Today is the 90th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany. While I haven’t looked, I have no doubt that leftists around the Internet are comparing that day to January 20, 2017 (and January 20, 2021, to May 2, 1945). Ho, hum. Today on Law and Liberty, Samuel Gregg recounts a reaction to Hitler that has far more bearing on our own time than any fantasy about Donald Trump.
As Mr. Gregg notes, many Germans who had no enthusiasm for Hitler viewed his appointment complacently.
When the Nazis acceded to power in 1933, the effect was not mass consternation on the part of those with misgivings. Even the most important German Jewish representative group, the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, maintained that, despite the Nazis’ ferocious anti-Semitism, “nobody would dare to touch [their] constitutional rights.”
(I knew someone in college whose grandfather, a Jew who had been awarded the Hamburg Hanseatic Cross for his service in the Great War, remained in Germany, confident that the Nazis wouldn’t touch a man with his patriotic record – until he was deported to a death camp. Fortunately, he had sent his wife and children to England before that.)
One man who didn’t share that complacency was Wilhelm Röpke, a 33-year-old, gentile professor at the University of Marburg who was already a famous economist. On February 8, 1936, he delivered a public lecture titled “Epochenwende” (the turning point between two eras), in which he “sought to identify the essence of what the highly ideological movements of the right and left then striving for power across Europe wanted to annihilate”. He called that essence “liberalism”, a term to which he attached a broader meaning than the political and economic opinions of contemporary liberal parties.
Instead, liberalism served in Röpke’s lecture as a synonym for the integration of Greco-Roman, Jewish and Christian, and Enlightenment ideas, culture, and institutions that, he believed, constituted the civilization of the West. Nazism – and Bolshevism, for that matter – should, Röpke maintained, be recognized as an insurrection against that particular complexion of concepts, expectations, and institutions.
Mr. Gregg describes Röpke’s synthesis of those “concepts, expectations, and institutions”, and I won’t repeat his summary. Instead, I have another point, one that is as pertinent today as it was 90 years ago.
The intellectual and political movements that contended in Europe before the rise of Nazism and Bolshevism all drew on elements of Röpke’s mix, though not necessarily the whole: Reactionaries and romantics omitted the Enlightenment, radical liberals the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition, French revolutionaries everything but the Enlightenment, pietists of various stripes everything outside their preferred faith.
The Nazis and Bolsheviks were different: They rejected all that went before, including the idea, common to Greece and Rome, Judaism and Christianity, and the Enlightenment philosophes, that reality is objective and the truth or falsity of an argument depends on how closely it tracks reality rather than on the race or class of its proponents. And because their invented reality was both mandatory for all and detached from reason, they enforced it through violence. Not believing in reason, they had no other choice.
Argument with convinced Nazis or Communists was futile, because they “knew” that arguments put forward by racial inferiors or bourgeois chatterers were inherently false. Moreover, if someone of the “correct” race or class presented them, that showed only that he had been deluded by the Jews or the capitalists (groups that tended to coalesce in their minds).
The mentality of the Nazis and Communists marks the Woke anti-thinkers of today. They, too, regard all previous generations with contempt and consider statements true if, and only if, they emanate from sufficiently wokened mouths. Their fantasy world differs from Hitler’s or Lenin’s, but it is fantasy all the same. Wilhelm Röpke would have recognized them. Their ideas – or, more accurately, emotions and neuroses – will, if they prevail, be the Epochenwende between Western civilization and an era of unprecedented barbarity.
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