Translated from Rolf Gutte/Freerk Huisken, Alles bewältigt, nichts begriffen! Nationalsozialismus im Unterricht. Eine Kritik der antifaschistischen Erziehung, VSA-Verlag, Hamburg, 2007, p. 47-59.
How could it have come to that?
The question “How could it have come to that?” is the starting and ending point, i.e. the quintessence, of the discussion of fascism in school. It is prominently featured in almost every textbook. Even if it is not posed explicitly, it weighs on the lesson.[6] It is not seeking an answer, but rather affirming judgments that have already been brought into being with the question. Strictly speaking, it is not a question at all; and certainly not a question that seriously demands an answer. One must therefore also imagine an “ever” or “even” in order to do justice to its spirit: “How could it have ever come to that?” Or: “How was that even possible?”[7] The question is meant to create a feeling. It is intended to create shock, dismay, and bewilderment in the face of its monstrousness, the deepest sense of helplessness, and to make this feeling the guiding principle of any further discussion of fascism.
Incomprehensible
In the question, the situation described, fascism with Hitler’s seizure of power, his policy of exterminating the Jews, euthanasia, the Lebensborn, the Second World War – in other words, the mysterious “that to which it came” – is presented as a monstrosity. Fascism is seen as a deviation from all “normal” political processes, if not the inversion of politics altogether. It is said to have been an enormous crime that lasted twelve years. Something happened, it is said, which in its monstrousness goes beyond the boundaries of the imaginable and therefore defies all categories for judging political processes. Entire departments of fascist politics are declared inexplicable prior to any theoretical examination. Many deeds are said to be beyond theoretical examination. They simply cannot be explained.[8]
It should therefore come as no surprise that in the minds of educated posterity, fascism has largely been reduced to an undemocratic seizure of power, euthanasia, the Holocaust, the Hitler Youth, and a senseless war. While an explanation of the “seizure of power” may still be found, it is hard to believe that the majority of people followed Hitler into war voluntarily. But the mind should finally give up when faced with the euthanasia program and the Holocaust.
Equipped with an image of fascism that focuses on the program of the extermination of the Jews, other aspects of fascist politics – such as elections, the formation of coalitions, the use of the Enablement Act, a radical version of the policy on foreigners, the linking of propaganda tools with government policy, or the instruments and goals of fascist economics, including employment policy, work assignments for the unemployable, government debt, and the development of an arms industry – are not even brought into the field of vision or are transformed into monstrosities so that fascism is clearly distinguishable from the political and economic systems of the bourgeois democracies.
In this way, the use of the Weimar Enablement Act becomes an attack on democracy or the coordination of radio and the press becomes pure manipulation. An affront to human dignity is discovered in labor requirements and the political intention to wage war in the arms industry.[9]
Elements found in fascism as well as in any other bourgeois politics thus become “something completely different.” In the end, it is only by pointing to the Holocaust that the “seizure of power” becomes a true scandal. It is only through knowledge of the mass killing of the Jews that National Socialist propaganda becomes criminal “mass suggestion.” Without the Holocaust, fascism would be entirely within the categories of bourgeois political machinations that everyone knows to be “normal scandals.” Without Auschwitz, its domestic policies would have been at best an abuse of democracy and its wars ill-prepared. Before any proper account, it is therefore already clear that every moment of fascist economics and politics inevitably bears witness to the Holocaust. That is why, it is said, democratic immigration policies cannot be compared with the fascist policy on outsiders, democratic radio, film and press censorship with fascist censorship, the cult of the leader of democratic parties with that of the fascists, or the banning of parties in democracy with that in fascism.
The rhetorical question “How could it have come to that?” does not allow an objective approach. It insists on the moral counterpoint as the guiding principle of any further examination. It searches for evidence and with this in mind even occasionally involuntarily latches on to a bit of truth about bourgeois society. That the fascist labor service was an abrogation of the free labor market and therefore an “inhumane” form of using people, that generally Germans and foreigners were “expended” in arms production, is immediately obvious in the case of fascism. Judgments that, in relation to the world of work in a democracy, would immediately be accused of ideology, are perfectly suitable for condemning fascism in this state-moral guise.[10]
Knowledge relativizes criticism
Fascism, represented by the genocide of the Jews, is not only considered incomprehensible. It must not, claims the predetermined question, be given any conceptual clarification. The suspicion is cultivated that any explanation of fascism could damage, relativize, or even erase the feeling of horror. Yet the one has nothing to do with the other: Anyone who sets aside an initial emotional judgment to try to clarify the facts that trigger the horror will use their theoretical comprehension to get to the bottom of the causes of the fascist final solution. If they succeed in doing this, they won’t approach the matter with a serene smile, but will be able to explain it. The criticism contained in a judgment of emotional horror which doesn’t reveal the underlying mechanisms then gives way to a criticism that does. This is the only way that it can be discussed and that conclusions can be drawn from it.
In contrast, a lesson that primarily appeals to the feeling of horror in young people seems to depend on a condemnation that does not involve any judgment at all. How else could it be explained that shutting off the mind, a procedure generally classified as “primitive,” is presented here as almost a pedagogical intention?
As a scientific judgment, this approach thrives on an infamous confusion: it is not uncommon for researchers to capitulate to their subject matter because they cannot explain it. In their horror at the Holocaust, however, they present something as a characteristic of the subject matter which is nothing other than an admission of their own failure. The finding that the subject matter is simply inexplicable is also intended to provide a reason why it is completely superfluous to try to shed further light on it. However, such a finding must be countered with a question: Where does this knowledge of the incomprehensibility of fascist crimes actually come from? What is the basis for the judgment that the subject is inexplicable? The finding that fascism defies any rational approach is also a theoretical judgment that must be subjected to scrutiny. Arguments would have to be put forward as to why fascism should elude any cognitive activity. Otherwise, the silly contradiction remains: there is a judgment about fascism that is epistemological in its substance, but at the same time asserts its own inexplicability. Theorists who want to be taken seriously actually announce that they have grasped that the Holocaust cannot be grasped. Their “insight” is therefore nothing of the kind. It lives solely on the decision that it is not appropriate for Germans to approach its monstrousness in a distanced, rational way.
Explanation as approval
If the appropriate intellectual approach to fascism is disgust, then a student who does not catch on to the rhetoric of the initial question and quite innocently misunderstands it as only a prelude to a further theoretical discussion of fascism, thereby checks it off and then presses for initial answers, is guilty of sacrilege. It disturbs the solemn mood, the general immersion in all the images of atrocities produced by German fascism in abundance. On top of this, anyone who resists the pedagogical confrontation with mountains of corpses and points out that the mere contemplation of the results of racism does not lead to any further clarification might even find themselves exposed to the suspicion of being a secret fascist sympathizer who wants to make excuses for it.
The suspicion that insight will undermine the emotional condemnation lays the basis for the denunciation that the desire to explain a subject pursues the aim of condoning it.[11] The interest in wanting to understand fascism is rejected with the argument that someone probably wants to show sympathy for it. Because it can happen that someone seeking clarification will encounter incredulous amazement from his contemporaries if he puts forward the thesis that, for example, the Holocaust was the result of a declaration of war on people who were declared enemies of the state. They do not want to cast doubt on his proposition, but only on his right to talk so calmly and rationally about this unparalleled crime in human history – which is yet another theoretical judgment, but does not want to be understood that way! And depending on the office and rank of the proponent of such a thesis, either the cautious question follows as to how he actually stands on the murder of the Jews, he is immediately insulted as a racist, or one discovers a cynicism in his interest in knowledge that one no longer thinks can be tolerated.[12] As if someone can become a racist by scientifically dealing with Hitler’s judgment on Aryans and Jews! He only becomes a racist if he finds that the fascist judgment makes sense to him, not just by dealing with it theoretically.[13] An attempt at an explanation is only cynical for those who confuse the theoretical distance necessary for any explanation with an indifference on the part of the theorist to his object of investigation, when it might have been precisely his indignation about the subject that drove him to make the theoretical effort.
Only approved reasons are reasons
Confusing an interest in knowledge with the justification of an act is based on the judgment that only good reasons can claim acceptance as reasons at all. According to this fairly widespread logic, it is inconceivable that someone could have had reasons for acts that are considered inhumane. They are characterized as senseless because they contradict the valid standards of politics and economics. And people who do not follow the valid norms cannot – so the false logic continues – have any rational reasons. Rather, they are guided in their actions by hidden irrational forces. While it stood to reason to German citizens during fascism that Jews who allegedly wanted to ruin Germany by occupying key positions in science and culture, parties and banks, should be disempowered, today it is held that the “final solution” to this disempowerment was a completely “senseless mass murder.” While it made sense for the fascists, who saw Jews as the natural enemies of the Aryans, to declare war on them, it seems crazy to today’s free-market democrats.
Such an assessment of fascist politics as irrational, senseless, and unjustified only arises if today’s democratic politics are considered rational, sensible, and justified – and without any reasons having to be given for this.
The fact that no one today goes around the country with the same moral verve and asks the question “How was this possible?” in the face of a policy on immigrants that sets up deportation prisons and deports immigrants can’t be explained by any particular quality or rationality of democratic politics. Such a thing is due solely to nationalist partisanship.
Because impossible, therefore sick
The logic by which only good reasons for an action are considered reasons at all, and these turn out be the politically approved ones in each case, opens the way for the intellectual engagement with fascism to switch to the darkest recesses of the life of the soul: if fascism, measured by humane standards, is considered to have been an impossibility, then hidden and deviant forces must necessarily have been at work. The idea of possibility does good service here. It absurdly declares events that occurred long ago to have been merely possible and claims that where actual impossibilities became realities, things simply could not have happened properly, i.e. in a rationally comprehensible way, and thus points to mysterious and enigmatic processes.
This includes the widespread opinion that fascism must have been the spawn of sick brains. The leitmotif of this pedagogical coming to terms with the past thus opens access to a finding by which fascism also weeded out its human material: the equation according to which anyone who did not submit to the raison d'être and morality of the state must be mentally ill and cost the lives of communists, gays, gypsies, and others.
So even anti-fascist democrats are no strangers to the racist idea that points to a defect in nature when people do not orient their thoughts and actions by the required political standards. The consequences that democrats draw when they have worked their way up to this message, which makes apologies for the political will but incriminates nature, can certainly be taken from some of the recommendations on how to deal with young neo-fascists today. Anyone who advocates imprisonment or labor camps does not consider the actions of German skinheads to be the conscious implementation of a political concept any more than someone who sees a sign of youthful immaturity in them that they will probably grow out of with age.
Evil
If students are supposed to succumb to the horror, they are required to expand the morality contained in the horror’s conceptless criticism into an attitude. Every objective observation has to be relativized by the desired attitude that discovers the work of evil in fascism. Fascism, one is supposed to think, is a unique crime that explodes all moral standards. It is the epitome of evil that lies dormant deep within human beings or nations and points to their potential depravity.
Hitler as the incarnation of evil, of the devil, represents an extra finding in its own right. If, for example, young children are told: “The Germans were good people and they were friends with their neighbors – until a time when your grandparents were still young and a little evil man called Hitler became their leader,”[14] then this is not child appropriate, but wrong.
When moral condemnation of political deeds fixates entirely on the character of a person, politics is not only denied any content or intention, they are not only “explained” tautologically by the evil nature of the politician, but the moralist’s subjective judgment of Hitler is also asserted to be his objective character.
So when the teller of fairy-tales tells the children about the “evil man,” this is not the beginning of a clarification of fascism, but its end. In this way, moral judgment is formed into a habit before any theoretical judgment: Fascism is evil!
Nationalistic concern 1: Guilt
It is noticeable that different rules of judgment apply in the academic treatment of world history, which is rich in massacres. German scholars by no means freeze in silence in the face of genocide. There is a lively debate about conditions and reasons, factors and causes. In the face of euthanasia and Auschwitz, by contrast, young Germans are virtually forbidden by German teachers from investigating. Such a thing only makes sense if from the outset they are conceived of as German and should feel German. It is therefore important to establish that the acts, which have been distorted into inexplicable monstrosities, were committed by one’s fellow countrymen, that the Holocaust was carried out by Germans. This should not only be known, but should be the decisive standard of judgment. It is expected to cause a special bewilderment. The extraordinary nature of the deeds should not be taken from the deeds themselves, but from the nationality of the perpetrators. And the student should discover himself in this nationality.
What’s more, he is not supposed to grasp the historical coincidence of having been born on the territory where fascism raged and being part of a population that goes by the same name as the people who carried out fascism, supported it, and suffered under it; rather, he is supposed to behave as if the extermination of the Jews were somehow also his own deed.
And that’s precisely the point. The transformation of a causal investigation into a nationalistic question of guilt, into a search for blame and culprits, is not a slip up, but intentional. This confusion of a theoretical need, namely to explain fascism and fathom its roots, with the concern to make someone ideally responsible for the damage that was caused, is due to habits of thinking in terms of the rule of law. It thrives on indifference to a theoretical view of the world. In the case of a damage that is classified as a breach of the law or a crime, there is no theoretical question about the cause, but only questions that provide answers that can be used in court: Who is guilty, who pleads guilty? What is the appropriate punishment for the guilt? Who will pay for the damage?
When educators deal with questions of guilt in textbooks, they want to point to those responsible who can be held accountable. Objectively, this is extremely impractical because it never gets to the root of the damage. However, the moral effect – in this case, the national moral effect – is all the greater. The difference between the two approaches is striking: anyone who seriously asks about the causes of fascism, who wants to know the reasons for fascist politics, will sooner or later end up with the capitalist mode of production, its inherent imperialism, and the bourgeois state power without which this mode of production cannot exist. Anyone looking for culprits ends up with the Chancellor of the German Reich, Adolf Hitler, as the main culprit. He places a certain share of the blame on the German people who were complicit, and moreover derives the responsibility of German descendants from this based on the model of collective guilt.
Of course, the question of guilt can also be answered negatively if it is already being considered. Hitler is also innocent or not guilty if he is declared mentally ill. It is the transformation of fascist politics into a mental defect, i.e. a disease among fascists, that allows even its movers and shakers to be excused. And where its politics is only the manifestation of a disease, it is not that the political will is susceptible to argumentative influence, but that an anomaly of nature is revealed which can only be helped by therapy.
On this basis, it is even possible to formulate accusations against the Germans which are also just excuses: How could they have allowed themselves to be manipulated? They should have realized what Hitler had planned for them! Perhaps they really didn’t know anything? And just like in the excuses, in accusations the citizens of the fascist state at the time also seem to be beings who could not have had anything to do with the actual policies of the NSDAP.
What has never been claimed for the Weimar Republic, and certainly not for the post-war democracy, is said to have determined their fate in the twelve years in between. In this phase of history, and only in this phase, they are said to have taken leave of their senses. Before that, they were convinced republicans, loyal to the Kaiser or democrats; afterwards, democrats and fighters against all forms of totalitarianism! But in between? A collective twelve-year blackout!
Complicity and shame
The rhetorical question of how this could have happened deals with questions of guilt, is intended to create a sense of guilt and impose a penitent attitude on the German post-war population: sons and daughters should be ashamed of the actions of the older generation, even though they had nothing to do with it. But that doesn’t matter. Of course, they are not personally guilty. But since they should see themselves as German students rather than as Hansel and Gretel, as Richard von Weizsäcker demanded of them, they must own up to their complicity. The former Federal President, whose speeches on German guilt are a staple in every high school class, put it this way:
“Guilt, like innocence, is personal. There is no such thing as the guilt or innocence of an entire people. But every German bears the legacy of his people’s history – the legacy of the whole of history with its bright and dark chapters. He is not free to reject the dark parts.”[15]
Students are supposed to voluntarily accept the coerced liability. The former Federal President is perfectly ok with being ashamed of the actions of people because they have the same nationality. But only in the case of fascism. He would never think that “we Germans should be ashamed” of the child murderer Bartsch or the Reemtsma kidnappers. They didn’t represent a German state affair, they are just simple criminals.
A sense of moral responsibility is therefore not demanded of the fascist perpetrators, but should rather belong to the good national manners of all Germans who – regardless of whether they experienced fascism, how much they were involved in it, or how they feel about it – have now been assigned to a completely different state. Today even victims should be ashamed and do feel ashamed, like Willy Brandt in Warsaw [translator’s note: West German Chancellor Brandt, an anti-fascist during the Nazi era, genuflected before a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during a state visit to Poland in 1970]. Even avowed anti-fascists who see the representatives of fascism as their enemies often follow up their condemnation with a statement that as Germans they accept a kind of shared responsibility for their actions, i.e. they have ideally partaken in them.
Moral responsibility and shame are supported by the consciousness of a national identity that transcends states and systems. In the name of something called “Germanness,” to which a pre-state objectivity is ascribed, modern people with German passports are ashamed of the actions of German speaking concentration camp henchmen. However, the national identity constructed in this way is a fiction that itself makes use of racist elements. When it is claimed that all Germans – those back then and those now, those still alive and those long dead, democrats and fascists, liberals and communists, the poor and the rich, members of the political elite and the “common people” – have a common identity, then a pre-social, i.e. natural, quality of political will is asserted that supposedly binds Germans into a unity. All the oft-cited evidence for this compulsory identity – language, culture, or history – very soon turns out to be images only meant to illustrate this naturalization. They have no evidentiary value: language does not create a national identity, as German-speaking Turks can tell you, as can German-speaking demonstrators who have been beaten up by German-speaking police officers and put behind bars by German-speaking judges. Nor does culture, as can be observed in Japanese choirs getting high on singing “Ode to Joy” or belly dancing groups of German housewives. The objectivity of national identity consists solely in being a citizen of the same state and having to obey its authority. It is neither pre-state nor independent of political rulings. This is accepted by the citizens in the agreement that they have it good with post-war Germany. This is then lived out and garnished with the delivery of evidence of anti-fascist authenticity. As a rule, this does not apply to the foreign victims of German thugs, but only to the image that foreign countries have and should have of Germany.[16]
This kind of national identity is successfully taught in German schools. Anyone who leaves school thinking that fascism was a unique collection of incomprehensible horrors which one must intellectually succumb to while shaking one’s head, presents himself not as a knowledgeable critic of fascism, but as a good German moralist who will do anything to ensure that “it doesn’t happen again” and wants to defend democracy from any attacks. In his uncomprehending vigilance, he even becomes critical on occasion. For example, when he invokes the memory of “our past” – not on account of the victims of German politics – to urge, nevertheless, don’t be so unfriendly to migrants, or to postpone the military operation in Bosnia for a while. On the whole, however, he knows that he lives in a democracy that should be revered and preserved because it is not fascism – after all, it even allows him to ask the politicians to exercise moderation.
Nationalistic concern 2: A German accident
If students who are confronted with this nationalistic morality innocently point out that other nations have also successfully committed genocide, then they are not wrong about the matter at hand, but rather about the purpose of the anti-fascist message.
Indeed, colonialists and imperialists from all over the world have never been squeamish about dealing with people who they find disruptive of their concerns. However, if in Germany it is hardly customary to pose the same question: “How was such a thing possible?!” as a moral indictment in teaching the extermination of the American indigenous population, the unbroken racism in the southern states of the USA, or the scorched earth tactics shortly before the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, then this is not because German anti-fascism sees the widespread extermination of Native American tribes as a rather forgivable sin belonging to the faux frais of the frontier era.[17] Rather, it is a calculated insistence on putting one’s own house in order. This self-accusation is not primarily the beginning of accusations against foreigners, but is intended to emphasize that such things do not actually constitute Germanness. The rhetorical question only arises in the case of the Germans, not in the case of other states and nations. It doesn’t really apply to the Germans – the question raised by Germans intends to make this clear – but perhaps it does apply to other nations.
Nationalism is demonstratively disappointed here: it was not some German politician who made a mistake one time, but rather the whole of what was then Germany actually carried out fascist policies over a period of more than ten years! It’s outrageous if “we Germans” are ordinarily not like that. What is inconceivable, monstrous, and impossible is not the actions of the fascists, but the circumstance that they were committed by a breed of people who are thought to be – by their own kind, of course – incapable of such things. Fascism is categorized as a deviation from the German national character.[18] On the one hand, the self-accusation is an admission of guilt. On the other hand, however, it is precisely through this particular self-accusation that it wants to underline that the perpetrator or perpetrators were not like the rest of the Germans. The sometimes almost fanatical emphasis on the world historical uniqueness of the Holocaust not only clings relentlessly to national shame. At the same time, it downplays the whole of fascism into a kind of atypical incident in the history of the German nation. The longer the post-war period goes on without any new German military campaigns, i.e. what’s generally accepted as a “peaceful” period, the more evidence this claim gathers for itself: In 1950, only five years of the post-war period had passed, compared to twelve years of fascism. But in 1995, so the logic goes, these twelve years are already compared to 50 fascism-free years of German politics. This ultimately allows the ambivalent confession of guilt to be mothballed altogether and fascism as a whole to be relativized as an accident in German history.
“How was that even possible?”
This is a question that already contains the entire package of depoliticized German lessons on fascism. Whatever remains of the commitment to this leitmotif – whether it reduces fascism to the Holocaust or reduces democracy to the absence of fascism, whether it plays emotion against reason or equates all unwelcome politics with symptoms of illness, whether it confuses an investigation into causes with questions of guilt or equates the assessment of a political will with its moral disqualification, or whether it is the nationalist willingness to accept complicity and bow to Germanness as an identity-forming factor – it can always be said that by establishing a national moral attitude, the West German anti-fascist claim was already satisfied and made a scientific study of National Socialism superfluous.
The subjects of the lesson
Of course, teaching the topic of “German fascism” cannot be done without certain subject matters. A real or imaginary visit to a concentration camp sets the mood and determines the other subject matters, highlights the key questions and decides in advance on the resolutions. Thus all six of the subjects discussed below are not in school lessons to examine the preliminary findings – they are the material of a nationalistic partisanship for the democracy of today.
[6] The questions early spoiled children bombard the teacher with are variations of this: “Is it true that Hitler killed 5 million people?”, “What did the Jews do to him?”, “Why did even children have to go to war?”, “How can a person be so evil?”, “Is it true that people’s gold teeth were broken out in the concentration camps?” etc. (From conversations between the authors and teachers.)
[7] A whole book with this title has been written about it: A. Grosser, Wie war es möglich?, Frankfurt 1980.
[8] For example: “It is not possible to rationally come to terms with the Nazi crimes alone. Without the introduction of one's own moral consternation, the lesson might not sufficiently clarify the dimension of the National Socialist crimes.” (from: Lehrplan Geschichte für die Klasse 10, Bremen 1982, p. 26) It is not only textbooks that ask this question and take it as the answer. West German research into fascism is largely in agreement on this finding.
[9] This explains, for example, why fascist economics and economic policy are virtually neglected in the teaching material. This is due to the helplessness with which almost every textbook in the field of economics was unable to discover any major differences that could then be blown up into evil. In fact, as in capitalism, there was protected private ownership of capital, with wage labor and money-commodity relations. There were even trade unions. Capital raked in profits, the state set up programs to combat unemployment and modernized the form of government debt without which no economic policy would work today. The fact that there were somewhat more drastic state interventions in a wartime economy, which companies also suffered from, is nothing particularly fascist. It was the same in France or Great Britain at the time. The textbook authors are rather perplexed by actual peculiarities such as the autarky program, find the raw materials policy rather ingenious, and do not fail to refer to the fascist employment program. Otherwise, the continuity of capitalism is of little interest. We have decided not to deal with this subject due to a lack of material. If you want to find out more about fascist economic policy, see K. Hecker, pp. 26ff., 79ff., 144ff. A. Barkai, Das Wirtschaftssystem des Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt 1988, is rich in material.
[10] When regular Germans at the pub insist that nevertheless not everything was so bad under Hitler, these apologetics express the discrepancy between the desired total moral condemnation and one’s own or mediated experience, which judges Hitler’s fascism from the perspective of the citizen concerned about his livelihood and therefore ready for any kind of opportunism. Hence the reference to the jobs that Hitler created “after all” and to the law and order that “after all” prevailed under him is not necessarily born of a partisanship for fascism, but rather is the mirror-image counter to the prescribed point of view. The teacher’s judgment that fascism must have been the epitome of human barbarism is then perhaps countered by the grandfather who says that fascism was quite normal at times and that it also had its good sides. He can judge that, they immediately add, after all he was there. Because of the total condemnation, somebody who participated in it already feels a partial rehabilitation is due. Seen in this light, the balancing act at the pub is the product of the post-war generation’s commitment to disgust and horror as an attitude. Students learn nothing real about fascism from either of them – neither from their grandfather nor from the teacher who provokes the retraction.
[11] For example, a German prodigy swimmer was accused of sympathizing with right-wing radicalism simply because she had declared that she wanted to understand Hitler.
[12] It has happened to me at university that students have burst into fits of crying and left the lecture hall because I tried to explain fascist racism in a sober and detached way.
[13] So it occasionally happens that people who read “Mein Kampf” today are surprised at how Hitler argued “reasonably in places.” Although this is not true, it does indicate that the reader may well recognize himself or his chancellor in Hitler’s politically argued legacy.
[14] From a children's book by J. Kesternberg. After K. Stender, “Es war einmal ein kleiner böser Mann, der Hitler hieß”, in: Psychologie heute 8/1994, p. 42.
[15] R. v. Weizsäcker in: Das Parlament No. 33/1991, p. 4.
[16] The service that these good anti-fascist citizens thinks they are providing the nation with their publicly broadcast shame has nothing to do with the service they are actually providing the nation. The belief in a foreigner-friendly Germany is not established abroad through the declarations of citizens. But these are accepted at home – unfortunately, rightly – with reassurance as proof that these shame-faced citizens consider the state’s policy on foreigners, which has long since overshadowed the pogroms of the neo-fascists, as in principle necessary for the state and constitutional because of the “overcrowding of the German boat.”
[17] In the USA, this question is also heard in intellectual circles! In Germany, such comparisons were only made later, when it became fashionable to question the singularity thesis again, according to which there had been no greater crime in human history than the fascist Holocaust.
[18] There are also studies that explain fascism as a – German – characteristic. The studies on the authoritarian character by Adorno, Horkheimer and others go in this direction. They do not claim that fascism and Germanness do not actually go together, but conversely want to prove that it is almost inevitable among Germans because the authoritarian character lies dormant in all people. They are also mistaken. The theory of the authoritarian character is in any case only a theory of susceptibility that presupposes fascism, which the Germans then fall for, instead of an explanation of it.