Getting Over Germanophobia

I know I’ve been on this topic for more than 40 years and have published screeds on it in both English and German. Unfortunately, neoconservatives are not likely to let go of this obsession; and I therefore go on expatiating on it. By now Germanophobia may be in the neocon DNA. Yes, I fully understand why the Nazi dictatorship in Germany would upset neoconservative publicists; and as someone whose family suffered under that regime, I can sympathize with their concern that something like the Third Reich should never return to Central Europe. 

But what this idée fixe has produced is a distorted or overgeneralized view of the German past that seems to have infected the American right, or at least that part of the right that enjoys a widespread media presence and social respectability. There also seems to be a special fixation among neocons and their dependents on the evils of Imperial Germany. Apparently Nazi tyranny was only a replay of the horrors of the German monarchy.

Having made a far from exhaustive collection of some of the expressions of anti-German rage syndrome coming from recognizably neoconservative sources over the last two decades, allow me to list some of them. (I avoid mentioning the misinformed by name lest I cause unnecessary offense.)

1. American populism was sidetracked by “philo-German” representatives like H.L. Mencken and Robert LaFollette, who recklessly opposed American entry into World War One to fight German military autocracy.
2. Mencken, by opposing American intervention in the two World Wars, exhibited his hatred of democracy and his Nietzschean fascist inclinations. This journalist’s particularly obstinate reaction to Wilson’s crusade for democracy is hard to justify considering that Imperial Germany had drawn up plans to invade the U.S. If the U.S. had not preemptively declared war on Germany in 1917, a German invasion of the U.S. might have been imminent.
3. The Germans were entirely responsible for the outbreak of the Great War, which was launched by German autocrats to achieve world domination. While countries like Britain should be encouraged to express national sentiments, we should prevent the Germans from doing so.
4. Although the present German government has suppressed free speech, this is entirely understandable given “Germany’s horrific history.”
5. The deeds of Hamas are attributable to German influence in launching pan-Arab movements in the late nineteenth century. Apparently, the Second German Empire was an early, energetic sponsor of Arab terrorist movements.

Allow me to note, in stating my position, that I have never claimed that the Germans and Austrians deserve no blame for the outbreak of the Great War. But like Christopher Clark, Niall Ferguson, Sean McMeekin, Rainer Schmidt, Thomas Nipperdey, and a host of other respectable historians, I have argued (I think quite reasonably) that the blame for the catastrophe that erupted in the summer of 1914 was fairly well distributed between the two sides.

Moreover, the U.S., which enjoyed an enormous industrial and demographic advantage over England and Germany, would have emerged the hegemonic power no matter which side had won in Europe. By the 1870s, the U.S. had become the world’s premier industrial power. During the First World War, it surpassed England as the world’s financial capital. Two books about ending the war that I highly recommend are Georges-Henri Soutou’s La Grande Illusion and Burton Yale Pines’s The Greatest Blunder. Both of these well-researched tomes show how the belligerents would have reached mutually acceptable peace terms by the end of 1917 if the U.S. had not entered the war. The American presence encouraged the French to demand much harsher peace terms and unnecessarily prolonged the war.

The assertion that the Germans planned to invade the U.S. is utter nonsense. What some Germanophobic neocons have discovered is that the German high command kept war contingency plans in case their country became embroiled with some other power. This was a common practice in both alliance camps before 1914. Further, there is no good reason to condemn opponents of America’s entry into the First World War as bad people who hated democracy. The U.S. should have stayed genuinely neutral in that war, which our government never really was. And the passionate Anglophile government of Woodrow Wilson should have worked as an honest peacemaker between the two sides. And, oh yes, the Lusitania, which a German U-boat sank in 1915, was falsely registered as a passenger ship: It was really a warship loaded with arms earmarked for the Allied side. 

More generally, the neoconservative charge that the Germans sabotaged American arms producers during the First World War, which should have been a reason to declare war on Germany, overlooks the indisputable fact that all American arms were going to Britain to be used against German soldiers: The arms manufacturers were overwhelmingly pro-British, and there was no way that American arms could have reached German customers because of the British blockade.

I’m also not sure how Imperial Germany created the Arab nationalist movement. In this matter I lean heavily toward the evidence provided by the Iraqi Sephardic historian Elie Kedourie that the Royal Institute of International Affairs and various English missionaries in the 19th century carried nationalist ideas to the Middle East. The Turkish nationalist movement identified with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk did reflect German ideas about military organization, but its model for a secular republic came from revolutionary France, not Berlin.

A reference to the “horrific history” of the Germans in explaining their present antifascist globalist managerial government seems woefully inadequate without noting the forced “reeducation” of Germany. This was a mental reconstruction process launched by the post–Second World War American military government which continued throughout its occupation. The occupying powers drove home the message that until the total defeat of the Third Reich Germany had pursued an aberrant nationalist course (Sonderweg); and nothing less than a total reeducation, assisted by the indigenous and American  antifascist left, would enable future generations of Germans to abjure their national identity and become “world citizens.” 

Several of my books deal extensively with what the Bavarian critic Caspar von Schrenk-Notzing, who has written a detailed study of this process, bluntly describes as “pure brainwashing.” Bourgeois civil liberties of the kind the Germans and their government now scorn were in no way prioritized in their forced reeducation. In 1951 the American occupiers reestablished the Frankfurt School at the University of Frankfurt to assist in the reconstructing of German minds. In 1949 the Germans were required to sign a secret agreement with the American occupying power that no German politician would be allowed to become chancellor without the American government’s approval.  This practice, we know, continued for decades, and this Kanzlerakte (Chancellor’s File) may still be in effect. Certainly, there is no indication that it has ended.

What we are seeing is by no means a continuation of Germany’s supposedly uninterruptedly evil history. It is, at least partly, the predictable consequence of arrogant imperialism. It was not enough to get rid of the Nazi government, which was necessary for the safety of the Western world. American globalist crusaders also sought to replace German identity with a therapeutically engineered form of antifascism. The anti-freedom politics and irresponsible immigration policies practiced by Germany’s leftist government cannot be fully contextualized without noting the American attempt to reeducate a conquered people.