OT - An Anniversary to Remember

by Scott Horton
Harper's Magazine
January 30, 2008

Today marks an important anniversary. On January 30, 1933--seventy-five
years ago today--the power of the state fell into the hands of Hitler
and his Nazi party, what Germans know as the Machtergreifung,
literally "seizure of power." But was it a "seizure," lacking all
semblance of legitimacy? More clear-sighted historians, like Fritz
Stern, use the term Machtübergabe, or transfer of power, which marks
some important points: the Nazis fared well in the elections, not
reaching a majority of course, but they were able to take the reins of
power through an alliance with conservatives whose distaste for the
liberal Weimar constitution was only slightly less than their own.
While the Nazi hold on power was tenuous at first, within a single
month, a terrorist attack affecting the most prominent building in the
nation's largest city would supply them with just the engine they
needed to begin the process of demolishing the liberal Weimar
Constitution and transforming the nation into a dictatorship, first
authoritarian and then totalitarian in nature.

On January 30, 1933 President von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as the
Reich Chancellor. This photographs marks their meeting in Potsdam
roughly two months later. It is to the great credit of the modern
German state that it marks the memory of these grim events today and
in the coming months. But Germany honors the memory of those who
suffered at the hands of the Nazis not as a simple act of atonement,
but also as an act of admonishment for its own people and for nations
beyond. The New York Times reports from Berlin:

"Most countries celebrate the best in their pasts. Germany
unrelentingly promotes its worst. The enormous Holocaust memorial that
dominates a chunk of central Berlin was completed only after years of
debate. But the building of monuments to the Nazi disgrace continues
unabated. On Monday, Germany's minister of culture, Bernd Neumann,
announced that construction could begin in Berlin on two monuments:
one near the Reichstag, to the murdered Gypsies, known here as the
Sinti and the Roma; and another not far from the Brandenburg Gate, to
gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust.

"In November Germany broke ground on the long-delayed Topography of
Terror center at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters.
And in October, a huge new exhibition opened at the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp. At the Dachau camp, outside Munich, a new visitor
center is set to open this summer. The city of Erfurt is planning a
museum dedicated to the crematoriums. There are currently two
exhibitions about the role of the German railways in delivering
millions to their deaths. Wednesday is the 75th anniversary of the day
Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in Germany, and the occasion has
prompted a new round of soul-searching.

""Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials
to immortalize its own shame?" asked Avi Primor, the former Israeli
ambassador to Germany, at an event in Erfurt on Friday commemorating
the Holocaust and the liberation of Auschwitz. "Only the Germans had
the bravery and the humility." It is not just in edifices and exhibits
that the effort to come to terms with this history marches on. The
Federal Crime Office last year began investigating itself, trying to
shine a light on the Nazi past of its founders after the end of the
war. And this month Germany's federal prosecutor overturned the guilty
verdict of Marinus van der Lubbe, the Communist Dutchman executed on
charges of setting the Reichstag fire; that event's 75th anniversary
is Feb. 27."

What merits recollection and study on this ominous date are not the
personalities involved, but the techniques they employed. We should
note that those tools continue to be used on the political stage in
many nations around the world; moreover they are used for many of the
same purposes, namely undermining constitutional guarantees of civil
liberties.

The Machtübergabe marked the real beginning for the strangulation of a
democratic state. The principal tool used was simple enough to
identify: it was fear. Fear of a vaguely defined existential threat to
the nation, from beyond its borders. Fear of the Soviet Bolsheviks,
principally. They were presented as terrorists--and indeed, they openly
embraced the use of terror as a political tool. And this fear was soon
joined by many others, particularly the fear of an "inner" enemy
within the nation's borders, framed in terms of the most revolting
racist stereotyping.

The ghost that stalked the world in the years between the wars roams
once more, though certainly not in the most virulent form. In truth,
it was never truly locked away, nor can it ever be. It is a part of
the human condition which we can at best hope only to press to the
margins. But the most effective tool to use against it is simple
enough: it is memory. It behooves us to remember our history and our
cumulative experiences. Historical consciousness is the only effective
inoculation mankind knows.

As the anniversary arrives, I note an important essay that the German
legal scholar Michael Stolleis has published in the December 2007
issue of Merkur under the heading "Fear Consumes the Soul." Stolleis's
piece is in German, but it is worthy of a broader audience-in fact it
needs to be read by Americans. I am translating and excerpting it
here, but if you can manage it, read the original:

"September 11, 2001 is not just the central date of recent American
history. It has decisively transformed the intellectual climate of the
liberal and democratic states of the West. After further attacks
occurred in Europe, or were narrowly avoided, fear is on the prowl.
Its password is "terrorism," the wish that commands all is called
"security," and the enemy it identifies is "Islam." In this climate
head scarves, sacrifices, the construction of mosques and Muslim
religious instruction become the embattled basic questions. The secret
service, the police, the customs officials and the armed forces
prepare for battle. The citizen is taught that he must sacrifice
freedom if he wants more security; at least he must be willing to part
with the privacy of his personal data. Data privacy, once the paradigm
of a free society, suddenly takes on the appearance of a quaint piece
of furniture from a by-gone era, a time in which we could afford a bit
of privacy. Now we must close ranks, they tell us, and all prepare for
the battle and the sacrifice of our own lives."

No one in America who heard President Bush's State of the Union
Address on Monday night, or who has listened to any of the Republican
presidential debates could mistake the message that Stolleis
encapsulates here. It is the essential clarion call of the Bush
Administration. But reading on, I see that he references only
materials published in Germany and debate within his own country. The
language used, the images mustered, have painful historical parallels
for Germans. But they might as well be a simple translation of the
debate from the United States.

The dialogue is not limited to the political world, for it resonates
in academia as well. Political scientists and lawyers foraging for the
models for a national security state, turn to the same sources. "The
Leviathan is summoned in its primal function, as guarantor of
security, and the qualities of rule-of-law state and civil rights
appear only to be troublesome appendages. In spite of, or rather
precisely because of the globalization of terror, the concept of
national sovereignty once more finds its defenders, who find the right
moment to remind us that in time of exigency, the state may kill its
own citizens."

And so we make the inevitable bridge from fear, to destruction of
civil rights, to the power of arbitrary detention to torture. The rise
of an authoritarian, and then a totalitarian state is always linked to
torture, in fact. And Stolleis comes to the debate that was unleashed
in Germany in 1996 by a Frankfurt police investigation, in which the
use of torture was defended to save a life. It was a familiar case for
American TV viewers. After all, we have an entire TV series, Fox's
"24," which is premised on the wonderful blessing of torture--teaching
us how essential to our security it is. Germany has not embraced
torture, however. And most Germans will read of Attorney General
Mukasey's disgraceful testimony today on the subject of torture and
wonder: What happened to these Americans? What caused them to change?
What led them to betray the values for which they fought in World War
II, and which we accepted when the war ended?

But the dark, threatening seeds of that change have made their
appearance in Germany as well. Stolleis reviews a book by the Cologne
law professor Otto Depenheuer, Selbstbehauptung des Rechtsstaates
(2007), which sounds like John Yoo rendered into German. But indeed, I
have often wondered, reading John Yoo, whether German was not in fact
the original language. For Depenheuer, civil liberties and the concept
of the rule of law are "draperies that cloak the fundamental security
function of the state." He values the decisive, brave political
leaders who are prepared to brush them all aside in the interest of
the idol of national security. For Depenheuer, torture is no object,
and neither is the brisk use of lethal force when a threat is
perceived. He bemoans our "self-satisfied, hedonistic culture." And
not surprisingly, Depenheuer's book is laced with citations to the
crown jurist of Germany in the thirties, Carl Schmitt (Yoo's books are
likewise chock full of Schmitt's ideas, but he seems a bit hesitant to
attribute them to their author). Again, a tie to the fateful
Machtübergabe, for when the Nazis took charge they turned to the self-
described "conservative Catholic" Schmitt to give them a legal master
plan for the destruction of liberal democracy, and he was only too
happy to accommodate their request. Criticizing and taking down
liberalism in the interest of robust security had, after all, been his
life's passion.

Stolleis raises the right question and he answers it. "Just how viable
is this chimera concocted from Carl Schmitt and the remains of a
constitutional democracy? A state that pumps itself up with this sort
of violence and threat potential had abdicated its role as a
constitutional democracy--for that requires shared powers, distancing
and the protection of civil liberties."

And Stolleis closes in what might pass for a quotation from an
American President, Dwight David Eisenhower. He felt that the nation's
concern for security in the mid-fifties was going to lead us to spend
ourselves into a catastrophe, and he had a fitting retort. "If you
want total security," Ike said, "go to prison." It sounded glib to
some, but Ike made clear that he was convinced the maniacal concerns
about security would lead to the destruction of democracy, the end of
the traits that defined America as a nation-just as had happened in
Europe between the wars.

But here are Stolleis's words, and they merit being read on this day,
marking the Machtübergabe, for they present the essential historical
lesson to be distilled from that dark period in human history:

"A free society that wishes to remain free must learn to cope with
danger. It must bear danger, when necessary, without running
immediately to call the national security state, the police and the
military. Only a self-conscious society, which desists from issuing
supplementary plenary powers to the state security agencies every time
a threat arises, will be able to conquer its inner fear. When
sacrifices must be made, then we should be able to complain about them
privately and publicly. But we have no need of a metaphysics of
sacrifice, much less a political theory of the sacrifice of citizens,
furnished with the incense of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Thoughts on "Tirpitz - Hunting the Beast"
    ... Britain was an island nation and a naval power. ... Around 50 percent of the troops in the Mexican War ... Germany has as many facets as any other society ...
    (soc.history.war.world-war-ii)
  • Re: why did Hitler Kill jews ?
    ... >view of the war being a regular Europen balance of power conflict. ... Poles from land next to Germany so they could be taken over by ... >>>attacks on France and Britain. ...
    (soc.history.war.world-war-ii)
  • Re: Killers opinions: Final Convictions of a Nazi
    ... later boarding a ship for South America where Hitler died a few years later. ... At her own desire she goes as my wife with me into death. ... It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted the war in 1939. ... have done immeasurable harm to the country and the whole nation by ...
    (misc.legal)
  • Neo Nazis pose World Cup threat.
    ... Rightwing extremists and neo-Nazis posed a security threat to the football ... Tournament planners in Germany have in the past played down concerns over ...
    (soc.culture.israel)
  • Re: Core Article: Towards a New Russian Century?
    ... Germany was the most important challenger Great Power in the first ... without the spectre of communism hanging over a ... The US only dreams of full spectrum dominance and does not have it. ...
    (soc.culture.russian)