The Fritz Stern Speech

Four days ago, I wrote of a speech made in November 2004 noted in NY Times Article. I noted that no where on the internet could I find a copy of his speech. Fritz Stern, in the speech accepting the Leo Baeck Medal, warns the people of his adopted country (America) of a rising danger in it's midst. Stern has spent a lifetime studying the emergence of the Nazi movement in Germany and lists the conditions he believes promoted it's growth. There is an unnerving number of parallels in our recent past.
I emailed Mr. Stern:

I read with great interest the article in the NY Times today about your speech last November at the Leo Baeck Institute. I share your concern about the mixing of religion and politics by our current President. I was disappointed to find no link to the text of your speech on the web. I would like to post a copy of your speech along side the NY Times article on my site listed below. [...] Thank you for your willingness to dedicate much of your life to understanding how Germany fell to Hitler. My sincere hope is that your speech will awaken America to the danger in it's midst.

Three days later he writes:

Dear Mr. Marco,
Thank you for your kind comments. The speech can now be found at www.lbi.org. Kind regards, Fritz Stern

Stern, who escaped persecution in Germany by emigrating with his parents in 1938 at age 12, sensing danger in the moment, spoke indirectly of the risks. Instead of pointing an accusing finger at the Christian Right and the Bush Administation, he referred to the intensification of his apprehension from the events of the last ten days. His speech took place on Nov 14, seven days after the election. Then he closed with a reference to the preciousness of our Bill of Rights in hopes it will protect us from ourselves.
I encourage you to read the whole document. Don't let the emotion (unreason) of comparing America to Nazi Germany stop you from listening. That unreason is our greatest enemy. Here is an excerpt:
Fritz Stern Speech

Still, for me it is felicitous because it is an encouragement at a hard time; events of the last ten days have intensified my reasoned apprehension, my worry about the immediate future of the country that saved us and taught us and gave us so much.

[...]

Allow me a few remarks not about the banality of evil but about its triumph in a deeply civilized country. After the Great War and Germany’s defeat, conditions were harsh and Germans were deeply divided between moderates and democrats on the one hand and fanatic extremists of the right and the left on the other. National Socialists portrayed Germany as a nation that had been betrayed or stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews; they portrayed Weimar Germany as a moral-political swamp; they seized on the Bolshevik-Marxist danger, painted it in lurid colors, and stoked people’s fear in order to pose as saviors of the nation. In the late 1920s a group of intellectuals known as conservative revolutionaries demanded a new volkish authoritarianism, a Third Reich. Richly financed by corporate interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture. These conservative revolutionaries were proud of being prophets of the Third Reich—at least until some of them were exiled or murdered by the Nazis when the latter came to power. Throughout, the Nazis vilified liberalism as a semi-Marxist-Jewish conspiracy and, with Germany in the midst of unprecedented depression and immiseration, they promised a national rebirth. Twenty years ago, I wrote about “National Socialism as Temptation,” about what it was that induced so many Germans to embrace the terrifying specter. There were many reasons, but at the top ranks Hitler himself, a brilliant populist manipulator who insisted and probably believed that Providence had chosen him as Germany’s savior, that he was the instrument of Providence, a leader who was charged with executing a divine mission. God had been drafted into national politics before, but Hitler’s success in fusing racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity was an immensely powerful element in his electoral campaigns. Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics, but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas. German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they didn’t think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously. They were proven wrong. People were enthralled by the Nazis’ cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from the pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.” Let me cite one example of the acknowledged appeal of unreason. Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, Nobel-laureate in physics and a philosopher, wrote to me in the mid-1980s saying that he had never believed in Nazi ideology but that he had been tempted by the movement, which seemed to him then like “the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.” On reflection, he thought that National Socialism had been part of a process that the National Socialists themselves hadn’t understood. He may well have been right: the Nazis didn’t realize that they were part of an historic process in which resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason. German elites proved susceptible to this mystical brew of pseudo- religion and disguised interest. The Christian churches most readily fell into line as well, though with some heroic exceptions.

[...]

Every democracy needs a liberal fundament, a Bill of Rights enshrined in law and spirit, for this alone gives democracy the chance for self-correction and reform. Without it, the survival of democracy is at risk. Every genuine conservative knows this.

Text of Speech
Acceptance speech delivered by Fritz Stern upon receiving the Leo Baeck Medal
at the 10th Annual Dinner of the Leo Baeck Institute
Professor Fritz Stern
Honoree of the Leo Baeck Medal
My thanks to Foreign Minister Fischer for his presence and for his most generous remarks; my thanks to Michael Blumenthal, to Ismar Schorsch, to Richard Holbrooke, to Anna-Maria Kellen, to Carol Strauss and the Leo Baeck Institute—to all of you. I see many friends here? It’s heart-warming and mind-numbing to be praised for simply doing what I thought had to be done. To have witnessed even as a child the descent in Germany from decency to barbarism gave the question “how was it possible” an existential immediacy. So I did no more than what others of my generation did as well: wrestle with that question, try to reconstruct some parts of the past, perhaps intuit some lessons. So I find it easier and more appropriate to translate your kind words into a celebration of Clio, the historian’s exacting and often elusive muse, and to use today’s festive occasion to acknowledge friends, colleagues, mentors, American and European, who have inspired me by example and encouragement. Writing is painful and solitary; scholarship at its best offers companionship, even harmonious companionship. No wonder that I am grateful for the exuberant exaggerations uttered tonight.
I am also grateful for the timing of this event. It would be nice to ascribe this to some invisible hand, but I suspect it had to do with the visibly crowded schedule of the Foreign Minister. Still, for me it is felicitous because it is an encouragement at a hard time; events of the last ten days have intensified my reasoned apprehension, my worry about the immediate future of the country that saved us and taught us and gave us so much. I take heart from tonight, since renewed hope is itself a marvelous gift. Herr Fischer, I can’t divine your thoughts and feelings about this country—they may be buried in your diplomatic heart—but let me say that what you see in this hall tonight is something very special and inspiriting: if the United States were a parliamentary democracy, if we had a House of Commons where the opposition faced the government in weekly contest, you would recognize here leading members of the shadow government.
Among us we have persons who could be your partner in statesmanship, and we have talent also to fill Treasury and Justice; we have many ministers of education, a minister for human rights, and when I look at my grandson I realize we even have junior ministers. We are reminded of the strength and vitality of this country. The world must envy us this bounty—and some day even our own citizens will appreciate our blessings.
I take special joy in saying this because the German-speaking refugees who came to this country in the 1930s and thereafter had similarly enthusiastic feelings about this country. Not only gratitude for saving us, giving many of us a chance for a new start, if often under harsh circumstances—I think of my own parents—but love and admiration for a country that was, when we arrived, still digging itself out from an unprecedented depression, under a leader whose motto was that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” unlike his German contemporary, who preached fear in order to exploit it. The United States was the sole functioning democracy of the 1930s—that “low, dishonest decade—and under FDR it was committed to pragmatic reform and in inimitable high spirits. No, I haven’t forgotten the unpleasant elements of those days—the injustices, the right-wing radicals, the anti-semites—but the dominant note of Franklin Roosevelt’s era was ebullient affirmation of reform and progress.
We are here to celebrate the Leo Baeck Institute, a monument that German Jewish refugees built as a memorial to their collective past, a troubled, anguished, glorious past to which many of them remained loyal even after National Socialism sought to deny and destroy it. It is impossible to generalize about German Jews in the modern era, but common to most of them was an earlier deep affection for their country, its language and its culture. Perhaps they loved not wisely, but too well. Even Albert Einstein with his abiding antipathy for things German remembered his unique, never-duplicated companionship with his German colleagues during his great years in Berlin with Max Planck and Max von Laue. I remember from my childhood the decent Germans, so-called Aryans, who being opponents of the Nazi regime disappeared into concentration camps after 1933.
The ties between us had been close, and when they were broken, when so many Germans decided they didn’t want to know what was happening to their Jewish or “non-Aryan” neighbors, when they denied their common past, the pain was deep. But something of what had once been remained in the minds of many refugees, and they founded the Institute to be a repository of this legacy. Its archives are a treasure for historians and scholars from everywhere—in recent decades especially from Germany itself—have come to its unique library. The LBI has contributed to greater understanding and reconciliation between Americans and Germans, between Christians and Jews.
The founders probably seized quickly upon the name Leo Baeck, to recall the last liberal Rabbi of Germany—a student of the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, someone who deepened theological learning by taking a fuller account of the irrational, mysterious elements in human existence. However much he and Paul Tillich had understood the power of the demonic when they studied it in the 1920s, Baeck couldn’t have imagined that he would live to see the triumph of hate-filled unreason. In the end, he had to endure living under that triumph, in a unique position as the last head of Germany’s Jewish community, its representative to Nazi authorities, which finally sent him to Theresienstadt, that Nazi mockery of a model concentration camp, where for a time specially selected victims, spared as yet from extermination, were allowed to retain some form of a community before they died of hunger and disease. Baeck survived his years there—perhaps he met my father’s sister and her husband in Theresienstadt before they were deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.
Richard von Weizsaecker, in his extraordinary presidential address on the fortieth anniversary of Germany’s unconditional surrender, warned that sparing German feelings would be of no avail. The wounds remain and need to be acknowledged. In that same spirit of candor, let me say that the work of the LBI is all the more important in light of what an earlier head of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Gerson Cohen, wrote in a Leo Baeck Yearbook in 1975. He mentioned that German Jewry had had “a bad press” in recent literature, being depicted occasionally as epitomizing submissiveness and self-hatred.
Theirs is a complex history, and hence the importance of the diverse testimony collected at the Institute; but it is also appropriate to recall Heine’s thought--that Jews are like the people they live among, only more so. Hence German Jews, who came in great variety—orthodox, liberal, secular, converted—were like Germans only more so: ambitious, talented, disciplined, and full of ambivalence.
After their civic emancipation in the nineteenth century, German Jews made an unprecedented leap to achievement, prominence, and wealth within only three generations, but some special insecurity and vulnerability clung to them, as it did to many Germans. I remember finding in an obscure book Disraeli’s confession to young Montefiore: “You and I belong to a race that can do everything but fail.” What a poignant remark, I thought, and mentioned it to my son, who instantly responded, “How hard on the others.”
It probably was hard on the others, but now many Germans regret the absence of that creative complicated element of German Jewry. They recall the inestimable contributions that Jews made to German life and culture in their century of partial emancipation. But their forbears had more complicated feelings on the subject, and even the most successful Jews felt, as Walther Rathenau once said, that “there comes a moment in every Jew’s life when he realizes he is a second-class citizen.”
Perhaps that strange mixture of German hospitality and hostility to Jews evoked the ambivalent response of some of the greatest of German Jews. They were the brilliant diagnosticians of German-European hypocrisy, the memorable breakers of taboos: think of Heine’s mockery of German sentimental pretense, of Karl Marx’s insistence that the cash nexus trumps virtue, or of Sigmund Freud’s exposure of sexual hypocrisy and falsehood. Disturbers of a false peace are indispensable but rarely welcomed. So anti-semitism, which comes in many guises and degrees, existed in pre-1914 Germany, as it did more ferociously in other countries. In Germany, it became an all-consuming political weapon only after the Great War. It is now conventional wisdom that the First World War and its senseless, unimaginable slaughter was the Ur-catastrophe of the last century.
It brutalized a Europe that before 1914, though deeply flawed by injustice and arrogance, also contained the promise of great emancipatory movements, championing the demands for social justice, for equality, for women’s emancipation, for all of human rights. The war radicalized Europe; without it, there would have been no Bolshevism and no Fascism. In the postwar climate and in the defeated and self-deceived Germany, National Socialism flourished and ultimately made it possible for Hitler to establish the most popular, the most murderous, the most seductive, and the most repressive regime of the last century.
But the rise of National Socialism was neither inevitable nor accidental. It did have deep roots, but the most urgent lesson to remember is that it could have been stopped. This is but one of the many lessons contained in modern German history, lessons that should not be squandered in cheap and ignorant analogies. A key lesson is that civic passivity and willed blindness were the preconditions for the triumph of National Socialism, which many clearheaded Germans recognized at the time as a monstrous danger and ultimate nemesis.
We who were born at the end of the Weimar Republic and who witnessed the rise of National Socialism—left with that all-consuming, complex question: how could this horror have seized a nation and corrupted so much of Europe?—should remember that even in the darkest period there were individuals who showed active decency, who, defying intimidation and repression, opposed evil and tried to ease suffering. I wish these people would be given a proper European memorial—not to appease our conscience but to summon the courage of future generations. Churchmen, especially Protestant clergy, shared his hostility to the liberal-secular state and its defenders, and they, too, were filled with anti-Semitic doctrine.
Allow me a few remarks not about the banality of evil but about its triumph in a deeply civilized country. After the Great War and Germany’s defeat, conditions were harsh and Germans were deeply divided between moderates and democrats on the one hand and fanatic extremists of the right and the left on the other. National Socialists portrayed Germany as a nation that had been betrayed or stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews; they portrayed Weimar Germany as a moral-political swamp; they seized on the Bolshevik-Marxist danger, painted it in lurid colors, and stoked people’s fear in order to pose as saviors of the nation. In the late 1920s a group of intellectuals known as conservative revolutionaries demanded a new volkish authoritarianism, a Third Reich. Richly financed by corporate interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture. These conservative revolutionaries were proud of being prophets of the Third Reich—at least until some of them were exiled or murdered by the Nazis when the latter came to power. Throughout, the Nazis vilified liberalism as a semi-Marxist-Jewish conspiracy and, with Germany in the midst of unprecedented depression and immiseration, they promised a national rebirth.
Twenty years ago, I wrote about “National Socialism as Temptation,” about what it was that induced so many Germans to embrace the terrifying specter. There were many reasons, but at the top ranks Hitler himself, a brilliant populist manipulator who insisted and probably believed that Providence had chosen him as Germany’s savior, that he was the instrument of Providence, a leader who was charged with executing a divine mission. God had been drafted into national politics before, but Hitler’s success in fusing racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity was an immensely powerful element in his electoral campaigns. Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics, but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas.
German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they didn’t think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously. They were proven wrong. People were enthralled by the Nazis’ cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from the pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”
Let me cite one example of the acknowledged appeal of unreason. Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, Nobel-laureate in physics and a philosopher, wrote to me in the mid-1980s saying that he had never believed in Nazi ideology but that he had been tempted by the movement, which seemed to him then like “the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.” On reflection, he thought that National Socialism had been part of a process that the National Socialists themselves hadn’t understood. He may well have been right: the Nazis didn’t realize that they were part of an historic process in which resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason. German elites proved susceptible to this mystical brew of pseudo- religion and disguised interest. The Christian churches most readily fell into line as well, though with some heroic exceptions.
Though modern German history offers lessons in both disaster and recovery, German has remained the language of politics in crisis. And the principal lesson speaks of the fragility of democracy, the fatality of civic passivity or indifference; German history teaches us that malice and simplicity have their own appeal, that force impresses, and that nothing in the public realm is inevitable.
Another lesson is the possibility of reconstruction, for the history of the Federal Republic since World War Two, a republic that is now fifty-five years old, exemplifies success despite its serious flaws and shortcomings. Postwar Germany made a democracy grow on what was initially uncongenial ground, when its people were still steeped in resentment and denial. American friendship supported that reconstruction, especially in its first decade.
I fear that an estrangement is now taking place, and I suspect that all of us here would wish to preserve in the private realm what may be in jeopardy in public life. German democracy, German acceptance of Western traditions, has been the precondition for its gradual reconciliation with neighbors and former enemies, with Poles and Slavs; for its efforts at reconciliation with Jews; for a general acceptance of the burden of the past and a collective commitment for the future. This German achievement is remarkable—but it too needs constant protection.
Herr Fischer, thank you for coming, and thank you for your kind words. We wish you success and Fortuna. Your great predecessors Walther Rathenau and Gustav Stresemann longed and worked for a peaceful Europe; your responsibilities go beyond Europe, which at last is peaceful. My hope is for a renewal on still firmer grounds of a trans-Atlantic community of liberal democracies. Every democracy needs a liberal fundament, a Bill of Rights enshrined in law and spirit, for this alone gives democracy the chance for self-correction and reform. Without it, the survival of democracy is at risk. Every genuine conservative knows this.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you all.
© Copyright by Fritz Stern