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| Image: dpa | Sebastian Willnow, reprinted by Left Voice |
I have to take issue with the headline on Nathaniel Flakin's recent article in Left Voice, entitled How East Germany Got Overrun by Nazis.
The headline makes no sense. Presumably the last person to voluntarily join the National Socialist Workers (Nazi) Party would have done so by 1943. It's hard to imagine that anybody younger than, say, 25 would have had the political awareness and gumption to consort with what was by then an overwhelmingly unpopular movement. A 25-year-old in 1943 will have been born in 1918. Our new recruit would today be 105 years old.
Yet, according to Mr. Flakin's headline, East Germany is today overrun by 105 year old Nazis! Amazing! And it can't possibly be true.
Silly me! Of course Mr. Flakin doesn't mean literal "Nazis." Instead he's using the term metaphorically--but then it's very unclear precisely what he does mean. Probably the word just refers to anybody Mr. Flakin doesn't like, and since he doesn't like anybody outside of his own small sect, then of course East Germany is "overrun by Nazis."
In the essay itself he uses the term "fascist" as a synonym for "Nazi." But fascist is also a weasel-word, and as a substitute for Nazi it's rather a poor one. Fascism certainly has to include the founder of the tendency, Benito Mussolini, whose sins are well-known, but who did not commit mass murder. He wasn't even antisemitic.
Mussolini was not strongly antisemitic. He had close ties to Italian Jews, including several early founders and members of the Fascist movement. He was also strongly affected by two Jewish women: Angelica Balabanoff, from Russia, and Margherita Sarfatti, an Italian. After Mussolini rose to national power, he reassured Italian Jewry of their safety in an interview with the Chief Rabbi of Rome.
Mussolini considered himself a socialist, and about the only thing he agreed with the Nazis on was the word "Socialist" in their title: National Socialist Workers Party. His wartime alliance with Hitler was mostly one of necessity.
So while the Nazis were fascist, they were their own unique and especially horrible brand, rather analogous to how Stalinism and Maoism are akin to communism. Hitler was sui generis--the term fascism doesn't give him enough credit. Using Nazi as a synonym for fascist is remarkably imprecise and unjust.
My sister and I visited Berlin for a week last June for a family reunion. My father was born there, and I lived there as a teenager, attending high school (Gymnasium). The reunion was with a group of second cousins, all of whom had parents born in Berlin, and all are in some fraction Jewish (none sufficiently so to be recognized as such by an Orthodox rabbi). Some of us (like me) were born abroad, others were born in Berlin but left the city before the wall was built, and yet others were raised in the GDR. We are now all in our 70s, slightly older than Angela Merkel, who is only 69.
I also spent a day with a classmate from high school--a native Berliner who has lived in the City his entire life. Along with some time visiting my sister's friends.
Those Germans of my generation--my cousins, my classmates, my sister's friends, and millions of others--confronted a dauntingly difficult task. They're the people who had to clean up after the Nazis--I mean real Nazis, not the imaginary ones of Mr. Flakin's invention. And in this endeavor they've been remarkably successful. They have commemorated the Holocaust. They have honored their Jewish exiles (they literally begged my father to take up his German citizenship--he refused), they built museums, they hosted Nuremburg trials and hunted down Nazi war criminals, and they found a way to work with Israel. They made it illegal to be a Nazi, and frankly--at least among my generation--Nazism is as dead as a doornail.
Short of resurrecting seven million people, it's hard to see how they could have done any more to atone for the sins of the Nazis.
Most important, they built the Bundesrepublik (Federal Republic). It's not perfect--not even close. They have something akin to a constitution (Grundgesetz) but it isn't really a constitution, and is in any case not the work of inspired genius that is the American Constitution. They're not as committed to free markets as I would prefer, they've been unreasonably (if understandably) pacifist, and their dedication to the Green agenda is as unreasonable as it is foolish. Still, compared to any plausible alternative, the Bundesrepublik has successfully provided peace and prosperity for Germany for the past 75 years, and by extension for all of Europe.
But Mr. Flakin is not impressed. He writes (GDR refers to former East Germany),
It wasn’t the 40 years of the GDR, but rather the 30 years since then, that saw the rise of fascist forces. After the Wende, when the capitalist West swallowed up its smaller neighbor, the planned economy was sold for scrap. That left millions of former GDR citizens poor, atomized, and open for authoritarian fantasies. ...
Along with an economic shock doctrine, the East also got a new state apparatus, with intelligence agencies that had been founded by Nazi war criminals. For a recent example, look at Hans-Georg Maaßen, a former head of the Verfassungsschutz who has since outed himself as an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, raving against “globalists” who secretly control the world. During the 1990s, that agency funneled lots of money to Nazi groups across the East — if you believe their version, they had to fund Nazis in order to know what Nazis were up to.
The first paragraph is arguably true. The East German economy largely was scrap--it's been widely reported that the infamous East German car, the Trabi, was worth less than the cost of raw materials required to make it.
The second paragraph is at best a gross exaggeration, if it is true at all. That one bureaucrat (Mr. Maaßen) out of thousands turns out to be a nutcase is not much of a surprise. And one has to ask if serious money was ever given to "Nazi" groups in E. Germany--though if "Nazi" is defined as anybody Mr. Flakin doesn't like, then it's likely true.
Does any of this diminish the serious and decades-long efforts of Germans of my generation to clean out the Nazis? No it does not, and I'm insulted by Mr. Flakin's cavalier dismissal of their efforts.
Mr. Flakin looks to be the age of my children--thirty-something. He is not responsible for the Nazis, the Holocaust, the World War, or any of the other sins perpetrated by his grandparents or great-grandparents. On these he is as innocent as my children.
But by the same token he's not responsible for the clean-up effort afterwards. This was done by his parents--and he should give them and their generation credit. He does his country a great disservice by not doing so.
Mr. Flakin picks on a poor fellow named Hannes Loth--apparently the second coming of Hitler himself--recently elected mayor of a small town in Eastern Germany. Mr. Loth represents the "far right" Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party--most popular in Eastern Germany.
The AfD supports some positions that I agree with. I do think Wokeism is a problem and needs to be dealt with. I also think that "climate change" is at best grossly exaggerated, for which the proposed cures are far worse than the disease. I disagree (but am sympathetic) with his views on immigration. These are all public policy issues on which reasonable people can disagree. No opinion on any of these topics will define you as either a communist or a fascist. Democratic institutions, such as exist in the Bundesrepublik, are the appropriate venues in which to have these debates.
But what to me is beyond the pale is when somebody objects to the Bundesrepublik altogether. Insofar as AfD really is "far right", it's because at least some of their members want to end the Republic and reestablish some sort of dictatorial rule.
And I object to Mr. Flakin for the same reason--he's against the very concept of a democratic Republic. I'd put him in the same category as the AfD.
The Bundesrepublik not only cleaned up the Nazi shit, but as Mr. Flakin notes, they also had to deal with the Stalinist-Commie shit when the wall came down. On this front they've been somewhat less successful, as the dichotomy between East and West Germany indicates. The old GDR was not as bad as Hitler--not by a long shot. They probably weren't even as bad as Stalin. I'd put them in a category like Mussolini--whether you want to call them fascist or communist doesn't really matter. The difference is only in fine points of Marxist theology.
That Mr. Flakin writes for Neues Deutschland, named after the former East German government mouthpiece, shows what he thinks of the Bundesrepublik. He opposes the hard fought, hard won efforts of my generation to remake Germany into a civilized country. He should be ashamed of himself.
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