Weimar: A Cultural History

...There was a brief flurry of interest a year ago, when the Consumer Price Index was taking discouraging monthly leaps...

...Only the government grows fatter, inexorably expanding while the private sector shrinks...

...And, at best, Congress promised to give back about $3 billion of that in the future, if businesses stepped up investment in plant and equipment...

...To anyone who has encountered such writings, Walter Laqueur's book should Weimar: A Cultural History by Walter Laqueur G.P...

...Although it is possible to engage in such hair-splitting, the reason for doing so seems more ideological than scholarly...

...But when inflation apparently subsided early this year, coming out of the double-digit range, interest in indexation waned...

...Despite such insight, Laqueur does make some mistakes of judgment reminiscent of other Weimar historians...

...If they did praise tyrants (like Stalin) and were exhilarated by criminal brutality, still it would be foolish, or so Laqueur would like us to believe, to compare them to the National Socialists, who longed to have dictators and wished to make war...

...It might be noted that the affliction is spreading, as many of the intellectual spokesmen for Weimar iconoclasm are making deep inroads into American culture...

...Satirists like Tucholsky savagely criticized German fascists specifically for being Germans, but bent over backward to exculpate French and Italian fascists as the bearers of Latin culture...

...He calculates that because of the nearly 12% inflation in 1974, the Quiet Tax picked up $8 billion more from individuals than should have been the case, and to correct for the overtaxation 43% of the $8 billion should have been returned to households with incomes above $20,000...

...By the same token, however, to view the exponents of formal philosophy (save for the Marxists and extreme nationalists) under the aspect of ideology is in this case to become oneself the captive of a politicized universe...

...Their voluminous tirades against German character—against, as one putative scholarput it, "character flaws in the German tribes first revealed by the Romans"—can inspire almost as much distaste as the Nazi bigotry they purport to attack...

...And because the high-income classes pay more taxes than the low-income classes, a tax cut that only adjusts for the overtaxation of inflation would mean Congress would have to cut higher income-tax classes more than lower income-tax classes...

...And businesses are steadily clipped of the cash they need to replace old plants and build new ones...

...But on the assumption that the Quiet Tax will soon have inflation back into the double-digits, it is predicted here that indexation is an idea whose time is coming...

...He also criticizes the tendency of Weimar intellectuals "to attribute too much significance to Bildung (formal learning)," so that "it dawned on them only gradually that illiterate people could be humanists and democrats by instinct whereas highly educated people could advocate cannibalistic ideologies...

...Laqueur also takes conspicuous pains to protect his left flank...

...Even mossback Republicans would blanch at having to vote for such an act...

...The act would merely state that if there is inflation in some subsequent year or years, a computer would automatically adjust tax brackets and inventory profits so that inflation doesn't overtax anyone...

...By cooperating with conservative forces as they did, the leaders of the Socialist Party "failed to realize that there are moments in history when the talking has to stop and when only bayonets and machineguns count...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 23...

...Fellner also calculates that the Quiet Tax got $7 billion more from businesses than it should have, by snatching away unrealized inventory "profits" that are only a figment of inflation...

...Although he does discuss the political and cultural rifts in German society that he believes aided Hitler's ascent to power, he also stresses the openness of history...

...Thus Maurice Barres described the effects of German pessimism upon the French national spirit of the 1880s...

...In the current global recession, Canada's recession is among the mildest...

...Senator Buckley introduced an indexation bill and got mild support from the likes of Senators Proxmire and McGovern...

...It would take an Act of Congress, but at least politicians would not have to vote directly to reduce taxes of the well-to-do and businesses...

...The "Tucholsky syndrome"...a violent contempt for fellow Germans, often mingled with uncritical awe for whatever was imagined to be anti-German, anti-bourgeois, or both...

...In their common contempt for traditional authorities, and in their rejection of all existing moral standards as examples of "bourgeois decadence," such rebels might be seen as brothers under the skin...

...Despite such lapses, Laqueur does observe a kinship between right and left nihilists during the Weimar period...

...Except for stopping inflation in its tracks from here on out, which is hardly a likely possibility, there seems only one solution to this diabolical process: an an-nual, automatic correction of the tax schedules to adjust for inflation...

...On January 1 of every year, Canadian taxes are lowered by precisely the amount required to correct for the inflation in the year ending the previous September...

...Despite the academic favor that emigre German radicals have enjoyed in America for thirty years, it seems unlikely that their political triumph during the Weimar period would have favored parliamentary government and social civility any more than the Nazis did...

...Who can argue with a computer...

...Laqueur has a keen understanding of the ironic effect of other human blunders...

...In commenting on the reparations imposed on the defeated Germans after the First World War, he notes that "the Allies were only too willing to concede to the Nazis [the cessation of indemnity payments] what they had refused to the statesmen of the Republic...

...The process described above is precisely the path of Great Britain's economy, and the British government now controls 60% of that miserable country's national income...

...22 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 Nazism, of course, had "intellectual roots" in the Weimar period, but so did a host of other political and cultural movements that have burgeoned in this century...

...In the process, according to Laqueur, they strengthened the hands of right-wing extremists like Hitler who gained popularity by condemning the "cultural bolshevism" of the Left...

...Such labeling might be partly justified inasmuch as the ideological Left claimed some descent from the Enlightenment while the nationalist Right appealed to romantic and naturalist thought...

...In treating German philosophy during the interwar years, for example, he identifies philosophical vitalism and rationalism with two opposing political outlooks...

...His warning might be applied with even more justification to the American scene as we witness the Weimar Left's jubilant revival among our intellectuals and educators...

...Nonetheless, this classification can also be misleading...

...He attempts to examine philosophical and aesthetic issues within a framework of ideological polarities that bring more confusion than clarity...

...Book Review/Paul Gottfried The Sorrows of Young Weimar • • According to the German poet Heinrich Heine, there is "nothing so unfortunate as an unsuccessful revolution...

...The Socialists, by contrast, are hagiographically presented...

...This syndrome was manifest in their political statements and even more in their view of criminality...

...In fact, Prime Minister Trudeau instituted this system in Canada two years ago and it works beautifully...

...The Marcuses, Adornos, Brechts, and Tucholskys were as much the cause of the moral decay that beset Germany during the twenties as their rightist counterparts...

...In fact, though they were a minority party, Laqueur criticizes them for having failed to take over the German government by force after World War I, in order to create democracy...

...And he quite correctly observes that the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber's mysticism was "more likely to appeal to some Protestant, even Catholic thinkers than to the rabbis, and in Israel Buber was to be remembered as a sociologist (Paths in Utopia) rather than a theologian—for which Jewish religion has little use...

...While there has been serious scholarship on Weimar Germany (the books of Karl Bracher come most readily to mind), accounts of how "the Germans tried democracy" (to quote the title of one of the most popular examples of this genre) often tend to generate more heat than light, and to be characterized by a certain smugness masquerading as righteousness...

...He deals with the Weimar period as a self-contained epoch rather than as the prelude to a wholly predictable catastrophe...

...The poisonous philtres continue to diffuse their subtle fragrance...

...As a mass political movement, National Socialism distorted thought by vulgarization...

...Laqueur relates such behavior to what he calls the "Tucholsky syndrome," whose victims, like the stormy figure after whom it is named, exhibited a violent contempt for their fellow Germans, often mingled with uncritical awe for whatever was imagined to be anti-German, anti-bourgeois, or, even better, both...

...While Hitler's lunacies were often related to the intellectual currents prevalent in Germany and elsewhere during his formative years, they were, as Laqueur implies, double distortions...

...Because the Quiet Tax works automatically against all income classes, an annual Act of Congress to correct its deleterious economic effects requires that the tax cut also be applied across all income classes...

...then the Nazi vision of the world was further distorted by the whims and fantasies of Hitler and his confidants once they came to power, often at the cost of excluding the intellectual wrapping attached to the older party ideology...

...For one thing, Laqueur rarely anticipates the unhappy ending of his story...

...The difference between the 52% and 43% reflects the regressive nature of the Quiet Tax, which works most against people who are in nontaxable brackets, by moving theminto taxable brackets, and not at all against people in the highest bracket, since they can be pushed no higher...

...What is true is that the architects of the ideologies of that time drew from different, and often opposing, traditions of thought...

...Indeed, it is because of the period's intellectual fecundity that Laqueur seems most drawn to it...

...It is as clear as the sun in a noonday sky, as Sam Ervin likes to say, that if this process continues the American economy not only will have no growth, but will move backwards...

...After having underscored their political imbecility, he then reminds us that their "motives were generous and their hearts in the right place...

...I refer, in particular, to the work of obsessive Teutonophobes and grisled Marxist emigres from Germany, still posing, like Erich Fromm, as the former democratic adversaries of Hitler...

...The threat of the revolutionary Left was not simply that "they fed grist to the mills" of Goebbels and Hitler, but that they, like other practitioners of ideological violence, made compassion and deference intellectually disreputable...

...The most extreme racial and imperialist policies of the Nazi movement had only a tangential connection to those views being advocated by the major ideologues and intellectuals of the twenties...

...The more serious roadblock is that while there's nothing Congress likes better than to cut taxes, there's nothing it loathes more than to cut taxes for the well-to-do...

...It is hard to remember that the writer is offering a recipe for parliamentary government, and not for the liberation of a student center at Berkeley...

...According to Laqueur, the "Tucholsky syndrome" has now begun to afflict American youth...

...In one place where he praises the aristocracy and the Kaiser for their supposed "style" he must add to his description: "however anachronistic their entire behavior, however arrogant and stupid their speeches, however damaging their policies...

...He accuses the traditional ruling class in Germany of "unleashing" the First World War upon Europe, though he never bothers to qualify such a sweeping charge...

...In the jargon of the economics profession, this is called "indexation" of the tax system...

...Surveying the careers of such iconoclasts as Kurt Tucholsky in journalism, Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, and Ernst Toiler in literature, and Georg Grosz in art, he tries to evaluate the effect of their incessant mocking of the German bourgeoisie...

...Why isn't indexation an idea whose time has come in the United States...

...The already progressive tax schedules are becoming steeper in progression, and nominal incomes are jumping faster up the brackets in an attempt to maintain real incomes in an inflationary era...

...Because they considered the German middle class the main source of human oppression, they championed moral and sexual deviants as their allies in the struggle for a better world...

...In my opinion, few topics have produced so much intellectual misfortune as the ultimately unsuccessful republic founded by the Germans at Weimar in 1919—and rapidly subverted by Hitler in 1933...

...Most of these cultural radicals bewailed the political and social oppression that they perceived in their own land, and claimed to champion human liberty and freedom from inhibition, yet they took strangely perverse positions...

...Professor William Fellner of the American Enterprise Institute, a former member of President Ford's Council of Economic Advisers, points out that in 1974 some 52% of federal income taxes collected came from households with incomes above $20,000...

...Putnam's $8.95 come as a welcome surprise...

...Moreover, radical journalists who attacked pre-Hitlerian Germany as morally corrupt, presented the Nazis as the representatives of a less virulent form of fascism than that represented by the republic...

...After all, authors like Brecht and Tucholsky were reform-minded cosmopolites...

...Even more puzzling is his final judgment of the Weimar bohemian leftists...

...Leftist bohemians praised Stalin while regularly denouncing politicians connected with the German republic...

...In the Tax Reduction Act of 1975, however, Congress rebated $8 billion to 1974 taxpayers, but gave only 15% to households with incomes above $20,000...

...Laqueur attempts to kaleidoscope the intellectual and artistic activities in Weimar Germany that have had the greatest impact on both their own and later generations...

...Perhaps he achieves his purpose most successfully in examining its bohemian culture...

...While such past thinkers as Schopenhauer and Kant were certainly vulgarized and exploited by ideologues, seminal philosophers of the Weimar era, like Edmund Husserl and Ernst Cassirer, were largely apolitical...

...Moreover, the Nazi victory was achieved through a series of accidents, some of them turned to Hitler's advantage by the blundering and arrogance of military and political leaders, but not by their predilection for an "Aryan Europe...