Crazy in Berlin (20 page)

“I continued in my naïve tolerance throughout the university years. A force to support it was my personal status as an aesthete. I avoided the drinking and the fraternal societies and the other nonsense, and consequently did not escape being marked as an odd one. Finding myself in the same category as the Jews, I went so far as to make some friends among their ranks. They were, naturally, excellent scholars, and their scholarship was conditioned with the sort of finesse that is so sadly lacking among the Germans. In my reaction against
Spiessbürgertum,
I shortly became infatuated with the Jews, and with their culture. And surely no culture is more attractive to the young man than the Jewish, just as there is no more repugnant than the German. Besides, Orientalism was my pursuit, and the Jew was the earliest flowering of the East. I gradually became aware of the indictment brought against my pets by the Germans, in all of its ramifications, but I still was not be moved. Indeed, I became more pro-Jewish than before. And I did this in an unusual mode. I accepted the accusations as truth, taking issue only with the interpretation. That is to say if the charge was that Jews owed allegiance only to their international Jewish state, I agreed and approved. For, thought I, what else could they do, when throughout history they have been rejected from the Christian society they sought innocently and sincerely to join? In the Twenties, as you may know, the Germans were in narrow straits, while the Jews allegedly flourished. Now it took some nerve to hold, as I did, that it was natural and just that they should tighten the screws against the gentile, for would not the latter have done so had the situation been reversed? I could never see anything peculiarly evil in the Jew’s economic behavior. Should the executioner be blamed for the practice of hanging?

“As for the arguments on racial grounds, they were sheer foolishness, only to be believed in by the kind of people who take up vegetarianism, Rosicrucianism, and other crackbrained schemes to evade paying the piper. I paid little attention to them, and I think this was also true of most convinced anti-Semites, whatever certain loudmouths said. This phase of Nazism was sheer spectacle; this was the Nazis’ analogy to Christianity’s graven images, saints’ relics, etc., and a central vulgarity on which Protestants and Catholics could agree. Never since Luther, whose nationalistic fury vis-à-vis Rome withered his sense of psychology, had the national appetite for histrionics been so appeased.

“Well, then, in the light of all this, why did I eventually reverse myself and become ineluctably anti-Semitic, even to the extent of joining the National Socialist party, which I had from the first abominated as an unholy alliance of gangsters and buffoons? I became an anti-Semite, not for the usual reason—because of the anti-Semites—but because of the Jews, and I joined the united front against the Jews because there was nowhere else to go.

“When I emerged from the university into the great world, moved to Berlin and entered its intellectual life—which in that time was almost uniformly Jewish—I did not change my stand. I still baited the anti-Semites, and, as one will when in the grip of a self-righteous obsession, in the absence of suitable adversaries engaged in dialogues with myself, acting first as
advocatus diaboli
in the presentation of the strongest possible case against the Jew, then demolishing it with my better arguments. I would probably never have had cause to change had I kept company only with gentiles, and certainly never, had my associates been anti-Semites. But I found myself in ever-closer relationships with Jews, whom I attracted as my philo-Judaic position became known, and whom I of course sought out. And thus the foundation came to be built, stone by stone, for the mansion of knowledge. For I found that no matter how well disposed a gentile is towards a Jew it can never be sufficient, for the Jew will not stop short of the total debasement of his friends. The Jew does not want, and does not ask for simple understanding. He craves only total victory, and rewards anything less with corrosive hatred.

“I was not permitted by the Jews to deplore the persecutions they had suffered at Christian hands. In their arrogance they asserted that this very act of deploring was a form of anti-Semitism because it credited their enemies with efficacy, and no matter how superficially well-intentioned the gentile who entertained such sentiments, he could not avoid unconscious
Schadenfreude,
no more than can the athlete who sympathizes with the cripple.

“This is an excellent example of the Jew’s ability to pursue his end by contradictory means. Sometimes he will object to the very designation of ‘the Jews,’ maintaining that no such racial, cultural, religious, ethnic, or whatnot entity exists, that it is the sheerest invention, the most fantastic lie. If you point out that if this were so, anti-Semitism would also be nonexistent, he will say, ‘Exactly, that supports my claim that the whole affair is simply the eternal struggle between the mob and the elite, with no relation to Jewishness.’ At other times, and under other guises, he will present the argument that only the Jews exist, and no other people, because of all the peoples of the earth, only the Jews have been able to preserve their identity in every milieu. He can disclaim Jewish influence on any culture, or assert that the Jew is the
Ernährer
of our heritage, and cite Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Yes, he will cite Jesus with the composure which is his forte! The modern world is, for him, a theater in which the Jews are anonymous members of the cast—unless the situation requires the reverse strategy, in which case he produces a list of leading performers beside whom the gentiles are relegated to the beer-hall stage: Marx, Freud, Einstein.

“He can assume any position at will, for he believes in none. And he hates the sympathizer because sympathy implies melioration, and melioration is change. The Jew’s real aim is to bring Time to a stop. Like all Asiatics, he has a horror of motion, process, becoming—whatever name you like—for us Occidentals, the superior Deity. When
is
replaces
to be,
he will have won. Humanitarianism, liberalism, evolution, tolerance, understanding, these he rightly sees as temporal devices to frustrate him, whereas he delights in the antagonism of fanatics. The anti-Semite is his darling, just as the atheist is the theist’s sweetheart, the murderer the victim’s beloved. The Jew would be a god. How near to success is he then when called a devil! And how he writhes in hatred when a slobbering, mealy-mouthed humanitarian addresses him as Man!

“Totalitarianism provides his most congenial society, with its stupid calls and alarms, its aping of the Jew’s own tricks, such as the obliteration of time and the fierce attack on moderates, and—
its persecution of the Jew!
When he becomes an obsession, he is on the threshold of victory.”

Bach retracted his big head into layers of neck-flesh, recovered, then began again, right forefinger extended:

“I do not mean to claim that I quickly saw the light. Young and innocent as I was, I determined after each rejection to redouble my efforts at understanding, feeling still that it was
our
responsibility that this strange people faced the world in a crabbed, distorted way. How very close was I to the truth! A human being if thrown into water at birth can swim. A few years of growth and this talent is gone, to be regained only by artifice. Yet, this is as it should be. Artifice is what makes us human. It is morally necessary to withhold this function from a child until he has lived long enough to learn the properties of water and the human body, and to experience a sense of achievement in placing them in a new relationship. So with me. By the heart, I had arrived at the proper relationship with the Jews, the masterly one, but I was condemned to tread the earth for some years in ignorance before returning to it by ratiocination.

“But, to proceed. I told myself again that the Jews had no reason to think kindly on their oppressors, and that it was only natural they would out of pride decline any aid that tended to imply a lack of self-competency on their part. I summoned up my resources of love, decency, intelligence. They might deny me, but I would not deny them. I suddenly took on, through the force of my commitment, the identity of a Jew; and the soma reflected the psyche: the cartilaginous tissue of my nose thinned, my eyebrows thickened, and my shoulders developed a nervous twinge.

“At first, my gentile friends derived much fun from this state of affairs, and would jokingly call upon me for the Jewish point of view on every question (this “Jewish opinion” is a favorite delusion of gentiles, and one which while ostensibly deploring, Jews enjoy enormously). But it did not take long for them to discover that what was an idle jest to them, was deadly serious to me. As my philo-Semitism became firmer and firmer, I felt a wall rising between us. The last brick fell into place when a story began to go around that I was really half-Jewish, and had thrown my lot with the alien part of my heritage. This fiction, I realized, was only their defense against accepting the terrible fact that I had, in free will, abdicated from the gentile’s estate.

“But, of course, neither was I received as a fellow by the Israelites. Here there existed no solid wall—this people could not have survived all those agonizing centuries by material means. (The Jew, by the way, has always deluded his enemies into thinking he is materialistic. Nothing could be farther from the truth, which you can appreciate when you observe that he has flourished in the West under capitalism, a philosophy which above all others is abstract and visionary, and based on the intangibles of faith and spirit. He is, however, naturally opposed to the recent developments of capitalism. If it becomes humane, that is to say, evolves into true socialism—which is absolute materialism—we have a chance of conquering him. Vain thought!)

“So I was with and around the Jews without being of them. Oh, they don’t hold secret meetings, like the mythical Elders of Zion (that wonderful legend, which is far too gross to be of Jewish origin—you know they, themselves, ‘plant’ most of the anti-Semitic fairy tales—is an example of the gratuitous aid they are often rendered by moronic gentiles), they have no arcane signs or handgrips, no insigne. How they communicate their identity to each other is so mysterious that it exceeds mystery, as does the manner in which a single spermatozoon out of ten thousand penetrates the egg. The important thing is that it happens. And, if
we
cannot grasp it, no Jew can fail to. Which is why no Jew can truly forsake his people, and why the Jews display that odd combination of mockery and pity towards those of their fellows who vainly toy with religious ‘conversions’ and facial surgery.

“The great reversal (from philo- to anti-Semitism) came, as those things do, all at once. I was in the habit at that time of spending the evenings with my Jews in a cellar-cafe where over a single glass of beer or cheap wine we would exhaust hours talking art, literature, philosophy, and those other diversions of the young, including politics, of which ours was, in that day—1927—communism. All in what I cherished, despite numerous disillusionments, as the intimate atmosphere of brotherhood. One evening a newcomer appeared at our table, a fierce, hideous, wooly-headed young Israelite, looking like the pictures one sees of Trotsky as a youth. He was discoursing passionately on some topic, political I should imagine, but as I took a seat, he terminated abruptly. ‘It’s all right,’ one of the others told him, ‘Bach is all right.’ He nodded amiably at me, and rather transparently began to comment on inconsequential matters. Later, when I had left the table briefly to speak with a friend across the room, I saw on returning that he and Schwartz, whom I regarded as my closest comrade, had their heads together, snickering. The object of their amusement was obvious. Now, lest you think me hypersensitive, I must explain to you that the Jew’s humor is concerned solely with satire; he does not laugh at things, but always at people. That is to say, he finds funny not what occurs by chance, such as a stout man’s tumble on the ice, but what has taken place by human will, and the involvements therefrom, such as, say, a gentile posing as a Jew. This temper stems first from the Jews themselves having suffered too much from chance to find comedy in the fortuitous, and, second, from their great reverence for the given, the inanimate, the timeless. One might almost say the Jew would see the ice mocked by the stout man’s hindquarters.

“I felt a rush of loathing at that moment, as one about to vomit feels the bile-bitter fluid rise in his throat, and not at the Jews, but at myself. For a moment I had seen in those mirrors of degradation that dreadful, abominable specter that no one can face with composure: my naked self. But I choked it down and took my seat, for the deepest self-knowledge bears with it the deepest cowardice. The impulse to action was to come almost an hour later. The conversation had continued in the same silly direction the newcomer had indicated: tastes in wine, the beasts at the Zoo, a job a friend had lately got on one of the Ullstein papers—
B.Z. am Mittag,
I believe—and so on. Finally, the group began, only half-seriously, to plan an outing in the next week. Half-seriously, I say, because we were all unemployed, and could not have raised the money for the elaborate refreshments listed as the minimum fare. ‘Where shall we go?’ cried Schwartz. Someone named a favorite section of the Grunewald. The eternal dupe, I had been swept up again into the warmth of the fraternity, and was adding my bit. I noted with good humor that we should avoid the spot named, because on a recent Sunday stroll I had marked that it was uncomfortably crowded.

“ ‘Yes,’ said the young Trotsky, ‘too many Jews.’ I think now that he was merely passing a harmless, if masochistic jest, as Jews often do, but, then, it struck the spot that had been worked raw by the earlier incident. I broke down and wept. God, there is nothing more terrible than a young man’s sorrow! But not even that will move a Jew! I sprang to my feet. ‘Yes,’ I sobbed, ‘just as here,’ and fled from the café. From that moment on, the battle was joined.

“I had been a fool, but my greater folly was yet to come. I fell prey to the subtlest device of this devil, and joined the ranks of his greatest ally, the National Socialist Party.