Thomas Karlauf

This is a massive life and times of the most influential German-language poet of the first half of the twentieth-century. “Poet” is not an entirely adequate description, for from the beginning, his career was marked by determination to make life and work a unity. His credo was that the stance of the poet is more important than the actual work produced.
This provoked ridicule from many of his contemporaries, but in a few found fertile ground, particularly among youths who were, as he had been, troubled loners. You can imagine where this is heading: the formation of a circle of devoted admirers subsumed to the ideal of pederasty as education.
In the light of further historical developments, detractors pointed to George’s early use of the ancient swastika symbol as a prominent design element in his books, portraying the poet as a forerunner of Hitler. That both used the same symbol is inconsequential. More eery is the language George used, stylising himself as “Führer” and heralding the coming of a New Reich. Even more than his vocabulary, his self-stylisation as high priest of a new religion, bent on imposing his absolute will on his followers, seems precursive. In fact, the pioneer German sociologist Max Weber was fascinated by the phenomenon of the George-circle, and used it to illustrate charismatic leadership, in distinction to legal and traditional leadership, in his final major work, Economy and Society.
In the last decade of his life, after his lyric inspiration was sapped, George’s work focused on reproducing his stance in a series of impressionable young men that his first circle of devotees were directed to scout out. It is fascinating that one of these, Claus von Stauffenberg, at first idolized Hitler, then attained immortality by attempting to assassinate the dictator. Facing death by firing squad, he exclaimed “long live secret Germany,” employing a term used by members of the George-circle to express their ambivalent ambition to foster the true essence of German culture while proclaiming their indifference to politics.
While less-remembered or read today than his erstwhile rival Rilke, many of George’s poems, which I first read a half-century ago in a seminar on modern German literature, remain among the best in the language. It is valuable to explore this very German cultural phenomenon. While perhaps most readers won’t need such an extensive treatment, those who do read this thoroughly-researched and well-written book are sure to find it as rewarding as I did.… (mehr)

In the mid-1930s, Edward Hartshorne was in Germany, working on his University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation, The German Universities and National Socialism, on the destructive effect of National Socialism on German universities. Upon his return home to the US, he became an instructor at Harvard. As part of a research project, he worked with Harvard colleagues Sidney Fay (who was also Hartshorne's father-in-law) and Gordon Allport to compile personal histories of refugees from Nazi Germany.

The Harvard team received 263 accounts, most of which were from Jews, and Hartshorne prepared a manuscript of selected accounts, which he titled Nazi Madness: November 1938. He was preparing this manuscript for publication, but it was never published, for reasons detailed in the note at the end of this review. Professor Uta Gerhardt, Emerita of the University of Heidelberg, and writer Thomas Karlauf, obtained Hartshorne's manuscript from his son and selected 21 personal accounts related to Kristallnacht and published them in Germany in 2009. This is a translation of that book.

In 1938, the Nazis had been in power for six years, during which they relentlessly worked to exclude Jews from the life of the nation. They were removed from professional, academic and civil service positions; prohibited from marriage and sexual relations with so-called Aryans; disallowed from public facilities. With Kristallnacht, in November, 1938, the Nazis' anti-Semitic actions turned to violent extremes.

In October, 1938, Germany expelled 16,000 Polish Jews from Germany. The "aktion" was sudden and violent, leaving the Jews stranded in the town of Zbaszyn, population about 6,000. One family, the Grynszpans, had a son, Herschel, then living in Paris. When Herschel received a postcard from his sister describing the family's treatment, he was so frustrated and furious that he went to the German embassy in Paris and shot Ernst vom Rath, a member of the diplomatic staff. Two days later, vom Rath died. Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels used the death as a pretext to invite attacks on Germany's Jews by announcing that "spontaneous demonstrations" against the Jewish community would not be interfered with. This set off the orgy of violence--essentially a paramilitary riot orchestrated by the Nazis--since known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, after the shards and crystals of glass heaped in the streets from shattered home and shop windows.

Synagogues were burned throughout Germany and Austria, hundreds of people killed, and Jewish-owned homes and businesses destroyed. Over 30,000 German and Austrian Jewish men were rounded up and shipped off to camps at Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, where they were routinely and brutally beaten, with about 1,000 dying, before they were released.

This volume of harrowing personal stories is divided into three parts, with seven accounts in each part. The first part describes the Kristallnacht riots themselves, the second part the concentration camp experiences and the third part "before emigration." This last part is a mix of different experiences of Jews in Germany and Austria in 1938 and 1939, before they were able to emigrate.

Many of the stories are quite similar, which helps reveal some striking points, like that the real abusers were the Nazis' paramilitary units, the SA and SS. Actual police forces were instructed to stay away, and many were upset by the Nazi actions. Far from being an expression of the people's righteous anger, as Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels called it, this riot was upsetting to most Germans. Of course, there were exceptions, most troubling the many young people who had been thoroughly indoctrinated by Nazism and reveled in the brutality.

Another striking point is what we don't see. Each of these personal accounts begins with a very short biographical sketch that includes information about where the person was able to emigrate to, generally in 1939. It reminds the reader that each of these accounts is from someone with the means to pay the extortionate demands of the Nazis and the good fortune to obtain emigration papers.

As time passes and those who witnessed the Holocaust and World War II pass away, the publication of personal accounts like those in this book become increasingly valuable to the historical record.

*****NOTE*****

Edward Hartshorne's own story, which is the subject of this book's Afterword, could make an interesting book. Hartshorne's eye-opening experiences in the 1930s made him a fervent proponent of US intervention in the war. When the US finally entered the fight in 1941, he put aside his academic work (including plans to publish the Nazi Madness manuscript) and worked with the OSS and the Office of War Information. Soon after Germany's defeat, he returned to the subject of his dissertation, Germany's universities. Attached to the US's Office of Military Government for Germany, Hartshorne worked to denazify the universities in the US zone of occupation and supervise their reopening.

In August, 1946, Hartshorne was driving on the autobahn from Bavaria to Nuremberg when he was shot in the head by a man in a Jeep and died two days later.

Uta Gerhardt and historian Richard J. Evans speculate that Hartshorne's murder may have been part of a plot by certain elements in the military government's Counter-Intelligence Corps. They write that Hartshorne was outraged to learn that the CIC was part of the ratline operation, which helped smuggle Nazi war criminals out of Europe to use them in the anticipated fight against Bolshevism. (For more about the ratlines, see Gerald Steinacher's Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice.) Gerhardt and Evans claim that Hartshorne alerted the Soviets to the ratline operations and that this convinced the CIC that Hartshorne was too much of a threat to them.

Novelist and historian Guy Walters disputes this conspiracy claim, stating there is no evidence to support the theory that Hartshorne contacted the Soviets about the ratlines or even knew anything about them himself. Walters refers to a New York Times report from 1946, which indicates that the killer was a German 19-year-old named Johann Detterbeck, who was a small-time criminal, active in the black market and wanted by the police for impersonating a US army officer, among other things. According to two German girls, they were riding in the Jeep with Detterbeck and two other men, out on a drunken joyride, when Detterbeck pulled out his pistol and shot Hartshorne after Hartshorne passed the Jeep. Detterbeck was himself shot and killed in a gunfight a few weeks later.

Whatever the real reasons of Hartshorne's murder, I like to think he would be pleased that most of his manuscript is finally being published, even if it is over 60 years later than he anticipated.

If you read German, you may be interested in an article about Hartshorne's work on the denazification of the German universities. You can find it by Googling "Edward Hartshorne und die Wiedereröffnung der deutschen Universitäten in der US-Besatzungzone." I'm not sure exactly what the following is, but on Amazon there is also this title: Academic proconsul: Harvard sociologist Edward Y. Hartshorne and the reopening of German universities : his personal account (Mosaic) James E. Tent, Trier 1998.

DISCLOSURE: I received a free review copy of this book.… (mehr)

This book is both fascinating and disturbing. Each essay is a glimpse into German society just as persecution of the Jewish population began. We see each person's struggle, astonishment, pain, and horror. Taken as a whole, this collection offers profound insight into how the Nazis managed to suppress and almost destroy an entire sect of people.

The essays in this collection were written by those who managed to escape and emigrate to other countries. These people, of course, were among the wealthier in the Jewish population. They were fortunate to have the means to buy their way out, which is what emigration amounted to. I can only imagine what life was like for those less fortunate, who had no choice but to remain.… (mehr)