The Spinoza Problem (49 page)

The auction of Spinoza’s property was conducted by W. van den Hove, a conscientious notary who left a detailed inventory of the 159 books in Spinoza’s library, with precise information about the date, publisher, and format of each book. In 1900 George Rosenthal, a Dutch businessman, used the notary’s list to try to reassemble the philosopher’s book collection for the Spinozahuis at Rijnsburg. Great care was taken to purchase the same editions, with the same dates and cities, but, of course, these were not the very same books that Spinoza had held in his hands. (In chapter 32 I imagine a scene in which Alfred Rosenberg is unaware of this fact.) Eventually George Rosenthal was able to collect 110 of the 159 books in Spinoza’s original collection. He also donated another 35 pre-seventeenth-century books, as well as works on Spinoza’s life and philosophy.

Spinoza was buried under the flagstones inside the Nieuwe Kerk, causing many to assume that he had undergone a late conversion to Christianity. Yet, given Spinoza’s sentiment that “the notion that God took upon himself the nature of man seems as self-contradictory as would be the statement that the circle has taken on the nature of the square,” a conversion seems highly unlikely. In liberal seventeenth-century Holland, the burial of non-Protestants inside churches was not rare. Even Catholics, who were far more disliked in Protestant Holland than Jews, were occasionally
buried inside the church. (In the following century, policy changed, and only the very wealthy and prominent were buried there.) As was the custom, Spinoza’s burial plot was rented for a limited number of years, and when there was no longer maintenance money available, probably after ten years, his bones were disinterred and scattered in the half-acre churchyard next to the church.

As the years passed, the Netherlands claimed him, and his prominence grew such that his portrait was featured on the Dutch thousand-guilder banknote until the euro was introduced in 2002. Like all portraits of Spinoza, the banknote portrait was based on scanty written descriptions; no likenesses of Spinoza were drawn during his lifetime.

A plaque was placed in the Nieuwe Kerk churchyard in 1927 to commemorate the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Spinoza’s death. Several Jewish enthusiasts from Palestine, who wished to reclaim Baruch Spinoza as a Jew, were involved in the commemoration. The Latin inscription reads: “This earth covers the bones of Benedictus Spinoza, once buried in the new church.”

In Palestine, at about the same time as the unveiling of this plaque, Joseph Klausner, the renowned historian and later a candidate in Israel’s first presidential election, delivered a speech at Hebrew University in which he declared that the Jewish people had committed a terrible sin in excommunicating Spinoza; he called for a repudiation of the idea that Spinoza was a heretic. He ended, “To Spinoza, the Jew, we call out . . . from atop Mount Scopus, out of our new sanctuary—the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—
the ban is rescinded!
Judaism’s wrongdoing against you is hereby lifted, and whatever was your sin against her shall be forgiven. Our brother are you, our brother are you, our brother are you!”

In 1956, the three-hundredth anniversary of Spinoza’s excommunication, Heer H. F. K. Douglas, one of Spinoza’s Dutch admirers, conceived the idea of constructing an additional memorial next to the 1927 plaque. Knowing that Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of Israel, much admired Spinoza, Heer Douglas asked for his support. Ben-Gurion enthusiastically offered it, and when the word spread in Israel, members of a humanistic Jewish organization in Haifa, who considered Spinoza the progenitor of Jewish humanism, offered to contribute a black basalt stone as part of the memorial. The formal unveiling of the monument was well attended and included governmental representatives of both Holland and Israel. Ben-Gurion did not attend the unveiling but visited the memorial in an official ceremony three years later.

The new plaque, placed next to the 1927 plaque, contained a relief of Spinoza’s head and the single word “
Caute
” (caution) found on Spinoza’s ring seal, and, below that, the black Israeli basalt stone sealed to the plaque contains the Hebrew word
(
amcha
), meaning “Your People.”

Some Israelis took issue with Ben-Gurion’s attempts to reclaim Spinoza. Orthodox members of the Knesset were so outraged by the idea of Israel honoring Spinoza that they called for the censure of both Ben-Gurion and the foreign minister, Golda Meir, for instructing the Israeli ambassador in Holland to attend the unveiling.

Earlier, in an article, Ben-Gurion addressed the issue of Spinoza’s excommunication. “It is difficult to blame the Jewish community in seventeenth century
Amsterdam. Their position was precarious . . . and the traumatized Jewish community had the right to defend their cohesion. But today the Jewish people do not have the right to forever exclude Spinoza the immortal from the Community of Israel.” Ben-Gurion insisted that the Hebrew language is not complete without the works of Spinoza. And indeed, shortly after the publication of his article, the Hebrew University published the entire body of Spinoza’s work in Hebrew.

Some Jews wished Ben-Gurion to appeal to the Amsterdam rabbinate for reversal of the excommunication, but he declined and wrote: “I did not seek to have the excommunication annulled, since I took it for granted that the excommunication is null and void. . . There is a street in Tel-Aviv bearing Spinoza’s name, and there is not one single reasonable person in this country who thinks that the excommunication is still in force.”

The Rijnsburg Spinoza library was confiscated by Rosenberg’s ERR in 1942. Oberbereichsleiter Schimmer, the working head of the ERR in the Netherlands, described the seizure in his 1942 report (later to become an official Nuremburg document): “The libraries of the Societas Spinozana in Den Haag and of the Spinoza-House in Rijnsburg also were packed. Packed in eighteen cases, they, too, contain extremely valuable early works of great importance
for the exploration of the Spinoza problem
. Not without reason did the director of the Societas Spinozana try, under false pretenses which we uncovered, to withhold the library from us.”

The stolen Rijnsburg library was housed in Frankfurt along with the greatest store of plunder in world history. Under Rosenberg’s leadership, the ERR stole over three million books from a thousand libraries. When Frankfurt came under heavy allied bombardment in 1944, the Nazis hurriedly moved their plunder to underground storage sites. Spinoza’s library, along with thousands of other uncatalogued books, were sent to a salt mine at Hungen, near Munich. At the war’s end, all the
Hungen treasures were transferred to the American Offenbach central depot, where a small army of librarians and historians searched for their owners. Eventually Dirk Marius Graswinckel, a Dutch archivist, came upon Spinoza’s books and transferred the entire collection (minus only a handful of books) to the Netherlands on the
Mary Rotterdam
, a Dutch ship. They arrived in Rijnsburg in March 1946 and were once again placed on display at the Spinoza Museum, where they may be viewed to this very day.

 

F
or the month awaiting trial, Alfred remained in solitary confinement in the Nuremberg prison, meeting only with the attorney preparing his defense, an American military physician, and a psychologist. It was not until November 20, 1945, the first day of the trial, that he saw the other Nazi defendants as they assembled before the presiding judicial body and the teams of prosecutors from the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and France. Over the next eleven months all would assemble in the same room 218 times.

There were twenty-four defendants, but only twenty-two were present for the trial. A twenty-third, Robert Ley, had hanged himself with a towel in his cell two weeks earlier, and the twenty-fourth, Martin Bormann, the “dictator of Hitler’s antechamber,” was to be tried in absentia, though it was widely believed that he had been killed as the Russians overran Berlin. The defendants were seated on four wooden benches arranged in two rows, with a row of armed soldiers standing at attention behind them. Alfred was seated second in the front right bench. On the front left bench were Göring; Hess; Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi minister of foreign affairs; and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, supreme commander of the military. In the months of detention preceding the trial, Göring had been withdrawn from drugs, lost twenty-five pounds, and now appeared sleek and jovial.

On Alfred’s right was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, highest surviving SS officer. On his left were Hans Frank, governor-general of occupied Poland; Wilhelm Frick, Reich protector of Bohemia-Moravia; and at the end of the bench, Julius Streicher, editor of
Der Stürmer
. Alfred must have been relieved he did not have to sit next to Streicher, whom he found particularly repulsive.

In the second row were such eminences as Admiral Dönitz, the Reich president after Hitler’s suicide and the commander of the U-boat campaign, and Field Marshal Alfred Jodl. Both maintained a haughty military bearing. Next sat Fritz Sauckel, head of the Nazi slave labor program; Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reich commissioner of the Netherlands; and then Albert Speer, Hitler’s close friend and architect—a man whom Alfred hated almost as much as Goebbels. Next there were Walther Funk, who turned the Reichsbank into a depository for gold teeth and other valuables seized from concentration camp victims, and Baldur von Schirach, head of the Nazi youth program. The two other defendants in the back row were lesser known Nazi businessmen.

The selection of the major Nazi war criminals had taken months. They were, of course, not the original inner circle, but with the suicides of Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler, these men represented the best-known Nazis. Finally, finally, Alfred Rosenberg had entered the inner circle. True to character, Göring, Hitler’s second
in command, tried to take control of the group, using a seductive twinkle or a bullying glare, and soon many deferred to him. The prosecuting team, disturbed by the prospect of Göring influencing the testimony of the other defendants, quickly took steps to separate Göring from them. First, they ordered Göring to eat alone during lunch breaks on trial days, while the other defendants sat at tables of three. Later, to minimize Göring’s influence even more, they enforced stricter solitary confinement for all defendants. Alfred, as always, declined to participate in the few remaining social opportunities available—during meals, on the walks to the courtroom, or whispered comments during proceedings. The others did not conceal their dislike of him, and he reciprocated fully: these were the men he considered responsible for the failure of the noble ideological foundation he and the Führer had so carefully fashioned.

 

Image copyright Omer Tamir. Permission granted under Creative Commons/ No Derivative Works license.

A few days into the trial the entire court viewed a powerful film made by American troops when they had liberated concentration camps. Nothing, not a gruesome detail, was omitted: the entire court was stunned and revolted by the screen images of gas chambers, the crematorium ovens crammed with half-burned bodies, mountains of decaying corpses, huge mounds of articles taken from the dead—spectacles, baby shoes, human hair. An American cameraman trained his lens on the faces of the defendants as they watched the film. Rosenberg’s white face registered horror, and he immediately looked away. After the film, he insisted, in concert with all of the Nazi defendants, that he had had absolutely no idea of the existence of such things.