I

This book leads me as a philosopher to speculate on history. The classical German tradition in philosophy was from Kant to Hegel. Everything after has been,  in diirftiger Zeit, philosophically a decline. Gobineau? Houston Stewart Chamber­ lain? Even Marx? Don’t be silly.

Kant made a distinction between ‘duty’ and ‘inclination,’ humans as morally strong when self-determined by Pfiicht; ‘duty’ being weak when yielding to Nei­ gung, ‘inclination.’ Then why, in old age, did he write about radical evil? Neither Schiller nor Goethe liked it or understood him, but Kant had been clear enough: Yielding to inclination, while weak, is innocent; but real freedom was the choice between good and evil, which Kant asserted.

The young Schelling had been romantic enough to identify ‘Truth’ with ‘Beauty,’ but this, as well as the pantheism that followed, still in his youth, was disrupted by ‘Kant-on-choice,’ including that of evil, even choice of selfhood itself. For Schelling – following Fichte at that time – the self had to be asserted by the self itself. It was not a given:

The animal can never get out of the Unity of the Whole, whereas man can tear it up arbitrarily… One would wish that mankind’s corruption were worst in animal behavior; unfortunately man can only be worse or better than an animal.

In his – to Hegel it seemed – seemingly desperate rush from system to system that followed even into old age, Schelling never got over what must have been an abyss, not even in his final ‘leap’ from ‘essence’ to ‘existence.’ To be sure, in his mind his ‘leap’ was straight to the existence of God. What he actually got was existence as such, brute, raw, largely impenetrable to Reason. Schelling was the first existentialist.

Schelling and Hegel had been good enough friends to write unauthorized essays together, one of which Franz Rosenzweig had to guess the author. What divorced the two thinkers later, fundamentally, was radical evil. Hegel -not one to rush, let alone desperately -said that Schelling published his drafts, but himself had a lasting trust in, what he called, the ‘Cunning of Reason.’ His own greatest catastrophe, like Nietzsche’s, was the ‘death of God;’ but whereas Nietzsche faced the specter of nihilism thereafter, Hegel’s ‘Absolute Spirit’ survived: it was in Man as well as in God: his Weltgeschichte, ‘World History’ was at once human and Divine.

Would Hegel’s ‘Cunning of Reason’ have survived Auschwitz? For Nietzsche, if God is dead, ‘everything is permitted’: the one and only threat is Nihilism. Auschwitz would have been no different in principle. But Auschwitz was a ‘Planet’ on which ‘evil was commanded.’ True, there had been SS officer Flacke, of whom one former Auschwitz prisoner, Dr. Ella Lingens testified that she did not know how he did it, but his camp was clean and his food also. The Frankfurt judge was stunned: “Do you wish to say that at Auschwitz everyone could decide for himself whether to be good or evil?” – “That is exactly what I wish to say,” she said. Every SS man had said that at Auschwitz one could only follow orders.

But Flacke was alone, could not smash ‘Planet Auschwitz,’ just as the ‘righteous among the nations’ were few, could not smash ‘Planet, trying to become a Universe, Third Reich, Drittes Reich.’ And there is now post-Holocaust anti­ Semitism in Europe. But Hegel said the following:

After doing everything the most enthusiastic courage could achieve, they [the Jews] endured the most appalling human calamities, and were buried with their polity under the ruins of their City… The scattered remnants of the Jews have not abandoned the idea of a Jewish state, but they have reverted not to the banners of their own courage, but only to the standards of an ineffectual messianic hope ( triige messianische  Hoffnung).

The young Hegel wrote this, in his so-called “Early Theological Writings.”

In old age, even near his death, he still wrote that, whereas in Islam monotheism transcends a nation, is therefore, unhappily, ‘fanatical,’ in contrast, “Jewish faith, confidence, merely a folk religion, a basic trait of the Jewish people, is admirable” (bewunderungswiirdig  ).

Hegel’s dialectic here is subtle, although most would agree he did not  pay sufficient attention to Islam.

Never before have either I or anyone else treated the relation between Schelling and Hegel as a response to Kant on evil; this time I had to concerning the theme of this book.

Had Hegel confronted Auschwitz, human ‘calamities’ more ‘appalling’ than he thought conceivable, he would have recognized in the Jewish people the ‘most enthusiastic’ if, to be sure desperate, ‘courage’ to restore their ‘State,’ to rebuild their ‘City,’ Jerusalem.

II

The above is meant for philosophers but abstract for historians. Concretely, not without its ‘scandal of particularity’ is an Intifada II, of which we are still in the midst. In some sense, theologians have treated ancient Jewish history as Heils­ geschichte, but do not treat post-Holocaust Jewish history as a scandal as well.

In a way Auschwitz has been escalated today. The suicide-bombers cannot kill hundreds, only a few dozen at a time, but the SS perpetrators could do the killing without thought, like robots, without a decision, just  as ordered, directly or indirectly, by  the  Kommandant:  press  a  button  one  day,  another  the  next. In contrast suicide-bombers need a decision, particularly because they also kill themselves: what will father say? Mother? Comrades and those who want instead dialogue for peace? Surely with the decision they also need an ideology, even a Weltanschauung     hope for him/herself  in Heaven,  death for victims on Earth.

III

I wrote section I on Philosophy after reading only this book’s title, not the book itself. My reason was that philosophy, if any discipline, gets at evil; the problem is that it is also detached from life, personal life.

Born, raised, partly educated in  Germany, the clash  between  the  ‘Golden Age’ in German philosophy and Hitler’s Weltanschauung is extreme; it is also, personally painful. Inthe following I face responses, partly respond myself, mostly with questions, addressed only to a selected few.

The author knows, of course, that his book  must be published not only in Israel, the country of victims, but also in the English-speaking world, home to once participants, now mostly onlookers, and also in Europe where the Holocaust took place.

Hence I have a question for Manfred Gerstenfeld: why does his book only marginally include Claude Lanzmann, author of Shoah, the film, forever unsurpassable? Why not, since Dietrich Bonhoeffer was murdered, Eberhard Bethge, the reporter of his thought, also unsurpassable forever? There are surface answers, that Lanzmann was too busy fighting anti-Semitism  in France, and Bethge was over ninety when he died. But deeper answers are underneath. Lanzmann implies that the evil of the Holocaust cannot be explained, either philosophically or historically, but only be pointed  to, as in Shoah.

In his interview, David Bankier, born in Germany in 1947, quite rightly attacks the myth of Jewish otherness, prominent Germans now talk about Hitler’s otherness; he could not even speak proper German and the style of Mein Kampf is terrible. But my question is about ‘too many Jewish lawyers, doctors, etc?’ A document in my possession shows there were only few in Halle and when I was in Sachsenhausen concentration camp they did not accuse Jewish lawyers of being too many but of perverting German law and accused Jewish doctors of seducing ‘Aryan’ women. My father, a lawyer, caring about the German Rechtsstaat was most appalled about Roland Freisler, a former communist, now in charge of Hitler’s Volksgericht.

Yehuda Bauer quotes Hans Mommsen saying, “All Hitler had to do was nod his head for the genocide to take place.” This, if true, began already on April 1, 1933. Jews like my Uncle Adolf had lost a leg in the Great War yet were boycotted simply as born Jews. (Is birth not innocent?) In answer Bauer, rightly, concludes that Nazi anti-Jewish activity was “first and foremost ideological;” he, rightly, quotes even the end of Marx’s Kapital: “Sometimes ideology … moves everything.” In this, after all, Marx was dependent on Hegel.

Aharon Lopez is a former ambassador to the Vatican. He reports theological changes and states, also that they are not enough, the  “true litmus test” being the “beatification  of Pius XII.”

Michael Melchior’s father was a rabbi who  sent his congregation to safety away on Yorn Kippur, according to Rosenzweig, the most important day in the Jewish Year. Melchior himself is now in Israel, also a rabbi, and so would Rosenzweig be, if he were alive.

Two honest German historians, one no longer alive, should have been in this book: Sebastian Haffner says Jew hatred was like a Buckel, a “humpback, Hitler was born with.” Joachim Fest writes:

Am Ende appellierte er [Hitler] an die Treue und den Gehorsam aller Deutschen, ‘bis in den Tod’ und kam im Schlusssatz [seines Testaments] noch einmal auf die Obsession [Jew hatred] zurueck, die im buchstaeblichen Sinn sein Hirngespinst war.

In the end he [Hitler] appealed to the fidelity and obedience ‘unto death’ and returned in his final sentence [of his testament] once more to the obsession [of his Jew hatred] which was in the most literal possible sense a cocoon in his  brain.”

“Humpback” or Buckel he was born with? Hirngespinst, “cocoon in his brain?” These historians know German history; yet the Holocaust remains unexplained. This book tells us how despite the Holocaust and its study, important parts of European society have regressed into new variants of open anti-Semitism. The author illustrates how this seemingly sudden phenomenon, was in reality an ongoing one. What Manfred Gerstenfeld has laid bare, should be the beginning of much more attention and further study.