Of Fear and Strangers, page 14
After eastern expansion, the Germans took up overseas conquests. And, like France, the lessons learned abroad filtered home. Bans on mixed marriages in Africa and Asia meant that the children of such unions held no right to citizenship. Nationalists demanded the very same treatment for mixed races born in Germany. In 1913, Socialists fought off these anti-miscegenation laws. However, such claims had won legitimacy and some traction. When they returned in 1935, the infamous Nuremberg Laws passed, forbidding the intermarriage of Jews and Aryans.
Deluged with positive news like the acquisition of Slavic lands, thanks to the Brest-Litovsk “peace” pressed on the reeling Soviets in March of 1918, Germany’s sudden defeat that November stunned the populace. Peace meant that their nation was divested of Eastern European and overseas holdings; ethnic Germans made up the largest minorities in what were once vassal states. This inscrutable collapse led to wild rumors of an internal “fifth column”; the saboteurs were said to be Slavs, Poles, and Jews. Founded in 1920, the National Socialists were bolstered by a fantastical condensation of the Jew as both Bolshevik and greedy money lender, inferior Easterner as well as corrupting Western modernist, weak and diseased as well as omnipotent and manipulative. Jews became the problem. Resolving the “Jewish question” seemed to be the mission: it offered Germans clarity of purpose and the possibility of redemption.
“Old style” German liberals had been deeply weakened by the war. Toleration was said to be a misguided notion, both by those in favor of Soviet Communism and by right-wing intellectuals like the influential Carl Schmitt, a political theorist whose ideas were worked out during the peaceful interwar years, but were built for the next battle.
Descended from the contested French-speaking Lorraine region, Schmitt’s family were small-town German Catholics existing in a Protestant land. The son of a railroad worker, Schmitt showed promise in school and won a scholarship to attend a gymnasium and then a university in Berlin. Tossed into this cosmopolitan city, the provincial youth felt alone. “I was an obscure young man of modest descent,” he wrote. “Neither the ruling strata nor the opposition included me.” He left the capital for Munich, where he continued his studies and threw himself into the intoxicating café nightlife. There, this floating man met and married a bohemian con artist, a faux countess who soon absconded with, of all things, his books. Attempts to annul this humiliating hookup failed, a fact that would later get Schmitt excommunicated when he remarried. Meanwhile, he took his state exams in Strasbourg, where he hoped to get a university job, a prospect that vanished when, in 1918, the region was reannexed by the French. He hung on, thanks to a string of teaching jobs, and wrote books on the politics of romanticism and the nature of dictatorship. Influenced by Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber, Schmitt sought to legitimate such mighty sovereigns. Their authority, he believed, must include the power to call for exceptions to the law, as might be required in emergencies. It was a line of thought that soon would find an eager audience.
In 1927, Schmitt developed his “concept of the political,” an ambitious attempt to undo more than two centuries of liberal theory. Politics powerfully molded identities, he argued, and national identities were based on an oppositional dynamic of friend versus alien foe. Strangers were by definition enemies; there was nothing ethically improper with such a “Fremdenfeindschaft.” And what even constituted a stranger? It was “simply the Other, the Alien.” It was the one who provoked the feeling of being “existentially” different. Therefore, strangers threatened to negate one’s own existence. They needed to be fought off. In the same way that aesthetics distinguished the beautiful from the ugly, the political realm precisely sorted out friends from foreign foes. Pushing back against strangers, for Schmitt, was the foundation of political life.
The political was neither good nor bad, in his view, it was absolute. The stranger-enemy relationship simply was. States helped their inhabitants recognize those enemies, but the enemies required little more rational justification than that. The intensity of hostility toward the alien was quite natural and sufficient in itself. None of this was contingent on grievances or perceived crimes. For Schmitt, it was an existential relation and could be applied to all of history. Politics was war, humans were tribal beasts, and homogenous groups were founded on hatred of strangers. In a globalizing world, that meant each state confronted many foes and forever must be ready for combat.
While relying on the Hobbesian view of the state of nature as war, Schmitt was also reinvigorating a particular nineteenth-century German line of attack on Enlightenment universalism. The importation of British and French Enlightenment ideals into German lands was met with resistance by Romantics as well as thinkers like Herder, who helped prompt a Counter-Enlightenment tradition. For Herder, ideals of universal reason and equality were destructive, for they seemed to demand the wiping out of communities based on local customs, beliefs, and historical traditions. Despite a prominence among anti-Enlightenment thinkers, Herder’s claims were always overstated. Universalist philosophies were intended to establish a normative rational consensus around public matters, not take away one’s lederhosen or pilsner. The Counter-Enlightenment argument tended to confuse the demand for equality with one for individual sameness; it conflated the protection of basic, legal rights with the crushing of human possibilities. In the face of his nation’s humiliation to the French, British, and Americans, Schmitt’s return to this Counter-Enlightenment thought can be seen as partaking of the same resentments that Herder voiced as Napoleon’s troops swept through his countryside.
Carl Schmitt, Nazi political theorist
In 1933, after debuting his “concept of the political,” Schmitt joined the Nazi Party and soon became one of its most eminent political thinkers. In that role, he legitimated the Führer’s emergency decrees and, like the theoretician of the total state, Ernst Forsthoff, gave Hitler transcendental authority. He took up racial notions of German identity and called for the burning of Jewish books. The Jew was the Alien and political life was instinctually driven to oppose him. The very idea of xenophobia, for Schmitt, would have been laughable, a misbegotten bit of post-Enlightenment claptrap. Each state was constituted by its strangers; the Nazi Party had successfully located those of the Germans.
Germany had once incessantly petitioned the Minorities Section of the League of Nations regarding the unfair treatment of their people in eastern lands; now it became the leading exponent of an ideology that extolled the virtues of treating minorities like serfs, or finding ways to dispossess and eliminate them. For a short while, exactly what that meant was unstated. However, by 1936, the very terms of the discussion in German-speaking lands had become deeply distorted. Universities, an eminent Swiss professor of international studies noted, had been infected by this “fanatical epoch,” which taught and practiced “xenophobia” and elevated such intolerance to what he sarcastically called a “moral principle.” For those under the Nazi spell, questions regarding why hosts might hate strangers dissolved. Followers of Carl Schmitt might ask a German citizen: why don’t you hate Slavs and Jews?
Adolf Hitler enacted Schmitt’s theories. An Aryan supremacist and ultranationalist, Hitler’s hatred ran deep and wide. He took up plans for the Jews, those internal stranger-enemies, and for Eastern Europe with its white “negroes.” As his armies gobbled up Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Ukraine, the Führer made no pretenses; this was bare-fisted colonialism. There would be no civilizing mission, no schools or hospitals, only the whip. Hitler sent troops and settlers out east to Germanize those lands and transform their former inhabitants into slaves, exiles, or corpses. His dream? A homogenous Aryan empire, rid of Slavs and Jews, Communists, gypsies, and the hereditarily unfit.
Alarmed observers like the German philosopher Hannah Arendt and the French thinker Simone Weil could not but note that Nazi answers for dealing with masses of racial inferiors had been auditioned long ago in the colonies. “Hitlerism,” Weil wrote in 1943, “consists of the application by Germany to the continent of Europe, and more generally countries of the white race, the methods of colonial conquest and domination.” Universal standards of justice inside the fatherland followed the course laid out in the colonies: they first became relative, then meaningless. Foreigners like the colonized Polynesians, whose children were taught that their ancestors were blond, blue-eyed Gauls, had been “deracinated,” forcefully shorn of their history, their culture, and hence their moral and spiritual weight. After that, the rest was easy.
The relation between colonialism abroad and dictatorship at home was not just theoretical: it was personal. General von Trotha had become a military hero in Germany thanks to the war against the Boxers and then his genocidal suppression in southwest Africa. Italy’s Republican Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, was himself a veteran of war in Ethiopia. Spain’s Falangist Francisco Franco engaged in the reconquest of Morocco, aided by his ally, Philippe Pétain of France, the hero of Verdun who later turned into a Nazi apologist. Dictatorial lessons for managing populations now came home.
Civilians also had been prepared for the logic and necessity of extreme measures against aliens. For example, in 1885, long before Hitler’s rise, a widely esteemed Sorbonne historian and fervent advocate of French colonization abroad, Alfred Rambaud, helped pave the way for others when he wrote:
So what is the situation of the Jews? They are like an Asiatic colony established in France. They are among us as if in a foreign land. Triply foreign. They are neither French, nor Christian, nor even European.
Triply foreign. Not our nation, not our religion, not even our civilization. After being elected to the French Academy, Rambaud peacefully passed away. However, his words would not be forgotten. A half century later, when Parisians entered the new Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions, housed in commandeered quarters on 21 rue La Boétie, they were greeted by this same passage, immortalized on a large placard. The institute, founded in 1941 thanks to the Gestapo, reminded visitors that, for years, Frenchmen had seen the need to exterminate this foreign colony in their midst.
During that same year of 1941, the Nazi empire began its fateful overreach. As Hitler’s tanks rolled through more of Eastern Europe, the dream of an ethnically pure realm seemed increasingly improbable. Facing millions of vanquished strangers, the Reich’s administrators and military leaders began to strategize. Poles and Ukrainians were savages to be used for brute labor. Eventually, pure-blooded Aryans would take over from them, but for now their muscle was needed. Jews, however, posed a lethal threat from within. They would need to be ferreted out, deported, placed in camps, then eliminated. A program commenced for the “natural enemies” of German political life. In 1942, the network of Nazi concentration camps and ghettoes, filled with POWs and “undesirables,” was joined by extermination camps, exclusively meant to gas the Jews, the disabled, and others. In the end, Carl Schmitt’s natural enemies died in extreme numbers. Seventeen million European prisoners were murdered, including six million of those “triple foreigners,” the Jews.
While the Nazis devoted resources to mass murder, their empire—which stretched from Finland to North Africa, from Crimea to the Netherlands—wobbled. By 1943, flashes of revolt occurred among occupied populations. At home, Germans faced food shortages and rolling defeats on the battlefield. Still, for some of their leadership, ridding Europe of the Jews remained a crazed priority. In the final months of the war, as utter devastation and collapse approached, a drunken Heinrich Himmler stared out at the smoldering wreckage. At least the Jewish question had been solved, he declared, and that was “something awesome.”
The culture that had given the world Kant, Beethoven, and Goethe had been overcome by an evil commitment to annihilate millions of strangers. If the Black Legend of Spain and Leopold’s Congo Free State once served as cautionary parables for mass murder, this twentieth-century infamy would now eclipse them. The nearly unimaginable crimes of the German National Socialists were Carl Schmitt’s politics gone insane. The facts alone beggared description. So grotesque were the crimes, so immense, that to categorize them seemed tepid, a dishonor to the dead. Was this xenophobia? That term—with its nonspecific object, its depersonalizing of the victims, its broad range from minor prejudice to ethnic cleansing—seemed to fail to do these events justice. The Nazis’ crimes seemed to have broken the back of language itself. “Xenophobia,” snorted Alvin Johnson, the director of New York’s New School for Social Research, in 1945, “what a word, to cover next to nothing.”
The Nazi program of eliminative anti-Semitism killed six million European Jews
AS THE BLACK SMOKE from concentration camps and the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki dispersed, a dazed process of accounting began. After 1870, globalization had taken off and had culminated in deep economic, cultural, and political interconnections, as well as two world conflagrations. The second killed over one hundred million human beings. If one wrote out the simple names of the dead, they would fill 750,000 pages; if each was given a short obituary, honoring their children and parents, those pages would make a mountain. How might any word communicate such loss?
Before the gates of Auschwitz were thrown open for all to see, Fortune magazine considered anti-Semitism “the classic example of that dislike and fear of strangers which the Greeks knew as xenophobia, and which appears as a familiar phenomenon among primitive peoples and peoples reverting to primitivism.” After 1945, that simply would not do. This was not some mere act of bias against strangers. Massacre? Slaughter? Atrocity? Four years earlier in a radio address to the British people, Winston Churchill exclaimed: “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”
“New conceptions require new terms,” a scholarly jurist named Raphael Lemkin wrote as if in response in 1944. Born in 1900 on a tenant farm in Russian Belarus, Lemkin was a Polish-speaking Jew. His family were tenant farmers, inhabiting a contested borderland that in his lifetime bounced from Germany to Russia to Poland. Despite that broader unrest, Lemkin fondly recalled a childhood filled with roosters at dawn, horse riding, potato farming, mushroom hunting, and the sheer delight of tending to farm animals. At the same time, he noticed the way his parents’ overlords mistreated them. Then, as a schoolboy, an odd moment stuck in his head: a man named Beilus had been accused of killing a child for Jewish Easter. When Lemkin arrived at school the next day, his teachers referred to him as “Beilus.”
“As soon as I could read, I started to devour books on the persecution of religious, racial, and other minority groups,” he recalled. His dark fascination pointed him toward, among others, the Christians in Nero’s Rome. Why, he asked his mother, didn’t the persecuted followers of Christ call the police? Her answer could not have been reassuring.
During World War I, as German troops raced toward them, the Lemkins fled into the forest and foraged to survive. Just before that onslaught, Raphael’s mother, a painter and linguist who had tutored her three sons, hurriedly buried their precious items, including the family’s books. Once the troops moved on, the family emerged to dig up their things. They resumed their lives without Raphael’s brother, Samuel, who had perished of starvation.
Raphael Lemkin
Raphael devoted himself to linguistics at the University of Lvov before switching to law, already filled with the hope that international restraints could be created to protect minorities. While working as a prosecutor in the Ukraine and then in Poland, he studied the devastation of hundreds of thousands of Armenians, Assyrians, and other Christians under Ottoman rule, attempts, he determined, that were not just to win a war. These were acts meant to destroy an entire people and their culture. Shockingly, he discovered a bitter truth. War crimes applied only to victims from other nations. The Turks went unpunished for crimes that took place with their nationals on their own sovereign turf. The killers got away with it.
Eloquent, erudite, and passionate, Lemkin rose through the ranks in cosmopolitan Warsaw, and became an advocate for the “law of nations” in which states might be held accountable to a global body for such atrocities. He advocated for “crimes against humanity” with the League of Nations; then, in 1933, as the Germans were storming out of that body, Lemkin delivered a proposal at a Madrid conference on international penal codes. In addition to matters like piracy, slavery, and counterfeiting, he called for the explicit criminalization of the extermination of ethnic, national, or religious collectives by “barbarism,” defined as the destruction of a people, and “vandalism,” the destruction of their culture. His proposal went nowhere, and with Adolf Hitler in office, this outspoken Jewish prosecutor was soon fired. Lemkin nonetheless continued to pore over histories of group massacres and the building menace in Germany, even as the object of his study crept up behind him. Reading Mein Kampf and Hitler’s public declarations, he began to understand the full intent of Nazi anti-Semitism: it was another attempt to wipe out an entire people and their culture, this time his own.
Six days after the Nazi invasion of Poland, on September 6, 1939, Raphael Lemkin hurried to the Warsaw train station, carrying little more than his shaving kit and a coat. Along the way, houses were “burning like candles.” After squirming to get on a packed train, he seemed to be on his way to safety when Luftwaffe planes struck, hurtling the railcar off its track. Scrambling to safety, Lemkin began his long trek through the woods; he hid in barns, ate wild plants and rotten potatoes, and, with a small band, made his way toward the border. After months of walking, near starvation, saved by the kindness of random hosts, he made his way from Lithuania and Latvia to Sweden, where diplomatic connections got him out of Europe.
