Bach, Hitler and the People Called German

Steven Ozment has done a remarkable thing in A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People (HarperCollins, 416 pages, $26.95). Ozment, a professor of history at Harvard, declines to see the history of Germany through the sole prism of the Third Reich. Rather, he begins with the beginning, going back to Tacitus in the first century a.d. The early story line is that of interaction with and, later, succession to the Roman Empire. In a manner reminiscent of Peter Brown’s The Rise of Western Christendom, Ozment shows how the “barbarians” did not so much invade the Roman Empire as they engaged, over a long period of time, in complicated negotiations of identity and power from which Frankish and then German dominance gradually emerged.

Ozment believes that this way of telling the story is crucial to the future of the young democracy that is the Germany unified in 1990. He wants to offer a “fuller and fairer” depiction of German history. Historians who see the whole of that history stamped with the Nazi swastika are projecting, “both in fear and fancy,” an impossible future. “On the one hand, there remains Germany the eternal land of obedience, with its documented modern history of aggression and totalitarianism. On the other, there is Germany the prostrate penitential state, an idealized egalitarian democracy with its gates thrown open to all, as portrayed by Güünter Grass. Each of these options projects an abject German people on their knees either out of docility and fear of their rulers or in utopian self-sacrifice—highly unlikely future scenarios for the latter-day survivors of the twentieth century.”

Moving somewhat rapidly from the first century to the sixteenth—it is, after all, a small book for such a big subject—Ozment finds the German character (he does not use the term “character”) marked by an oscillation between “self-transcendence and self-abasement” grounded in the theology of Martin Luther. Simul iustus et peccator—at the same time sinner and justified—is at the heart of the German sensibility. “In Luther’s view the German Christian, unlike the Roman, did not see his life on a spiritual continuum from diminishing sinfulness to increasing righteousness. His soul spanned two poles and he led a double life—hopeless and mad in the life he alone could sustain on earth, yet eternally secure in the heights to which his faith momentarily lifted him.” This duality had its parallel in the political doctrine of the “two kingdoms.” “Luther envisioned two coeval authorities ordained by God to govern the secular and ecclesiastical spheres of life—the princes and lords to oversee body and property, the pastors and priests to safeguard consciences and souls.” In the absence of traditional ecclesiastical governance (the bishops did not go over to the Reformation), the princes became also “emergency bishops,” thus conflating and confusing the two kingdoms. A small item indicating the impact of Luther: between 1520 and 1546, one third of everything published in the German language was written by Martin Luther. Luther’s popular catechetical writings, later imitated by Catholics, “made the Germans Europe’s most theologically literate people.”

Sometimes explicitly, more often between the lines, Ozment offers a revisionist account of the role of Jews and Judaism in German history. Revisionist, that is, by contrast with the many post-Holocaust books on Germany that make anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism the leitmotif of the entire story. The Nazis—and many contemporary historians follow them in this—drew a direct line between their anti-Semitic views and Luther’s notorious writings against the Jews late in his life. Ozment suggests that those writings were an aberrant eruption and notes that Luther’s close associates, such as Melanchthon and Justus Jonas, in no way subscribed to Luther’s fulminations. “Luther’s anti-Jewish tracts lived on in the complete editions of his works but did not as a rule find their way into Lutheran confessions, catechisms, and hymns.” An eighteenth-century anthology of anti-Jewish writings, Judaism Unmasked, has been called the anti-Semite’s “literary munitions arsenal.”Ozment notes, “Nowhere in its more than two thousand pages is the name of Martin Luther so much as mentioned.”

Contrary to the conventional notion that eighteenth-century Pietists were given to social and political quietism, Ozment observes that Frederick William I converted from Calvinism to Pietism precisely in order to forge a stronger link between religion and the public order. Lutheran leaders of Pietism such as Johann Arndt, Philip Jakob Spener, and August Hermann Francke very deliberately put Christianity into the service of state and society. While maintaining a link with Luther’s duality of worldly and spiritual orders, Spener also wrote, “We are under an obligation to achieve some degree of perfection.” There is a moral duty, he contended, to be guided by the Holy Spirit in one’s moral actions. Ozment offers an unexpected but, on second thought, plausible observation: “Here he anticipated Immanuel Kant’s secular notion of a categorical imperative in conscience, demanding a universally applicable response to moral challenge.” From Kant to Nietzsche, it is suggested, Germany’s modern intellectual history is the product of “lapsed Lutherans” wrestling with irrepressible returns of a rejected theology.

Dialectic and Bipolarity

And of course there is no Germany without Johann Sebastian Bach, whose music was, says Ozment, in sharp contrast to that of the Enlightenment, and especially of the French Enlightenment. “What distinguished Bach’s work and made it lasting was the musical-emotional demonstration of humankind’s need for transcendence and majesty, yet utter inability to encompass and master either.” The Enlightenment believed in man’s ability to resolve the riddle of history, both to mock and to play the gods. “By contrast, Bach’s music reasserted the dialectical character of reality and the bipolarity at the center of the human heart, each mysterious and complex beyond all human fathoming. . . . The alternating loss and restoration of harmony left the auditor with an intermittently pleasurable, but never final or secure, sensation of reconciliation, which was also the intention of the juxtaposition of Law and Gospel in the Lutheran sermon: oneness only in division, righteousness only in sin.” Ozment makes much of the similar dialectic in Goethe’s Faust. It may suggest something important about the German mind and spirit that in 1914 soldiers on the battlefront were sent three books: The New Testament, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Goethe’s Faust.

In Ozment’s concluding discussion of Germany’s present and possible futures, one misses any treatment of what appears to be the striking triumph of secularism in today’s Germany. That may be because Ozment believes that triumph occurred in Wilhelmine Germany around the turn of the century. “If not Europe’s most deeply religious land, Germany had been its most theologically engaged since the Reformation. Because of, or perhaps despite, such literacy, increasing numbers of inward Germans abandoned the traditional spiritual refuges for those promised by enlightened reason, empirical science, or post-Enlightenment fringe spiritual movements. Behind this transfer . . . lay centuries of excessive familiarity with, and estrangement from, mainstream religion.” And this: “Finally, the long nineteenth-century deconstruction of German history and tradition, particularly the unprecedented intellectual and spiritual assault on mainstream morality and religion, had taken its toll by the 1920s, leaving many Germans confused, cynical, and exploring dark and unfamiliar pathways, not least that leading to National Socialism.” In this light, one may infer that what appears to be a fairly recent triumph of secularism is, in fact, a return to the deep disillusionment of the early twentieth century which had been only momentarily interrupted by a religious resurgence in the immediate aftermath of the horror of the Third Reich.

Why Hitler?

In his account of the Third Reich, Ozment is particularly suggestive, and sometimes provocative. Nazi theory, especially its racial theory, was premised upon the Nietzschean motif of the highest and lowest man. In this, Hitler set himself against Christian egalitarianism, including the Lutheran simul iustus et peccator that portrayed Everyman as both the highest and the lowest. Although he never gained a majority vote and probably never had the support of a majority of Germans, Hitler gained power because—after the oppressive reparations imposed by the Allies following World War I, after years of desperate depression and runaway inflation, and after the manifest failure of the Weimar Republic— “he conveyed, like no other, the image of a leader more outraged over the people’s plight than they, and possessed of the will and wit to end it—something Hindenburg and the Weimar Republic had long since lost the ability to do.” In Germany’s darkest days, everyone else had failed. “In the end it was that fact that gave Hitler, a politician who knew how to stuff a void with promises, a decisive advantage.” Enough people went along, but after seizing power “the party ruled supreme only by fear and terror, and never succeeded in making Germany the voluntary, cohesive national community that its propaganda desired.”

Jews and Judaism, Ozment emphasizes, were by no means in the forefront of Hitler’s appeal to the German people. But they were always on his mind. “Hitler hated Christianity and communism for their social leveling and static societies, and he identified the supremely hated Jews as the mother root of both plagues.” Contra Daniel J. Goldhagen and others who depict Germans as a nation of “willing executioners” just waiting for a Hitler to give them permission to go out and kill Jews, Ozment contends that hostility to Jews was not entrenched in German culture. “By comparison with most other states, nineteenth-century Germany had been a good place for Jews to live.” There was resentment that Jews, less than one percent of the population, occupied so many places in the elite professions, but the majority-Protestant population desired only Jewish conversion and assimilation into Christian society. There was a similar resentment of the Catholic minority. “The perception that German Catholics and Jews had a prior allegiance to a religious community deemed higher than the German state endeared them neither to their secular and areligious, nor to their devoutly Protestant, fellow citizens. Still, as late as 1900, anti-Semitism was far rifer in France and Czarist Russia than in Germany.”

Ozment emphatically rejects the claim of some historians that World War II was waged primarily to exterminate Europe’s Jews. “The original motives for the war were completely self-centered, not Judeocentric or anti-Semitic. Germans wanted to avenge and repair, by total victory, the draconian reparations they had been compelled to pay and the terrible suffering they had endured since World War I.” As for Hitler’s personal motivations, his chief target was Christianity, through which, in his view, the Jewish corruption worked its evil. “Pure Christianity,” Hitler said, “leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind; it is wholehearted Bolshevism under a tinsel of metaphysics.”Ozment writes, “Thus, while Hitler subjected German Jews to a ‘final solution,’ he singled out the removal of the ‘rotten branch of Christianity’ as the ‘final task’ of National Socialism, with the removal of Slavs, Gypsies, and homosexuals in between. Beyond the Jewish Holocaust lay the eradication of Christianity.”

“German Christians”

The eradication would begin with co-optation, which Hitler attempted in establishing a church of “German Christians” to displace Protestant leadership. Ozment observes, “The liberal Protestant theology of the Enlightenment and the left-wing Hegelians was far more vulnerable to being co-opted by National Socialism than was traditional Christianity.” With the encouragement of the Vatican, Catholics ducked their heads in the hope of weathering the storm and maintaining enough institutional strength “to preserve a base from which to fight principled moral battles,” which they did in combating a euthanasia program that, before it was stopped, killed 72,000 physically or mentally impaired children and adults between 1939 and 1941.

In sum, says Ozment, “Through Christianity and Bolshevism, the ancient empire-destroying power of the Jews lived on in the modern world. Therein lay, for Hitler, the imperative of a ‘final solution’ for the Jews and of a postwar terror for the Christians.” As for the implementation of the Holocaust against Jews, Slavs, and others, it was more of an opportunistic, jerry-built, improvisational affair dictated by circumstances rather than a well-coordinated imposition of a master plan. On this, Ozment’s version is similar to the recent and much acclaimed study by Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution.

When the much smaller and economically enfeebled East Germany was unified with West Germany in 1990, the oddity appeared that Easterners were much more at peace with German history than their Western cousins. West German President Richard von Weizsacker observed that East Germans had a “more stable, serious, and truthful consciousness of German history,” notwithstanding Communist Party lapses into “ideologization.” Actually, those lapses largely explain the oddity. Easterners were taught that the Hitler years had nothing to do with them; the horror was the product of decadent capitalism against which Communists had heroically battled. For West Germans, and especially for intellectuals, the Third Reich is German history and everything that had gone before was discredited as having led directly to the horror. Among intellectuals espousing that view, Ozment singles out the novelist Günter Grass and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. By almost equating Germany with Hitler and by insisting that Germany has a permanent “democracy deficit,” such thinkers hobble the efforts of former leftists such as Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to lead the now united nation into an era of confident democracy. Similarly, Ozment excoriates those—mainly Jewish organizations—who demand never-ending “shakedowns” as reparations for what was done by dead Germans of a time now long past. All who make National Socialism and the Holocaust “the bookends of German history,” Ozment contends, stand in the way of Germany’s pressing need to meet the challenges of its democratic future.

Spiritual Deficit

The challenges are daunting. Ozment gives detailed attention to the complicated question of immigration, mainly Muslim and mainly from Turkey. Originally welcomed as “guest workers” who would do the work that Germans no longer were willing to do, legal and illegal immigrants are now as much as ten percent of the population and are not assimilating culturally and politically. Curiously, Ozment does not refer to a major factor exacerbating the problem, namely, the “baby deficit” created by the fact that German reproductive rates fall far short of replacement levels. And despite the centrality of religion suggested both by the book’s title, A Mighty Fortress, and by the substance of Ozment’s narrative, his conclusion entirely skirts the “spiritual deficit” of a secularist culture consumed by consumerism.

Ozment is insightful about the ambivalence of Germans toward the European Union, an ambivalence that he apparently shares. On the one hand, Germany’s commitment to the transnational experiment is a bid to be accepted as a “normal” and no longer threatening people. On the other, most of the people, unlike the aforementioned intellectuals, want Germany to be a nation among the nations, while also fearing that its status as the richest and most powerful of the nations in the EU will once again arouse the fears of others.

While not downplaying the twelve-year nightmare that was the Third Reich, Steven Ozment insists that that is not the whole of German history, nor even the most important part. He rather likes and admires the German people and believes it is long past time to give their still young democracy a chance to vindicate that favorable disposition. His disposition is commendable and his argument is generally persuasive. But as with the music of Bach, one might observe, Germany’s “alternating loss and restoration of harmony” may provide even the sympathetic observer with “an intermittently pleasurable, but never final or secure, sensation of reconciliation.”