Humanity’s war against Nazism had a military component that concluded with Germany’s defeat in 1945, but there’s also a moral struggle that continues into our own time. We got a sense of how vexed this struggle can be a few years ago when Whoopi Goldberg said the Holocaust was not about racism because it involved two groups of white people. A more severe warning about the difficulties of putting World War II behind us came last Friday, when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed the German government to “reverse course” on its decision to treat the political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a confirmed right-wing extremist organization. American schools have left many of our best and brightest ignorant of the racist energies that drove history’s great catastrophe.
The German government has indeed learned from the past. Yet for us to understand its recent action we must translate its decision into American terms. The AfD endangered democracy, Germany’s interior minster told us, because its “ethnic-based policy devalues entire population groups by treating them as second-class citizens.” For “ethnic” substitute “racial.” If Americans associate race with physical characteristics, Central Europeans consider “races” to be groups that share myths of common ethnic ancestry.
A little background explains why Germany produced extreme racism. Europe’s modern history starts in 1789, when the French made the revolutionary claim that they—the nation—and not the king, should govern. This heady notion quickly spread eastward but encountered a problem in the German lands: there was no German kingdom, but instead dozens of small units like Baden or Bavaria in a “Holy Roman Empire.” Germans who wanted to govern themselves as a nation therefore asked what might unite them if not the clear boundaries of an old state. The answer was culture: above all the German language, which Martin Luther had standardized when he translated the Bible. Until then, German had been a set of mutually incomprehensible dialects.
Every people wants to know its origins. Germans wondered where those dialects came from. Historians said they came from the German tribes who had settled Central Europe centuries earlier, when the original Roman Empire ruled farther south. Those tribes had then united and made Germany’s history as a people—or Volk. In other words, because Germany lacked the kind of state that might have made the nation’s history—the kind of state France, England, or Denmark had – German historians invented a different agent. The first History of the German People appeared in 1825.
In twelve volumes the Germans were made to appear great, producing figures of genius, such as the creators of that Holy Empire that succeeded the original Roman one: Charlemagne, Otto I, Frederick Barbarossa. Now we know that, although these emperors spoke variants of German, they had no idea whatsoever of acting as Germans. But to those who invented the “German people,” such facts did not matter. A rising historical profession taught Germans that although the Holy Empire had become a disunited farce by 1789, centuries earlier it had ruled over many peoples, and that was their destiny once again.
This teaching grew more poisonous with the advent of scientific racism after Darwin’s discoveries later in the nineteenth century. What "really" made Germans great over the ages, it turned out, was not just a shared culture but a common bloodline. The height of such thought came in 1940, in efforts to make a Third Empire, Hitler’s Reich. Now influential historians taught how race had made Germany over a thousand years:
Only in Germany was there [around the year 900-JC] already a real people as a community of life organized by estates and tribes, in which the ruling class, the warlike, powerful, rich nobility, was of the same Germanic blood and language as the creative peasantry and the dependent population. This ethnic (völkisch) unity gave the Germans alone in Europe the strength to erect a new political edifice on the ruins of the Carolingian empire.... Outside of Germany, however, such ethnic foundations for a new state formation were still lacking. There, the noble descendants of Germanic conquerors of the Migration Period still ruled over an indigenous population of predominantly different blood.
The author of this text, Herbert Grundmann, implied that non-Germans lacked the right to rule themselves for racial reasons. Grundmann, who was not a member of the Nazi Party, reflected a consensus of German historians, a consensus that put down roots deep into the German population, giving its military a righteous conviction without which its atrocities against non-Germans—and above all Jews—would have been unthinkable.
Grundmann’s views did not disappear after May 1945; as a non-Nazi he was able to continue teaching and writing. And so the struggle against the structures of belief that made Nazi racism so formidable now moved from the battlefields to seminars and lecture halls, pitting Grundmann and his ilk against a rising generation of historians—many trained in France, Britain, and the United States—who showed the idea of a German Volk with a continuous past to be a gargantuan fiction.
Today, it’s mainly the AfD that sustains this fiction. Its leaders know it’s illegal to put calls for discrimination in party documents, but disdain for non-Germans breaks through despite the efforts of slick political professionals like Alice Weidel. Her fellow party leaders have said that a passport is not enough to make a person a German (“we also have to examine a person’s ‘ancestry’”); that they would identify and deport “unassimilated” citizens; and that Turkish Germans—“caraway salesmen…and camel traders—should go back where they belong, to their mud huts and multiple wives.” Weidel herself lost her cool in a speech of May 2018, telling the German parliament: “Burkas, headscarf girls, subsidized knifemen and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and above all, the welfare state.”
Politicians of Germany’s mainstream parties know their history, and that is why they have responded with such undiplomatic bluntness to Secretary Rubio's unsolicited advice. “Reversing course” would mean undoing the work of generations—not only the men and women who died to defeat the Nazi regime, but also the generations since who, across many borders, have labored to undo its lies.
