When a person who knows what he's talking about from personal experience and considerable thought speaks, it's not a bad idea to pay attention.
I'd never heard of Fritz Stern, 78, before, unfortunately, but this man, who was a boy in Breslau, Germany, before Hitler came to power, who fled to the U.S. in 1938 because his GRANDparents were Jewish, and under the Nazis that was verboten, has something important to say to us today. He's been a professor at Columbia for a long time, and has devoted his scholarly life to trying to figure out how the Nazis managed to do all that they did, and to destroy what democracy Weimar Germany, as it was called after the defeat of WWI, had before Hitler.
How do you destroy a democracy?
What does it take?
How do you establish a democracy?
What does it take?
How vulnerable is our democracy?
How vulnerable is our country?
Clue: See how we behave when attacked.
Pearl Harbor?
Rounded up the Japanese-Americans, their parents, and babies.
9-11.
Invaded Iraq.
Guantanamo.
Courage. How did Hemingway define it? "Courage is grace under pressure."
Bravery.
Going into the Trade Center as rescuers, before the buildings collapsed.
The aftermath of 9-11?
Do you feel this to be a shining moment in our history?
Have we built on the support given to us by so many around the world after 9-11?
Have we given up any hard-fought liberty in exchange for what we thought was security?
Ben Franklin had something to say about that.
What he said was that those who are willing to give up liberty for security neither deserve liberty nor enjoy security.
So many seem to long for security.
At my college graduation I asked a friend what he was planning to do, now that he'd won his degree.
"Go on the cops," he replied.
In those days the cops in New York were where you went if your parents couldn't afford to send you to college. There were a lot of smart cops, for that reason. They just didn't have college educations. So I was surprised to hear this really sharp fellow say that's what he wanted to do. I figured that by bothering to spend four years earning a degree, he might go for something different.
"Why?" I asked.
"Security," he said, with emphasis, and that ended the little conversation.
I had difficulty understanding why someone had such a need for security, especially at that age, right out of college. It seemed adventureless. Knowing the pattern your life was supposed to follow. Going on the cops was a well-trodden path for many young men. Go on the job, wait for retirement at 50. Retire. Find something else. Watchman. Security guard. The policeman's dream: buy a bar. Egads! I ran from all that. I wouldn't have minded a successful bar.
Our parents had come through the Depression. It affected a lot of people. Grasping security was one of them. Civil service jobs represent security to a lot of people. It's hard to fire the postman, even when times are tough. Great if you want to be a postman.
Clever leaders, such as Hitler, promise security. Not just personal security, but national security. All kinds of security. God is with us. Gott Mit Uns. Embossed on Wehrmacht belt buckles. Security in numbers. Just follow der Fuhrer, don't ask too many inconvenient questions, and you will have security. His followers died. No security. No liberty. Had to start all over from very bad wreckage. People starved.
We want to avoid this. But we have no guarantees. We have to invent it every day. There's no Big Daddy in the Sky to make our decisions for us. It's up to us, and it's not in our genes. We have to figure something out, continually. How will we do that?
The price of avoiding the fate of Germany is being a lot more vigilant than we've been, lately.
Since democracy is the subject of our course, Constitutional Law, I commend this excellent article by reporter Chris Hedges, of the New York Times, to you.
As for me, I'd like to see the book Fritz Stern is writing.
***
January 6, 2005PUBLIC LIVES Warning From a Student of Democracy's CollapseBy CHRIS HEDGES
FRITZ STERN, a refugee from Hitler's Germany and a leading scholar of European history, startled several of his listeners when he warned in a speech about the danger posed in this country by the rise of the Christian right. In his address in November, just after he received a prize presented by the German foreign minister, he told his audience that Hitler saw himself as "the instrument of providence" and fused his "racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity." "Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics," he said of prewar Germany, "but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas." Dr. Stern's speech, given during a ceremony at which he got the prize from the Leo Baeck Institute, a center focused on German Jewish history, was certainly provocative. The fascism of Nazi Germany belongs to a world so horrendous it often seems to defy the possibility of repetition or analogy. But Dr. Stern, 78, the author of books like "The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology" and university professor emeritus at Columbia University, has devoted a lifetime to analyzing how the Nazi barbarity became possible. He stops short of calling the Christian right fascist but his decision to draw parallels, especially in the uses of propaganda, was controversial. "When I saw the speech my eyes lit up," said John R. MacArthur, whose book "Second Front" examines wartime propaganda. "The comparison between the propagandistic manipulation and uses of Christianity, then and now, is hidden in plain sight. No one will talk about it. No one wants to look at it." Dr. Stern was a schoolboy in 1933 when Hitler was appointed the German chancellor. He ran home from school that January afternoon clutching a special edition of the newspaper to deliver to his father, a prominent physician. "I was young," he said, "but I knew it was very bad news." The street fighting in his native Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) between Communists and Nazis, the collapse of German democracy and the ruthless suppression of all opposition marked his childhood, and were images and experiences that would propel him forward as a scholar. "I saw one of the last public demonstrations against Hitler," he said. "Men, women and children walked through the street and chanted 'Hunger! Hunger! Hunger!' " His paternal grandparents had converted to Christianity. His parents were baptized at birth, as were Mr. Stern and his older sister. But this did not save the Sterns from persecution. Nazi racial laws still classified them as Jews. "It was only Nazi anti-Semitism that made me conscious of my Jewish heritage," he said. "I had been brought up in a secular Christian fashion, celebrating Christmas and Easter. My father had to explain it to me." His schoolmates were swiftly recruited into Hitler youth groups and he and other Jews were taunted and excluded from some activities. "Many of my classmates found the organized party experience, which included a heavy dose of flag waving and talk of national strength, very exhilarating," said Dr. Stern, who lost an aunt and an uncle in the Holocaust. "It was something I never forgot." His family fled to New York in 1938 when he was 12. He eventually went to Columbia University intending to study medicine. But his passion for the past, along with questions about what happened to his homeland, caused him to switch his focus to history. He wanted to grasp how democracies disintegrate. He wanted to uncover the warning signs other democracies should heed. He wanted to write about the seductiveness of authoritarian movements, which he once described in an essay, "National Socialism as Temptation." "There was a longing in Europe for fascism before the name was ever invented," he said. "There was a longing for a new authoritarianism with some kind of religious orientation and above all a greater communal belongingness. There are some similarities in the mood then and the mood now, although also significant differences." HE warns of the danger in an open society of "mass manipulation of public opinion, often mixed with mendacity and forms of intimidation." He is a passionate defender of liberalism as "manifested in the spirit of the Enlightenment and the early years of the American republic." "The radical right and the radical left see liberalism's appeal to reason and tolerance as the denial of their uniform ideology," he said. "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." [Emphasis added.] Dr. Stern, who has two children from a previous marriage, is married to Elizabeth Sifton, a book publisher. They live in New York. He is writing a book called "Five Germanys I Have Known," a combination of memoirs and reflections that looks at Weimar, Nazi Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany, East Germany and unified Germany. He is widely read in Germany and has won its highest literary prize. "The Jews in Central Europe welcomed the Russian Revolution," he said, "but it ended badly for them. The tacit alliance between the neo-cons and the Christian right is less easily understood. I can imagine a similarly disillusioning outcome." Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company |
RINCETON, N.J.