My German Question by Peter Gay

Author:Peter Gay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 1998-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

Best-Laid Plans

For a time it seemed as though 1937 might bring what 1936 had promised: an alleviation of pressure on Germany’s Jews, or at least no intensification. Yet this was the year in which our family made concrete plans to get us all out of the country, displaying a trust in our arrangements that in retrospect appears naive. How were we to know, when the Nazis themselves did not know, that they would drastically speed up their timetable of persecutions? The road to Auschwitz was never straight or foreseeable. But these arguments have seemed nothing better than lame excuses to the critics of German Jewish assimilation I later encountered, only too often, in the United States. For them, our situation had been obvious from the start; German Jews, they said (to borrow a phrase from the historian Charles Beard), without fear and without research, had been culpably blind in the face of spectacular warnings and had sold out to an irresponsible fantasy known as the German-Jewish symbiosis.

Self-appointed commentators, especially decades after the fact, found it all too easy to reprimand German Jewry collectively: “And you still thought, after the Nürnberg Laws and other horrors, that you were Germans?” But we were Germans; the gangsters who had taken control of the country were not Germany—we were. Like everyone else interested in this dismal controversy, I learned about the indictment of German Jewry by the great scholar Gershom Scholem; a Zionist from his youth, he had argued since the early 1920s that the notion of a German-Jewish symbiosis was sheer self-delusion. The Jews, he insisted memorably, had loved the Germans, but the Germans had never loved the Jews. Yet my parents and I did not think we were living a delusion. Granted, our Germany had taken refuge in exile or was living underground at home, and resistance to Nazi oppression appeared to be impossible. But we believed that the Nazis had no right to impose their perversion of history and biology on us.

The most formidable obstacle to fathoming things to come was doubtless the very insanity of the Hitlerian program. “It was all in Mein Kampf” has long been the litany of our detractors, who, without an inkling of what uprooting oneself meant and how hard it was to read the signals, reproached me or my parents for not having packed up on January 30, 1933, and left the country the next day. But Hitler’s threats were so utterly implausible that we regarded them as unreliable guides to future conduct. They were literally incredible. Germany, after all, was the most civilized of countries; it was the country that, next to the United States, was the haven of choice for Eastern European Jewish emigrants looking for a tolerant society relatively free of anti-Semitism. France had shown its anti-Jewish leanings in the Dreyfus case; England seemed an almost impermeable society; the German record was one of a centurylong, almost uninterrupted improvement of relations between its Jewish and gentile populations. Inflated, demagogic political rhetoric was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.