Post 1/2
Hello all, I am pleased to submit to this forum an English translation of the obscure essay by famed German businessman, political critic, prolific writer and author, Peter Drucker. Originally penned in 1936.
Please note this is based on the only publicly available German text of the essay which is known to be missing two pages from the original German work. You'll notice this in a sudden shift towards the end. If anyone has access to the full essay in German, my translator will be happy to include that.
Original essay: Die Judenfrage in Deutschland, 1936 : http://ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/cdm ... ac/id/3415
The Jewish Question in Germany
By Peter Drucker.
To my father in love as a sign
Of the connection in what is human.
I.
The German people have started their national uprising with a battle against citizens of
Jewish origin. This is especially significant, not only because racial anti-Semitism is the sole basic
concept of National Socialism that until now could be implemented in full. Rather most of all because
in the racial theories, as in their implementation through the new weapons of moral ostracism and
economic boycott in place of pogroms or banishment, lie the feature that distinguishes the German
national socialistic revolution from other fascistic or pseudo-fascistic ones. The racial theories are the
essentially new thing that National Socialism has contributed to Europe’s storehouse of learning and
thought.
This author, as a German citizen of Jewish origin, is inclined emotionally to consider that other
features of National Socialism, such as its attitude to Christianity or to personal freedom, are more
important and more painful to accept than the attitude to the Jewish question. He must, however,
admit that the racial theories, as the new and original gospel of salvation of the German national
revolution, are ultimately the decisive ones for assessing it, and will be so, at least in the intellectual
sense, for its success.
Despite efforts to find a scientific basis for them, the racial theories of National Socialism are a set of
beliefs. As such, they are not accessible to rational criticism and are not to be perceived as rational.
Only belief can close the logically unbridgeable gap between the dogma of natural biological mastery
by the Nordic race, and the stronger Jewish heredity, biologically ineradicable, that allows one Jewish
grandparent’s share to invariably trump three other Nordic grandparents. We do not believe that the
two fundamental dogmas of the racial theories can be correct. Therefore, we do not consider it our
task to undertake a rebuttal of them from their totally inadequate sphere of rational thought (Ratio).
In what follows, we will leave the correctness, or lack of it, outside the contested area. We do not
consider the question as being worth investigating as to whether Jews have certain characteristics,
and which ones they are, and whether these are biologically innate to them and inalienable, or
assumed over time and therefore alienable.
Rather, we ponder why precisely these qualities have to be perceived as hostile and intolerable, and
how the battle against the Jews could have become the crystallization point of the German national
movement. We are presenting for discussion, not the timeless subject of Judaism as a spiritual
mission, that could always and without effort be obtained in detail, but rather the reasons,
conditioned by time and circumstance, for ostracizing all individuals whose predecessors were
derived from this community, with no exceptions and with no possibility of escape.
This, our task, is much more modest than the effort undertaken by both sides to find out what the
eternal mission of Jewry is, and either to damn or to glorify it. We wish neither to accuse nor to
defend, nor to present either a philosophy of history or metaphysical speculations, but rather only to
clarify. All we want is to provoke reflection about the reasons for racial anti-Semitism in Germany.
We believe that only objective self-knowledge on both sides, which finds approaches in many places
in all of the spiritual confusion of our time, can open a path to effective solution of the Jewish
question in Germany other than pogroms or mass suicide. For the way things are now, as we know
along with everyone else (and even radical anti-Semites agree on this), cannot go on much longer.
This writer can claim no other legitimacy for such a task, than that over many years he saw racial
anti-Semitism coming in Germany. Therefore, the explanation attempted in what follows is not
found as per the national socialist revolution, but rather farther back, before the national socialist
movement even arose. Despite that, this author considered it right to hold back this work, which
was essentially complete in the spring of 1933, until now, to eliminate any clouding of his judgment
by possible personal embitterment. He hopes he has succeeded in that, and that this document is
objective and free of prejudice, exclusively informed by his undiminished love of, and attachment to,
the German people.
II.
The key to understanding the Jewish question is provided, in our opinion, by the history of the Jews’
emancipation through the ideas of bourgeois liberalism, the ideas of 1789. The Jewish community, in
terms of its ideas, was a religious one, that of the chosen people, even if this idea only could
materialize in blood terms by a certain race, which we do not wish to discuss here. The form of the
Jewish community, that of a monotheistic theocracy, formally the same as Christendom, made it the
only form capable of surviving the breakdown of ancient life. The dual religious relation to
Christendom as a community of the old covenant, and therefore both the origin and earthly tie as the
place of execution of the Redeemer, and “fulfilled” by his death, made Jews spiritually inaccessible for
Christendom. It ensured them a unique position in the Christian cosmos as those Most Highly
Favored and Most Deeply Rejected. They were not inside, but also not outside of the spiritual order
expressed in the triple division of the world into Christians, Jews and heathens.
The identity of the organizational forms gave them a place in the world order of the Middle Ages,
likewise not outside it, but also not inside it, expressed in the Jews being forced into commercial
occupations and being limited to these. Since the collapse of the world of the Middle Ages, since faith
is no longer the sole force that creates a community, there has been a Jewish question. If also not for
the moment for the Jews, who, encouraged by having their main locus in the East, were ever more
isolated, passing through their religious-mystical renaissance movement, Hasidism, in the 18th
century, the century in which religious life underwent its steepest decline in Europe. However, for
the outside world, it was increasingly incomprehensible that a community lived in its midst that was
built on a basis disowned by Europe, isolated by it and isolating itself.
We cannot emphasize enough how important it seems to us that Jewish emancipation did not
come from within Judaism, and that thus Judaism has not developed internal power that would have
given it a place in the European order. Rather, the emancipation occurred from without, from ideas
of bourgeois liberalism hostile to community and connectedness. The Jews were freed from the
ghetto not as “Jews,” but as “humans” and “citizens,” in the name of equality. However, that cannot
mean anything else than that the Jews were freed, by destroying the bonds of Judaism: for the
concept of the chosen people with its claim to totality, on which the Jewish community rests, is in
fact connected with the ghetto, but is totally unable to relate to bourgeois equality, although often
the Jews did not become conscious of this.
Pious Jews in central or western Europe were anxious to observe everything prescribed by their faith,
and therefore really felt themselves to be Jewish, If they promoted and assumed bourgeois equality,
they would no longer be proper “Jews” in accordance with the concept of Judaism, any more that a
Catholic who regularly went to confession, but no longer believed that the church alone could make
one holy, would be a true Catholic.
Therefore, Judaism was not able to develop any counterforce that would have given emancipated
Jews a “Jewish community” able to be coupled and incorporated in the bourgeois world. Thus it
happened that the emancipation appeared not just as being freed from the outer limitations, but also
to the same degree as being freed from the suppression of all worldly knowledge, all worldly intellect.
It appeared as being freed from the limitation to the spiritual and spatial confinement of waiting for
the Messiah and of mourning lost greatness, from the banning of all culture and everything of beauty,
as being freed from Judaism itself.
Through emancipation, Jews lost their Jewish community and connectedness. Therefore, of necessity,
the emancipated Jew makes his claim in society not on the basis of his “Jewishness,” but rather on the
basis of his “no-longer-Jewishness,” on the basis of the bourgeois equality of all. Therefore, of
necessity, released through the forces of liberalism, he is a representative of liberal ideas. Following
the destruction of his own community, these ideas alone could give him a place in human society.
What a paradox the result of this development in fact is, only becomes clear, when one considers that
only the most devoted conservatism has held the Jews together through all those centuries.
Two factors have provided support to emancipated Jews’ acceptance of bourgeois liberalism
throughout Europe, and promoted maintenance of it. First, liberalism emancipated the Jews only in
western and central Europe. But in terms of numbers, in the east, where Jews preponderantly lived, it
failed to do so. There the ghetto continued to exist, and suppressions and persecutions persisted.
Therefore, Jews constantly emigrated to the west- to freedom- and the problems of emancipation
could not reach equilibrium. Owing to Jewish persecution in the east, the western, totally
emancipated, totally “de-judified” Jews were constantly being shaken awake, and in them a common
feeling of responsibility for the fate of eastern European Jews was aroused, which reminded them of
their common origin with them. Although naturally given a predominantly religious emphasis, this
feeling of community could not help but lead to strengthened accentuation of liberalism, to
summoning the “liberal world conscience,” since the pogroms were religious persecutions. This was
because the sole salvation for eastern Jews lay in victory of liberal ideas, religious tolerance and
bourgeois equality.
The second factor was that the “bourgeois occupations,” i.e., the socially approved
occupations in bourgeois society, were the ones offered first to Jews liberated by bourgeois liberalism
and, in many countries, the only ones open to them. These occupations simultaneously best suited
the Jews’ capabilities. Whatever the original situation of the Jews may have been, mention of the
Jewish artisans in London’s East End should suffice to refute the myth that Jews were incapable of
manual labor. Likewise, mentioning the misery of a million to a million and a half lower-class Jewish
merchants in New York should also put to rest the other myth that craftiness in business appears
among them under all circumstances. It is certain that a thousand years of forced limitation to
commercial activity under the most difficult external circumstances could not but help the Jew to
develop strong capabilities in commerce. Likewise, the also coerced financial monopoly was
developed due to the church’s prohibition on usury. A religion of laws, made rigid in forms and legal
clauses, by which spiritual life alone could be carried on, could not help but raise Jews to be lawyers.
Maintaining and preserving the medical traditions of ancient times produced traditions and talent in
medical care.
Therefore, the Jews brought strong capabilities to bourgeois occupations, all the more so as access to
other professions was precluded owing to the nature of things, even in those places where no legal or
societal difficulties were imposed. For people cannot become farmers at all in countries where there
already are farmers, and only with difficulty in newly founded countries without farming traditions.
Also handicrafts, owing to the regulations of the guilds, became hard to access in most European
nations. Apart from this, it is also natural that, as liberals, Jews would strive toward those professions
that gave them a chance to advance.
The ancient antagonism between Christians and Jews would also have imposed a problematical
special situation for Jews (as circumstances in America show) even if liberalism had succeeded in
dissolving all connections and creating from them a new European community. But, as we have
already discussed, by no means did it penetrate into all regions, and in those places where it did
penetrate, not equally strongly by any means. Rather, it also got stuck spiritually. The failure of
liberalism to create a society based on the equality of all persons led to its becoming purely a negative
force that only dissolved. For emancipated Jews, and for Jews “released” from their community, this
produced a problem of assimilation, i.e., of fitting into the European community-forming
connections: the connection of the church, and the counterforce that developed from liberalism, the
Nation. This problem is different in its particulars in every country, depending on how much
liberalism penetrated, and in what manner. For example, in England, where the basic concept of
religion as a “private matter” triumphed totally, the problem of assimilation is purely a populace one:
the Jew there is seen by the populace as other, to the point where proving the opposite as
extraordinarily difficult. The reverse is true in France, where the populace’s conception became fully
wedded with the French version of liberalism. There the Jewish question assumes a predominantly
religious tone, and it is no accident that the Dreyfuss Affair has led to lay partisanship (“Laizismus”).
The situation is much more complicated in Germany, which we will be addressing in greater detail.
Before that, however, we must spend some time on the overall problems of assimilation.
The tragedy of assimilation is that emancipated Jews, who are bereft of community and
connections, must of necessity view the problems as solvable by the individual and through the good
will of the individual – of which there has never been a lack on both sides. Meanwhile the
community, due to its character as such, is seen as a community problem, and every effort of
individuals to solve it as an individual, is perceived as contradictory to its basic principles, and as
hostile. This is most salient in the problem of Jews and the Church. Jews, emancipated although they
are heretical, could not acknowledge the demand of the Christian Church that they be members of it
as a prerequisite to membership in European communities as well as individual national
communities, because it directly contradicted the principles emancipating them. If they stayed
religious Jews, naturally they had to defend this claim vis-à-vis the “Religion-is-a-private-matter”
principle, and thus deny the communal nature of the Church, in other words the Church itself.
Therefore, membership in the Jewish religion means being Other and Outside. Individual
assimilation without an inner, and not merely superficial, assumption of the Christian faith, is just as
impossible as is a full solution of the problem of community of Jews if a Jewish religious community
worth the name is to continue, in our opinion. (We hope that from this determination no one in any
manner will read a denial, enmity or intolerance against Jewish faith. We only believe that it is
necessary clearly to express the either-or nature of the assimilation problem.)
Clear recognition of this situation was made more difficult in that just converting to
Christianity could not by itself solve the assimilation problem. For the Church’s claim to be the sole
basis for community in Europe very obviously conformed less and less to reality to the extent that the
Nation State made the same claim. Jews, however, lack the historical development in both that
reconciles their claims. One convincing proof for our thesis is the fate of two men that were very
much alike, August Neanders, the great Protestant church historian, and Friedrich Julius Stahl, the
greatest political thinker of German positivist Protestantism. Neander grew up in the ghetto and
became acquainted only rather late in life with German culture and its intellectual traditions. From
the start, Stahl grew up in German culture and in the intellectual atmosphere of the Classics. But
Neander was never regarded as being Jewish, but Stahl always was, because during the fifteen years
that lay between these two men, the French Revolution had done its work, and liberalism and the
new linkage into the Nation had decisively weakened the community-forming power of baptism.
Therefore, to the extent that community-forming power had been removed from baptism,
emancipated Jews had to perceive religion increasingly as a “private matter,” and the claim of the
Church as increasingly groundless. This is explained not only by the marked preference they gave to
Protestantism upon conversion as the “more free religion,” – although Catholicism would probably
have been a much better fit to Jewish religious notions – but also by the “liberal” attitude of even the
most pious and convinced of the converts to Christianity. This was found even among those Jews
who had grown up in the Christian faith, who had to accept the exclusive claim of Christianity, even
if, like Stahl, they were rigorously orthodox and filled with the notion of the “Christian state.”
Therefore, an inner tension remained between having origins in Judaism and Christian faith, which –
if we dare introduce the word – had a negative community-forming effect. By this we mean that the
Jews, though no longer linked into any community, as a result of their same (but not communitarian)
attitude to the Church and to the Christian faith, would be perceived as from a foreign community by
it, even though they did not perceive themselves thus. This exclusion (or more accurately, this inner
reservation) would naturally seem to the Jews as being forced back under the yoke of the Jewish
community broken apart and scrapped by liberalism. It would be perceived as a denial of equality, as
something “reactionary,” and bind them even more strongly to liberal tendencies at odds with the
Church.
Something else was developing in parallel, if also as a consequence of the larger differences,
much more manifold, in the relationship between liberalism and the Nation State in the various
countries in particular. This was the clash of the Jews with that other community, the Folk. Here
also of necessity they had to try to bridge the antagonism between liberal emancipation from the
claim of exclusivity of the “chosen people” and the reassertion of this claim of exclusivity by the
Nation, from individuals outward through “national convictions” or through especially close
penetration of the national culture and history. And of necessity this effort was to remain inadequate,
being totally against the spirit of communalism.
The role that the continuation of the Jewish religion plays in relationship to Christianity, is played in
relation to the Nation in eastern Judaism. As long as there is an eastern Judaism as a closed
community, in particular on a religious basis and thus a transnational one, and as long as the effort of
eastern Jews to reach the west continues as a movement toward “freedom,” to emancipation, that is
how long the Jews must of necessity confront the claim of exclusivity that is similar to that of the
Church, based on the national community derived from a common historical experience.
This not only means that they less often incline toward blind nationalism, but most of all, that even if
they become most deeply bound to the Folk to which they have attached themselves, and which they
most wholeheartedly strive to enter into, they are able to see national community according to liberal
ideas as only part of the world community or of the European community, even if it is the best and
most important one. There is nothing accidental about the fact that the nationalistic movement that
Hitler drew instruction from, the “Get-Free-from-Rome” movement of Georg von Schönerer in
Austria, campaigned equally against the Catholic Church, the Hapsburg dynasty and the Jews as antinational
and supernational. For even though the Church’s concept of universality and the empire
(“Reich”) concept handed down from the house of Hapsburg differed from the messianic hopes of the
Chosen People, what is common to them is being anchored in an ultimate Spirituality, that cannot be
reconciled with deification of this world and worship of success, which are essential to every form of
nationalism.
From this position of the Jew-and-Nation problem, the objection is also answered that we have
frequently enough heard against our explanation: Frenchmen in Germany, Germans in France, and in
short inhabitants of any white nation, are subsumed within one or two generations into their new
nationality, and only Jews fail to do this. Our explanation is that all the others derive from a nation,
i.e., from the same communitarian basis. Therefore they acknowledge their claim to exclusivity,
while the emancipated Jews come from outside. Therefore the position of the Nation to the Jews is
entirely different from that to inhabitants of other nations. Jews in their own country are not viewed
as inhabitants of a foreign nation, as foreigners, but rather as something that half does belong and half
does not, with the category of the nation not considered as fully comprehensible. This is most clearly
manifested in the fact that each nationality is accustomed to view the Jews of another nationality
primarily as Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Germans, and only secondarily as Jews. Meanwhile, their
own Jews appear primarily as such, and secondarily as fellow countrymen. This naturally will have a
negative impact on community forming to the same degree as the relationship of the Jews to the
Church does extraordinarily much to push Jews to relate to international ideas of bourgeois
liberalism.
Also, the romantic attempt of Zionists to create a “Jewish people” based on modern concepts of the
Nation, is naturally only a reaction to the problem of assimilating into the Nation. Beyond that, it is
the strongest symptom of total destruction of the only purely Jewish community, the religious one,
and the hope for a messiah, as well as for the longing of the Jews for a newly effective community
and connection.
Also, the status of the emancipated Jew toward society is primarily determined by the fact
that as someone released and liberated, he lacks linkages. Thus we in no way want to deny the
significance which having origins in the Jewish community, or being a member of the Jewish
religion, has for the individual. But this significance lies precisely in the fact that having origins in
the Jewish community is the reason for standing on the outside, and for exclusion. The effect of this
for the Jews themselves in their status vis-à-vis Judaism is that they deny the communal character of
Judaism. Even the most pious emancipated Jew, who is entirely positively inclined to the religious
content of Judaism, denies that his religion is something that basically distinguishes it from others,
and that it is something other than a “private matter.” For him, it is very obviously more than that:
it prohibits him from entering into mixed marriages and makes it quite difficult to mix socially with
non-Jews. For religiously indifferent Jews – and naturally still more for Jews who have abandoned
the Jewish religion – to that must be added that in emphasizing the significance of derivation from
Judaism, no matter from which side they may come, a yoke is seen that is always forced on them
against their will, against which they struggle.
Thence comes the deep, if for the most part unadmitted anti-Semitism of liberal Jews that derives
from instinctive recognition by individuals of the true reason for the failure of assimilation. It
contrasts strangely with the feelings that Jews have of belonging together as people without
connections, deriving naturally from a common exclusion.
For non-Jews, the Jewish question is precisely the problem of those who have been “dejudaized”
through common historical circumstances, who have been torn from their connections and
are individualized “no-longer-Jews.” What to the non-Jew will seem to be “typically Jewish” and
foreign is a product of the de-judaizing emancipation that gives special emphasis to the lack of
connectivity. With this in no way do we want to deny that there is a Jewish person with certain
characteristics, deficiencies and tendencies. But the characteristics that play a role for the Jewish
question, i.e., that are felt to be foreign and separating, are just those that are found in all who lack
connectivity, which is shown by creation in the national socialist vocabulary of the term “Judaized
Intellectual.” In the same way, Irish intellectuals in England (like Bernard Shaw) have a position
very similar to that of Jewish intellectuals in England.
More than anything else, it is the intellect, the purely critical, uncreative understanding, that is
considered to be typically Jewish. However, only through destruction of connections and limitation
of the intellect in faith – in non-Jewish as well as in Jewish intellectuals - has the intellect retained its
position and its subversive effect.
The best proof for our thesis is the fact that the most strongly “Jewish” Jew, the one most
deeply bound into the Jewish community, the strict orthodox Jew, living half in a voluntary ghetto, is
sensed as being the least problematical one. It is precisely the first generation of the emancipated
ones, who no longer has any Jewish nor any other connection, that is especially considered “Jewish.”
The best and most well known example of this is Raabe’s “hunger pastor.” The Jewish question,
therefore, is a question of “no-longer-Jews,” “no-longer-desiring-to-be-Jewish ones,” all of whom,
torn from Judaism, are determined, formed and connected by this historical experience. Therefore,
the Jewish question is only secondarily dependent on activities of Jews themselves, but primarily by
the development and posture of liberalism and the liberal bourgeoisie in the various countries1.
1) It is from this lack of connectivity above all that the tendency toward socialism is explained, which, with its
equalizing tendency, is as un-Jewish as it is possible to be; but Marxist socialism is accessible solely from
liberalism, because the connection developed from it, or more correctly, the sham connection – and therefore it
is the natural refuge of all liberals that sense their lack of connectivity as homelessness. Add to this that for
Russian Jews, communism promised to play this same role that liberalism had played, and is playing, in the
West, that of the liberator.
Continued in next post...
Peter Drucker, Jewish Question in Germany; 1936 ENGLISH!!
Peter Drucker, Jewish Question in Germany; 1936 ENGLISH!!
Post 2/2
[text missing] there where liberalism is weakest, the social denigration of the Jews was greatest, in Berlin and in
Catholic Munich; Frankfurt, with its large Jewish population, long-established, is a special case. Therefore in
Germany the Jews have had an extraordinarily large share of bourgeois features, and of necessity must have it.
This, naturally, had a reverse effect on them that was decisive. Holding firm to the Jewish religion – a
natural reaction in other countries where the Jews’ standing is much more “distant” – appeared ever more
senseless in Germany. Religious indifference among the Jews was amplified by the religious indifference of the
entire German bourgeoisie. It was further promoted by the fact that, not by law, but de facto, the state
discriminated against the Jewish religion. A Jew could not become an officer, a public official, a university
professor or a judge.
But baptism opened up all these paths and a baptized Jew even became a personal adjutant to the last German
Kaiser. This of necessity led to conversions on a large scale, and still more to the baptism of babies newly born
to Jewish parents. Religious indifference on both sides of necessity resulted in mixed marriages within the
Jewish and non-Jewish intelligentsia, bound by a common liberalism, i.e. by common opposition. The strong
predominance of Jews in commercial occupations resulted in money-motivated marriages by impoverished
members of the nobility, with Jewish blood getting into the gentry in large amounts. This trend was known to
Kaiser Wilhelm II, and he did not view it with displeasure. In the interest of maintaining the standard of living
of his guards officers, he is said even to have promoted it.
Thus it happened that in Germany the Jews have come to make up not only an unusually large share of the
liberal intelligentsia, but also that the non-Jewish bourgeoisie, especially the intelligentsia, is mixed with Jewish
blood to a high degree. In contrast, hardly any Jews are found in the other social strata, since everyone was
absorbed into the bourgeoisie, insufficiently supplied as it was with fresh blood. Therefore, the share of Jews,
and the strong penetration of Jewish blood has become an essential feature of German liberal bourgeoisie,
through which the bourgeoisie has become distinguished from all the other societal strata, especially from the
petty bourgeois.
Numerous factors have accelerated and promoted this development, in that they facilitated assimilation
or at least appeared to do so. One primary factor is that it took until the 19th century for Jews to emigrate into
all the western European countries, with the exception of Holland. In contrast, they have resided in Germany
for centuries, if not a millennium. It is a Jewish characteristic to be named after one of the oldest German cities
or districts. All of the nonreligious culture of the Jews therefore is also German, from the language of the
eastern Jews. This is known to have started as essentially German from the late Middle Ages. Therefore,
emancipated Jews were inclined to view Germany as their natural spiritual homeland.
The result of all this, then - as remarkable as it may sound today – was that no country was so ready to
accept Jews as was Germany. After the collapse of European spiritual unity, all the western European countries
have developed their own spiritual forms, in many ways, as in England. It is a uniform which they require
everyone to put on, and which they demand that everyone acknowledge. In Europe, Germany alone remained
to carry within itself all the sites, battlefields, places where all spiritual conflicts were resolved, full of unlimited
extent. All the streams, thoughts and ideas were carried by it freely, at the cost of unity and of form. Therefore,
in Germany, no demand was made that foreigners assume a new form. Rather, the stranger was greeted as a
contribution to the spiritual cosmos in which the life of the German nation took place. He retained his special
character and was cared for.
Therefore, the bourgeoisie, the social strata that carried intellectual life in the 19th century, was friendly and
unreserved in its acceptance of the Jews in Germany, not demanding that they change in any fundamental way.
A few regions, such as Oberhessen, where a historically justified anti-Semitism existed, constituted an
exception. Otherwise there was no place in Germany where there existed the effective inner distancing and
foreignness vis-à-vis the Jews, as it did in England itself and in the liberal circles friendly to the Jews. With no
envy, German bourgeoisie permitted them to take up bourgeois professions. Without envy, their supremacy in
some of these professions was endured, and even promoted.
But it is precisely as a consequence of this structure of Germany that the position of Jews within liberal
bourgeoisie would become particularly problematical. Since Germany has no spiritual fixed point, every lack of
connectedness has a dual dangerous effect, and is doubly subversive. Because the national connection in
Germany is something so problematical, the existence of the Jews from a national standpoint would be felt all
the more strongly and negatively than in countries where the connectedness within the people is something
secure and self-evident. Still more is this the case for religion, because there rages in the soul of every German
the fateful German battle between Protestantism and Catholicism, between the unifying Germano-Prussian
nation and the Holy Roman Empire. The existence of a Jewish religious community must be felt as a painful
foreign body. If the Jews in other countries are a grain of sand in the skin, in Germany they are a grain of sand
in the eye, which causes overall pain despite being so small. This special, unavoidable Jewish question in
Germany, which of necessity made the Jews to be a “subversive element,” was doubly and triply salient owing
to their prominent position in a bourgeoisie that was already hostile to connectivity and subversive of forms.
That is no fault of the Jews, but is a tragic debt.
The Jewish question was so especially palpable in Germany, because the self-dissolution of Jews had
progressed so far. Precisely because of this, in our view, after their being dissolved on [discontinuity here
between pages 12 and 13 of the original] Jew – the product of hundreds of years of oppression – naturally has to
be especially tender and hard, to be able to assert themselves. Naturally enough, these qualities adhered to a
greater or lesser degree to the first generation freed from the ghetto, when the barriers of oppression were
dropped. But this especially strong vitality would be lost, the more the Jews lived in a carefree manner. And
along with this, the natural competitive edge of Jewish persons would become ever less.
This assertion may perhaps provoke alienation at first glance, because it coincides with National
Socialism’s assertion that the Jews are acquiring ever-greater influence in Germany. Further on we shall clarify
this apparent contradiction, and wish now to present a few facts only to support our assertion: Before the war,
for example, virtually all the leading positions in German business were in Jewish hands. In contrast, after the
war, there have been only two speculators, Jacob Michael and Jacob Goldschmidt, along with one captain of
industry, Silverberg, that have reached a high level. Apart from these exceptions, no new Jewish commercial
leaders have made it big in Germany. Not only that, the pre-war positions held by Jews in business have all
passed to non-Jews. Even in the intellectual professions, we believe that a universal reversal of Jewish
predominance can be documented. We believe the numbers can back this up. We believe that statistics on, for
example, the numbers of Jewish university students in the postwar years, in relation to those of other university
students, would, quite naturally, correspond to the overall tendency of Jews to be increasing in absolute
numbers. But it would lag extraordinarily far behind the increase in non-Jewish students, thus yielding a drop
in the Jewish share.
What is certain is that the number of Jews who have assumed a leading position in free occupations has been in
the process of declining. In postwar Germany, no Jewish attorney succeeded in attaining a position similar to
that of a Hachenberg, Mamroth or Pinner in the prewar period. Naturally, this applies only to the free
professions, not to public officials, professors or assistant positions, from which Jews were more or less excluded
before the war. Therefore, following the war, i.e. after these positions became open to Jews, there was a very
pronounced increase. There is one thing that seems to us to be far more important than all of this in refuting
the notion that Jews have a special position in Germany, and that is the increasing numbers of Jews who are in
white-collar positions with no chance for advancement. Owing to this, the distribution of occupations among
German Jews has moved more and more toward being equal to that of all Germans.
Still more than the biological factor, the spiritual one was to work toward a rapid and complete
solution of the Jewish question in Germany. In no other country have the Jews felt their special position, their
separation, to be as painful as in Germany, since in no other country have they felt themselves to be so little
Jewish, so much as citizens of the country. In no other country, therefore, have the best among them viewed
their Judaism so much as a special obligation vis-à-vis the national culture. This tragic conflict between a deep
yearning and love for German-ness and the feeling of not fully belonging to it, the tragedy a Gundolf, a
Hoffmannsthal, and also a Rathenau, is found only among German Jews. Therefore, the Jews also have
cooperated decisively in solving the German problem of living, of uniting in one nation: Friedrich Julius Stahl, a
conservative, and Eduard von Simpson, a liberal, were pathfinders for Bismarck’s Second Reich. Lassalle was
another, from whom not only the term “national socialism” derives, but also the idea of a national workers’
movement for reconciling the people, with a first effort to incorporate the working class into the Nation.2
We in no way want to deny that these tendencies within German Jewry are opposed by plenty of others. We
attribute particular significance to them, because we see the decisive historical event as being formation of a
unified German nation, through which the integration of the Jews, and the complete solution of the German
Jewish question could be brought to completion.
Germany’s decisive national experience that could have led to creation of a German people was the World War.
Because we were the losers in it, its natural consequence should have been a national renewal. The alleged
”shirking” of the Jews cannot be the cause, not least because the Jews, who participated in this violent national
event, fighting at the front, were integrated into the new national community. But even they have been
defamed and boycotted. The stone honoring the memory of the sole German member of the Reichstag who
volunteered for the war, Ludwig Frank, one the two fallen people’s representatives, was removed from its
cemetery and destroyed. This is because Ludwig Frank was a Jew, and in numerous places in Germany, the
names of the fallen on war memorials who were Jews have been removed. What is the reason that the Jewish
question in France, for example, was as good as completely solved through the uniting experience of the World
War, while in Germany, during the World War, 3 in contrast it resulted in complete exclusion of Jews from the
national community? 2 We do not wish to go in any further detail into the share of Jews in development of national socialist ideology. We have to be content to indicate the great influence Gundolf and Wolf-Kehl have had through the propagation of
Stefan George’s ideas, or how philosophical empiricism was overcome by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.
3 For the same reasons, things developed very similarly in Hungary and Austria, but we will not delve further into
this in what follows.
IV.
With the founding of the Weimar Republic in Germany, the Jewish question emerged from being an
insignificant side matter into a political problem of the first rank. This is because, owing to their position within
the German bourgeoisie, the Jews of necessity would be considered to bear responsibility for the origin and
development of the German Republic.4 Prior to 1918, the very uppermost political and societal strata – princes,
court nobility, officials and military officers - were practically free of Jews and also largely free of mixed blood
with Jews. In practice, Jews never enjoyed full equality as citizens and free access to all professions. 1918
provided the Jews not only with full equality and free access to all the professions, but owing to the collapse of
the strata that had until then been the social and political leaders, leadership passed to the “second front” of
societal structure, the intelligentsia. But, as the only class in Germany, it had such a large share of Jews and was
so strongly intermingled with Jewish blood, that, as we have seen, this was to be perceived as its most
important feature.
Even if, as we stated, the de facto influence of Jews within the bourgeoisie was declining, nonetheless the
fact that societal leadership had passed from a Jew-free stratum to one strongly infiltrated by Jews, appeared to
amount to an enormous increase in Jewish influence. Therein lies the explanation of why the assertion that
solely the increase in number of Jews in the “decisive” profession appeared to be supported by directly
evidence, and could not be refuted by citing numbers. The effects of the inflation exacerbated this. Just like the
rest of the middle class, the intelligentsia had lost its possessions; but income, not possessions, has always been
decisive with the intelligentsia. Since this could be brought up again after the inflation, the intellectuals
asserted their social standing.
Contrast that with the middle class engaged in commerce and trade. In the first years of the Republic, it
still formed the backbone of the bourgeoisie. When the Republic formed, it completely reverted to being
proletarian, since its bourgeois status had been built on assets saved on relatively small incomes during the long
years of peace. Through this the new system’s societal leadership passed more strongly to that stratum whose
most conspicuous feature was being mixed with Jews.
This development would have caused the intelligentsia to become the leading class, since that was the sole
essential change in the German social structure through and since 1918. Since then, it would of necessity result
in the altered status of the Jew being perceived as the essential new thing in the new system. This has no other
meaning than that the Jews would be made responsible for the
4 The similar standing of social democracy has made it responsible for the Weimar Republic, and lead to ‘anti-
Marxism’, to which we can refer now only briefly.
system and its development. This was now given extraordinary encouragement in that the Jews could not so
easily make their exit from liberalism than other bourgeois, because it had brought them their equality and was
their guarantee. To the extent that ever broader strata of the German people turned away from the Weimar
Republic and rejected the principles of bourgeois liberalism, to the degree especially that the middle class,
dispossessed by the inflation, “decamped from the bourgeoisie,” it would more and more be only the Jews and
“judaized intellectuals” who would stand for these principles, for bourgeois freedom and equality, for
maintaining the bourgeois commercial and societal order.
Therefore, the more the middle class of the German people inclined to the view that bourgeois liberalism had
brought only disadvantage to them, the more striking it would be that it undeniably brought advantage to the
Jews. Therefore it cannot be a surprise that a solution for such a conspicuous clash between the advantages of
the Jews, and that which ever wider classes of the people considered to be advantageous to Germany was,
according to the cui bono principle, was found in this: the Jews are responsible not just for how the Republic
developed, but also they created this regime to their advantage over Germany.
Investigating the reasons for the collapse of the Weimar Republic in detail is outside the framework of
this study. However, we must go into it to the extent that the explanation for racial anti-Semitism lies therein.
German liberalism came to power not through its own strength, but – following the spiritual and economic
collapse of the monarchy – through the German people’s belief in Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which linked
assumption of the democratic form of government with the promise of a just peace. This promise was broken at
Versailles. Germany, in the name of democracy, self-determination of peoples, and freedom, was condemned to
lingering inequality and eternal loss of rights. Along with it, Germany was ejected from the bourgeois
community established on the principle of national equality.
The spiritual rug had been pulled out from under the feet of German democracy. From then on, the principles
of bourgeois liberalism appeared increasingly as false and hypocritical to the Germans. And this to an increasing
degree, as passing years proved that this loss of rights was conceived to be permanent. The Polish corridor and
Upper Silesia were stolen; the Ruhr was invaded, followed by occupation of the Memel district, and so forth.
This continued for years until Brüning’s customs union with Austria was vetoed, and Germany’s disarmament
negotiations would lead to the view that the victors themselves did not believe in the honorability of their
promises, and thus also not in the basic principles of liberalism. Rather, they saw these as mere means to
maintain their position, and were denied as soon as they turned against them.
Democracy, citizen representation, a worldwide economy, pacifism, and in short all the articles of
belief of bourgeois liberalism necessarily became instruments to keep Germany down. Those who represented
these would be seen as working in the interest of enemies, against Germany’s interests. Of necessity, this
foreign-policy development sooner or later would have led to a collapse of formal democracy in Germany, as
being inimical and foreign to the people. Inflation, which for the most part traced back to foreign-policy causes,
and its effects, then also pulled the economic rug out from under the feet of democracy and destroyed bourgeois
consciousness in Germany – something that was weak in any case – as well as belief in the bourgeois economic
order and bourgeois morality.
Thus from these premises followed the development and subsequent collapse of the German Republic.
The spiritual and de facto leaders of the German republic, the German liberal bourgeoisie, especially the
intelligentsia, have little to exonerate them from guilt in this. With a comprehensive lack of instinct, - among
German nationals as well as among the social democrats who became liberal petty bourgeois – not a single one
of the problems was recognized, let alone solved. The German Republic could not only have been kept, but
could have been made into an effective unit of the German people, if it had succeeded in founding a new
national community from the pathos of defeat after four years of war, instead of splitting the nation in endless
quarreling and de-unification. From the injustice and deception at Versailles, it could have created a new
European task with Germany as the pioneer for a genuine, just, lasting peace based on equality and the right of
peoples to self-determination, instead of being alone in leading a foreign-policy battle against economic
burdens, and neglecting the moral facets which were decisive. From the collapse of the capitalistic economic
order in the inflation, it could have founded a new cooperative one. Above all, it could have been a leadership,
if the Weimar Republic advocates had not forced Brüning, the sole effective leader, to constantly run through a
punishing gauntlet.
In all of this, liberalism failed, and therefore it could not only appear as inimical to and subversive of the
people, but also in fact acted that way. Because – and this is where the true core of the “stab-in-the-back”
legend lies – for the German people, it did in the fruits of the great and awful national experience of the World
War, and it killed German unity. Every member of the German bourgeoisie or the German intelligentsia (the
author in no way excludes himself) who complains about the current situation, should first ask himself whether
he can acquit himself of all guilt for that, before he shifts guilt onto the “stupidity of the masses” or the effects
of the world economic crisis.
Liberalism collapsed because it appeared to be foreign and hostile to the people and Germany appeared to have
been imposed on by the Western powers. Spiritually, it was too infertile to undertake the necessary domestic
reform for “living democracy.” Therefore, those who represented it in Germany or were held responsible for it
were likewise battled against as hostile and foreign to the people. The Jews, as we stated, were held responsible.
With this, the possibility arose for anti-Semitism as a means to fight against the Republic, without being only a
“cheap bet on low mass instincts.” But if in this fight, it came to anti-Semitism, then it had to be a racial anti-
Semitism. Because in fact the fight was conducted to produce unity in the German people, a people who cannot
be harnessed in their eternal idea, the idea of a Reich, in the narrow confines of the modern national concept,
by those who do not wish to see the Reich idea and cannot grasp it.
Therefore, a term – or at least a word – had to be found that was broader than that of the Nation. At the same
time, this term had to result in a setting of a boundary against the Jews. They were not separated from the
Germans nor connected among each other by anything that was nation-forming – not language, religion,
culture, nor, among the majority, through outward appearance, and only partially by their history. That was
because, as we have been at pains to prove, they had no actual community. And finally, this new term for unity
would have to explain why all intellectuals were liberal, and perceived as subversive. This is explained only by
the racial concept, which explains that many intellectuals, whom no one would consider to be anything other
than Germans, in actuality, are “of a foreign race.”
Could the Jews have prevented this development? We believe not. For the position of the Jews within
liberalism implied that only what they did to promote liberalism appeared as “typically Jewish,” and was
attributed to the totality of the Jews. All other types of activities by Jews or non-Aryans had to remain out of
consideration, or, at best, were made to benefit the individual – the political carryover of that well-known
phrase that every Jew has heard a hundred times: “If only all Jews were like you…” If the Weimar Republic had
been successful, then nothing could have led more to full integration of the Jews into the German national
community than this identification of Jews and liberalism; as it was, it caused them to be excluded. Nothing
shows this as clearly as the fate of Walter Rathenau, who was shot because of the capitalistic, liberal and
democratic side of his personality.
There was another side to this tragically torn-apart man, manifested in his organizing of commerce in raw
materials during the war, his call for a levee en masse against the dictated peace of Versailles in 1919, and in his
orienting of German foreign policy in the Treaty of Rapallo against the West in a way that anticipated national
socialist thought. His assassins ignored these, although they were well aware of his kinship with their own
ideas. Thus, Gundolf and Hoffmannsthal were not perceived as Jews, while Kurt von Ossietzky and Heinrich
Mann, Aryans both, were seen as “typically Jewish.”
Also, that is why the handful of Jewish intellectual communists who were participants in the Munich Soviet,
indissolubly linked Judaism and communism, and did more to promote anti-Semitism in Bavaria than years of
national-socialist propaganda. This was in spite of the fact that otherwise the Jewish share in communism was
extraordinarily small, because Jews for the most part were property owners.
Non-Aryans were active in the German National Party, and in it they were probably more strongly represented
than in any other party, excepting, of course, the social democrats. No heed was paid to it. Posing the Jewish
question in this way, it is also proven that all the scandals in business and in local government, which
republican circles were involved in, cannot be utilized against the Jews. As, for example, in the case of
Adenauer, the Jews were not involved in these at all. It is also typical that we talk of a Sklarek affair, instead of
a Böss affair, though essentially what was new in it was that German local officials in leading positions were
corrupt. In contrast, the numerous cases of rightists being corrupt did not have a burdensome effect for the law
as a whole, because in fact it was the Jews and the Left that bore that responsibility. Efforts are made to defuse
the accusations against leftists and the Jews by proving that they had to do with rightists. Or, that it has been
German Nationals and not Jewish Marxists who caused the value of the Mark to fall and who accepted the
Dawes Plan. All such efforts remain without any success.
An entirely different matter is the extent to which the Jews themselves necessarily brought about the
responsibility from their position, an involuntary one through no fault of their own, and also encumbered
themselves with more guilt. We cannot help but regard their own guilt for what developed, or at least for how
vehement the development was, as being very considerable, even if we place great stress on the effects of their
forced position.
An extraordinarily small minority of genuinely subversive writers exists, like those who now are
continuing their activities in such a disagreeable manner in the emigrant press. We give less consideration to
this than to the absence of any instinct among the vast majority who in no way were aware of their special
situation and the obligation that arose from it, even with the greatest good will and love for Germany. They
could not be made to acknowledge that there is a Jewish question, neither through the assassination of
Rathenau, nor even through the advent of National Socialism. A solution to this question also demands special
efforts and a totally different attitude on their part.
V.
It does not follow from the possibility that racial anti-Semitism in Germany exists, that it is right to
want a solution to the Jewish question in this way, nor that it is possible to solve it in this way. Along with a
large number, perhaps a majority of German “non-Aryans,” the author agrees that he would gladly bear his
personal fate if he were convinced that the way taken were beneficial to the German people, and could bring a
solution to the Jewish question.
We are entirely ready to acknowledge that a Jewish question exists. However, we do not believe that it
arises from the Jews having some unique racial features, but rather from the historically based special position
of Jews within liberalism. For us who believe this way, the best and quickest solution to the Jewish question
appears not to be to go into it as such, but rather to treat it as part of the overall complex of liberalism. For we
believe, and we have explained why, that the Jewish question was fully in the process of solving itself.
Replacement of liberalism by a nation state genuinely built on the national community would, in our opinion,
have given extraordinary acceleration to this development. This is because the liberal bourgeoisie would have
stopped playing the leading role, and probably even this bourgeoisie itself would have ceased to exist as a
separate class. Thereupon, naturally also the special position of Jews within liberal bourgeoisie would no longer
be palpable and active. If, on the other hand, non-Aryans in fact were racially incapable of coupling into the
German national community, then, on their own and without any forced measures, they would remain outside
that community – as a racial minority.
National Socialism has not taken this route from intellectualism to solving the Jewish question, and has
not even attempted to go this path. Rather, it has decided on a solution – and already to a large degree
implemented it – that deprives Jews of all opportunities to work and live in Germany. Even those Jews who
retain their positions as attorneys or physicians due to their status as war veterans, have been openly boycotted.
The same is the case with Jewish businesses and Jewish companies, even though reputedly in the future, the
class of businessmen is the only class the Jews will be allowed into. To the degree that the party and the state
become one, this has to increase, not decrease. This is the case in all other professions, especially white-collar
workers. True, this has not resulted in all non-Aryans being totally excluded from all positions yet. But what it
has led to, is that the new generation of non-Aryans, even if allowed into schools and universities, shall have no
possibility to find any sort of work. No one would dare to hire a non-Aryan.
This can have no other meaning than that National Socialism sees the solution to the Jewish question
in re-establishing the ghetto, in recreating a totally sealed-off Jewry, the actual Jewry. Just as Jewry back in its
day was destroyed and dissolved by liberalism, so now it will be set up again though a force that is hostile to,
and overmasters, liberalism. Although admittedly with some considerable changes: the number of new Jews
has increased to an extraordinary degree by inclusion of all baptized Jews and Jewish relatives, and also by those
married to non-Aryans; we will deal in greater detail below with the numerical breakdowns.
The Jews in the new ghettoes based on race have no chance to escape. They do not have a commercial
monopoly. Even if they were to be permitted to conduct commerce, there will be an “Aryan economy”
promoted by the state that will be preferred to them. Beyond that, they will not only be economically excluded
beyond any escape, but also spiritually. Even if the most radical demands are not implemented that forbid Jews
to use the German language (“translated from Hebraic”), or exclude them from Christian churches etc., they
have already been completely excluded from intellectual life in Germany. It is just that which cannot be
coupled with the premise that Jews by nature are racially unworthy, that they have no understanding of what is
German, let alone being capable of creating or recreating German art. This is because the opinion is that when
the German people have become aware of their racial uniqueness, Jews could still be free to continue
undisturbed in attempts to work in German art, because anyway the German people immediately would
recognize it to be racially foreign and non German, and to a man they would reject it.
But the essential difference between the new and the old ghetto is that the new one is merely a
compulsory organization, with no inner community formation. Despite all their privations and humiliations,
the Jews stayed in the old-style ghettoes, although they could at any time obtain equality by converting to
Christianity. But they found community and connection in their religion. The new ghettoes are mere prisons:
re-establishment of Jewry as a community is impossible, because there is no connectivity for it, and there will
be none. The Jewish question can only be resolved by complete destruction and dissolution of Jewry.
True, perhaps pious Jews – a minority in Germany – may be able to reconcile themselves to the ghetto,
if they get an economic basis for existence. Perhaps some liberal Jews may also return to Orthodoxy. Thus
possibly Jewry in Germany, that was so close to complete dissolution, may again be retained for a time. It is an
entirely natural consequence that totally orthodox Jews, who had been horrified to see Jewry disintegrating,
could view Hitler as “God’s punishment” for having left the ghetto. Also, though, he is proof that the Lord does
not allow his people to perish.
But by far the largest part of German Israelites, and certainly all those baptized, and family relatives of
Jews, and of course those married to non-Aryans, will not be satisfied with this. For Judaism has no spiritual
meaning for them whatever. They will not see why they have been saved for a future in which they do not
believe. Therefore, they will never be able to perceive a communal entity within the new ghetto. This is
because they feel themselves to be Germans; they have no Jewish traditions, and want none. Everything that
has intellectual value to them, and which they possess, is German. And they will always perceive their
exclusion as ostracism, which they never will acknowledge or voluntarily take upon themselves. It is precisely
the younger generation, which has been baptized or intermingled, who will never acknowledge the new
ghetto.
Constituting the Jews as a minority, which well-meaning ignorance is constantly talking up, also
would not solve the problem. Because what would this “minority” be based on? Apart from this, it would be
impossible for National Socialism to give recognition to the Jews as a minority in the usual sense of the word –
and in fact that is how it is meant. Because, even if you deny them the right to enter into mixed marriages, at
least a parity share must be granted to them in national leadership, schooling, occupations, courts, and
officialdom. But national socialists, with their teaching that Nordic peoples are racially superior, will not permit
a Jew to become an instrument of national public administration, not even as a letter carrier. They do not
believe that this is only a momentary over-the-top phenomenon (“Überspitzung”) evoked by revolutionary
excitement. It is pursued as a teaching that follows from the superiority of one’s own race over another one
that is numerically much smaller.
With all previous efforts to protect a minority, support was given to maintain its national uniqueness when its
stock was threatened by the cravings of the majority to absorb it. Here instead is a smaller minority that strives
for nothing except to move up into the majority, and is forced into a life on its own. Therefore, as soon as
anything comes along to weaken the theory of racial superiority, a danger will exist that immediately the non-
Aryans will again try to “sneak in” to German-ness.
Naturally, the same holds true for the suggested solution of allowing Jews to pursue business professions, which
additionally reveals the awkward predicament of the national socialists themselves. Either this is simply a
gesture to the rest of the world – and then it would truly be embittering – or it is meant in earnest. If so, the
competition by Jews in business that of necessity will follow will appear as something dangerous that will
exacerbate the Jewish question. It again will limit the Jews to one occupation, and the result can only be to
radicalize National Socialism’s petty-bourgeois adherents.
Therefore, the national socialist effort for a solution is no solution. Rather it is a policy making it
permanent. In fact, for non-Aryans and for those married to non-Aryans, it is the Jewish question created
anew, that can only be kept by force in this condition. At the same time, it causes the Jewish question to always
be the central problem of German politics for the foreseeable future. Any criticism of National Socialism, and
any attempt at reform or political renewal, must place the Jewish question in the forefront. And if the gates of
these new compulsory ghettoes are again opened, in addition, the tragedy of assimilation will start all over
again. This is because there has occurred a retrogression in the already completed assimilation, and beyond that,
a problem of assimilation has been created for hundreds of thousands, yea, millions of mixed-origin persons and
those married to non-Aryans. In addition, naturally it will again be the most reckless and uninhibited ghetto
inmates that will be the first to surface, because they will be the strongest ones. Already we are getting a
foretaste of this: everywhere we are seeing scoundrels whose lack of character goes so far that they suppress
their Jewish ancestry. They accuse their mothers of adultery, or they obtain separations from non-Aryan
spouses and non-Aryan children. On top of this, they get unreserved acknowledgement as being members of
the people.
This turning of the Jewish question into something perpetual, especially in this form, also constitutes
Germany’s most severe jeopardy, in our opinion. It is particularly severe under a fascist regime that can only
replace the lack of genuine community by a totally mechanical unanimity, and therefore sees a threat to the
foundation of the state in any form of opposition.
The way National Socialism has treated the Jews has turned them into unconscious, but implacable enemies.
One in fact can forget murder, bodily pain and privations. What one cannot forget is moral ostracism,
destruction of hundreds of thousands of happy mixed marriages, alienation between non-Aryan children and
Aryan fathers, breaking of friendships lasting many years, destruction of all self-respect and any moral and
intellectual bases for existence.
If it were only a case of the 600,000 people who belong to the Jewish religious community in Germany, then
perhaps this opposition would perhaps be negligible. But National Socialism has already itself admitted, for
example by raising the school quota, that the number of non-Aryans is much, much greater. Just how great is
something they apparently do not wish to see as yet. No census of the people based on race has been
undertaken, and naturally we cannot provide an exact figure. But we believe that the “cleansing” in various
professions confirms our estimate that the ratio of Jews by religion to other non-Aryans is at least one to four.
Probably it is one to five, so that one has to reckon overall on about 3 to 3½ million non-Aryans5, of whom
about 600,000 are Israelites. A somewhat smaller number is racially pure persons who do not adhere to the
Jewish religion, and the rest are persons of mixed origin. To this must be added those Aryans who are
indissolubly connected, economically and morally, to the fate of non-Aryans, through marriage, and as parents
to non-Aryan children. Not to even mention cases where the connection consists merely of personal friendship
or a distant family relationship. We believe we are not exaggerating if this is at least another 500,000 to
1,000,000 persons, who are much more strongly against racial anti-Semitism, and thus against the basic
principle of national socialism, than are racially pure Jews, whose numbers they may roughly equal.
4 Recently the Times’s Berlin correspondent named a still higher number – four million – without being
contradicted by German authorities.
Added to this three and a half to four million persons affected – 6 to 8% of the German people, and probably
between 25 and 30% of German intellectual bourgeoisie – is the large number of those who, as actual and
believing Christians, cannot accept a teaching that through denial of the sacramental character of baptism, the
essence of Christendom itself is denied with equal effect for Aryans and non-Aryans. No further explanation is
needed as to why we regard this as still more dangerous to German unity than making the Jewish question into
something perpetual.
Was it necessary and unavoidable that National Socialism had to go this route? We believe that one
must say yes, if one affirms that National Socialism in Germany was something necessary and unavoidable. This
is something that we cannot permit ourselves to judge within the framework of this investigation. Rightly
perceived, there is an urgent matter here: a false conclusion that makes the “Jewish race” the scapegoat for
liberalism, along with implementation of racial anti-Semitism that is so disastrous for Germany, resulting in the
Jewish question becoming perpetual. We believe that dealing with the Jewish question of necessity follows
from the nature of National Socialism. It is only an example of what is perceived by the author – and by many
conservative and national Germans along with him – to be the true tragedy of German history: Generally
national socialism has overall instinctively recognized what the true problems are, because in Germany under
the Weimar Republic, it was the only party that actually recognized the sorrows and distresses of the masses.
The people were all crying for connectedness, community and leadership; it was the only party that offered
them a homeland. It has united into itself all the self-sacrifices of youth, all the hopes for better, brighter times,
all the disappointments of the dispossessed, and has become irresistible.
But never has it found the right answer, since it never led and shaped the masses, but rather was shaped and led
by them. Therefore, it has in fact recognized the danger of destruction of Germany’s religious foundation, but
its solution is that the church is to be mastered by the state, rather than what alone would be possible and
Christian, which is to have the church effect inspirational penetration of the state. It in fact did recognize the
cultural sterility and anarchy of the postwar period as a danger, but has sought to replace it with a prewar
culture that is still more mendacious and lacking in content. In fact it has seen the dangers of formal
democracy, but has come to power via the paper ballot. In fact it has recognized the danger of individualism
turning into anarchy, but it seeks a solution through complete removal of the soul from individuals converted
into mere numbers in the hustle and bustle.
And that is why it is that National Socialism in fact did recognize the Jewish question as a problem, but not
thereby solved it once and for all, by integrating German Jews, who want to be Germans, into its community.
The Jews would certainly have been all too eager to go along with that and disappear as Jews, as Italian Jews did
in fascism, because they had just as little belief and actual connection as the rest of German bourgeoisie. Thus
perhaps Jewry, perceived as subversive, would have been eliminated, and the nation would have gotten some
good Germans. This perhaps would have been the sole positive thing that fascism in Germany would have been
capable of. Instead of that, National Socialism persecutes non-Aryans, as scapegoats for liberalism. Thus, it
decimates the German bourgeoisie, but it obtains Jewry, and it even so to speak it recreates it for millions. For
National Socialism truly has recognized the necessity of a living, new unity that combines all of the spiritual
forces and all those whose desire is to build up. But it seeks to obtain this new unity by denying all of Europe’s
living ideas, from connection to religion to freedom of the individual.
These spiritual forces of the German and European past have been excluded by National Socialism
along with the Jews. But in them lies the only option to solve the Jewish question in Germany. For there can be
a German future only based on the German spiritual past. Freedom of the individual is just as much an
inalienable intellectual basis for Europe as Christendom or the concept of the state’s bearing social
responsibility. As a national unit, Germany will only continue to exist if all these living spiritual forces, which
in inalienable fashion belong to its innermost essence, are connected and integrated into a new spiritual unity.
And despite everything, we believe in Germany’s future.
Through this, there is an option of decision for German Jews and “non-Aryans:” a decision in favor of Germany
or in favor of Jewry. If they make a decision – as many have done – for Jewry, then they must know that by this
they give authority to National Socialism, and have excluded themselves for all time from Germany. But if they
decide in favor of Germany – for Germany in the eternal spiritual sense in which Germany is incompatible with
national socialism – then they have done what is essential to bring a final solution to the Jewish question in
Germany, and thus for true German unification in the future. It is one of the few comforting signs of our times,
that so many people, and in fact the best of them, have decided that this much more thorny and difficult path is
the self-evident one. They have done so silently and without making a great deal of fuss about it.
We believe that that therefore it matters for every individual of those who currently are excluded.
Because it is the individual’s spiritual and moral existence that National Socialism negates. Only from it can the
transformation come, therefore. Only from the conviction of being “true Germans at long last” can the solution
come. For baptized Jews, persons of mixed origin, and those married to non-Aryans, who are most severely
afflicted, but who also bear the main burden of battle, since they cannot take refuge in Judaism, primarily this
means being a “true Christians at long last.” Jews will be integrated into a German spiritual unit that, as in the
great past, is Europe’s center, support and dominant spiritual power. For this goal, no sacrifice is too great; and
if it succeeds, and we have been allowed to take part in it, we shall not have suffered persecution in vain.
[text missing] there where liberalism is weakest, the social denigration of the Jews was greatest, in Berlin and in
Catholic Munich; Frankfurt, with its large Jewish population, long-established, is a special case. Therefore in
Germany the Jews have had an extraordinarily large share of bourgeois features, and of necessity must have it.
This, naturally, had a reverse effect on them that was decisive. Holding firm to the Jewish religion – a
natural reaction in other countries where the Jews’ standing is much more “distant” – appeared ever more
senseless in Germany. Religious indifference among the Jews was amplified by the religious indifference of the
entire German bourgeoisie. It was further promoted by the fact that, not by law, but de facto, the state
discriminated against the Jewish religion. A Jew could not become an officer, a public official, a university
professor or a judge.
But baptism opened up all these paths and a baptized Jew even became a personal adjutant to the last German
Kaiser. This of necessity led to conversions on a large scale, and still more to the baptism of babies newly born
to Jewish parents. Religious indifference on both sides of necessity resulted in mixed marriages within the
Jewish and non-Jewish intelligentsia, bound by a common liberalism, i.e. by common opposition. The strong
predominance of Jews in commercial occupations resulted in money-motivated marriages by impoverished
members of the nobility, with Jewish blood getting into the gentry in large amounts. This trend was known to
Kaiser Wilhelm II, and he did not view it with displeasure. In the interest of maintaining the standard of living
of his guards officers, he is said even to have promoted it.
Thus it happened that in Germany the Jews have come to make up not only an unusually large share of the
liberal intelligentsia, but also that the non-Jewish bourgeoisie, especially the intelligentsia, is mixed with Jewish
blood to a high degree. In contrast, hardly any Jews are found in the other social strata, since everyone was
absorbed into the bourgeoisie, insufficiently supplied as it was with fresh blood. Therefore, the share of Jews,
and the strong penetration of Jewish blood has become an essential feature of German liberal bourgeoisie,
through which the bourgeoisie has become distinguished from all the other societal strata, especially from the
petty bourgeois.
Numerous factors have accelerated and promoted this development, in that they facilitated assimilation
or at least appeared to do so. One primary factor is that it took until the 19th century for Jews to emigrate into
all the western European countries, with the exception of Holland. In contrast, they have resided in Germany
for centuries, if not a millennium. It is a Jewish characteristic to be named after one of the oldest German cities
or districts. All of the nonreligious culture of the Jews therefore is also German, from the language of the
eastern Jews. This is known to have started as essentially German from the late Middle Ages. Therefore,
emancipated Jews were inclined to view Germany as their natural spiritual homeland.
The result of all this, then - as remarkable as it may sound today – was that no country was so ready to
accept Jews as was Germany. After the collapse of European spiritual unity, all the western European countries
have developed their own spiritual forms, in many ways, as in England. It is a uniform which they require
everyone to put on, and which they demand that everyone acknowledge. In Europe, Germany alone remained
to carry within itself all the sites, battlefields, places where all spiritual conflicts were resolved, full of unlimited
extent. All the streams, thoughts and ideas were carried by it freely, at the cost of unity and of form. Therefore,
in Germany, no demand was made that foreigners assume a new form. Rather, the stranger was greeted as a
contribution to the spiritual cosmos in which the life of the German nation took place. He retained his special
character and was cared for.
Therefore, the bourgeoisie, the social strata that carried intellectual life in the 19th century, was friendly and
unreserved in its acceptance of the Jews in Germany, not demanding that they change in any fundamental way.
A few regions, such as Oberhessen, where a historically justified anti-Semitism existed, constituted an
exception. Otherwise there was no place in Germany where there existed the effective inner distancing and
foreignness vis-à-vis the Jews, as it did in England itself and in the liberal circles friendly to the Jews. With no
envy, German bourgeoisie permitted them to take up bourgeois professions. Without envy, their supremacy in
some of these professions was endured, and even promoted.
But it is precisely as a consequence of this structure of Germany that the position of Jews within liberal
bourgeoisie would become particularly problematical. Since Germany has no spiritual fixed point, every lack of
connectedness has a dual dangerous effect, and is doubly subversive. Because the national connection in
Germany is something so problematical, the existence of the Jews from a national standpoint would be felt all
the more strongly and negatively than in countries where the connectedness within the people is something
secure and self-evident. Still more is this the case for religion, because there rages in the soul of every German
the fateful German battle between Protestantism and Catholicism, between the unifying Germano-Prussian
nation and the Holy Roman Empire. The existence of a Jewish religious community must be felt as a painful
foreign body. If the Jews in other countries are a grain of sand in the skin, in Germany they are a grain of sand
in the eye, which causes overall pain despite being so small. This special, unavoidable Jewish question in
Germany, which of necessity made the Jews to be a “subversive element,” was doubly and triply salient owing
to their prominent position in a bourgeoisie that was already hostile to connectivity and subversive of forms.
That is no fault of the Jews, but is a tragic debt.
The Jewish question was so especially palpable in Germany, because the self-dissolution of Jews had
progressed so far. Precisely because of this, in our view, after their being dissolved on [discontinuity here
between pages 12 and 13 of the original] Jew – the product of hundreds of years of oppression – naturally has to
be especially tender and hard, to be able to assert themselves. Naturally enough, these qualities adhered to a
greater or lesser degree to the first generation freed from the ghetto, when the barriers of oppression were
dropped. But this especially strong vitality would be lost, the more the Jews lived in a carefree manner. And
along with this, the natural competitive edge of Jewish persons would become ever less.
This assertion may perhaps provoke alienation at first glance, because it coincides with National
Socialism’s assertion that the Jews are acquiring ever-greater influence in Germany. Further on we shall clarify
this apparent contradiction, and wish now to present a few facts only to support our assertion: Before the war,
for example, virtually all the leading positions in German business were in Jewish hands. In contrast, after the
war, there have been only two speculators, Jacob Michael and Jacob Goldschmidt, along with one captain of
industry, Silverberg, that have reached a high level. Apart from these exceptions, no new Jewish commercial
leaders have made it big in Germany. Not only that, the pre-war positions held by Jews in business have all
passed to non-Jews. Even in the intellectual professions, we believe that a universal reversal of Jewish
predominance can be documented. We believe the numbers can back this up. We believe that statistics on, for
example, the numbers of Jewish university students in the postwar years, in relation to those of other university
students, would, quite naturally, correspond to the overall tendency of Jews to be increasing in absolute
numbers. But it would lag extraordinarily far behind the increase in non-Jewish students, thus yielding a drop
in the Jewish share.
What is certain is that the number of Jews who have assumed a leading position in free occupations has been in
the process of declining. In postwar Germany, no Jewish attorney succeeded in attaining a position similar to
that of a Hachenberg, Mamroth or Pinner in the prewar period. Naturally, this applies only to the free
professions, not to public officials, professors or assistant positions, from which Jews were more or less excluded
before the war. Therefore, following the war, i.e. after these positions became open to Jews, there was a very
pronounced increase. There is one thing that seems to us to be far more important than all of this in refuting
the notion that Jews have a special position in Germany, and that is the increasing numbers of Jews who are in
white-collar positions with no chance for advancement. Owing to this, the distribution of occupations among
German Jews has moved more and more toward being equal to that of all Germans.
Still more than the biological factor, the spiritual one was to work toward a rapid and complete
solution of the Jewish question in Germany. In no other country have the Jews felt their special position, their
separation, to be as painful as in Germany, since in no other country have they felt themselves to be so little
Jewish, so much as citizens of the country. In no other country, therefore, have the best among them viewed
their Judaism so much as a special obligation vis-à-vis the national culture. This tragic conflict between a deep
yearning and love for German-ness and the feeling of not fully belonging to it, the tragedy a Gundolf, a
Hoffmannsthal, and also a Rathenau, is found only among German Jews. Therefore, the Jews also have
cooperated decisively in solving the German problem of living, of uniting in one nation: Friedrich Julius Stahl, a
conservative, and Eduard von Simpson, a liberal, were pathfinders for Bismarck’s Second Reich. Lassalle was
another, from whom not only the term “national socialism” derives, but also the idea of a national workers’
movement for reconciling the people, with a first effort to incorporate the working class into the Nation.2
We in no way want to deny that these tendencies within German Jewry are opposed by plenty of others. We
attribute particular significance to them, because we see the decisive historical event as being formation of a
unified German nation, through which the integration of the Jews, and the complete solution of the German
Jewish question could be brought to completion.
Germany’s decisive national experience that could have led to creation of a German people was the World War.
Because we were the losers in it, its natural consequence should have been a national renewal. The alleged
”shirking” of the Jews cannot be the cause, not least because the Jews, who participated in this violent national
event, fighting at the front, were integrated into the new national community. But even they have been
defamed and boycotted. The stone honoring the memory of the sole German member of the Reichstag who
volunteered for the war, Ludwig Frank, one the two fallen people’s representatives, was removed from its
cemetery and destroyed. This is because Ludwig Frank was a Jew, and in numerous places in Germany, the
names of the fallen on war memorials who were Jews have been removed. What is the reason that the Jewish
question in France, for example, was as good as completely solved through the uniting experience of the World
War, while in Germany, during the World War, 3 in contrast it resulted in complete exclusion of Jews from the
national community? 2 We do not wish to go in any further detail into the share of Jews in development of national socialist ideology. We have to be content to indicate the great influence Gundolf and Wolf-Kehl have had through the propagation of
Stefan George’s ideas, or how philosophical empiricism was overcome by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.
3 For the same reasons, things developed very similarly in Hungary and Austria, but we will not delve further into
this in what follows.
IV.
With the founding of the Weimar Republic in Germany, the Jewish question emerged from being an
insignificant side matter into a political problem of the first rank. This is because, owing to their position within
the German bourgeoisie, the Jews of necessity would be considered to bear responsibility for the origin and
development of the German Republic.4 Prior to 1918, the very uppermost political and societal strata – princes,
court nobility, officials and military officers - were practically free of Jews and also largely free of mixed blood
with Jews. In practice, Jews never enjoyed full equality as citizens and free access to all professions. 1918
provided the Jews not only with full equality and free access to all the professions, but owing to the collapse of
the strata that had until then been the social and political leaders, leadership passed to the “second front” of
societal structure, the intelligentsia. But, as the only class in Germany, it had such a large share of Jews and was
so strongly intermingled with Jewish blood, that, as we have seen, this was to be perceived as its most
important feature.
Even if, as we stated, the de facto influence of Jews within the bourgeoisie was declining, nonetheless the
fact that societal leadership had passed from a Jew-free stratum to one strongly infiltrated by Jews, appeared to
amount to an enormous increase in Jewish influence. Therein lies the explanation of why the assertion that
solely the increase in number of Jews in the “decisive” profession appeared to be supported by directly
evidence, and could not be refuted by citing numbers. The effects of the inflation exacerbated this. Just like the
rest of the middle class, the intelligentsia had lost its possessions; but income, not possessions, has always been
decisive with the intelligentsia. Since this could be brought up again after the inflation, the intellectuals
asserted their social standing.
Contrast that with the middle class engaged in commerce and trade. In the first years of the Republic, it
still formed the backbone of the bourgeoisie. When the Republic formed, it completely reverted to being
proletarian, since its bourgeois status had been built on assets saved on relatively small incomes during the long
years of peace. Through this the new system’s societal leadership passed more strongly to that stratum whose
most conspicuous feature was being mixed with Jews.
This development would have caused the intelligentsia to become the leading class, since that was the sole
essential change in the German social structure through and since 1918. Since then, it would of necessity result
in the altered status of the Jew being perceived as the essential new thing in the new system. This has no other
meaning than that the Jews would be made responsible for the
4 The similar standing of social democracy has made it responsible for the Weimar Republic, and lead to ‘anti-
Marxism’, to which we can refer now only briefly.
system and its development. This was now given extraordinary encouragement in that the Jews could not so
easily make their exit from liberalism than other bourgeois, because it had brought them their equality and was
their guarantee. To the extent that ever broader strata of the German people turned away from the Weimar
Republic and rejected the principles of bourgeois liberalism, to the degree especially that the middle class,
dispossessed by the inflation, “decamped from the bourgeoisie,” it would more and more be only the Jews and
“judaized intellectuals” who would stand for these principles, for bourgeois freedom and equality, for
maintaining the bourgeois commercial and societal order.
Therefore, the more the middle class of the German people inclined to the view that bourgeois liberalism had
brought only disadvantage to them, the more striking it would be that it undeniably brought advantage to the
Jews. Therefore it cannot be a surprise that a solution for such a conspicuous clash between the advantages of
the Jews, and that which ever wider classes of the people considered to be advantageous to Germany was,
according to the cui bono principle, was found in this: the Jews are responsible not just for how the Republic
developed, but also they created this regime to their advantage over Germany.
Investigating the reasons for the collapse of the Weimar Republic in detail is outside the framework of
this study. However, we must go into it to the extent that the explanation for racial anti-Semitism lies therein.
German liberalism came to power not through its own strength, but – following the spiritual and economic
collapse of the monarchy – through the German people’s belief in Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which linked
assumption of the democratic form of government with the promise of a just peace. This promise was broken at
Versailles. Germany, in the name of democracy, self-determination of peoples, and freedom, was condemned to
lingering inequality and eternal loss of rights. Along with it, Germany was ejected from the bourgeois
community established on the principle of national equality.
The spiritual rug had been pulled out from under the feet of German democracy. From then on, the principles
of bourgeois liberalism appeared increasingly as false and hypocritical to the Germans. And this to an increasing
degree, as passing years proved that this loss of rights was conceived to be permanent. The Polish corridor and
Upper Silesia were stolen; the Ruhr was invaded, followed by occupation of the Memel district, and so forth.
This continued for years until Brüning’s customs union with Austria was vetoed, and Germany’s disarmament
negotiations would lead to the view that the victors themselves did not believe in the honorability of their
promises, and thus also not in the basic principles of liberalism. Rather, they saw these as mere means to
maintain their position, and were denied as soon as they turned against them.
Democracy, citizen representation, a worldwide economy, pacifism, and in short all the articles of
belief of bourgeois liberalism necessarily became instruments to keep Germany down. Those who represented
these would be seen as working in the interest of enemies, against Germany’s interests. Of necessity, this
foreign-policy development sooner or later would have led to a collapse of formal democracy in Germany, as
being inimical and foreign to the people. Inflation, which for the most part traced back to foreign-policy causes,
and its effects, then also pulled the economic rug out from under the feet of democracy and destroyed bourgeois
consciousness in Germany – something that was weak in any case – as well as belief in the bourgeois economic
order and bourgeois morality.
Thus from these premises followed the development and subsequent collapse of the German Republic.
The spiritual and de facto leaders of the German republic, the German liberal bourgeoisie, especially the
intelligentsia, have little to exonerate them from guilt in this. With a comprehensive lack of instinct, - among
German nationals as well as among the social democrats who became liberal petty bourgeois – not a single one
of the problems was recognized, let alone solved. The German Republic could not only have been kept, but
could have been made into an effective unit of the German people, if it had succeeded in founding a new
national community from the pathos of defeat after four years of war, instead of splitting the nation in endless
quarreling and de-unification. From the injustice and deception at Versailles, it could have created a new
European task with Germany as the pioneer for a genuine, just, lasting peace based on equality and the right of
peoples to self-determination, instead of being alone in leading a foreign-policy battle against economic
burdens, and neglecting the moral facets which were decisive. From the collapse of the capitalistic economic
order in the inflation, it could have founded a new cooperative one. Above all, it could have been a leadership,
if the Weimar Republic advocates had not forced Brüning, the sole effective leader, to constantly run through a
punishing gauntlet.
In all of this, liberalism failed, and therefore it could not only appear as inimical to and subversive of the
people, but also in fact acted that way. Because – and this is where the true core of the “stab-in-the-back”
legend lies – for the German people, it did in the fruits of the great and awful national experience of the World
War, and it killed German unity. Every member of the German bourgeoisie or the German intelligentsia (the
author in no way excludes himself) who complains about the current situation, should first ask himself whether
he can acquit himself of all guilt for that, before he shifts guilt onto the “stupidity of the masses” or the effects
of the world economic crisis.
Liberalism collapsed because it appeared to be foreign and hostile to the people and Germany appeared to have
been imposed on by the Western powers. Spiritually, it was too infertile to undertake the necessary domestic
reform for “living democracy.” Therefore, those who represented it in Germany or were held responsible for it
were likewise battled against as hostile and foreign to the people. The Jews, as we stated, were held responsible.
With this, the possibility arose for anti-Semitism as a means to fight against the Republic, without being only a
“cheap bet on low mass instincts.” But if in this fight, it came to anti-Semitism, then it had to be a racial anti-
Semitism. Because in fact the fight was conducted to produce unity in the German people, a people who cannot
be harnessed in their eternal idea, the idea of a Reich, in the narrow confines of the modern national concept,
by those who do not wish to see the Reich idea and cannot grasp it.
Therefore, a term – or at least a word – had to be found that was broader than that of the Nation. At the same
time, this term had to result in a setting of a boundary against the Jews. They were not separated from the
Germans nor connected among each other by anything that was nation-forming – not language, religion,
culture, nor, among the majority, through outward appearance, and only partially by their history. That was
because, as we have been at pains to prove, they had no actual community. And finally, this new term for unity
would have to explain why all intellectuals were liberal, and perceived as subversive. This is explained only by
the racial concept, which explains that many intellectuals, whom no one would consider to be anything other
than Germans, in actuality, are “of a foreign race.”
Could the Jews have prevented this development? We believe not. For the position of the Jews within
liberalism implied that only what they did to promote liberalism appeared as “typically Jewish,” and was
attributed to the totality of the Jews. All other types of activities by Jews or non-Aryans had to remain out of
consideration, or, at best, were made to benefit the individual – the political carryover of that well-known
phrase that every Jew has heard a hundred times: “If only all Jews were like you…” If the Weimar Republic had
been successful, then nothing could have led more to full integration of the Jews into the German national
community than this identification of Jews and liberalism; as it was, it caused them to be excluded. Nothing
shows this as clearly as the fate of Walter Rathenau, who was shot because of the capitalistic, liberal and
democratic side of his personality.
There was another side to this tragically torn-apart man, manifested in his organizing of commerce in raw
materials during the war, his call for a levee en masse against the dictated peace of Versailles in 1919, and in his
orienting of German foreign policy in the Treaty of Rapallo against the West in a way that anticipated national
socialist thought. His assassins ignored these, although they were well aware of his kinship with their own
ideas. Thus, Gundolf and Hoffmannsthal were not perceived as Jews, while Kurt von Ossietzky and Heinrich
Mann, Aryans both, were seen as “typically Jewish.”
Also, that is why the handful of Jewish intellectual communists who were participants in the Munich Soviet,
indissolubly linked Judaism and communism, and did more to promote anti-Semitism in Bavaria than years of
national-socialist propaganda. This was in spite of the fact that otherwise the Jewish share in communism was
extraordinarily small, because Jews for the most part were property owners.
Non-Aryans were active in the German National Party, and in it they were probably more strongly represented
than in any other party, excepting, of course, the social democrats. No heed was paid to it. Posing the Jewish
question in this way, it is also proven that all the scandals in business and in local government, which
republican circles were involved in, cannot be utilized against the Jews. As, for example, in the case of
Adenauer, the Jews were not involved in these at all. It is also typical that we talk of a Sklarek affair, instead of
a Böss affair, though essentially what was new in it was that German local officials in leading positions were
corrupt. In contrast, the numerous cases of rightists being corrupt did not have a burdensome effect for the law
as a whole, because in fact it was the Jews and the Left that bore that responsibility. Efforts are made to defuse
the accusations against leftists and the Jews by proving that they had to do with rightists. Or, that it has been
German Nationals and not Jewish Marxists who caused the value of the Mark to fall and who accepted the
Dawes Plan. All such efforts remain without any success.
An entirely different matter is the extent to which the Jews themselves necessarily brought about the
responsibility from their position, an involuntary one through no fault of their own, and also encumbered
themselves with more guilt. We cannot help but regard their own guilt for what developed, or at least for how
vehement the development was, as being very considerable, even if we place great stress on the effects of their
forced position.
An extraordinarily small minority of genuinely subversive writers exists, like those who now are
continuing their activities in such a disagreeable manner in the emigrant press. We give less consideration to
this than to the absence of any instinct among the vast majority who in no way were aware of their special
situation and the obligation that arose from it, even with the greatest good will and love for Germany. They
could not be made to acknowledge that there is a Jewish question, neither through the assassination of
Rathenau, nor even through the advent of National Socialism. A solution to this question also demands special
efforts and a totally different attitude on their part.
V.
It does not follow from the possibility that racial anti-Semitism in Germany exists, that it is right to
want a solution to the Jewish question in this way, nor that it is possible to solve it in this way. Along with a
large number, perhaps a majority of German “non-Aryans,” the author agrees that he would gladly bear his
personal fate if he were convinced that the way taken were beneficial to the German people, and could bring a
solution to the Jewish question.
We are entirely ready to acknowledge that a Jewish question exists. However, we do not believe that it
arises from the Jews having some unique racial features, but rather from the historically based special position
of Jews within liberalism. For us who believe this way, the best and quickest solution to the Jewish question
appears not to be to go into it as such, but rather to treat it as part of the overall complex of liberalism. For we
believe, and we have explained why, that the Jewish question was fully in the process of solving itself.
Replacement of liberalism by a nation state genuinely built on the national community would, in our opinion,
have given extraordinary acceleration to this development. This is because the liberal bourgeoisie would have
stopped playing the leading role, and probably even this bourgeoisie itself would have ceased to exist as a
separate class. Thereupon, naturally also the special position of Jews within liberal bourgeoisie would no longer
be palpable and active. If, on the other hand, non-Aryans in fact were racially incapable of coupling into the
German national community, then, on their own and without any forced measures, they would remain outside
that community – as a racial minority.
National Socialism has not taken this route from intellectualism to solving the Jewish question, and has
not even attempted to go this path. Rather, it has decided on a solution – and already to a large degree
implemented it – that deprives Jews of all opportunities to work and live in Germany. Even those Jews who
retain their positions as attorneys or physicians due to their status as war veterans, have been openly boycotted.
The same is the case with Jewish businesses and Jewish companies, even though reputedly in the future, the
class of businessmen is the only class the Jews will be allowed into. To the degree that the party and the state
become one, this has to increase, not decrease. This is the case in all other professions, especially white-collar
workers. True, this has not resulted in all non-Aryans being totally excluded from all positions yet. But what it
has led to, is that the new generation of non-Aryans, even if allowed into schools and universities, shall have no
possibility to find any sort of work. No one would dare to hire a non-Aryan.
This can have no other meaning than that National Socialism sees the solution to the Jewish question
in re-establishing the ghetto, in recreating a totally sealed-off Jewry, the actual Jewry. Just as Jewry back in its
day was destroyed and dissolved by liberalism, so now it will be set up again though a force that is hostile to,
and overmasters, liberalism. Although admittedly with some considerable changes: the number of new Jews
has increased to an extraordinary degree by inclusion of all baptized Jews and Jewish relatives, and also by those
married to non-Aryans; we will deal in greater detail below with the numerical breakdowns.
The Jews in the new ghettoes based on race have no chance to escape. They do not have a commercial
monopoly. Even if they were to be permitted to conduct commerce, there will be an “Aryan economy”
promoted by the state that will be preferred to them. Beyond that, they will not only be economically excluded
beyond any escape, but also spiritually. Even if the most radical demands are not implemented that forbid Jews
to use the German language (“translated from Hebraic”), or exclude them from Christian churches etc., they
have already been completely excluded from intellectual life in Germany. It is just that which cannot be
coupled with the premise that Jews by nature are racially unworthy, that they have no understanding of what is
German, let alone being capable of creating or recreating German art. This is because the opinion is that when
the German people have become aware of their racial uniqueness, Jews could still be free to continue
undisturbed in attempts to work in German art, because anyway the German people immediately would
recognize it to be racially foreign and non German, and to a man they would reject it.
But the essential difference between the new and the old ghetto is that the new one is merely a
compulsory organization, with no inner community formation. Despite all their privations and humiliations,
the Jews stayed in the old-style ghettoes, although they could at any time obtain equality by converting to
Christianity. But they found community and connection in their religion. The new ghettoes are mere prisons:
re-establishment of Jewry as a community is impossible, because there is no connectivity for it, and there will
be none. The Jewish question can only be resolved by complete destruction and dissolution of Jewry.
True, perhaps pious Jews – a minority in Germany – may be able to reconcile themselves to the ghetto,
if they get an economic basis for existence. Perhaps some liberal Jews may also return to Orthodoxy. Thus
possibly Jewry in Germany, that was so close to complete dissolution, may again be retained for a time. It is an
entirely natural consequence that totally orthodox Jews, who had been horrified to see Jewry disintegrating,
could view Hitler as “God’s punishment” for having left the ghetto. Also, though, he is proof that the Lord does
not allow his people to perish.
But by far the largest part of German Israelites, and certainly all those baptized, and family relatives of
Jews, and of course those married to non-Aryans, will not be satisfied with this. For Judaism has no spiritual
meaning for them whatever. They will not see why they have been saved for a future in which they do not
believe. Therefore, they will never be able to perceive a communal entity within the new ghetto. This is
because they feel themselves to be Germans; they have no Jewish traditions, and want none. Everything that
has intellectual value to them, and which they possess, is German. And they will always perceive their
exclusion as ostracism, which they never will acknowledge or voluntarily take upon themselves. It is precisely
the younger generation, which has been baptized or intermingled, who will never acknowledge the new
ghetto.
Constituting the Jews as a minority, which well-meaning ignorance is constantly talking up, also
would not solve the problem. Because what would this “minority” be based on? Apart from this, it would be
impossible for National Socialism to give recognition to the Jews as a minority in the usual sense of the word –
and in fact that is how it is meant. Because, even if you deny them the right to enter into mixed marriages, at
least a parity share must be granted to them in national leadership, schooling, occupations, courts, and
officialdom. But national socialists, with their teaching that Nordic peoples are racially superior, will not permit
a Jew to become an instrument of national public administration, not even as a letter carrier. They do not
believe that this is only a momentary over-the-top phenomenon (“Überspitzung”) evoked by revolutionary
excitement. It is pursued as a teaching that follows from the superiority of one’s own race over another one
that is numerically much smaller.
With all previous efforts to protect a minority, support was given to maintain its national uniqueness when its
stock was threatened by the cravings of the majority to absorb it. Here instead is a smaller minority that strives
for nothing except to move up into the majority, and is forced into a life on its own. Therefore, as soon as
anything comes along to weaken the theory of racial superiority, a danger will exist that immediately the non-
Aryans will again try to “sneak in” to German-ness.
Naturally, the same holds true for the suggested solution of allowing Jews to pursue business professions, which
additionally reveals the awkward predicament of the national socialists themselves. Either this is simply a
gesture to the rest of the world – and then it would truly be embittering – or it is meant in earnest. If so, the
competition by Jews in business that of necessity will follow will appear as something dangerous that will
exacerbate the Jewish question. It again will limit the Jews to one occupation, and the result can only be to
radicalize National Socialism’s petty-bourgeois adherents.
Therefore, the national socialist effort for a solution is no solution. Rather it is a policy making it
permanent. In fact, for non-Aryans and for those married to non-Aryans, it is the Jewish question created
anew, that can only be kept by force in this condition. At the same time, it causes the Jewish question to always
be the central problem of German politics for the foreseeable future. Any criticism of National Socialism, and
any attempt at reform or political renewal, must place the Jewish question in the forefront. And if the gates of
these new compulsory ghettoes are again opened, in addition, the tragedy of assimilation will start all over
again. This is because there has occurred a retrogression in the already completed assimilation, and beyond that,
a problem of assimilation has been created for hundreds of thousands, yea, millions of mixed-origin persons and
those married to non-Aryans. In addition, naturally it will again be the most reckless and uninhibited ghetto
inmates that will be the first to surface, because they will be the strongest ones. Already we are getting a
foretaste of this: everywhere we are seeing scoundrels whose lack of character goes so far that they suppress
their Jewish ancestry. They accuse their mothers of adultery, or they obtain separations from non-Aryan
spouses and non-Aryan children. On top of this, they get unreserved acknowledgement as being members of
the people.
This turning of the Jewish question into something perpetual, especially in this form, also constitutes
Germany’s most severe jeopardy, in our opinion. It is particularly severe under a fascist regime that can only
replace the lack of genuine community by a totally mechanical unanimity, and therefore sees a threat to the
foundation of the state in any form of opposition.
The way National Socialism has treated the Jews has turned them into unconscious, but implacable enemies.
One in fact can forget murder, bodily pain and privations. What one cannot forget is moral ostracism,
destruction of hundreds of thousands of happy mixed marriages, alienation between non-Aryan children and
Aryan fathers, breaking of friendships lasting many years, destruction of all self-respect and any moral and
intellectual bases for existence.
If it were only a case of the 600,000 people who belong to the Jewish religious community in Germany, then
perhaps this opposition would perhaps be negligible. But National Socialism has already itself admitted, for
example by raising the school quota, that the number of non-Aryans is much, much greater. Just how great is
something they apparently do not wish to see as yet. No census of the people based on race has been
undertaken, and naturally we cannot provide an exact figure. But we believe that the “cleansing” in various
professions confirms our estimate that the ratio of Jews by religion to other non-Aryans is at least one to four.
Probably it is one to five, so that one has to reckon overall on about 3 to 3½ million non-Aryans5, of whom
about 600,000 are Israelites. A somewhat smaller number is racially pure persons who do not adhere to the
Jewish religion, and the rest are persons of mixed origin. To this must be added those Aryans who are
indissolubly connected, economically and morally, to the fate of non-Aryans, through marriage, and as parents
to non-Aryan children. Not to even mention cases where the connection consists merely of personal friendship
or a distant family relationship. We believe we are not exaggerating if this is at least another 500,000 to
1,000,000 persons, who are much more strongly against racial anti-Semitism, and thus against the basic
principle of national socialism, than are racially pure Jews, whose numbers they may roughly equal.
4 Recently the Times’s Berlin correspondent named a still higher number – four million – without being
contradicted by German authorities.
Added to this three and a half to four million persons affected – 6 to 8% of the German people, and probably
between 25 and 30% of German intellectual bourgeoisie – is the large number of those who, as actual and
believing Christians, cannot accept a teaching that through denial of the sacramental character of baptism, the
essence of Christendom itself is denied with equal effect for Aryans and non-Aryans. No further explanation is
needed as to why we regard this as still more dangerous to German unity than making the Jewish question into
something perpetual.
Was it necessary and unavoidable that National Socialism had to go this route? We believe that one
must say yes, if one affirms that National Socialism in Germany was something necessary and unavoidable. This
is something that we cannot permit ourselves to judge within the framework of this investigation. Rightly
perceived, there is an urgent matter here: a false conclusion that makes the “Jewish race” the scapegoat for
liberalism, along with implementation of racial anti-Semitism that is so disastrous for Germany, resulting in the
Jewish question becoming perpetual. We believe that dealing with the Jewish question of necessity follows
from the nature of National Socialism. It is only an example of what is perceived by the author – and by many
conservative and national Germans along with him – to be the true tragedy of German history: Generally
national socialism has overall instinctively recognized what the true problems are, because in Germany under
the Weimar Republic, it was the only party that actually recognized the sorrows and distresses of the masses.
The people were all crying for connectedness, community and leadership; it was the only party that offered
them a homeland. It has united into itself all the self-sacrifices of youth, all the hopes for better, brighter times,
all the disappointments of the dispossessed, and has become irresistible.
But never has it found the right answer, since it never led and shaped the masses, but rather was shaped and led
by them. Therefore, it has in fact recognized the danger of destruction of Germany’s religious foundation, but
its solution is that the church is to be mastered by the state, rather than what alone would be possible and
Christian, which is to have the church effect inspirational penetration of the state. It in fact did recognize the
cultural sterility and anarchy of the postwar period as a danger, but has sought to replace it with a prewar
culture that is still more mendacious and lacking in content. In fact it has seen the dangers of formal
democracy, but has come to power via the paper ballot. In fact it has recognized the danger of individualism
turning into anarchy, but it seeks a solution through complete removal of the soul from individuals converted
into mere numbers in the hustle and bustle.
And that is why it is that National Socialism in fact did recognize the Jewish question as a problem, but not
thereby solved it once and for all, by integrating German Jews, who want to be Germans, into its community.
The Jews would certainly have been all too eager to go along with that and disappear as Jews, as Italian Jews did
in fascism, because they had just as little belief and actual connection as the rest of German bourgeoisie. Thus
perhaps Jewry, perceived as subversive, would have been eliminated, and the nation would have gotten some
good Germans. This perhaps would have been the sole positive thing that fascism in Germany would have been
capable of. Instead of that, National Socialism persecutes non-Aryans, as scapegoats for liberalism. Thus, it
decimates the German bourgeoisie, but it obtains Jewry, and it even so to speak it recreates it for millions. For
National Socialism truly has recognized the necessity of a living, new unity that combines all of the spiritual
forces and all those whose desire is to build up. But it seeks to obtain this new unity by denying all of Europe’s
living ideas, from connection to religion to freedom of the individual.
These spiritual forces of the German and European past have been excluded by National Socialism
along with the Jews. But in them lies the only option to solve the Jewish question in Germany. For there can be
a German future only based on the German spiritual past. Freedom of the individual is just as much an
inalienable intellectual basis for Europe as Christendom or the concept of the state’s bearing social
responsibility. As a national unit, Germany will only continue to exist if all these living spiritual forces, which
in inalienable fashion belong to its innermost essence, are connected and integrated into a new spiritual unity.
And despite everything, we believe in Germany’s future.
Through this, there is an option of decision for German Jews and “non-Aryans:” a decision in favor of Germany
or in favor of Jewry. If they make a decision – as many have done – for Jewry, then they must know that by this
they give authority to National Socialism, and have excluded themselves for all time from Germany. But if they
decide in favor of Germany – for Germany in the eternal spiritual sense in which Germany is incompatible with
national socialism – then they have done what is essential to bring a final solution to the Jewish question in
Germany, and thus for true German unification in the future. It is one of the few comforting signs of our times,
that so many people, and in fact the best of them, have decided that this much more thorny and difficult path is
the self-evident one. They have done so silently and without making a great deal of fuss about it.
We believe that that therefore it matters for every individual of those who currently are excluded.
Because it is the individual’s spiritual and moral existence that National Socialism negates. Only from it can the
transformation come, therefore. Only from the conviction of being “true Germans at long last” can the solution
come. For baptized Jews, persons of mixed origin, and those married to non-Aryans, who are most severely
afflicted, but who also bear the main burden of battle, since they cannot take refuge in Judaism, primarily this
means being a “true Christians at long last.” Jews will be integrated into a German spiritual unit that, as in the
great past, is Europe’s center, support and dominant spiritual power. For this goal, no sacrifice is too great; and
if it succeeds, and we have been allowed to take part in it, we shall not have suffered persecution in vain.
-
David Thompson
- Forum Staff
- Posts: 23724
- Joined: 20 Jul 2002, 20:52
- Location: USA
Re: Peter Drucker, Jewish Question in Germany; 1936 ENGLISH!
For more on Drucker, see:
Peter Ferdinand Drucker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker
The Man Who Invented Management (Business Week)
http://www.businessweek.com/stories/200 ... management
Peter Drucker on the Jewish Problem in Germany
http://coolcite.com/blog/1227/?post=63
The Drucker Institute
http://www.druckerinstitute.com/
Peter Ferdinand Drucker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker
The Man Who Invented Management (Business Week)
http://www.businessweek.com/stories/200 ... management
Peter Drucker on the Jewish Problem in Germany
http://coolcite.com/blog/1227/?post=63
The Drucker Institute
http://www.druckerinstitute.com/
Re: Peter Drucker, Jewish Question in Germany; 1936 ENGLISH!
Excellent essay. I'm glad I came across it, and I hope the missing pages will turn up soon.
Thank you!
Thank you!