Have German writers of Jewish extraction — or for that matter German writers — ever felt at home in the German Reich? There is a justifiable sense that German authors, of Jewish or non-Jewish origins, have at all times been strangers in Germany, immigrants on home ground, consumed with longing for their real fatherland even when they were within its borders. From the time that Bismarck’s Second Reich gave physical, materialist, and military forces precedence over the life of the intellect, when the character of the drill sergeant was proposed and recognized by the world as the typical representative of Germany, from that time German writers have felt they were living in moral banishment and exile. Behind the sergeant stood the engineer who supplied him with weapons, the chemist who brewed poison gas to destroy the human brain, and at the same time formulated the drug to relieve his migraine; the German professor, falsely depicted in German humorous satirical magazines as an absent-minded dreamer who forgets his umbrella, but who is in fact the most dangerous (the most dogmatic) enemy of European civilization: the inventor of the philological equivalent of poison gas, who is paid to disseminate the idea of Prussian superiority, the noncommissioned officer of the university, which in the time of Wilhelm II became a barracks.
In the new German Reich the only free and independent people, the only revolutionaries in the proper sense, were the writers. Which is why, long before the advent of Hitler, they felt themselves to be émigrés and expatriates in that empire of technology, of corporals, of parades, and of standing at attention. If you want to understand the burning of the books, you must understand that the current Third Reich is a logical extension of the Prussian empire of Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns, and not any sort of reaction to the poor German republic with its feeble German Democrats and Social Democrats. Prussia, the ruler of Germany, was always an enemy of the intellect, of books, of the Book of Books — that is, the Bible — of Jews and Christians, of humanism and Europe. Hitler’s Third Reich is only so alarming to the rest of Europe because it sets itself to put into action what was always the Prussian project anyway: to burn the books, to murder the Jews, and to revise Christianity.
The great historical error of the younger generation in Germany was that it subjected itself to the Prussian drill sergeant, instead of joining forces with the German intellect. About 1900 Jews started to appear in Germany who were classified as “Kaiser Wilhelm’s Jews,” or “Jewish Prussians,” or “Jewish lieutenants of the reserve,” or even “Sunday Jews.” Without setting aside their religion, they tried to transform it into a kind of Protestantism, and their temples into Prussian barracks. They referred to themselves as “German citizens of the Jewish faith” and the fact that they chose the term “German citizens” instead of merely “Germans” goes to show that they themselves sensed that citizenship was a different category from people and nation. They had just about enough willpower not to repudiate the thousand-year-old tradition of their forefathers, but they lacked the strength not to falsify this tradition. Because they didn’t have the courage to convert, they preferred instead to have the entire Jewish religion baptized. The result was Jewish priests with a Protestant bearing and in Protestant costume; “Reformed Israelite communities” that worshiped on Sundays instead of the Sabbath; Jews who had themselves driven to temple — the house of a betrayed God — on Yom Kippur in luxurious carriages, dressed in the uniforms of Prussian lieutenants of the reserve; Jews who eventually came to view the “Jewish confession” as a state-authorized concession to Jehovah as a kind of twin of the Prussian god. . They felt entitled to take out a lease on “German civilization”; inconstant and fickle as they were, to introduce and to support literary and other “fashions”; undiscriminating as they had become, novarum rerum cupidissimi,* to admire every version of corruption in literature, in the visual arts, in the theater, because they had forgotten Jehovah; to profess liberalism and freethinking.
It would be true to say that, from about 1900, German cultural life was largely defined, if not dominated by this “top class” of German Jews. To be fair, what they did was not wholly bad. Even their errors were sometimes salutary. In the whole of that large kingdom with a population of sixty million, among all those industrialists, there was — individual exceptions aside — no class that was actively interested in art and intellect. As far as the Prussian Junkers are concerned, the civilized world will know that they were just about able to read and write. One of their representatives, President Hindenburg, openly admitted that he had never read a book in his life. And, incidentally, it was this icon, ancient from early youth, that the workers, Social Democrats, journalists, artists, and Jews worshipped during the war, and that the German people (workers, Jews, journalists, artists, Social Democrats, and the rest of them) then reelected president. Is a people that elects as its president an icon that has never read a book all that far away from burning books itself? And are the Jewish writers, scholars, and philosophers who voted for Hindenburg really entitled to complain about the bonfire in which our thoughts are consumed?
As for the industrialists — their minds were taken up by iron and steel, by guns and “Big Berthas”; they were smelting the modern version of “Siegfried’s sword.” The big businesspeople were producing the cheap junk labeled “Made in Germany” with which they flooded an unhappy world. Only the German Jews (doctors, lawyers, tradesmen, department store owners, artisans, or manufacturers) were interested in books, theater, museums, music. Even if they were occasionally guilty of bad taste, it remains a fact that there was no one else in the whole of Germany capable of pointing out and correcting their errors. The magazines and newspapers were edited by Jews, managed by Jews, read by Jews! A swarm of intellectual Jewish critics and reviewers discovered and promoted numerous “pure Aryan” poets, writers, and actors! Does there exist — now that theater and literature have been “cleansed”—a single outstanding actor or writer who was not recognized and praised at a time when reviewing and public opinion were in the hands of Jews? I challenge the Third Reich to come up with a single example of a gifted “pure Aryan” poet, actor, or musician who was kept down by the Jews and emancipated by Herr Goebbels! It’s only the feeblest dilettantes who flourish in the swastika’s shadow, in the bloody glow cast by the ash heaps in which we are consumed. .