Introduced as “the first American Jew to speak in Berlin since the war on the relations of Germans and Jews,” Elliot E. Cohen delivered this address to a German audience of almost a thousand in the Rathaus Schoeneberg, the city hall of West Berlin. The meeting was held under the joint auspices of the newly formed Gesellschaft für Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Mr. Cohen, editor of COMMENTARY, was present in Berlin as a member of the American delegation to the Congress (whose proceedings are reported in this issue by François Bondy).
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Meine Damen und Herren: I must tell you that the words I am about to say are painful words—painful for me to utter, painful for you to have to hear. But I would not be honest with either you or myself if I did not say them. I suppose I should also say that I speak not as a representative of any organization, or even officially for COMMENTARY magazine—of which I am the editor—but only as one American Jew, come here as a delegate to this Congress for freedom, speaking something of what is in his heart, as he finds himself standing, for the first time since the war, in Berlin.
I have been asked to speak on the theme of the drawing together, the reconciliation, of the German and the Jew. In all conscience, I must report the situation as I see it, not only among American Jews but among Jews everywhere. As for reconciliation, we still stand today at a point before the beginning. Between us there is a chasm as wide as an ocean—and over the abyss no sign of a bridge.
Let us face it—this is a chasm which cannot be bridged by a few kind words and pious resolutions, or even by certain necessary financial or diplomatic arrangements. It is not another problem to be reported on and memorandized about and filed away with other postwar problems in a portfolio (lettered, I suppose, EJ: Extermination Jews). This is the abyss down which not only were plunged how many millions of my fellow Jews, but also the German nation, and almost human civilization itself. Even in an era full of wholesale destruction, shameless deeds, and every treason to humanity, it is still what must be called a special case. Need we argue this? Of course, not only in Germany, but in France, in England, in Russia, and in the United States, there was (and is) anti-Semitism—yes, Germany was not unique—and yet would you not say there was something a little special and extraordinary about what happened here? And, of course, not only Jews were slaughtered but countless others—labor people, liberals, gypsies—yet was there not something, if not unique, then a little special when, in their millions, the strong, the feeble-aged, and the child in arms, were assigned irrevocably to a common doom, not for what they believed or what they did but for what they innocently and inescapably were by birth? Yes, Jews consider the extermination a special case—and not only Jews, but humankind everywhere, except in this country, perhaps.
I say perhaps, because we do not know. We do not know because you of Germany have not told us, by any substantial word or act, what is actually in your hearts. Actually, there is silence, as of a grave. From one quarter the silence is particularly eloquent and ominous: where are the words of fellow-sympathy, anguish and introspection, of diagnosis and healing, of regeneration and wisdom, that some of us expected from your men of religious thought and spiritual leadership, from your scholars, from your historians and poets and novelists on this colossal historic tragedy?
There is so little—almost nothing. We across the Atlantic, Jew and non-Jew, have listened, listened intently—but, so far, in vain.
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There exists today what might be called a vacuum of sentiment: a vacuum of expressed feeling and articulated thought. And since nature abhors this kind of vacuum also—perhaps most of all—the empty space is filled with the suspicion that Germans, even the best Germans, are reconciled to what happened. Or else that they are satisfied to consider it a closed question: after all, they seem to say, the Jews are gone. And perhaps—voices are not lacking to suggest—many Germans are, on the matter of Jews, still of the same or similar evil heart and intention. I think it profitless to discuss the question of collective guilt; but I do say this: even if one were to grant that the German people as a whole were not implicated in the past crime, if they do not speak out soon, if they do not take measures to show to the world that they are aware of what was done, and that they mean to take steps—steps of correction and self-understanding and the education of the whole citizenry in this evil and its meaning—then indeed all Germans, whether guilty or innocent of past crime, will be implicated. By default, Germany can achieve a collective guilt in the present and future.
And I need not tell you that the whole democratic world watches. Indeed, it is my belief that if you feel that the new effort of the Western State and of your Berlin is not understood or appreciated in America, it may well be because in democratic public opinion Germany still lies behind a smoke curtain—the smoke that still seems to hang over the concentration camps, and which it will require great gales of the fresh winds of good words and vigorous action to blow away.
I am well aware of the fact that there were Germans during the Hitler period and during the war who helped Jewish friends and neighbors, and even saved their lives; this is known and it will not be forgotten. We are also gratefully conscious that in the newspapers and periodicals some voices have been raised discussing the problem with good will and intent. And from some writers in the highest fields of culture we have also had similar words, some of great eloquence and feeling. But they have been few and with no great influence; and we have not been able to tell whether they were the first birds heralding a new dawn, or lone voices crying in the wilderness.
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Do You expect us to begin—to take the initiative in breaking through the vicious circle of bitterness and hostility and recrimination and suspicion and rejection that exists between us today? The Jew cannot take the initiative—the shock and the sense of hurt is too vast and too great. Need I remind you that, even in far-off America, there are few of our five million Jews who did not lose some friend or relative or whole family in this unequal war. And then there is the exquisitely torturing additional fact, too often forgotten, that this slaughter came from a quarter to which Jews had for more than a century looked for light, learning, and freedom. To Jews, Germany—need I remind this audience?—was the land of enlightenment and emancipation. My family is of East European origin; the first names of culture that I heard as a child in far-off Mobile, Alabama, from my grandfather, himself a follower of the German enlightenment from his student days in Lithuania, were Goethe, Lessing, and Schiller. Something like this was true, in less or greater degree, for all Jews everywhere. So this was not for Jews a mere massacre, but a spiritual betrayal, which shook not only their faith in humankind but in Western civilization itself. To them Germany was the torchbearer—and see to what the torches led!
Surely it would be understandable if from so colossal and uncanny a victimization a group would emerge traumatic, hysterical, almost unhinged of reason. But with some pride I note this has not happened, and that as a group the Jews seem to have kept their place among those who put their faith in freedom, reason, and human brotherhood. But in the reckoning that still remains to be settled between them and the German people, how, in all conscience, can we say the first word?
And yet if the bridge is ever to be built across the abyss, the silence must be broken. The dialogue between German and Jew must begin—and actually the whole weight of what I have to say here this evening is that the dialogue must begin soon. It is already late. It is five years—five long years of silence—since the war’s end.
The dialogue cannot be avoided and it must not be avoided. We cannot hope to bury what happened in a grave, with a few pious funeral wreaths and a little monument. The dead are dead, but that which killed them—the evil germ of race hatred and planned mass extermination that Hitler loosed—still stalks the earth, and unless we learn how to destroy it, it will destroy us.
Since I am an intellectual, you will expect me, of course, to believe, as I do, that the only path to understanding is the understanding, that is to say, the only path to reconciliation between men is through the enjoined deepest powers of the mind and heart, what we call reason, die Vernunft. To be sure, there are practical matters to be settled, too, such matters as restitution, and one does not minimize their importance. Indeed, here, too, the mind and heart can speak; and they should and must speak generously instead of with the haggling and niggardliness that too often obtain and surely are not appropriate to so special a case. And there should be punishment of adjudged criminals in the name of justice, and swift public action to search out, punish, and condemn men guilty of new anti-Jewish “incidents” and provocations. All this we should by now be able to take for granted. But can we?
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But above all we must begin a process of search and study and of open, candid free discussion on a level worthy of the grave, desperate living issue that lies athwart us. Only in this way can the heart be purged of shame and guilt: and how else except through putting themselves through this hard school of moral and political self-examination can men who expect to build a free and democratic Germany hope to avoid for themselves and their country the same disastrous traps that lost them their liberty and ruined them before?
Perhaps, from our dialogue together, the insight might result that anti-Semitism is not merely the Jews’ misfortune but the lever by which a whole people can be robbed of its freedom. Maybe we would learn together that what enables terror to subject a whole population is the possibility of persuading a nation to permit tyranny to put one or another group outside the community as a pariah group with a subhuman status, strip it of all human rights, subject it to torture and extermination, and then by exhibiting the victims as a showcase demonstration of what can happen to all, paralyze the mind and will and conscience of a people. We know the central political fact of our time is the use of massive political terror—and the key to its efficiency would seem to be the very modern device of isolating group after group of human beings, by placing them one after another in arbitrary categories, whether of race or class or belief, thus rendering them, each in its turn, superfluous and expendable. And the end of the process is that all men become in the literal sense displaced persons excluded from society, and are made slaves, and soon less than slaves, mere dead matter disposable at the will of the state.
And perhaps, if there were such a dialogue between Jew and German as I envisage, perhaps the new reconstructed German would learn the dangers of identifying nation and culture, would learn that it is unhealthy, impoverishing, and dangerous to insist that all groups must conform to a national cultural pattern, would learn that a diversity of religious belief and cultural patterns makes not only for a richer cultural interplay within a nation, but safeguards all men and the whole people from the uniformity demanded by a single official culture which, in the end, opens the door to regimentation and totalitarianism. In America, not only the Jews but a dozen other groups carry forward distinctive cultural patterns without any diminution of loyalty to the state, or loss of national unity.
No group should be asked to pay the price of complete religious and cultural assimilation for their acceptance into the general society, and their full recognition as citizens. Jews intend to survive as a distinctive group in the West and they will survive; and one prophesies that wherever they are given the chance they will be found—as they are in America—in the first rank of active, devoted citizenship, while at the same time creatively continuing their religious and cultural tradition.
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Is It visionary to expect that the Germans will find the energy and the will for so heroic a task of re-examination and re-evaluation as the situation requires? I am, of course, not suggesting that facing up to the fact and the meaning of the Jew in German history and society, and of the meaning and menace of anti-Semitism, is a sole or primary task of social revaluation; but I do say with some conviction that it is an inescapable task, and one that holds the key to many other things. And I have not even touched on many important aspects of the cultural or religious phases of the relations of the Jew to the German, and so much could be said here!
This society for Christian and Jewish cooperation is, of course, a heartening step forward. This society, if it grows and multiplies, opens up a great path—a path that we in America have found a chief high road in matters of the general good and welfare. In problems such as this—and a thousand others—we have learned that great works are accomplished by voluntary associations and the activity of free citizens banded together. In this matter of the German and the Jew, you must have constitutional safeguards and legislative acts and ordinances, but the core and the dynamic must come from the private individual, acting in his various groups. And such organizations must undertake side by side with government, and along with the free activity of writers, scholars, and intellectuals in the universities and outside, the education of every citizen through what he reads, through his union locals, his clubs, in any other way he can be reached. Those who understand must talk to those who still do not understand. But it will not be done unless you accept it as a major task. It will not be done by courtesies exchanged on the highest level or brotherhood meetings to hear mutually friendly orations once a month or on certain set anniversary occasions. For the task is as difficult as to rebuild a city—invisible spiritual ruins are indeed infinitely harder to restore.
As I close, I feel I have said much more than I meant to say, and yet that I have not even made a beginning. But perhaps this is because I so strongly feel that the beginning cannot come from a Jew, but must come from the other side, from the spontaneous reaching out from the hearts of Germans of good will and from the words and acts inspired by such good will. If that good will is there, let us see it, and its consequences. I wish I could hope for some dramatic deed, here and now, some bold proposal that would be more than a verbal or ritual gesture—some act that would not only be symbolic, but would set up a process of working together that would build at least one span of the bridge across the chasm. I have had one or two thoughts—but it is not for me to suggest.
Let the Germans begin. We await the opening of the dialogue between German and Jew.
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