IN DEFENCE OF GERMANY
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR] SIR,—The reason offered by " A German Landowner " for the persecution of the Jews in Germany is that they " arc alien in race and thought," and that they " never ceased to injure Aryan interests." He expects your readers to be naive enough to swallow this sweeping indictment, which he does not make the least attempt to substantiate. The manifold and valuable services rendered by the Jews to the intellectual and economic development of Germany, and the sacrifices that they made for that country in the Great War, have been described so often in your columns and elsewhere during the past six years that it is surely superfluous to summarise them here afresh. But since your correspondent designates the Jews of Germany as " alien in race and thought," I should like to point out that 'the difference in race by no means made them " alien in thought," as two or three typical instances can show.
When Friedrich Gundolf's work, Shakespeare and der deutsche Geist, was published in 1911, the extreme Con- servative Deutsche Tageszeitung wrote that it was animated by " a rare nobility of conviction, aristocracy of the soul and of the mind," and declared : " We have again received a masterpiece of German spirit." But the " Aryan " writer did not know that the great literary critic—a teacher of Josef Goebbels—was a Jew, whose real name was Gundelfinger. Similarly, an architect, Ph. Jantscher, writing in a Nazi journal, Der Freiheitskampf, in 1931, against the new style of building, said : " When the veteran master, Alfred Messel, completed his Wertheim building in Berlin, a new epoch dawned for German architecture. Many architects, consciously or unconsciously, adopted this reminder of the Gothic, the German style." And Heinrich Class, in his Deutsche Geschichte, glorified the Wertheim building as a symbol of modern German architecture. But when it became known that Messel was a Jew, this passage was omitted from later editions of this work.
There is probably no German poet whom the Nazis have execrated so much as Heine, and no German author whom they have lauded so much as Nietzsche. Yet this is what Nietzsche wrote of Heine in his Ecce Homo: "The highest conception of a lyrist, in my judgement, was manifested by Heinrich Heine. I seek in vain in all the realms of the centuries for an equally sweet and passionate music. . . . And how he wields the German tongue! It will one day be said that Heine and I were by far the first artists of the German language."
The spuriousness of the racial myth was reduced to ridicule when Germany's woman representative won the world championship in the fencing contests at the Olympic Games at Amsterdam in 1928. Her name was Helene Mayer, and her victory was acclaimed by the " Aryan " Press with the words : "Hochachtung vor diesem blonden deutschen Miidel !" (which may be rendered : " Hats off to this blonde German lass! ") But there were some very wry faces when it was discovered that Fraulein Mayer was the daughter of a Jewish doctor.
Your correspondent writes : " My country has made up its mind to get rid of a considerable part of a race which it regards as harmful." By " my country " he means the Dictatorship in his country, and his simple identification of the one with the other unfortunately reveals to what extent he has succumbed to the Nazi ideology. He asks almost plaintively : " Would it not be better to recognise that Germany cannot alter, or even modify, her system to please foreign countries ? " The answer is that nobody asks Germany to do any such thing. But those countries that still uphold the elementary principles of civilisation hope that it will not be long before Germany returns to them.—Yours faithfully,
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