Exorcising the Weimar Psychosis

...The significant point for my purpose is that once Hitler came to power the migration of Jewish intellectuals began...

...To paraphrase a well-known saying, apparently Hell hath no furies like an intellectual spurned...

...But when I made some wisecrack, I realized that for him this was no jesting matter...

...The FBI broke off diplomatic relations with the White House in 1969-70...

...There is no need to detail the death throes of the Republic here...

...Essentially the latter spent their time debating the interior decoration of the Titanic...

...John began the intellectualization of Christianity, and in so doing set a pattern for ideological abstraction that would recur for the next 20 centuries...

...As Laqueur points out, the average Jew was a tailor, not an intellectual...

...The conservative Republicans found him useful as a club for beating the Truman Administration...

...Von Seeckt and his Reichswehr, or the Communist party, contributed more to the demise of Weimar than all the Tucholskys, Groszs and Weltbuhnes put together...

...The Rightists assaulted the "Jewish-Bolshevik Republic," but the interesting fact is that most Left Jewish intellectuals wanted to wreck Weimar, and by the end of the 1920s the thoroughly Stalinized German Communist party was as anti-Semitic as its hero...

...To oversimplify (and make a bad pun on Odets), these refugees and their epigones have been constantly "Waiting for Righty...

...Knowing an infinite regressus ("Epimenides, the Cretan, says all Cretans are liars...

...Once Eisenhower was in the White House, they discarded McCarthy and he vanished from American politics...

...Some were anti-Semites, others not...

...This was particularly true, naturally, of the social scientists, who proceeded to pass the affliction on to generations of graduate students...

...A distinguished refugee political scientist for whose work I have enormous respect was somberly informing the group that Eisenhower was the "American Hindenburg," and Joe McCarthy the "American Hitler...

...Congress was in Democratic hands and the Judiciary, with Republican appointed Judge John Sirica at the point, was delving deeper and deeper into the fetid mess...

...This has been written off as crass cynicism, yet-as post-World War II developments in Catholic Eastern Europe suggest-it was anything but a stupid question...

...On the other side of the fence, Hitler looked on all intellectuals with contempt...

...Ironically, the famous Frankfurt school, the Institute for Social Research, which migrated en masse to the United States and included such analysts as Max Horkheimer, T. W. Adorno, Otto Kirchheimer and Herbert Marcuse, expended little effort-before exile-in exploring the social bases of Nazism...

...In the White House, meanwhile, under Henry Kissinger's direction, there emerged a deutero-State Department...

...A Vietnam veteran looked at him in surprise and said, "Hell, the Army and the Marines would go to war with the Navy and Air Force...

...This brings us inevitably to the disputed role of the Jews in Weimar's downfall...

...Hofstadter, who had perhaps done too much work on the paranoid style in American politics, was shaken to his roots by the symbolism of a Goldwater nomination...

...The answer in the U.S., of course, was No: The American military establishment, albeit unhappy, never dreamed of challenging the civilian state...

...As Laqueur notes, "When asked by the Social Democratic leaders whether the Reichswehr was reliable so far as the Republic was concerned, [General] von Seeckt, its commander, used to answer: 'This I do not know, but it certainly obeys me.'" Indeed, the only mass organizations in full support of the democratic government were the Social Democratic party and its affiliated trade union movement...

...The late President Lyndon Johnson is seldom billed as an exorcist, but an observation of his puts the case in a sentence...

...Yet to a serious student of American politics the real question remained, "What is Nixon's institutional base...

...When told that Pope Pius was upset about something, Stalin inquired, "How many divisions does the Pope have...

...There were common patterns and links, but there was also disorder and asymmetry...

...To make a long story short, by his very actions in setting up his Leninist apparatus Nixon-whose mile-wide support among the people was only an inch deep-had alienated virtually everyone, inside the bureaucracy and out...

...True, in aggregate they did not speak the same language: An ideological abyss existed between the factionalized Left and the anomic Right...

...The activities of creep turned loyal Republicans, dying of financial malnutrition out there in the countryside, into quietly dedicated enemies...

...perhaps there was not one Zeitgeist but several...

...I have at times suspected they have a vested interest in the correctness of their prophecy-a phenomenon Laqueur refers to as the Tucholsky Syndrome...

...In short, the intellectual life of the Weimar period was not characterized by a monolithic Left confronting a monolithic Right...

...The key to this strength, I'm convinced, is that while Americans take the legitimacy of their Republic for granted, they are possessed by a healthy scepticism of political virtue, of centralized power, and of charismatic snake-oil salesmen...

...Weimar addicts could never forget that the Reichswehr had refused to sign the Armistice, insisting that the civilian Catholic politician Matthias Erzberger take pen in hand...

...Stevenson, contrary to myth, received a majority among Catholic ethnics...

...At the height of the Nixon trauma, one of my foreign students from a coup-ridden nation raised this question in class: "Suppose Nixon ordered the military to take over, what would happen...

...when I am confronted with one, I went off to fix myself a drink...

...Not until 1964, when Senator Barry Gold-water suddenly loomed on the horizon as a potential Hitler...

...I submitted that Goldwater was no bellwether of Fascism (personally he was and is as good a small "d" democrat as I am), and that even if he was "personally innocent, but objectively guilty" (to paraphrase Rubashov), he had no institutional base either...

...But once again the psychic tom-toms began beating...

...One can argue without fear of historical contradiction that to a 1st-century Christian, God was not a Greek paradigm, but when you reach the modern era it is often hard to differentiate between the logos of the intelligentsia and the reality of the external world...

...There was, to be sure, a Left-wing body of intellectuals that totally denied the legitimacy of the Republic, derided it with pen and tongue, and played at revolutionary politics...

...From the Right-wing viewpoint, the Socialists were semi-Bolsheviks (though the Communists devoted most of their efforts to fighting them, as "social fascists," rather than attacking the emerging Nazis...

...The Spartacists, later to become the Communists, started a revolt at the other end of the spectrum...

...The problem, in a nutshell, is that intellectuals write our histories and commentaries and, understandably, they take logos more seriously than praxis...

...To argue that Kurt Tucholsky's or George Grosz' savage attacks on the Republic brought it down is comparable to saying that Harriet Beecher Stowe won the battle of Gettysburg...

...Watergate and the eventual defenestration of Richard Nixon was somewhat more complicated...

...In the basement of the Executive Office Building the President installed the Plumbers, a parallel intelligence agency that could be relied upon when the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Central Intelligence Agency let him down...

...Clearly, the time has come to exorcise the Weimar psychosis...

...The worried intelligentsia presumably put away their passports, and for a time nobody accused me of false consciousness...

...But in its intellectual luggage there was one unfortunate bequest: the Weimar psychosis...

...and, second, they managed somehow to survive, and even be reasonably successful, without the guidance of this self-anointed elite...

...presumably if a garbage collector were to write a Republic, garbage collectors would be the guardians...

...I first encountered the Weimar complex in 1953 at a party on the West Side of Manhattan...

...Although it was a nasty interlude while it lasted, it never approximated Fascism...

...Obviously the young Nixon had not wasted his time as a studious member of the House Un-American Activities Committee...

...Finally, in the Committee to Re-elect the President (creep) he created a parallel political organization, one dedicated to him, not to the Republican party...

...The majority in one fashion or another called for a restoration of traditional German values-however, there was little common agreement on the exact identity of the values that were being discussed...

...At first I thought he was joking...

...Far from seeing Goldwater as the easiest candidate for a Democrat to beat, those with the Weimar psychosis saw him as the focal point for a major reactionary movement in the nation...

...I was delighted with the prospect of a Goldwater candidacy...

...I said in a Cleveland speech that summer, "For God's sake, don't anybody rock the hearse...

...Yet never does Laqueur fall into the error of assuming that the intelligentsia, either Right- or Left-wing, played a significant role in the catastrophic downfall of the democratic order...

...Would the military, for example, claim it had been stabbed in the back by liberals in Vietnam...

...Indeed, I got into an argument with my friend, the late Richard Hofstadter, in the pages of Encounter...

...The Armed Forces...

...This was roughly as realistic as trying to establish a pork sausage factory in an Orthodox kibbutz, and poor Eisner paid for it with his life...

...There also was a Right-wing congeries, equally sectarian and equally unrealistic...

...The Weimar psychosis surfaced with a vengeance, especially after Nixon's smashing defeat of McGovern in 1972...

...I have put Jews in quotes because the individuals involved were roughly as Jewish in religious-cultural terms as the Fathers Berrigan, who keynoted a similar Left nihilism in the United States of the 1960s...

...Alas, the Social Democrats were never able to muster enough independent strength to bring these powerful bureaucracies to heel...

...The United States, in sum, is not Weimar Germany...

...The Judiciary...

...I think it is fair to say that this diaspora, scattered through various American colleges and universities, proved to be an unprecedented catalyst in the development of our higher education, not to mention its contribution to literature, the arts and pure science...

...As Laqueur amply documents, the feisty intellectual life of the German Republic had virtually no relationship to fundamental social forces...

...The early Jewish Communist cadres had quit or been expelled (as "rootless cosmopolitans and Trotskyites"), and were off editing little magazines in which they occupied themselves trading insults...

...Realizing that much of liberally oriented official Washington was hostile, Nixon vigorously set to work infiltrating various agencies with his own political commissars...

...And the Left intelligentsia held them in splenetic scorn because, first, they refused "enlightened" intellectual leadership...

...Turning serious, I inquired where McCarthy would find his Storm Troops, and was told "the alienated masses...

...The Civil Service...

...When the American people," he once remarked to me, "hear a politician talking about his honor and high moral vision, they go home and lock up the silver...

...No, the intellectuals did not destroy Weimar or install Hitler...

...It is no accident that Plato made philosophers the ruling class in the Utopia he constructed more than two thousand years ago...

...In the same sense, those Left Jewish intellectuals who dreamed of destroying the decadent, bourgeois Republic simply had no troops...

...This tragic combination of events grew out of certain basic structural aspects of the Republic and the fragmentation of its political base...

...Of the 500 Communists who contested the 1932 Reichstag election (of whom 100 were elected), not one was a Jew...

...Nevertheless, as Laqueur says, "unfortunately it cannot be taken for granted that Weimar culture was a giant jigsaw puzzle in which all pieces, ordered with patience and ingenuity, will eventually fall into place...

...confessedly he never read the masterwork of his chief "theoretician," Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century...

...We know the concrete results, but on a higher level what the Nixon debacle demonstrated is the toughness of American democracy...

...Although no one can fault his intellectual credentials, Walter Z. Laqueur has somehow managed to escape from this subjectivist trap...

...It spread to Conservative circles, where, as Watergate unraveled, Senator James Buckley of New York solemnly announced that we were facing a "crisis of the regime...

...Some looked to the young, dynamic Soviet Union for inspiration (the so-called "National Bolsheviks"), and at one point during the French occupation of the Ruhr received support from Karl Radek, Bolshevik agitator-at-large...

...A bit blunt, but a fair estimate of the chaos that would ensue...

...Since the masses (by which I understood the working-class) had turned in substantial majorities for Adlai Stevenson, I suggested they were hardly ripe for Right-wing demagoguery...

...And every time American politics goes through one of its periodic typhoons-McCarthyism in the '50s, Goldwater in the '60s, the Watergate affair in the '70s-they update their passports and prepare for "Fascism...

...His Weimar: A Cultural History, as Richard Hanser observed in his review of the book in these pages ("Looking the Wrong Way," NL, March 3) is an excellent chronicle of the activities of the talented men and women who broke new ground in so many areas of German culture...

...As Nixon bounced around the world attempting various distractions, the background music was provided by the meticulous labors of Federal grand juries...

...Who but a radical editor like Kurt Eisner would have tried in 1918 to set up a Bavarian Soviet Republic...

...Erzberger was later assassinated and the myth was launched that the civilian Republic had betrayed the true Reich...

...Moreover, he never questioned the legitimacy of the Republic...

...Well, as I wrote then, McCarthyism provided this country with some baleful episodes, and did a great deal of harm to innocent people, but the Wisconsin Senator never had an institutional base...

...still, "Jews" played a disproportionately large role in the nihilist counterculture of the Left...

...From the moment the Social Democrats proclaimed the formation of the German Republic in November 1919, the Reichswehr, the judiciary, the civil service, the churches, and the professoriat refused anything more than conditional allegiance...

...He ended the conversation abruptly by declaring I was a victim of "false consciousness...

...Only a small minority of this minority had been politically involved, and the arrival in the United States of such distinguished scientists as Albert Einstein, John von Neumann and Hans Bethe (plus hundreds, of similar distinction, in other fields) was one of the few unwitting favors Hitler ever granted the West...

...The curious thing about the Nixon modus operandi was the extent to which it was based on the Leninist model of the dual apparat...

...Moving to a different plane, then, we can say that most of the intellectual fervor was politically irrelevant, that if both the Right and Left intelligentsias had been transported to the moon, the consequences would have been trivial...