To the Editor:

Josef Joffe, in “One-and-a-Half Cheers for German Unification” [June], analyzes the social, economic, and political ingredients that poisoned the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic. He concludes that these ingredients are “scarcely” found in contemporary Germany, and that, upon German unification, a new wave of darkness is not likely to go forth. . . .

In his opening paragraph, Mr. Joffe indicates that the Weimar Republic paved the way for the rise of the Nazi party. . . . But what doomed the Weimar Republic was the enemy within: the German Communists who were anti-democratic and collaborated with the Nazis in destroying the state. That eminent historian George F. Kennan, in his Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, describes the role of the Communists as the instrument of a foreign power, as follows:

. . . [T]he political behavior of the German Communists . . . in the crucial years of Hitler’s rise to power . . . was negative and destructive. It was the denial of their support to Brüning which forced him to rule by emergency decree instead of by a parliamentary majority and created precedents which were later to be most unfortunately exploited by Hitler himself. It was their use of violence—their incessant brawling on the streets with both Socialists and Nazis—which provided much of the excuse for the eventual monopolization of the police power by right-wing elements and its use against the liberties of the Republic—indeed for Nazi violence of all sorts. . . . [W]hen, on November 6, 1932, new general elections were held in which there was a marked and surprising decline of Nazi voting strength,. . . . how did the Communists react? They . . . intensified their attack on the Social Democrats. . . . Moscow was convinced the road to a Soviet Germany lay through Hitler.

. . . [T]he strength of the republican forces in Germany, throughout the period of the 20’s and the first two years of the 30’s, would have been of a different order had the political potential of these two million to five million Communists been added to the cause of democracy instead of being subtracted from it and mobilized against it. . . . [N]o one can deny, I think, Stalin’s responsibility for the failure of the Weimar Republic. . . .

Louis Fischer, a historian of a different orientation, in his work, Russia’s Road from Peace to War, expresses a similar view:

. . . The Nazi losses [of 1932] and the Communist gains frightened industrial magnates and the military. They had money and power, but they saw that the working class and large sections of the middle class were deserting the German state which rocked from simultaneous blows by Nazis and Communists in the Reichstag, in strikes which both parties supported, . . . and in the deliberate stimulation by the two parties of confusion and discontent. . . . German Communist leaders of my acquaintance did not conceal the intent of their made-in-Moscow political strategy: “Yes, these actions will bring Hitler to power; he will be finished in six months and then our turn will come.”

Mr. Joffe’s failure to recognize the collaboration of the Communists with the Nazis as a key ingredient in the destruction of the Weimar Republic causes him to underestimate the achievements of the Weimar Republic against all the odds, and makes his analysis inaccurate.

Harry V. Lerner
Bethesda, Maryland

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To the Editor:

Josef Joffe ends his “One-and-a-Half Cheers for German Unification” by giving unification a full three cheers. Having survived the trauma of Nazi death camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau, I see no cause for cheering the emergence of a powerful German state . . .

It is imperative that some safeguards be built into a united Germany to allay the concerns of those who remember the reign of terror and evil in the Third Reich. Mr. Joffe fails to address these legitimate concerns. According to him, the rightist Republikaners are losing ground, and “the neo-Nazis are on the verge of extinction.” But reports of violent demonstrations by skinheads in Berlin, Leipzig, and Munich belie these assumptions. There is a new phenomenon of young Germans vandalizing Jewish cemeteries and threatening “foreigners,” continuing the work once done by their grandfathers and fathers, now too old and too rich to engage in such activities.

Two generations have been raised in East Germany without any democratic traditions. While many West Germans have made considerable progress in confronting their Nazi past, the Germans in the East have yet to fill in the blank pages of the Nazi criminal period in their history books.

East German youth must henceforth be exposed to an educational process that will, perhaps, dampen their nationalistic fervor; infuse them with some humility; teach them that democracy means not only the right to travel and to earn a decent living, but also tolerance for others and respect for the human rights of Jewish, Turkish, and other minorities; help them to understand that freedom of expression does not give them the right to beat up Jews or to desecrate cemeteries and synagogues and that there can be no healing without remorse and without facing the truth of the Holocaust.

Mr. Joffe fails to mention a widespread trend in both Germanys to erase their “ancient history” and start afresh as one nation, “new, reborn.” A campaign has been launched to bury the ugly past and to dismantle monuments to the Holocaust, beginning with the Dachau museum.

This effort to institutionalize forgetfulness and forgiveness in a “new Germany” ought to be firmly opposed. . . . Jewish concerns must be emphatically and clearly reiterated . . . and made part of the constitution of the newly unified state. This should include an acknowledgment of German responsibility for the Holocaust and an obligation to the victims, as well as to the Jewish state that gathered in the surviving remnant. . . .

The U.S. Congress and the American media have a moral obligation not to repeat the mistakes of silence and indifference made during World War II. They inherit that obligation from their predecessors, who at the end of the war traveled to Buchenwald and Dachau to serve as witnesses to the horrors of the Holocaust. . . .

As a prisoner at Dachau who was liberated in May 1945, I remember the congressional delegation and a group of eighteen American newspaper publishers and editors who had come to view the carnage. I remember the grief on their faces. Some Senators could not hold back their tears. Their shock revealed that they had never heard of or read about the Final Solution, about the Nazi extermination of Jews in the heart of Europe, even though reports of these atrocities were available.

The delegations had been invited to inspect the camps by General Dwight Eisenhower, then Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces in Europe. Prophetically, Eisenhower cabled Washington that he wanted the evidence of atrocities recorded and preserved in photographs so that the Germans would never be tempted to deny their guilt and “to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.”

The tendency to deny the Holocaust, as Eisenhower had feared, is growing everywhere, along with anti-Semitism. Contrary to Mr. Joffe’s analysis, it is not anti-Semitism, but memory, that is “on the verge of extinction.”. . .

Alfred Lipson
Bayside, New York

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To the Editor:

. . . According to Josef Joffe, the Germans saw in Hitler the savior who could free Germany from the “grip of economic agony” (hyperinflation coupled with unemployment). Under Hitler’s leadership this could be done by vanquishing “the enemy within (the Jews) and the enemy without (Russian Bolsheviks and Western capitalists) who together had conspired to enslave the German nation.” This is not quite correct. Hitler never differentiated between inner and outer Jewish enemies. Jews (whether inside or outside Germany), international Bolsheviks, and international capitalists were simply one foe in three disguises—but all Jews nonetheless. Comparable charges were already widespread in Germany, Austria, and France through anti-Semitic political parties which date back to the closing third of the 19th century. By the time Hitler came to power, anti-Semitism was supranational to the point where it was sponsored by international congresses . . .

It would be nice if we could attribute anti-Semitism to “economic agony.” That would give us a relatively simplistic solution to an otherwise intractable phenomenon which still threatens the lives of all Jews, including those not yet born. . . .

I apologize to Mr. Joffe if he accuses me of responding to an article he did not write. I merely wish to record one reader’s difficulty in sharing his optimism for even half-a-cheer.

Leo Blond
Bayside, New York

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Josef Joffe writes:

Harry V. Lerner is right in pointing to the reprehensible behavior of the German Communists during the Weimar Republic, and I am glad that he reminds us of this “key ingredient” in the destruction of the first German Republic. By extension, however, one could easily argue that the absence of a potent Communist party in West Germany today will contribute to a reunited Germany’s democratic stability (the successor of the East German Communist party, the PDS, probably will not make it past the 5-percent cutoff required for representation in parliament).

Alfred Lipson is not quite fair in turning my “one-and-a-half cheers” into a full “three cheers.” He has doubled the cheers I am willing to bestow on this event. I agree with him that nobody should ever forget the Holocaust, and that we should watch out for phenomena such as the “skinheads in Berlin, Leipzig, and Munich.” Still, there is a world of difference between the murderous, mass-based anti-Semitism of the Weimar Republic and the kind of marginal outbursts he describes. It is the difference between a headache and cancer.

I do not agree that there is a “widespread trend in both Germanys to erase their ‘ancient history.’ ” Indeed, it was only the demise of the ancien régime in the GDR which, finally, made the East Germans confront their long-suppressed part in the history of Nazi Germany. At any rate, I am quite heartened by the fact that the attempt of some revisionist German historians to deny the uniqueness of the Holocaust did not work. An impressive majority of West German historians exposed the attempt for what it was: a convoluted, contorted try at absolving Germany of the crimes of the past.

Leo Blond is right in assuming that he was responding to “an article [I] did not write.” Still, one of his points is worth stressing: though “economic agony” may exacerbate anti-Semitism, it is never its only cause. Perhaps anti-Semitism is an “anthropological constant” that needs no “cause” other than the presence of Jews, and thus is not amenable to “rational” solutions. Indeed, if you look at Poland, anti-Semitism does not even require the presence of Jews; it does quite “nicely” on its own. At any rate, my point about contemporary Germany was a rather modest one: compared to 1919 and after, anti-Semitism, as measured by the tools of social research, is mercifully small. That is a cause for reassurance, but not for smugness.

To all my critics: I share your anxiety and worries, but I still think it useful to remind American readers of the heartening difference between Germany 1990 and its predecessors of 1871, 1919, and 1933.