The German Genius

contemporary music, and founded an organization to promote the sciences and humanities. But then it attracted unwelcome attention from the British authorities, who viewed it as a Russian-inspired communist organization, and it was closed. 8
    Newspaper, radio, and film initiatives had to be licensed by the occupying powers, and one of the most interesting developments here was the decision to bring back Erich Pommer, the original force behind the Universum Film AG (UFA) productions of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , The Testament of Dr. Mabuse , Metropolis , and The Blue Angel . He returned in July 1946 and was welcomed, in his own words, “like the coming of the Messiah.” A residence was made available for him in Berlin and he was given a personal servant. Hollywood objected vociferously—German films had been their main rival up until 1933—but agreement was eventually reached, both sides accepting the fact that their chief objective now would be to combat Soviet Cold War propaganda. 9
    All of these initiatives were interrupted when, on July 24, 1948, the Soviet Union halted all road and rail traffic between Berlin and the West. This resulted in the famous airlift ( Luftbrücke ), which endured until September 30, 1949. * By then the Cold War was firmly in place, culminating in the summer of 1961 when the Berlin Wall was constructed. An important issue in postwar German culture was the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung —overcoming (or coming to terms with) the past. This process was not helped by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s policy of employing former high-ranking Nazis in positions of authority if he felt they could help administer what was to become known as the “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s and/or take part in the Cold War. Arguably the most disgraceful element in this direction was the fact that both the German and American governments knew that Adolf Eichmann had been living in Argentina since 1952 under the name Ricardo Clement and shielded him in case he made public information he possessed about figures such as Hans Globke, the author of a commentary on Hitler’s Nuremberg race laws and then a senior figure under Adenauer. The Israelis did not capture Eichmann until 1962.
    In these and other ways the exigencies of the Cold War continually interfered with the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.
    Robert Conquest has made the point that the non-Nazi world was hindered in coming to grips with “Hitlerism” by the Soviet presence at Nuremberg. “It seems anomalous that one of the states passing judgement over Nazi Germany, as an aggressor, should itself have been expelled from the League of Nations six years previously on that charge.” 10 However, the first full-length book that tried to ensure that Germans were forced to come to terms with their past did appear much sooner than anyone anticipated. Max Weinreich’s Hitler’s Professors:The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People appeared in March 1946, less than a year after the end of the war. Weinreich was born in Latvia in 1893 and studied German philology at Berlin and Marburg. After completing a doctorate on Yiddish, he eventually became director of the institution that was to evolve into the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna. Weinreich was at a conference in Brussels when Poland was annexed and, with difficulty, made his way to the United States. There, when he learned that Vilna had fallen under Soviet control as part of the Nazi-Russian partition of Poland, he set about re-creating YIVO in New York. These experiences made it natural for him to focus on the scholars under Hitler who had lent their good name and imprimatur to Nazi genocidal policies. In his book, Weinreich used 2,000 wartime publications, many of them secret until that point, and roamed among another 5,000 articles from within the Third Reich to identify, for example, “large-scale experimentation” as one of these policies, exposing how the Nazis made a science of the ghetto, how they had developed their concepts of “folk” and “space,” the developments in “racial science,” the scientific aspects of the death factories, and many of the matters discussed in Chapter 35, of this book, on “Nazi Scholarship.” Since the Wall came down in 1989, many other scholars have added to what Weinreich initially reported, but he set the scene, and his book is today rightly regarded as a classic.
    Siegfried Kracauer