PREFACE
This book first appeared in 1998 towards the end of the Goldhagen debate in Germany under the title Gold-Hagen und die "hürnen Sewfriedte": Die Holocaust-Forschung im Sperrfeuer der Flakhelfer. An explanatory word for those unfamiliar with the German language and German mythology and the play on words in this title: Siegfried, the Germanic hero of the Nibelungenlied was invulnerable, except for a spot between his shoulder blades. Hagen, his adversary, knew about this and waited for the right moment to plunge his spear into it. In a similar way Gold-Hagen found the vulnerable spot of German mainstream historiography, which tries to explain the Holocaust in terms of abstract sounding phrases, such as "implementing the Final Solution" or "the process of destruction," and administered a fatal blow to it by reminding readers that what was actually involved was the cold-blooded slaughter at point-blank range of helpless people.
There was good reason for Hans-Ulrich Wehler, the leader of German structural history, to perceive the Harvard Junior Professor's bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners as a "thorn in the flesh."1 Daniel Goldhagen's book sticks like a harpoon in the body of German academic history and "Siegfried" cannot shake it off. Unable to deal with the book, the deans of German historiography go so far as to deny that there has been a Goldhagen controversy in Germany.2 May they continue "the sleep of the unjust," the uncomfortable feeling that Goldhagen comes very close to the truth is spreading, namely that Germany was a nation of "eliminatory anti-Semites" that were in agreement with the "Führer." Eichmann and his staff in the Reichs Sicherheits Hauptamt (RSHA), were not simple policemen who disposed of Jews behind the front lines, like cogs in a wheel who just did their job without giving much thought to what they were doing (as Hans Mommsen and his colleagues would like us to believe). The opposite happens to be the case: They were highly motivated perpetrators who acted in accordance with their anti-Semitic views, fully aware of the consequences of their deeds.3
As problematic as it may be to speak of "the German historians," it is nonetheless true that they closed ranks against Goldhagen and rejected his book collectively. The manner in which they rejected it, made it all too clear that they did not respond to the book as trained historians, but as Germans, whose biographies are intertwined in various ways with the Nazi past. By pointing this out in my book, I hit the nail on the head.4 The smugness and unwillingness of German academics (not only historians) to step down from their pedestal, in order to discuss openly, confirms my thesis. I had to wait for four years before the first, and up till now the only, professional historian, namely my German-Canadian compatriot Michael Kater to take the time to comment on my book. After much begging and flattery on the part of the Australian Journal of Jewish Studies he wrote a review. In doing so, he confined himself to a desperate defense of his German colleagues. Solidarity with these colleagues seems to take absolute priority over dealing with the serious problems raised in the book, problems he refuses to address.5
The reason for the anger with which Kater attacks my book became all too clear to me when I read the foreword of his book Das "Ahenerbe" der SS and learned that he finds himself much in the same dilemma as do his German colleagues Mommsen, Jäckel and Wehler, whom he defends. Kater, too, wrote his dissertation under the guidance of a Doktor-Vater who once had been a strapping Nazi, namely under the guidance of Werner Conze from the University of Heidelberg6 who made a name for himself in the Third Reich as a volkish and anti-Semitic propagandist. I take it that that is news to Michael Kater, even though he could have gotten to know Conze in his published writings as a former disciple of Adolf Hitler, a disciple for whom Jews were traitors, parasites, and devious enemies of the Volk who had to be removed. But I assume that Kater didn't want to know this, as--according to some new findings--he didn't want to know anything about the criminal past of the former SS-Obergruppenführer Wolf-Dietrich Wolff from the "Ahnenerbe" Foundation of the SS. According to court records Wolff was an accomplice to the murder of at least 87 Jews in Natzweiler Concentration Camp. Kater wrote on behalf of this Nazi criminal an expert opinion on York University stationary, in which he tried to convince the court "that Wolff just performed…routine administrative tasks within the 'Ahnenerbe' Foundation and hence could not have made any decisions on his own."7
The bad news about the Nazi past hasn't reached the generation of Mommsen, Wehler and Jäckel and also the generation of Kater any earlier than now, because they partook in the conspiracy of silence, not because the archives were sealed. Here in Germany a diplomatic silence still is observed; as in a secret agreement nobody mentions to any one else "those critical years." I should, in fact, be ashamed of myself for breaking this unspoken rule in this book. When it appeared for the first time in 1998, I asked a philosopher from the Technical University of Darmstadt, with whose daughter my children had attended Kindergarten and primary school, and with whom I frequently had stimulating conversations after PTA meetings, whether I could count on him for a review. The next day there was a note from him in my mailbox, informing me: "Unfortunately I am unable to review your book, because I know too little about this whole business" (my translation). Truly astonishing, the "well known representative of Darmstadt cultural life" who is an ardent advocate of a "close-to-life philosophy" and who is "concerned about the pressing contemporary problems,"8 knew too little "about this whole business." The former pupil of an Adolf Hitler Boarding School, whom I mention in my book as the Darmstadt historian who against his better judgment accepted Rainer Zitelmann's apologetic Hitler biography as a dissertation, doesn't seem to be quite as ignorant, but he is dazzled when he sees me. Whenever our ways cross, he looks at me, as if I were a ghost. And the late President of the Technical University of Darmstadt and former Fritz Fischer student, who also gets "honorable mention" in my book, pretends he doesn't see me when he walks by me. The editor of the historical journal Aschkenas who is also the Director of the local State Archives, wrote me that he couldn't have my book reviewed in his journal, because he can only spare room for important books, and Neue Politische Literatur, the journal of the Darmstadt University's Department of History, shrouded itself in silence, when I offered my book to the editors to have it reviewed. They didn't even respond to my letter.
However, the book deepened friendships with people who really mean something to me and it even smoothed the way to new friendships. My old friend Claude Owen who had to flee with his parents from Frankfurt in 1938, because of "racial" reasons, and who, after an interim stay in Bolivia, came to Canada, where he taught me German literature, felt that such a book was long overdue. He wrote me: "Your opus appears to me to be of the very highest caliber and of fundamental veracity and necessity." The Australian philosopher and political scientist Harry Redner, with whom I struck up immediate friendship when we met during a public lecture held in a meeting hall of the Jewish congregation in Frankfurt, said to me: "Fred, I think that everything you say in the book is true." The book also paved the road to friendship with Sol Littman, the former Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto, where I met him before his retirement. In view of the difficulties I had and still have with the book, he stood by me over the years and strengthened my resolve with encouraging words such as these: "As the Jewish refusnicks…used to say to each other 'Be strong'." Under no circumstances should I forget to mention Helmut Dahmer, the "obstetrician" who helped me to give birth to the book. If he wouldn't have been there, to whom else could I have spoken unabashedly about Germany and the Germans? Others also need to be mentioned: Julia Frankel, Frances Hanna, Hans-Georg Enger, Torsten Schäfer, Michael Will, Frank Haindl, Wolfgang Günther, Andreas W. Hohmann, Dieter Johannes, Walter Wilkes--and last but not least, my sister Leni Coleman. I am indebted to all of them more than I can express in words. Since my book has reached them, I can take a breather, for I have accomplished something.
What has enabled my accomplishment, and what was it that drove me to write this book? My rootlessness! My roots had been severed in 1955 when I emigrated at the age of thirteen with my parents to Canada. However, the memories remained with me. I identify with Canada's awakening to full independence during the First and Second World War. But if the memory of French-Canadians goes back to Normandy and Brittany and that of Canadians of Anglo-Saxon descent back to England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, then my memory reaches back into the Third Reich and into the immediate post-war years in a small village in Lower Saxony. As an uprooted German I was virtually predestined to adopt the perspective of the "roaming observer" when I returned to Germany in 1982. I seemed to roam around aimlessly, while looking for something, which I was unable to identify. At a staff meeting in the Hessische Staatsarchiv Darmstadt one archivist is supposed to have wondered: "This Herr Kautz is looking for something; could it be that he is Jewish?" No, Herr Kautz isn't Jewish, but whoever is familiar with the Clifford Geertz book Thick Description, can easily guess what was going on. An important essay in this book is entitled "Deep Play." It describes how something unexpected happened to the "roaming observer": While the ethnologist Clifford Geertz runs from the police along with the natives, he all of a sudden discovers the point of intensity, in which everything in the society, he is observing, comes to a point.9 My "objet trouvé" was a former Wehrmacht Lieutenant, whom the Technical University of Darmstadt designated as my faculty advisor. Something happened during an encounter of a peculiar kind with him during his office hours, when, before I knew it, I got into a heated argument with him. The subject of the quarrel was a small town Lutheran minister, whose biography I tried to piece together with the help of documents. In this heated argument everything that was wrong with German academic history came to a point.
The minister in question had been a Nazi and a leading activist of the "German Christian" Movement in Friedberg County. With missionary zeal he had indoctrinated church goers to rally them under the banner of Adolf Hitler and his crony, the Reichsbischoph Müller. In an attempt to understand what went on in the head of this upright Lutheran clergyman, I had thoroughly studied his monthly devotional column, published in a small regional church newspaper, of which all issues from 1927 to 1941 were at my disposal. In it I had found the longing for a "Führer," the gospel about the Volk being a part of the order of creation, which had to be guarded against the Jews as enemies of the Christian way of life, anti-communism, anti-pacifism, anti-modernism, philistine sexual morality and a hodgepodge of other things one usually associates with Nazism. I had also obtained from the Berlin Document Center a copy of the minister's Nazi Party membership registration card. In Wiesbaden I had looked at his Denazification trial record, and in the Central Archives of the Evangelical Church in Hesse and Nassau I had studied his personal dossier.
I was even more surprised when the normally friendly advisor, who treated me, as a rule, in a kind of benevolent fatherly way, started to brow-beat me even before I had a chance to sit down and organize myself. "Nein Herr Kautz, that is not how one writes history!" he lashed out at me, accused me of character assassination, and asked me, what this insignificant minister had done to me that gave me cause to write in such a derogatory way about him. He would have preferred seeing a "more merciful approach"; my basic source was, according to the advisor, rather weak.
About "Luther's clear German eyes" we quarreled. To the advisor and ex-Wehrmacht Lieutenant the phrase referred to the "clairvoyance of the religious leader." I had read Walter Kempowski who had collected testimonials from "Old Fighters" and from hysterical women who had just melted away when their "Führer" had subdued them with his commanding glance; and they all swore that their idol had light blue eyes, although Hitler's eyes were brown. I saw my minister prone to a similar delusion when he was captivated by "Luther's clear German eyes," which looked at him in a "compelling" way. Seeing that Lucas Cranach had painted a swarthy, dark-eyed Martin Luther, to the ex-Wehrmacht Lieutenant and active duty academic law enforcement officer, this was of course gibberish, mere "psycho-talk." All in all, what I had written was below all standards, a mishmash of undigested readings, by no means the yield of scholarly research, much rather a "pamphlet." In short, the brow-beating awaiting Goldhagen, I had already received more than a decade earlier and couldn't help but see what was happening, when from the lofty height of his tenured position Eberhard Jäckel rejected Goldhagen's study as "just a bad book," Hans Mommsen whimpered about the "biting sharpness" of the Junior Professor's assertions, and Jost Nolte ridiculed the Junior Professor as a "pamphleteer."
Unbelievable how some Germans are bored by this prehistory. Among the numerous laudatory reviews my book received in non-professional journals, there is one that touches upon crucial events that had led up to its publication, namely the article in the ötv magazin, which was not meant as a critical article at all, but rather as a pat on the back from my labor union, the ÖTV, for a rank and file union man who had published something.10 The substance of the 270 word article is about my odyssey from Germany to Canada and my return to my native land as a GI, a report on my university studies in Canada and the U.S. and my subsequent research trip to Germany, where the academic welcoming committees were already awaiting me full of suspicion. "Ohne Emotion" ("Without Emotion") is the title, which heads the article in fat print, and I do not quite understand, whether the author Dietmar Rothwange refers with this title to himself or to the German historians, whom, according to him, I accuse of writing history, not from the perspective of human beings capable of experiencing joy and sorrow, but from the vantage point of genuine Wissenschaft--as if experiencing joy and sorrow, on the one hand, and Wissenschaft, on the other, were mutually exclusive. In any case, the labor union journalist Rothwange seems to subscribe to this dichotomy. One need not look for value judgments in the article, there just aren't any. "Now Fred Kautz has problems with his native land," the article states in passing and leaves it at that. "Tough luck, buster," the subtext reads. Das Päckchen, the high gloss propaganda sheet for the wage slaves at UPS, where I once worked as an unskilled laborer in order to survive, could not have mentioned these problems in a more non-committal way. It took a young Canadian, the reporter Kalvin Reid from the St. Catharines Standard, the newspaper of the Niagara Peninsula, to give some thought to the connection between my biography and the book I wrote.11 His knowledge about what happened "back in the Old Country" during World War II, was not at par with the latest research (so that he let Field Marshal Montgomery's 8th Army advance as far as West Prussia), but the story interested him and this motivated him to do an admirable piece of investigative journalism. He even tracked down some of my opponents, in order to ask them what they thought of the book Gold-Hagen und die "hürnen Sewfriedte." "Two contacts in the history department at the university in Darmstadt refused to comment on Kautz and his work," Reid notes. The German press could benefit from taking tutoring lessons from this enthusiastic Canadian reporter.
And it was left to my Canadian compatriot Sol Littman, the son of a Jewish-Canadian seamstress who helped to unionize Canadian workers in the clothing manufacturing industry, to point out what it means to have come from a working class family and to have acquired a university education. "Kautz is the product of a German working-class family that emigrated to Canada while he was a fourteen year old adolescent" he writes. "He went to school in the small, provincial Canadian city of St. Catharines, attended the local university (Brock) and went on to graduate studies in German history at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and at Darmstadt University. The first in his family to receive a university education, his academic life has not been easy."12 My father was a farmer in Bessarabia before the war. After the war he had to work as a farm hand in Lower Saxony; thereafter, he cut peat in the bog and jobbed in a road construction crew. In Canada he found work as an unskilled laborer in the construction industry. He worked like a cart horse till his old TB returned. He had originally been struck while fleeing in the winter of 1945 from West Prussia, or perhaps got it in our damp refugee dwelling "back in the Old Country." After he had been cured, he stayed on in the Schaefer Hospital for Respiratory Diseases and worked there as a janitor. To write something was more difficult for him than lifting heavy bricks on a construction site, for he had received at the most three years of schooling in Bessarabia. When he had to sign his Old Age Pension check, he virtually flexed his muscles, because he was not used to holding a writing utensil in his hand.
Hence, I belong--without having had much choice in the matter--to the first generation of those intellectuals who have risen out of the working class and for whom we have no real name yet. That, too, means rootlessness or being homeless. In the words of the German writer Gerhard Zwerenz:
Return to the inarticulate protectiveness of the proletarian, motherly embrace is no longer possible for those who have gotten used to thinking, who have acquired a passion for the search of truth with all its uncertainties.13
I could sing a song about all this as, when I drove from Buffalo across the Canadian-American border to visit my parents in their small house on Lake Street in St. Catharines (just a 45 minute drive).
I abhorred returning to the "inarticulate protectiveness of the proletarian, motherly embrace." I wanted to liberate myself from this stifling embrace. Perhaps, in the past, I wanted to defect to the idols who sit in upper floor executive offices or who hold chairs in university departments. I am no longer driven by this desire. I no longer want to make common cause with them, especially if they still wear the Nazi uniforms of yonder days under their lab coats of "value free" science. The thought of becoming like them repels me.
I feel I owe this confession to the reader. In the words of the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg:
Why should we bar the reader from entering the work-shop of the researcher? To present research findings, while blending out the way we got them, distorts things enormously.14
May the reader look into the workshops of the historians, especially at those belonging to the generation of the Adolf Hitler Boarding School, the Hitler Youth, and the auxiliary anti-aircraft gunners. Kurt Vonnegut, that master of black humour, might say this to arriving guests: I promised to give you an explanation of why it was necessary to bring out a second augmented edition of this book, which was originally entitled Gold-Hagen und die "hürnen Sewfriedte," but something went wrong in the kitchen. What I wrote here instead of a foreword also turns out to be a report of my last two decades "back in the Old Country," which were by no means a piece of cake.
Fred Kautz
September 2002NOTES
1. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, "Wie ein Stachel im Fleisch," Die Zeit, May 24, 1996, p. 40.
2. Wolfgang Wippermann, "Goldhagen und die deutschen Historiker: Strukturalistische Verkürzungen, böswillige Verdrehungen und antisemitischen Untertöne," in "Die Fratze der eigenen Geschichte"--Von der Goldhagen-Debatte zum Jugoslavien-Krieg, ed. Jürgen Elsässer und Andrei S. Markovits, Antifa Edition (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1999), p. 21.
3. Cf. Among others Yaacov Lozowick, Hitlers Bürokraten--Eichmann, seine willigen Vollstrecker und die Banalität des Bösen, transl. Christoph Münz (Zurich: Pendo Verlag, 2000); and Ian Kershaw, "Trauma der Deutschen," Spiegel spezial, No. 1 (2001), p. 6-13.
4. I no longer stand alone with this analysis of the German Goldhagen debate. The Swiss author Raphael Gross notes that in comparison to Israel, the U.S. and Poland, Holocaust Studies deserving the name have hitherto hardly been conducted in Germany, where they just seem to be getting under way now. In view of this tardiness he poses the question "whether the history of the Holocaust…could have been written any earlier by German scholars." He doubts it, "for it is evident that historians who were enmeshed in the Nazi past couldn't produce studies on the Holocaust, matching the quality of Hilberg's, Reitlinger's, Browning's and Goldhagen's studies. They shied away from doing empirical studies on the destruction of the Jews. And like me, Gross notes:
This, however, does not mean that German historians did not exert their influence on the [discourse on the Holocaust]. This influence may be noted in other fields, namely in the "politics of memory," where the remembrance of the Holocaust becomes more and more abstract. In similar evasive words, with which German historians shied away after the war from empirical Holocaust research, they now dabble in the "politics of memory" by producing a highly abstract consensus, ritualistically stressing the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust, insisting that it cannot be compared to any other genocide and that it constitutes everlasting shame etc.
Even the Holocaust research conducted in Germany today give Gross much cause for concern. He perceives in it "a strange emotional distance to the horrendous event under investigation...and the absence of value judgments." Gross, "Die verspätete Holocaustforschung," Buchzeichen, Supplement to the Tages-Anzeiger, Oct. 8, 2001, p. 11.
5. Michael H. Kater, Rev., of Gold-Hagen und die "hürnen Sewfriedte": Die Holocaust-Foschung im Sperrfeuer der Flakhelfer by Fred Kautz (Berlin, and, Hamburg. Argument Verlag, 1998), as well as my rebuttal, Australian Journal of Jewish Studies, 15 (2001), p. 129-148. [Both are to be found in this book in the last chapter, entitled "Kater and Mouse."]
6. Michael Kater: "I am especially indebted for continuing support to my Doktor-Vater, Herr Werner Conze, Heidelberg,." Toronto, May 1973, "Foreword" to his book Das "Ahnenerbe" der SS 1935-1945--ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches, Studien zur Zeitgeschichte, ed. Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1974), p. 8-9.
@NOTES 2 = 7. Cf. Ernst Klee, "Ein Medizinhistoriker als 'Dienr' eines Nazitäters," in Klee, Deutsche Medizin im Dritten Reich--Karrieren vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2001), p. 293-298 and 306-307; Michael Emmerich, "Die Fehler eines Studenten: Der Sozialhistoriker Michael Kater habe sich zum ' Diener' der SS gemacht, meint Ernst Klee -Vorwurf und Antwort," Frankfurter Rundschau, Oct. 30, 2001, p. 20.
8. Cf. Reinhard Olschanski, "Lebensnahe Philosophie," Darmstädter Echo, May 25, 2002, p. 22.
9. Clifford Geertz, " 'Deep Play': Bemerkungen zum balinesischen hahnenkampf," in his Dichte Beschreibung: Beiträge zum Verstehen kultureller Systeme, transl. Brigitte Luchesi and Rolf Bindemann, suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft 696 (1983; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), p. 202-260.
10. [Dietmar Rothwange], "Ohne Emotion: Kollege kritisiert etablierte Historiker," das ötv magazin, No. 10/11, (Oct./Nov., 1999), p. 36.
11. Kalvin Reid, "Writer opens Pandora's box of German history--Ex-St. Catharines man object of academic scorn for his views on German involvement in Holocaust," The Standard, Sept. 18, 1999, p. 1-2.
12. Solomon Israel Littman, "Der zermürbende Kampf von Fredric Kautz gegen den akademischen Betrieb," Graswurzelrevolution, May 2002, p. 14.
13. Gerhard Zwerenz, Der Widerspruch: Autobiographischer Bericht (1974; Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), p. 197.
14. Carlo Ginzburg, "Geschichte und geschichten: Über Archive, Marlene Dietrich und die Lust an der Geschichte," [Carlo Ginzburg in an interview with Adriano Sofri], in Ginzburg, Spuirensicherung: Über verborgene Geschichte, Kunst und soziales Gedächtnis (1983; Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), p. 12.