How professors made anti-Semitism socially acceptable – culture

For Siegfried Unseld he was later a Thersites, the eternal moaner and rebel from the Iliad, he could not forgive him the uprising of the editors, in which the “literature producers” demanded co-determination in 1968, which the Suhrkamp and Insel publishers were not willing to grant. Unseld thought he could do without the polyglot, infinitely educated Walter Boehlich, and he had a grudge: he was all but wiped out in the publisher’s chronicle, he had never been the chief editor, who, because Unseld didn’t speak French, negotiated with Beckett, over translated into Danish, Spanish, French and English and also represented the critical theory of the Frankfurt School in the house.

His particularly daring venture was the “Collection Insel”, founded in 1965, a left side line against the “beautiful island book”, which was still Art Nouveau in terms of aesthetics and content. Boehlich wanted a “political education” with Georg Büchners Hessian messengerintroduced by the youth-moving Enzensberger, with Herbert Marcuse, who wrote about Marx, with Martin Walser about Jonathan Swift.

Treitschke’s text boiled down to a single sentence: “The Jews are our misfortune!”

The most important volume in this series was “The Berlin Anti-Semitism Controversy”. The book is as legendary as it is unread, the title has become historical, the work of the private scholar Boehlich, who, as one professor had to grumble, “was outside the university as a journalist”, “highly gifted”, as the professor had to regret, ” however, the path to an academic career did not work out for him”.

Boehlich was all the more successful outside as a critic and enlightener who did not take his readers for fools. Unseld can no longer add grudges, he died in 2002, four years before Boehlich. As a kind of reparation for his rejected adversary, the book has now been re-released after 58 years by the Jewish publishing house, which belongs to Suhrkamp. The bibliography has been greatly expanded. In the introduction, Nicolas Berg Boehlich indicates Boehlich’s role in the publishing house and is able to reconstruct the importance of the collection for further research.

Research on anti-Semitism has now become a life activity, there has long been extensive documentation, but Boehlich’s achievement is unrivaled: all alone, without grants lasting several years, without academic assistants and without international conferences, he made a lesson out of one of the most inglorious chapters in German intellectual history, a lesson that was frightening in every respect .

In the fall of 1879, the Berlin historian Heinrich von Treitschke published an essay gloomily titled “Our Prospects,” which boiled down to a single sentence: “The Jews are our misfortune!” A slogan with a resounding effect was born, decades later as a constantly repeated battle cry by Julius Streicher striker graced. Treitschke did not yet want to exterminate anyone, but the Jews should conform to his image of a godly Prussian Germany. “What we have to ask of our Israelite fellow citizens is simple: they should become Germans, simply feel like Germans.”

Treitschke was certain of the approval of “my Jewish friends” – like every anti-Semite he has friends among the Jews – “when I complain that a dangerous spirit of arrogance has awakened in Jewish circles in recent times”. In other words, the Jew has become too bold and needs a punch in the mouth. The historian was only too ready to give him the swipe.

Court preacher Adolf Stoecker had already done his part and preached about “self-defence against the Jews”. After the pulpit came the lectern, the Jews are not really Germans and moreover they are becoming more and more, or in the language of the educated Treitschke, “year after year a crowd of ambitious youngsters selling pants are penetrating our eastern border from the inexhaustible Polish cradle, whose children and grandchildren should one day rule Germany’s stock exchanges and newspapers” – it’s as if Björn Höcke and Götz Kubitschek were preaching the downfall of Germany through unlimited mass immigration.

Open detailed view

No more “soft philanthropy”, demanded Treitschke, Germany above all else, and the Jews should kindly show tolerance, become Germans and not remain “German-speaking Orientals”. Fake news hasn’t even been invented yet, when the professor is already dealing with the fact that the Jews are already starting to “eliminate Christian images” and are demanding the introduction of “Sabbath celebrations in mixed schools”.

He assures his publisher that he “doesn’t want to provoke, but to reconcile”, but one must also “tell the guys that it’s not us, but they themselves, who are to blame for the furia tedesca that is now breaking out”. The way he stirs up popular anger is the best Goebbels who knew who he was learning from.

The horror among the scholars of Jewish origin was great. They rejected the reprimanding tone, reminiscent of Shylock: “We also have feelings, the Jew is also a human being, so to speak.” After some hesitation, among the Christian Germans, Theodor Mommsen, the famous author of “Roman history” (he received the first German Nobel Prize for literature for this in 1902), rose up against his colleague and warned in a word of power against the “civil war of a majority against a minority”. For Boehlich, Mommsen is the hero in this dispute: “The moralist has won for the moment, but only for the moment.”

Open detailed view

Anti-Semitism was by no means just a mob movement, but was fueled by hate speech by academics like Treitschke and was immediately socially acceptable. The look back at the Wilhelmine double year 1879/80 was topical in a folk-educating way at the same time, because the readers in the mid-1960s were told where the ideology came from, with which the henchmen who were on trial in the Auschwitz trials tortured and murdered.

For Boehlich, who was brought up as a nationalist himself, the documentation of the Berlin scandal in the previous century was only part of his critical work. To Unseld’s anger, his employee also worked outside the publishing house, and above all he aroused offense. At the Germanists’ Day in 1966, he demanded: “If we want to recover, the Auschwitz trials are not enough; then the trial against German history must also be conducted.” Boehlich was ready to lead him at any time.

In Munich, Treitschke’s name is still emblazoned on the street sign

When the University of Bonn elected Hugo Moser as rector, who had curry favor with racist language research during the “Third Reich”, Boehlich was outraged in two articles in the Time: “Not only in Bonn, but everywhere at the universities of the Federal Republic, people refuse to ask the question about the role of the universities in the Third Reich and about their guilt.” Benno von Wiese, the country’s best-known German scholar and the most famous follower of the subject, cried in the same Time, that he unfortunately, unfortunately, along with a whole generation of intellectuals, “succumbed to the influence of a fateful zeitgeist”.

The much-cited “faith” that just as inevitably took its course had not begun, as Boehlich repeatedly pointed out, in 1933, when the young, ambitious Benno von Wiese threw himself at the new state.

The city of Munich, after all the former “capital of the movement”, unintentionally confirmed how urgently necessary it was to look back at the beginnings of anti-Semitism, after all the former “capital of the movement”, where the idea of ​​paving a street after the academic anti-Semite Treitschke came up not in 1933 but in 1960 to name. The decision to do so, as the documents in the city archives show, was “unanimous and without discussion”. In a first draft, the namesake was praised as a “master of stylistic formulation”, “he is counted among the great Germans”. You can say it like that. In any case, the process that Boehlich wanted is not over.

In Berlin, they have now denied the propagandist Treitschke’s grave of honor, in Munich, where there have been several attempts to persuade the city to change it, the name is still emblazoned on the street sign.