Section 9
To better understand what the freedom of the individual has meant and means to me and others, I would like to allow myself to add a side note here: I grew up in the "Wilhelminian era", which is today unduly reviled by those born later. But the German Empire of that time gave every decently behaving citizen as much freedom in speech and writing as a state threatened by encirclement from two fronts could possibly grant. I had to repeat this to myself in my younger years whenever I looked at the greater freedom of the English on their island and in their colonies at that time - with uncritical preference.
I grew up as the son of non-Baden parents in Freiburg im Breisgau, in the "liberal Muschterländle", as it was benevolently or praisedly referred to by non-Badeners. The population of Freiburg at that time was particularly "liberal" - not in a political sense, but in a humane sense - whose motto, favoring the individual, was: "To each animal his own!" The peculiarity and unusual behavior that our fellow citizens noticed in my friend L. F. Clauß and me were also tolerated by those who were accustomed to paying attention to the instructions of the Archbishop's Ordinariate. Then the verdict was: "s muss au so Lüt 98" (There must be people like that too). It did not escape my friend and I that with such comfortable freedom neither the Prussian state nor the German Empire could have been founded and maintained. But we were the grateful beneficiaries of this freedom for the individual.
Immediately after 1918, I had suspected or sensed that the demise of such freedom had begun, a demise through doctrines of freedom that amounted to the "freedom" of only what Ibsen had horrifically described as the "compact majority". A mutual incitement of urban masses began, which increasingly threatened what a National Socialist "philosopher" later condemned as the "private sphere". My friend Clauss was able to escape such threats when he emigrated to Arabia and was able to live "as a Bedouin among Bedouins" - the title of one of his books - in the freedom of the desert - a freedom that is today highly endangered by oil deposits.
Brought up by my parents and school in a patriotic, i.e. moderately nationalistic spirit, I had first become acquainted with nationalist incitement a few years before the start of the First World War as a student in Paris, initially with surprise, then with dismay and shock, but had hardly felt any nationalistic incitement among the middle and lower classes there. The owner of the hostel where I lived, a real "old Parisian" - frank, open-hearted, expressing her opinion in vivid language without being afraid of coarseness - had experienced the siege and surrender of Strasbourg in 1870 and often told me about her impressions: she had gotten to know les Prussiens; they were just as good people as the French; only ambitious politicians sowed discord between Germany and France. I first felt hatred between nations in Paris when I attended a slide show by the Franco-Slave Association and the Franco-Russian Association. To my astonishment, I noticed, although I could not explain it at first, that the French members of these associations, mostly students, greeted their Slav friends excitedly as they entered. As the evening progressed, I sensed an unspoken but crackling hatred which, as I later realized, evidently corresponded to the encirclement that had been initiated against the German Reich, the preparation of an Eastern and Western front. I had never experienced anything like this in Germany, nor hatred of the English during the Boer War, which was detested throughout Europe.
The effects of such incitement to hatred were revealed to me by the behavior of a Czech student who, like me, had just arrived in Paris and was sitting next to me in a lecture. I spoke to him several times in German, which he spoke well, and saw in him - harmlessly enough - a representative of the allied Habsburg Empire. On the return journey I met him again by chance on the train as we passed through Alsace, and greeted him in German with his usual friendliness, when he replied in French with a palpable rejection softened by his upbringing. I did not let my surprise show, and after a short conversation I wished him a safe journey home in French and went back to my compartment. In the house where I was staying, in whose neighborhood lived an elderly "lady" whom the owner eagerly showed me and who was described to me as "one of those that King Edward had", there was the apartment of an astronomer. His son, who was the same age as me, asked me, who lived two flights of stairs up, to exchange an hour of French and an hour of German with him every evening. In this way I got to know the lifestyle and living style of a "good" French household, but on the first exchange evening I had the feeling that the young Frenchman did not want to learn to understand the foreign people through the foreign language, as I did, but was learning German only reluctantly and with a rejection of the German way of life, presumably only in order to learn the language of the future enemy. After a few evenings I noticed that the Frenchman, while trying hard to maintain his politeness, kept looking at me with a look of hatred. Immediately afterwards he told me that unfortunately he no longer had time for language studies. At that time I began to suspect that such hatred was not directed at me as an individual with certain traits, but at me as a member of a people rejected by French politics.
So it was in Paris - but only in the "educated" classes that set the political tone and in whose "ladies' world" Edward VII had frequented - that I experienced hatred between nations for the first time. It was an oppressive experience for me, but I only realized its full extent later. Anti-German attacks on the wall, which I saw from time to time, had made little impression on me. Outside of the lectures I attended, my attention was directed to the hustle and bustle of the big city, the cheerful bustle of the Parisians of the lower and middle classes, who did not lose their good humor even in the hustle and bustle of their working days. I did not notice any anti-German sentiments towards foreigners either; on the other hand, I suspected that "those gentlemen up there", i.e. the rulers, were using their time in office to "line their pockets".
In Germany, before I moved to Norway in the summer of 1923, I became acquainted with party hatred, which was no longer capable of recognizing an individual as such because it saw in every person the representative of a detested "class." It was the communist hatred taught by Lenin in fanatical language, which had already begun to be met with counter-hatred from the "right" around 1923, a counter-hatred which was increased to the same fury by the NSDAP after I moved to Norway. I had already sensed in Dresden and Breslau that the Germans, at least the urban Germans, had lost their sense of the individual and were instead trying to classify this individual into a political group, one that they supported or opposed. Everyone should "show their colors," should "take a stand," in other words, should put on blinders and condemn those who think differently. In 1885, the philosopher Friedrich Paulsen wrote to the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies about the Social Democrats: "They demand a vote: yes or no, and whoever does not say yes, they insult." Since 1885 and especially since 1919, however, all the major parties, including the NSDAP, had become accustomed to such behavior, which threatened the freedom of individuals. Within the parties, this lack of freedom prevailed as "factional discipline" - all of these signs that, as I will show, the Germanic concept of freedom had begun to fade.
I was not subjected to such oppression in Norway or later in Sweden, and even then I found no domestic political incitement in either nation, but enough respect for the free choice of those who thought differently. Here the individual still met the individual, and so also the individual who was a foreigner. An old Norwegian farmer, who evidently had no knowledge of history, once
praised the French in conversation with me because they had introduced freedom, equality and fraternity through their Great Revolution. I left him uninformed because of his age, but also because I could tell from his whole open nature that his preference for the French was by no means connected with a rejection of the Germans, who - in preparation for the World War - had generally been described as "backward" compared to the French. This Norwegian farmer saw me as an individual who deserved his goodwill, with precisely these traits of my nature: a free older man compared to a free younger man.
The same experiences later delighted me in Sweden. At that time, neither country was subject to the pressure to join a political group that had been spreading in our country since 1919 and which I found unbearable. I could still breathe the air of Germanic freedom in Scandinavia at that time, just as L. F. Clauss breathed Bedouin freedom in Arabia in the same years. O nomen dulce libertatis! (Cicero) O sweet name of freedom!
During my student years I had learned what the Germanic peoples defended as their freedom against all state coercion, especially that of the converting Norwegian kings, and above all I learned about the Icelandic stories (Sögur) that the courageous Diederichs publishing house in Jena published in the many volumes of the "Thule collection". Germanic freedom was best preserved in the Icelandic Free State, which the constitutional legal theories of our time can hardly recognize as a real state. So later, when National Socialism began to appeal to Germanic culture and Germanic "loyalty to the faithful", I was able to recognize immediately that it was completely misunderstanding Germanic culture and the freedom inherent in it.
The "loyalty to the Germans" that Hitler expected from the Germans and to which Himmler committed his SS would not have been recognized as such by the Germanic peoples, or at least would not have been acknowledged. After 1933, I always assumed that two works that presented Germanic freedom and loyalty were written to correct National Socialist ideas: Claudius Freiherr von Schwerin, Freiheit und Gefolgschaft im Germanischen Staat, 1933, and Bernhard Rehfeldt, König, Volk und Gefolgschaft im nordischen Altertum, 1942.
I mention these writings here because the ideas of newspaper writers in particular about Germanic culture have become even more inaccurate in Germany since 1945 than they were after 1933. French researchers were the first to recognize that the restoration of freedom in Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its oppressive lack of freedom - the cives of the aristocratic republic had become the servi of the empire under the Caesars - was thanks to the Germanic tribes, who were decried as "barbarians" (Chateaubriand, Guizot, Michelet, Henri Martin, Ozanam and later). However, I gradually realized that if a population were de-ruralized and urbanized, any possibility of preserving Germanic freedom would disappear. Urban masses can no longer be governed in a "Germanic" way. The Germanic tribes were - as I later realized - "born democrats" if one understands democracy to mean the freedom and equality of landowning fathers of families. I later felt a strong breath of such freedom in Norway and Sweden. I owe my earliest ideas of what the Germanic peoples understood by freedom to the Icelandic stories in the "Thule collection", a new edition of which has begun to be published today. Later, Andreas Heusler from Basel with his book "Germanentum" and Gustav Neckel with his book "Altgermanische Kultur" (1925) enlightened me as the best experts, so that today I know how distorted the "general public's" ideas about Germanic people have become since 1933 and even more so since 1945. But new editions of Heusler's and Neckel's works would hardly find any buyers today. Germanic freedom is no longer "in demand".
I lived with my Norwegian wife from 1923 to the end of 1929, first in Norway and then in Sweden, in countries whose freedom was not yet restricted by "social" bureaucracy and official paternalism, and whose people were not yet massed in urban masses and inciting each other against each other. In Sweden I associated with excellent people who were friendly to me, but I soon learned that they were anti-German, and thus opposed to the policies of the German Reich. But they were also liberal-minded and unincited, and never let the individual German they liked feel their anti-German sentiments. Such behavior increased my respect for them and their people - also remembering the saying: "To each his own!"
I was reminded of the Scandinavian freedom of that time, of this legacy of Germanic, and therefore unique, spirit, when I read a report about the funeral of the Social Democratic MP Erler, who was highly esteemed even by his political opponents and who had died in 1966. One of the eulogists said - with inner approval or rejection? - in praise of the deceased that one of his guiding principles had been: "Freedom is always also the freedom of those who think differently."
The deceased may have grown up in the "Wilhelminian era." However, his motto has not been observed in our country since 1919; today it sounds like an echo of an outdated past, but it was still valid in the Norway and Sweden in which I felt at home.
When I arrived in Germany with my family at the end of 1929, I was very poorly prepared for the restrictions on individual freedom, the Germanic freedom that had been increasing since 1919, for the attempts by the state and the parties to nationalize and patronize people, for the "iurare in verba magistri" that every party leader demanded, for the blind submission to the instructions of the party leaders. My sense of freedom, which soon understood that the restoration of order in the German Reich would require the abolition of some civil rights for a number of years, did not allow me to imagine an all-powerful National Socialist party as late as 1932.
One evening in 1931 or 1932 we were sitting together in Schultze-Naumburg's house in Saalecker in the presence of the Thuringian minister Frick, when the possible or probable goals of Hitler and his party were being discussed. After a long silence I said: "If I were Hitler, I would immediately found my own opposing party after an election victory, because public criticism is necessary." Frick, honest but not mentally agile, looked at me with an embarrassed smile. I had to remember my sentence several times later, especially when I heard about the misdeeds of high-ranking bigwigs, about misdeeds that had become generally known, but whose perpetrators no one, not even a newspaper, dared to accuse publicly. I need only mention the
name of Koch, that of the Gauleiter in East Prussia. Koch is said to have been recommended to the "Führer" by Streicher and Bormann - knowledge of human nature?
From 1933 onwards I was increasingly surrounded by a general lack of freedom, and I also felt the above-mentioned threat to my "private sphere", so that, as already mentioned above, I kept myself as far away as possible from all of Hitler's and the NSDAP's internal politics. Not that my
"private sphere" was threatened, my freedom, including my freedom to teach, was unduly restricted; I was known as "Racial Günther" and was left pretty much in peace in Jena, and could, if necessary, also invoke the duties of my academic office. But I suffered, as I was liberal-minded and accustomed to from Scandinavia, from having to see other people's lack of freedom. For example, I suffered from having to return the shy Hitler salute of a university employee who I knew, as a dissident, secretly detested Hitler. The hypocritical subservience of some citizens who had become party members for their own benefit or to avoid disadvantages could upset me.
I also found it embarrassing - not to say disgusting - when someone was cautious in his comments to me or tried to make me believe that they agreed with the measures of the many "little Hitlers". In the years after 1933 and 1945 I had to correct my idea of the German population because I had not suspected, on the one hand, how many people there were who were prepared to be submissive, and on the other hand, how many who immediately suppressed and harmed those who thought differently when they were defenseless in a particular political situation. I was somewhat relieved when Javaharlal Nehru publicly stated some time before his death that in every nation, including India, there were people who would seize the opportunity to commit atrocities if the law and order were disturbed. I need only recall the atrocities that people committed against their fellow countrymen who thought differently in Norway, Denmark and Holland in 1945. Count Gobineau once said: "L'homme est l'animal mächant par excellence."® The truth just quoted by Nehru, expressed openly by him, was suggested by the friendly Horatius, wrapped up in the legend of the Trojan War: Iliacos intra muros peccatur et extra? In the thirties, however, I was not yet granted such a composure of age.
So in 1933 and later I asked myself again and again whether all this was happening on Hitler's orders or at least with his tolerance, and I asked myself whether he had never been informed how the many, many "little Hitlers" were oppressing his "compatriots" in his name. To this day I have not been able to find an answer to such questions, because the "information" that was given to us in 1945 from home and abroad could only satisfy sworn Nazi haters or the less intelligent.
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