Autor/Autorin
The culture of debate is enriched when current texts by the lawyer Fritz Bauer are reissued. In 2016, the Europäische Verlagsanstalt (EVA) republished Bauer’s lecture on „The Roots of Fascist and National Socialist Action“, delivered in October 1960 to representatives of youth organisations and first published in 1965 in the resnovaeder EVA collection.
A brief introduction to the 122-page volume, which also documents the debate on Bauer’s lecture that took place in 1962 following a major enquiry by the SPD parliamentary group (pp. 78-108), was written by David Johst. He believes that Bauer’s views would „hardly meet with any resistance today … … today“. Especially as the debate on the „right way“ to deal with the Nazi past has been „largely contained“ and consensus on history prevails, with an incipient „formal ossification“ now evident. Behind the confessions, Johst suspects, is „the same comfortable obedience, the tendency to secure economic and social advantages, as Bauer had criticised in connection with National Socialism.“ (S. 17)
As far as dealing with history is concerned, Bauer’s criticism of the subject spirit, which is summarised in the formula „law is law and order is order“, is not a closed chapter after all.
The critical lawyer Heinrich Hannover wrote in his 1961 review of Bauer’s lecture, which was published against the will of the CDU-led Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of Culture, that the author rightly refused to call the foundations of fascism „spiritual“. Bauer enables young people to categorise the Hitler era in terms of intellectual history and to make them „sensitive to false and idealistic tones“. It is therefore to be hoped that young people will not fall for the anti-hero Bauer recently created on film by the self-forgetful national culture of remembrance, but will read the original.
Heinrich Hanover
Book review: Fritz Bauer, Die Wurzeln nationalsozialistischen Handelns, published by Landesjugendring Rheinland-Pfalz, Mainz (n.d.), 35 pages.
„Finally a concise, youth-appropriate presentation of Nazism“
For many members of the younger generation who lack their own perspective, the National Socialist period of German history is an accumulation of unconnected facts; unconnected in two senses: On the one hand, they believe they can separate the „good“ (by which they understand not only the inevitable motorways but also – horribile dictu – „order“ and anti-communism) from the bad (concentration camps, aggressive war, one-party rule); on the other, they see these twelve years as unrelated to the rest of German history, explained by the injustice of Versailles, excused by the communist danger that was already acute at the time. The inner context of the facts, the totality of the evil spirit and its embedding in straight lines of development in German history was made visible by the Hessian Attorney General Dr Fritz Bauer in a lecture that was published as a brochure by the Rhineland-Palatinate State Youth Council.
Bauer is not interested in presenting the reader with a phenomenological panopticon in which one could feel like an outside, self-righteous spectator and be indignant about the wickedness of others, the „Nazis“, but rather he makes intellectual connections that make it tangible that only „the Hitler in us“ has made the Hitler above us possible – and could make it possible again every day. „Nazism did not fall from the sky,“ writes Bauer, rejecting the view that everything was fine and dandy in Germany until the criminal Hitler and his henchmen came along and turned things upside down. „There is no ‚leader‘ without people who allow themselves to be led. The problem of Nazism cannot be solved with a psychology of Hitler and his immediate environment … The question of the roots of Nazism is therefore always also a question of the receptiveness of the broadest strata to its evil spirit and the willingness of many, indeed all too many, Germans to be complicit.“
Bauer responds to the objection that the historical situation in Germany after the First World War explains Hitler’s rise. He refutes this by making comparisons with other countries that had never opened up to Hitler despite similar emergency situations. Hitler needed a certain mentality, which he only found in Germany. Bauer sketches the history of authoritarian thinking in broad strokes, a specifically German intellectual history that began with the reception of Roman law and closed itself off to the democratic and liberal ideas of human and civil rights. Luther’s „authority“, Hegel’s glorification of the reality of the state, Kant’s conservative and positivist constitutional thinking are cited as symptoms of the world view and political morality that Germans were taught from the 16th century until Nazism.
A highly instructive lesson, even in the details, which shatters the conventional habits of thought of our day in their self-evidence and, for the attentive reader, extends the intellectual-historical lines to the present day. The German ideal of the civil servant, who has no opinion of his own, no character and no conscience and is supposed to serve as a loyal and well-behaved tool for good or ill, is relentlessly denounced; The „idolisation of the law“ and a corresponding fictitious state morality is castigated, which „covers the raw events of foreign policy with a cloak of ethics and ensures a clear conscience for the actors“, the doctrine of double morality, which places the state and its functionaries under a different moral law to that which applies to the everyday life of the individual.
It is not possible to give even a brief outline of the wealth of ideas that Bauer has condensed into just under 30 pages. This book finally provides a concise, easily understandable and youth-appropriate presentation of the foundations (Bauer rightly refuses to call them „spiritual“) of fascism and Nazism, which can be given to young people to enable them to categorise the Hitler era in terms of intellectual history and to make them sensitive to the false idealistic tones with which fascist thought and action tends to disguise itself.