The Art of Fairness by David Bodanis

Author:David Bodanis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2021-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

NOT GIVING, BUT UNDERMINING

Get rid of the “lying” press and you have one less constraint. Get rid of every institution that keeps the current government in power—undermine the checks and balances in the Weimar Constitution—and you’ll be entirely free. Hitler needed that, and Goebbels, sharing that need, was his perfect instrument. This was the opposite of giving, and here too helps clarify the mechanism of its proper working from our first chapters.

The institutions Goebbels attacked wouldn’t feel gratitude toward him—they’d resent him—but that didn’t matter. He didn’t want their help. Instead, he wanted to break them into a series of isolated individuals, and so entirely at his whim.

A first target was the legislative branch of government, embodied in the parliament, or Reichstag. Much of the country’s institutions had been designed by the famed sociologist Max Weber, a notable figure at Goebbels’s old university of Heidelberg for many years. But how could an academic know anything? The legislature was incompetent, Goebbels and his agents insisted; it was slow and it was backward-looking, and it didn’t deserve to be listened to.

The attacks began with the mocking nicknames, and then went further. The legislature was loaded with Deserters, obviously, and no doubt with Jews, and if there were legislators who were neither Social Democrats nor Jews, yet still disagreed with Nazi policy—well, who was to say they weren’t secretly controlled by the forces of international finance, which everyone knew—for Goebbels had informed the nation of this many times—was basically Jewish? The fact that most of the main banks in Britain and France and America snobbishly kept Jews out (and in Britain and America often excluded Catholics too, for that matter) was not going to be brought to anyone’s attention.

Just as the press could be undermined by pretending they weren’t merely wrong, but malicious, Goebbels didn’t say the country was following a misled democracy, or an inefficient democracy, or a democracy that needed to be reformed. There was a better, more overwhelming term, and in his newspaper, Der Angriff, Goebbels underlined it. “We oppose a fake democracy,” he proclaimed. Who would wish to be limited by the established rules of an institution that was fake? Populist voters like to think the establishment is just a charade. Nor, because it was fake, was there any chance his party would be corrupted once they got elected and joined the legislature. When it came to “the marbled halls of parliament … [W]e do not want to join this pile of shit. We are coming to shovel it out.”

Slamming opponents in the judiciary was important too. Even when Nazi representatives began to enter the Reichstag, a few judges who respected the Weimar Constitution tried to block the worst of their acts. Goebbels turned the full force of his name-calling and public derision on them. He knew that the weak points in any constitution are the people who have to enact it. Judges who insisted on fairness were taunted for being unpatriotic, and—even if they’d been born in Germany, even if their parents and grandparents had been born in Germany—for not being properly German.

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