Kristallnacht

Posted on November 13, 2003 in Crosstalk Hatred Peace

Yule Heibel is aghast at some demonstrations and statements against Jews on the anniversary of Kristallnacht:

I am virtually keeping on top of things, and some of what I see is ugly indeed. The Jerusalem Post reports on a brawl breaking out in Vienna (Vienna!, ha!, why am I not surprised?) between observers of a Kristallnacht commemoration and pro-Palestinian-rights protesters. There’s mention of Martin Hohmann’s recent benighted — and possibly evil — remarks in Germany about the alleged role of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. There wasn’t a whole lot in the US press about Hohmann. Too bad, really, because he’s a young guy actively bowdlerising history, and it behooves us to keep track of this kind of stuff and to shine some light on it. Hohmann used language in a particularly German way. His remarks hinged on the word Taetervolk. A Tat is a deed, an act. A Taeter is a person who does a deed, and it usually has pejorative meaning: a murderer, for example, is a Taeter, a culprit, a criminal, a perpetrator. As for Volk, well, everyone knows that one: a people. Hohmann said that Jews could be considered a Taetervolk in the sense that Germans could be considered a Taetervolk, but only because neither one is really a Taetervolk and it’s silly to think of them in those terms…


In other words, let’s get Germans off the “collective guilt” hook by showing how inappropriate it is to ascribe the word Taetervolk to anyone …while at the same time conveniently slurring the allegedly non-Taetervolk with the epithet of the …well, of the Taeter.


What’s troubling about Hohmann’s use of the word Taetervolk is that it’s a typical German omnibus word, the kind exploited so well by the Nazis: like Sippenhaft or Endloesung or any number of German words — Schadenfreude, anyone? — it’s the coupling of two or more words to create one, a coupling which produces a short-circuit in thinking. If you have a convenient word like Endloesung (Final solution), you’re tempted not to think about its full implications. You’re not asked to take it apart, to deconstruct it. It is in a sense a perfect “1984”-type language, orwellian in its easyspeak.

In that sense, to my mind, Martin Hohmann was showing his deep Nazi roots by using that one little word. At least he was censured, and the German army general who praised his speech was fired outright.

I have often said that the greatest tragedy of the Holocaust is that it set an astronomical ceiling for atrocity. I must begin by saying that I support the cause of Palestinian sovereignty on the West Bank and remain extremely critical of the government of Ariel Sharon. But though Sharon and his supporters are masking their dictatorship by appealing to world pity for what Jews suffered in the Holocaust, I do not make the link between their religion and evil any more than I make the link between Christianity and what is happening now in Iraq.

Two things empower Sharon: first, the memory of the Holocaust. This not only draws uncritical sympathy from some quarters, but it also enables his government to practice human rights abuses “under the radar”: “We’re not as bad as the Nazis were,” they say in defense of various practices of the present and past including administrative checkpoints throughout the West Bank, house demolitions, military occupation, and torture. As long as they stay under Nazi numbers and avoid outright genocide (until, perhaps, the world political climate allows it), they can continue.

The second thing is the stupidity of those Palestinians and their supporters who latch on to anti-Semitism as a means of attack. Yule covers these very well. As I said, I think the Palestinian cause is ultimately just, but the means being employed to attain what they want is undermining it. Sharon’s policies are fascist, not Jewish in nature. The traditional confusion of ethnic and religious identity makes it hard for critics inside the Jewish community to wage an effective witness on behalf of Palestinian sovereignty precisely because when people criticize Israel, they all too frequently blame it on Judaism. There are millions of Jews world wide who would be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause if the Palestinian leadership actively voiced approbation of this type of rhetoric.

Like Yule, I feel haunted by the resurrection of Nazi-inspired thinking in the peace movement. Those who promote it should be shunned. There’s enough evidence against Israel to present an effective witness against the Sharon government. The problem is Ariel Sharon and his party. When we broaden the attack to include the whole of World Jewry, we win him allies who would otherwise be our friends.

Look hard: are you helping create the problem with your silence against hate speech among the supporters of the Palestinian cause? The breaking glass that you hear may be the shattering of a nonviolent hope for peace in Israel and Palestine. Were you the one who dropped it?