Once I had started becoming critical of antisemitism, I discovered rotten spots in its flesh at every turn.
One of its loudest speechifiers was Dr. Paul Liman, first an editorial writer for the Dresdner Nachrichten, then for the Leipziger Nachrichten. My friend at the time, Wolf von Dallwitz, ascertained from the parish registers that it was only Liman’s father who had converted from Judaism to Christianity. When Liman was subsequently reproached for not being particularly well-qualified to champion racial antisemitism, he tried to lie his way out of it: “His father had supposedly told him he was of Italian extraction and therefore so dark and hairy.”
For years, Ahlwardt was the antisemites’ most celebrated speaker. In Neustettin, in the remotest corner of Eastern Pomerania, he had been elected [in 1892] to the Reichstag, beating out a Conservative. Along with his secretary, he had systematically called on farms, asking each farmer how many acres of land and how much livestock he owned. Then he turned to the secretary, who pulled out a gigantic notebook, and dictated to him: “Take this down! Gussow owns 30 acres, five cows, and four pigs; he ought to own: 60 acres, 12 cows, and ten pigs.” He had become famous for his books, which were entitled Judenflinten [Jewish Guns] and Eid eines Juden [Oath of a Jew]. The foundation of these books seemed a bit shaky to me and my friend Dallwitz. So Dallwitz, himself a glowing antisemite, went to him to look at the evidence. Ahlwardt came up with a stack of files but could make neither head nor tail of it. When Dallwitz pressed him more, Ahlwardt broke off the conversation with the words, “If I cannot prove something, I simply claim it.”
Among the antisemitic leaders, I got to know only a few really decent people, and those of flawless character were so uneducated in formal terms that outrage gripped me, young person that I was, when I had a chance to observe them up close. All of them were demagogues, some of them against their better judgment, others due to lack of judgment.
It was not so much the Jews but the antisemites who turned me away from antisemitism.
In 1903, when I encountered Liebermann von Sonnenberg again in the Reichstag, he used a speech to clobber me, his lost “crown prince.” I limited myself to a brief personal remark, quoting the lines:
“Those traveling to truth through error
Are the sages.
Those persisting in error
Are the fools.”
Since I gestured toward Liebermann while saying these last words, the speaker grabbed his bell to call me to order. But he sat down again, as he had second thoughts about whether he might actually call old Rückert* to order.
Because of my practical experience, I have thoroughly renounced antisemitism. Perhaps only those who have experienced this childhood disease themselves are wholly immune to it! The antisemitism of my first 30 years was largely based on the following: I hardly knew a single Jew. Why should I associate with the representatives of an inferior race? Especially given that these people were sub-par morally, though (unfortunately) above par intellectually, as a result of which one could be trampled quite easily when dealing with them. Did not the entire power of this alien nation, one so insignificant in quantitative terms, rest on this combination of cunning and moral innocuousness?
* The poet and professor Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866) – trans.
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