European Document/ Kristallnacht Reflections
Gann, L. H.
EUROPEAN DOCUMENT KRISTALLNACHT REFLECTIONS fifty years ago, on November 10, 1938, I stood with a crowd that watched the main synagogue in Mainz as it went up in flames. The world was upside...
...But what could he do...
...Mainz had a reputation for tolerance...
...Those citizens who had not voted for the Catholic Center party in the last semi-free elections in 1933 had included many Social Democrats...
...Kristallnacht was the end for them all...
...I have found none since...
...W hat of those super-assimilated German Jews, denounced as Kaiserjuden, "Imperial Jews," men proud of their reserve officers' commission, German patriots to the core...
...This is how it seemed to that crowd of onlookers who stared in bewilderment at the burning Temple...
...I myself do not think much of suchcriticisms, many of them made with the benefit of hindsight...
...How often did I hear, in England, observations such as the following: "You refugees whine and snivel...
...After Kristallnacht was over, it therefore fell to my mother, a trained lawyer, a stickler for law, order, and good governance, to surrender the sword that my father had gained as a combat officer in World War I—this in compliance with that never-ending flood of official ordinances specifically designed to make life hellish for Jews...
...Television programs nowadays are aptto give a mistaken impression of contemporary moods, and to read present-day sensitivities into another era...
...such seemed to me the prevalent mood...
...Now you tell us hard-luck stories, and expect the British Army to do your fighting for you...
...For German Jews, of course, Kristallnacht was more than a tale of arson, arrests, suicides, and murder...
...The world was upside down...
...Heine might with equal justice have written about the assimilated German Jews...
...I had no answer then...
...The answer is not easy to give—except that the role therein of the by L. H. Gann Weimar intelligentsia has been much exaggerated in retrospect...
...Kristallnacht, once for me a half- oppressed private memory, became this past November a public occasion—covered by programs on public television, sermons, concerts, panel discussions, speeches, research projects...
...Far from attending to their duties, German firefighters stood around the Temple, looking sheepishly and with obvious embarrassment at a conflagration they were not allowed to extinguish...
...W hat exactly perished at Kristallnacht...
...This culture has not been recreated...
...The police officer who received the sword was as embarrassed and apologetic as my mother was distressed...
...Few events in Germany's march toward barbarism have been better documented...
...Ten years earlier, it would not have occurred to the average German Jew or so-called non-Aryan (a person of partially Jewish descent, or a Jew converted to Christianity) that a person could not be, at the same time, a Jew and a German...
...Mainz, a middle-sized Rhinish town, was not of course typical of German cities at the time...
...What could he do...
...Kristallnacht broke the link...
...Sixty-one-point-three percent were employed in commerce—a large percentage of them as owners of small stores, or as commercial travelers, accountants, bookkeepers...
...In 1933 only about 12.5 percent made their living in the public services or the professions—and most of those in a quite modest capacity, as provincial lawyers, general medical practitioners, pharmacists, nurses, teachers, and suchlike...
...A critique of Tiicholsky on Wendriner's part would certainly have been fun to read...
...The average German Jew in 1933 was not a rabbi, a psychiatrist, a banker, a professor, or a writer...
...West Germany's Jewry, as reconstituted after World War II, has played but a small role...
...Their temples today—our L. H. Gann is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...Radicals, from Karl Marx to Kurt Ilicholsky, jeered at the merchants as philistines and humbugs, or caricatured them (as Tiicholsky did in his cartoon figure of Wendriner, a comic yet repulsive Stock Exchange Jew...
...Between them, these German marranos amounted to about half a million people—their very existence bore witness to the far-reaching integration that had been achieved between Jews and Germans at the time...
...What perished was a specific culture that combined German with Jewish legacies, and made a considerable impact on German intellectual life...
...I only returned in 1945, this time wearing the uniform of a sergeant in a British regiment...
...they seemed to describe events in another country in another world...
...Nazi voters had formed but a minority...
...What was missing...
...No occupational breakdown exists of that ill-documented group of non-Aryans...
...Overall, these German Jewish businessmen—small or large—had a bad press, not merely from anti-Semites but also from some Jewish critics...
...What could they all do...
...They had internalized the values of that enlightened and reformist German bureaucracy that had emancipated them toward the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century...
...My father was then in England...
...Wendriner and his friends in the local Liedertafel (glee club), or Thrnerschaft (gymnastic association), or veterans league, or Stammtisch (the table set aside for regulars in the local pub), were better integrated into German life, and altogether more cheerful, than the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 25 intellectuals assumed...
...The British Army has better things to do...
...Nearly one quarter (23.1 percent) were artisans or industrial workers...
...And what did the so-called German-Jewish symbiosis entail...
...It was not true that the whole world stood horrified at what happened in Germany...
...Germany's road need not necessarily have led into the Third Reich...
...Wendriner and company were not as introspective and troubled as the literati...
...It was the end of the world...
...Kristallnacht was a German, as well as a Jewish, catastrophe...
...Far from it...
...In addition, Germany in 1933 contained half a million Jews, registered as such by reason of their religious affiliation...
...I was later asked that question many times when I went to grammar school in England, and thereafter...
...They were a remarkable lot, committed to the Rechtsstaat, hard-working, conscientious, enterprising, and patriotic...
...Overwhelmingly, they formed part of the middle class...
...Herr" Wendriner, even "Herr Kommerzienrat" Wendriner, simply did not read those monographs produced by the Frankfurt School of Sociology or by Marxians, Freudians, and Adlerians that have received so much publicity since...
...Who is to say that Wendriner missed much...
...Mainz was mainly Catholic...
...Six weeks later, my brother and I left our native city...
...Certainly among the bystanders in Mainz who watched the Temple burn, there was no merriment...
...The crowd, as I remember it, was not only embarrassed but incredulous and filled with gloomy forebodings...
...The assimilated German Jew, the Yekke in Israeli parlance, did, however, have problems of a special kind...
...Heine, in one of his poems, made fun of those Prussians who walked so stiffly as if they had swallowed the corporal's cane with which they had once been beaten...
...Yet as I watched these television programs, they were curiously remote...
...churches tomorrow...
...I can only answer according to my own recollections, distorted through fading memories, and the perusal of many books and articles published many years thereafter...
...But why did you not defend your freedom when you had a chance...
...Such remarks were addressed to me not only as a Jew but also as a German...
...surely, they must have realized what was coming...
...111 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989...
...They have likewise had a bad press: they had neither foresight nor common sense nor a true feeling of ethnic identity...
...Yet this Jewish bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie deserved a better hearing than they usually got...
...Far from it...
...It was terror by order from above...
...Zionists deplored the Jews' preoccupation with commerce, and called for a "healthier" form of occupational stratification...
Vol. 22 • January 1989 • No. 1
