskehl, a great and noble rewriter of myths; Carl Zuckmayer, a powerful dramatist; Arnold Zweig, the author of the splendid Sergeant Grisha and De Vriendt’s homecoming, an inspired novelist and essayist. An inadequate and incomplete listing of those soldiers of the intellect who were defeated by the Third Reich! The reader doesn’t need to take note of each individual name. It is enough if he salutes them, them and other Jewish writers who are among my closest friends, and whom friendship forbids me to label: Stefan Zweig, Hermann Kesten, Egon Erwin Kisch, Ernst Weiss, Alfred Polgar, Walter Mehring, Siegfried Kracauer, Valeriu Marcu, Lion Feuchtwanger, the deceased Hermann Ungar, and the revered seer and prophet, Max Picard.
I hope other German Jewish writers not on my list will forgive me for having omitted them. May those who do appear not be offended by finding their names next to those of some enemy or rival. They have fallen on the intellect’s field of honor. All of them, in the eyes of the German murderer and arsonist, share a common fault: their Jewish blood and their European intellect.
The threatened and terrorized world must understand that the arrival on the scene of Corporal Hitler does not mark the beginning of any new chapter in the history of anti-Semitism: Far from it! What the arsonists tell us is true, though not in the way they intended: This Third Reich is only the beginning of the end! By destroying Jews they are persecuting Christ. For the first time the Jews are not being murdered for crucifying Christ but for having produced him from their midst. If the books of Jewish or supposed Jewish authors are burned, what is really set fire to is the Book of Books: the bible. If Jewish judges and attorneys are expelled or locked up, it represents a symbolic assault on law and justice. If authors with European reputations are exiled, it is a way of proclaiming one’s contempt for France and Britain. If communists are tortured, it carries the fight to the Russian and Slavic world, which is always far more that of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky than that of Lenin and Trotsky. By making Austria a laughingstock, it makes a mockery of German Catholicism; and if one sets out to conquer or annex it, that is a threat to the whole of the Adriatic. Mussolini is mistaken; he has failed to understand his Cimbri and Teutoni; ages ago another Roman allowed himself similarly to be taken in by barbarians: Mussolini should have studied his Roman history more closely! By making up to the fascists, one shows one’s contempt for “Roman law.” One day the world will realize with astonishment that it was conquered by a corporal (albeit one who already had a field marshal to do his bidding!). We German writers of Jewish extraction are the first to have been vanquished for Europe. We at least are not guilty of blindness or falsehood. All we have is honor…!
The great gain to German literature from Jewish writers is the theme of the city. Jews have discovered and written about the urban scene and the spiritual landscape of the city dweller. They have revealed the whole diversity of urban civilization. They have discovered the café and the factory, the bar and the hotel, Berlin’s bourgeoisie and its banks, the watering holes of the rich and the slums of the poor, sin and vice, the day of the city and the city by night, the character of the inhabitant of the metropolis. This theme was almost imposed on the gifted Jewish writers by the urban milieu from which most of them came, to which their parents had been forced to move, and also by their more highly evolved sensibility and their Jewish aptitude for cosmopolitanism. The majority of non-Jewish German writers concentrated on the description of the rural landscapes that to them were home. In Germany, more than any other country, there is a “folk literature” based on region, landscape, tribe, often of high literary value, but necessarily inaccessible to a wider European public. As far as “abroad” was concerned, there was only that “Germany” whose literary mouthpieces were predominantly Jewish writers. It is through them that the French, the English, the American reader gain their sense of German reality. But this precisely is the basis for further accusations from narrow-minded nationalists and historians against Jewish writers. In the most infantile and jejeune manner, they took the subject matter, the setting, for the author’s personal character. A Jewish writer was “remote from the soil” when he wrote about the city; a “café house writer” when he discovered bars; a “traitor to the fatherland” when he depicted the world; a “superficial scribbler” when he found more sensual forms than the dry, abstract language of the provincial dilettante; a “feuilletonist” if he happened to have charm and lightness of touch; a “joker” if he was witty; and if he happened to take on the description of the countryside, it was straightway objected that “he saw with his head and not his heart.” Jakob Wassermann’s moving testimonial, My Career as a German and a Jew, was vilified; it was forgotten that the one and only German war song was written by an Austrian Jew who died on the battlefield, Lieutenant H. Zuckermann. They forgot the patriotic poems of Ernst Lissauer; they repudiated the Rhenish dramas of the half Jewish Zuckmayer, so popular with the theatergoing public.
Literary anti-Semitism has existed in Germany since 1900. The racist anti-Semite Adolf Barthels, the moderate anti-Semite Paul Fechter, and many others attack the literary works of Jewish writers, often with personal invective. Certainly coarse and tasteless individuals may also be found among Jewish scribblers. But it is always these who are offered as the typical representatives of the Jewish writer! As early as 1918, before putting a book on display in their windows, provincial bookshop owners would ask if an author was Jewish—not even bothering to read it. And never—even though literary anti-Semitism was growing ever more virulent—did a Jewish author say anything publicly against it. There are strong and deep friendships between German Jewish writers and the best of the non-Jewish writers. A fine German stylist like Hans Carossa (not a Jew) was discovered and promoted by an admirable Jewish writer (though not one who wants to be named in this context). Let us remind our readers that Hans Carossa was the only non-Jewish German writer who refused to belong to the academy of the “Third Reich.” The German press was silent about this refusal, so nothing is known about it abroad either.
Many of us served in the war, many died. We have written for Germany, we have died for Germany. We have spilled our blood for Germany in two ways: the blood that runs in our veins, and the blood with which we write. We have sung Germany, the real Germany! And that is why today we are being burned by Germany!
Cahiers Juifs (Paris), September/November 1933
(from the French)