The Hohmann affair revisited: unspeakable traditions in German political
thought?

Max Paul Friedman

The selection of _Taetervolk_ as the "Unwort des Jahres" by a panel of
German language experts sparked a minor renewal of interest in the Hohmann
affair, and the editors of H-German have asked me to comment. In October
2003, then CDU Member of Parliament Martin Hohmann used the word, which
translates roughly as "people of perpetrators," in a speech blaming crimes
committed during the Bolshevik Revolution on Jewish communists. He was
subsequently, if tardily, expelled from the CDU's Bundestag faction after a
public uproar, the first politician to be punished in this manner.  Hohmann
himself responded to the dubious honor of the annual award for bad language
by issuing his first press release since November. "The jury made a good
choice," he declared, going on to explain that the concept _Taetervolk_ is
an unjust collective accusation against an entire people, which is why, he
concluded, he never said it about the Jews. [1]

Let's clear up a misconception. As Hohmann has repeatedly insisted in his
own defense, he never did say the Jews are a _Taetervolk_. Instead, he used
weasel words, passive constructions, and the conditional tense to make the
accusation while leaving room for plausible deniability. "With a certain
justification one could, in view of the millions of dead in the first phase
of the revolution, ask about the '_Taeterschaft_' of the Jews," he
contended. Given the number of Jews active in the Cheka, "one could with
some justification designate Jews as a '_Taetervolk_.'" To do so would
follow the same logic, he went on, as calling Germans a _Taetervolk_. He
then argued that both charges are equally inappropriate. In the end,
"neither 'the Germans' nor 'the Jews' are a _Taetervolk_." Instead, he noted
that Bolsheviks of Jewish origin had turned their backs on their religion,
that the Nazis walked away from Christianity, and the true criminals of
history therefore are "the godless," regardless of their ancestry. [2]

Hohmann did not renounce his remarks under fire and he urged his critics to
read them in context. That is a good idea, because it is the context both of
his full speech and of his political biography that makes clear how devoted
he is to the very ideas that drew the most criticism. Removing the focus
from the Unwort itself, or assigning the word to that limbo of
conditionality and plausible deniability Hohmann carefully constructed for
it, does nothing to alter the focus of his remarks or his ownership of the
ideas at the center of the controversy.  He and those who defended him,
including a German general subsequently fired for doing so, cast his remarks
as courageous truths unfairly forbidden in German society. In fact, the
ideas are hoary cliches with recognizable pedigrees.

At the heart of the speech is a focus on alleged Jewish responsibility for
communism. Hohmann offered statistics showing the overrepresentation of Jews
in the leadership of communist movements. Historians have not had much
trouble explaining why many Jews, denied full citizenship or facing
discrimination or persecution in most countries and especially in Czarist
Russia, flocked to European socialist movements of the 19th and early 20th
centuries that promised a future of equality. But Hohmann conveniently
ignores the fact that Jews therefore were numerous also among the
Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, and other rivals of the Bolsheviks, and
were numerous among Stalin's victims as well. The bloody history of the
early Soviet Union was not an ethnic or religious struggle led by Jews, but
a power struggle among competing political factions based on ideology and
personality.

For Hohmann, though, Jewish responsibility is crucial. The most frequent and
revealing rhetorical stratagem Hohmann uses is to blame a Jewish
collectivity for the actions of individuals of Jewish origin. There are dark
stains on the history of the Jews, he told a television interviewer; "one
such stain was the participation of _the Jewish people_ in the Bolshevik
revolution of 1917." [3, emphasis added.] In the speech itself, Hohmann used
formulations with the same rhetorical purpose, such as "the murder of the
Russian Czar and his family was ordered by the Jew Jakob Swerdlow and
personally carried out by the Jew Chaimowitz Jurowski." By ignoring all
other factors and precursor events in explaining why the Czar was killed,
Hohmann leaves only the single identifying mark "Jew" as the cause of the
crime.

One need not read into Hohmann's peripheral remarks evidence of concealed
anti-Semitism deployed through code words, although one could try. He opened
his speech with a list of complaints about a welfare recipient who enjoyed a
state-funded supply of Viagra and another who received his checks and rent
subsidies in sunny Florida. It seems unlikely that he was covertly invoking
tropes of dangerous Jewish sexual appetites or money-grubbing Palm Beach
retirees. Instead, the connection is at once more subtle and more obvious: a
speech that begins and ends with calls to protect the virtues of German
civilization against its degradation has at its center an extensive
exposition of the Jewish threat to the survival of the West.

In taking this approach, Hohmann has plenty of company. It was the Nazi
ideologue Alfred Rosenberg whose 1930 _Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts_ posited
his own theory of a clash of civilizations between the Aryan race, bearer of
culture, and the corruption worked by Jews. The historian Ernst Nolte set
off the _Historikerstreit_ with his thesis that the Bolsheviks' crimes
produced the Nazis' crimes, that the Holocaust was in effect a product of
1917 rather than 1933, and that there was a rational, defensive core at the
heart of Hitler's plans. [4] The amount of ink spilled over Nolte, pro and
con, should be enough to refute the myth that such topics cannot be
discussed in contemporary Germany.  But the most striking parallels are to
an even more notorious volume. "The international Jew completely dominates
Russia today," wrote Adolf Hitler in _Mein Kampf_. "In Russian Bolshevism we
must see the attempt undertaken by the Jews in the twentieth century to
achieve world domination." [5] The weapon of Marxism, Hitler complained,
allowed "a gang of Jewish journalists and stock exchange bandits" to
dominate Russia. [6] These parallels drew little comment in the German
press, perhaps because one is not supposed to be able to get _Mein Kampf_ in
Germany and it is bad form to discuss it, or perhaps because the parallel
was too evident to require comment. [7]

Hohmann does not cite Hitler and I cannot know whether he has read _Mein
Kampf_.  He seems, however, to have read Henry Ford, whom he presents as an
authority on the Jewish question and whose observations, he assures his
listeners, "will astonish you." He then impresses them with Ford's sales of
half a million copies of _The International Jew_, translated into 16
languages, in which Ford described a global Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy.
Whether or not the audience was surprised, it is astonishing that a person
of Hohmann's high political position apparently did not realize that Ford's
publication is one of the touchstones of American anti-Semitism, that Ford
devoted 91 consecutive issues of his large-circulation _Dearborn
Independent_ to his virulent conspiracy theories, and that Hitler held him
in such high esteem he hung a portrait of Ford in his office and awarded the
automaker a medal. [8] Hohmann's promise to "astonish" his listeners
contains the assumption that they have never heard this about Henry Ford,
and the rhetorical value of the astonishment presumably lies in the
legitimating effect of such a well-known and respectable figure espousing
such controversial opinions, views that Hohmann himself now has the courage
to utter.

The remarks that call to mind classic Nazi tropes drew the most attention,
but Hohmann's thinking seems less influenced by fascism, which he rejects,
than by a right-wing Catholic interpretation of modernity. Hohmann hails
from the Catholic region around Fulda and likes to call himself a
"Fuldamentalist." His central argument blaming "the godless" for modernity's
evils is in line with the "undiluted Catholic worldview" of the CDU's early
leaders, who placed "National Socialism in the context of an age-old battle
between Christianity and materialism."  [9]  In his speech, Hohmann invokes
a hobbyhorse of right-wing Christian thought in inveighing against the
French Revolution. Why, he asks, does France today celebrate rather than
atone for a bloody past that included massacres in Paris and the provinces,
especially the Vendee, and brought to power a supposedly enlightened
dictator "whose crusading wars of conquest left Europe with millions of
dead?"  If conservative French historians often link and condemn the
revolutions of 1789 and 1917, Hohmann here makes an explicit equivalence
between Hitler and Napoleon-another mitigating comparison intended to dilute
the singular horror of the Nazis.

In other ways, Hohmann simply engages in traditional anti-Semitic practices,
such as identifying Jewish Germans as less than full members of the German
nation, and rather as members of some mythical international Jewish nation
(one now headed by Ariel Sharon). He does this by blaming "the Jewish
people" for the October revolution; he does it in the same speech by
complaining that "Jewish slave laborers" received compensation while "German
slave laborers" did not, even though most of the slave laborers were not
Jewish and some of the Jewish slave laborers were German. And he has done
this elsewhere, for example, after Paul Spiegel, head of the Zentralrat der
Juden in Deutschland, denounced the conservative concept of a German
_Leitkultur_ by pointing to some dangerous actions motivated by such
nationalist thinking such as the burning of synagogues and the murder of a
homeless man. Hohmann responded that Germans today have no more collective
responsibility for these acts than Paul Spiegel has when the Israeli army
kills innocent civilians-a comparative structure that functions only if one
believes that Paul Spiegel is more Israeli than German. [10]

That kind of parallel structure reveals much about Hohmann's thinking. No
matter how carefully he nests his accusations in layers of grammatical
insulation, he still winds up arguing that if the Germans are guilty of X,
the Jews must be guilty of Y, and if the Jews are not guilty of Y, then the
Germans must not be guilty of X-a configuration that requires X to equal Y,
for the Holocaust to equal the Revolution of 1917.  Hohmann did not invent
this equivalence. It springs from the totalitarianism school so prominent
and so useful in domestic and international politics during the Cold War,
and he is hardly a courageous pioneer to invoke it.  However, Hohmann then
exceeds even the argument of the authors of _The Black Book of Communism_ by
making Communism not only a worse crime than Nazism, but a Jewish crime.
[11]
To undertake his argument in the first place, Hohmann had to set up a straw
man by inverting words. _Taetervolk_ was never a common expression in
discussion of the German past. What one does hear from time to time is _Volk
der Taeter_. While both could translate as "people of perpetrators," the
difference is significant. Both are synecdochic fallacies, but _Taetervolk_
is all-inclusive and _Volk der Taeter_ is not.  The Germans could once be
called a _Volk der Dichter und Denker_ (people of poets and thinkers)
because of the presence of renowned poets and thinkers among them. That
expression did not make every German a poet, although the construct
_Dichtervolk_ would have, which is why nobody used it. When Karl Kraus
changed the line to _Volk der Richter und Henker_ (people of judges and
hangmen), he was not saying every German was a hangman, although had he said
_Henkervolk_, he would have. To come from a people among whom poets played a
significant role was a source of pride, and to come from a people among whom
hangmen, or later perpetrators, played a significant role, was a source of
shame or at least of inquiry.

By reversing the construction and claiming that a broad swath of opinion,
including of course monolithic international Jewish opinion, holds all
Germans to be perpetrators, Hohmann can then knock down the straw man he has
sewn together. At the same time, he himself thrusts this unfashionable
charge of collective guilt upon another collectivity, thus having it both
ways.

Since nobody is talking about punishing all the Germans for the crimes of
the Nazis anymore, what Hohmann is really after is a change in two
tendencies. Narrowly, he challenges any state-funded efforts at restitution
or commemoration of the Holocaust, since German taxpayers are thereby
collectively asked to bear a burden.  He asks in the speech for a reduction
of restitution payments to "the above all Jewish victims of National
Socialism" in light of the weak economy, to a level "commensurate with the
reduced capacity of the German state." More broadly, he would like an end to
German humility, a renewed appreciation for military values, and an
assertive, unapologetic nationalism infused with a Christian identity. The
European Union's constitution, he notes, must include a reference to
Europe's Christian values.

The narrow question of taxation as punishment again highlights the flaw in
Hohmann's parallel. It is universal practice for states to tax their
citizens to carry out their policies, even if that means redirecting money
from a large group of people to a smaller group. That is true of all
taxpayer-funded restitution payments for past crimes, which are not paid by
contemporaries of the crimes, let alone individual perpetrators, whether the
recipients are Polish slave laborers, Korean sex slaves, or Japanese
American internees. [12] National and international law increasingly
recognize the usefulness of redress for serious rights violations, and when
states decide to make symbolic restitution payments, they do so with public
funds the same way they subsidize farm products a given taxpayer may never
consume or build highways he or she may never use. Germans are not being
collectively punished by restitution payments, unless all taxation is
punishment. Looking at the Jewish half of the parallel brings out the
difference. Supposing we were to take Hohmann's argument at face value. If
German restitution payments are to continue, should "the Jews" also pay
restitution to the descendants of the Bolsheviks' victims? There is no such
polity. If Russia were to engage in some sort of redress, it would be
Russian taxpayers who fund the project. Those are the rules of the state
system, and one price of belonging to a state is participating to some
degree in its political engagement with its past.

Hohmann's second, broader agenda is clear in the speech and from his other
statements. As concerned with apparent Jewish power and German victimization
as Hohmann is, his remarks come in the context of a coherent presentation of
an exculpatory interpretation of Germany's fascist history to promote a
conservative Catholic style of German nationalism. Like other nationalists,
he is tired of having to take responsibility for his nation's past. He spoke
out during the debate over the slave labor restitution fund against "false
exaggeration and excessive moralizing," and criticized the Institut fuer
Sozialforschung's photograph exhibit on the crimes of the Wehrmacht as
defamatory. [13] He opposed plans for a Holocaust memorial in Berlin not on
aesthetic grounds (which are ample), but because "nearly three generations
of repentance are enough. There should not be six or seven . . . . the
memorial would be a monumental expression of our incapacity to forgive
ourselves." Instead, Hohmann argued that the Neue Wache is itself an
appropriate memorial for Jewish victims. The Neue Wache, a moving copy of a
Kaethe Kollwitz sculpture, is of course a pieta. But then Hohmann thinks
Christianity is a better religion, so a Christian symbol would be a
preferable memorial for Jewish victims. [14] In another familiar echo, he
blamed Germany's declining birth rate in part on the "tolerance of
homosexuality." [15] Hohmann is nothing if not consistent.

While the Hohmann affair led to a good deal of unproductive hand-wringing
and predictably ugly exchanges on the internet, it was sensibly handled by
the CDU, as soon as Angela Merkel calculated the political cost, and it led
to some of the earnest and salutary discussion of history one often comes
across in the German press (and one wishes would find its way more often
into American newspapers). It also became one more piece of evidence from
the last couple of years indicating that public discourse on the Nazi past
is bursting the limits imposed by the uneasy politico-academic consensus
that was, with hindsight, remarkably long-lived. Guenter Grass, Joerg
Friedrich, Anonyma, and Guido Knopp have their differences, but they all
make one thing clear: mainstream German society is no longer content to
leave its Nazi-era history to professional historians. Perhaps what is
surprising is not so much that historians are now losing control of the
debate as that they ever had such control.

NOTES

[1] Press release from 20 January 2004, posted at www.martinhohmann.de.

[2] Quotations from Hohmann's speech from October 3, 2003, here and
throughout, from text posted at
http://www.telepolis.de/deutsch/inhalt/co/15981/1.html.

[3] Frontal 21, ZDF, 1 November 2003.

[4] See Ernst Nolte, "Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will,"
_Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung_, 6 June 1986, and his _Der europaeische
Buergerkrieg. Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus 1917-1945_, 4th ed.
(Frankfurt am Main: Propylaeen, 1989).

[5] Chapter 14, "Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy."

[6] Chapter 11, "Nation and Race."

[7] Historian Wolfgang Wippermann did point this out in an interview
published at www.netzeitung.de/deutschland/260914.html, and historian
Norbert Finzsch made the observation to me in conversation the day after the
scandal broke.

[8] See Neil Baldwin, _Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate_
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2001). Most of Hohmann's statistics were drawn
from a book by Bielefeld librarian Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein, who
argued that Jewish communists turned Hitler into an anti-Semite. In their
figures, Bieberstein and Hohmann counted as Jews people who had Jewish
ancestors but were of Christian faith, pursuing the biological definition
used by the Nazis. Bieberstein, _"Juedischer Bolschewismus." Mythos und
Realitaet_, with a foreword by Ernst Nolte (Dresden: Edition Antaios, 2002).

[9] Maria Mitchell, "Materialism and Secularism: CDU Politicians and
National Socialism, 1945-1949," _Journal of Modern History_ 67:2 (June
1995): 278-308, quoted at 283-4. See also A. Dirk Moses, "Coming to Terms
with the Past in Comparative Perspective: Germany and Australia,"
_Aboriginal History_ 25 (2001): 91-115.

[10] _Der Spiegel_ online, 31 October 2003,
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,272157,00.html (.40 Euro
fee to download).

[11] Hohmann's math would work out differently from that of the _Black Book_
authors, since even he would be hard-pressed to attribute the victims of
Chinese and Southeast Asian Communism to the actions of a Jewish cabal
around Mao, Ho, and Pol Pot. Stephane Courtois et al., _Le Livre Noir du
Communisme: Crimes, terreur, repression_ (Paris: Laffont, 1997).

[12] See, for example, Elazar Barkan, _The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and
Negotiating Historical Injustices_ (New York: Norton, 2000).

[13] "Wer ist Martin Hohmann?" Sueddeutsche.de, 31.10.2003.

[14] Text of Hohmann speech on the memorial posted on Hohmann's homepage at
http://www.martinhohmann.de/, where
Hohmann also promises to promote
Christian values, defend German interests and work against a "multicultural
society."

[15] If one takes Hohmann's remark at face value, it is ironic coming in the
context of a press conference on gay adoption. The very legal measures he
opposed would increase the number of German homes available for children
and, arguably, increase rather than decrease the "demand" for births. "Wer
ist Martin Hohmann?" Sueddeutsche.de, 31.10.2003. The notion that
homosexuals shirk their duty to produce children has a solid far-right
pedigree, including Herwig Hartner's _Erotik und Rasse_ (Munich: Deutscher
Volksverlag, 1925). For this reference I thank Alexander von Humboldt Fellow
Geoffrey Giles of the University of Florida, who is completing a book about
Nazi policies toward homosexuals.


Max Paul Friedman teaches in the Department of History at Florida State
University and is the German Historical Institute's 2003-04 Juergen
Heideking Fellow at the Universitaet zur Koeln. He is author of _Nazis and
Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin
America in World War II_ (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and, with
Padraic Kenney, of _Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global
Politics_ (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

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