Managing Editor Drew Griffin sits down with GWU Professor Samuel Goldman to discuss his piece in Modern Age on Finis Germania, Rolf Peter Seiferle, and the particular difficulty that the Holocaust poses for modern German Identity.
Drew Griffin is the managing editor of Providence.
Sam Goldman is associate professor of political science at George Washington University.
Kirkland An produced this episode.
Rough Transcript
Drew Griffin
Welcome to the ProvCast, the regular podcast of Providence, a journal of Christianity and American foreign policy. I’m managing editor, Drew Griffin. My guest today is Samuel Goldman. He is an associate professor of political science and director of the Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom at George Washington University. He is a frequent contributor to The American Conservative, The New Criterion, Wall Street Journal, Providence, and is the literary editor of the Modern Age. Professor Goldman, welcome.
Sam Goldman
Thank you for having me.
Drew Griffin
So, I wanted to have you on and talk about a piece that you recently had published in the spring 2019 edition of the Modern Age, talking about what you call the “German problem,” and we’ll go into a little bit of the specifics around that, but you are a frequent writer and a guest commentator on the rise of antisemitism in Europe, in the United States, the role of Israel in the modern world, and its dealing with its critics. You recently in 2018 wrote a book, God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America for University of Pennsylvania Press. So, talk a little bit if you can about just the current state of the instability and crisis that we see in Europe, and maybe even potentially in Germany the rise of antisemitism, the struggle to find and articulate national identities, and maybe elucidate maybe a little bit of the background into your piece and […] the German problem.
Sam Goldman
Well, I think the place to begin might be with the Second World War, or its immediate aftermath, which was a period in which it was widely believed that what used to be called the “national question” in Europe had finally been settled after half a century of warfare, the deaths of tens of millions of people, the destruction of large swaths of the European continent, including many of its great cities. Finally, Europe, or at least Western Europe, was composed of relatively homogeneous nation-states that lacked large national minorities speaking a different language or practicing a very distinctive religion, a problem that had plagued Europe since the French Revolution, if not before. For the next four or five decades, it seemed that that solution had been successful. When communism fell in 1989, it was hoped that European nations could finally overcome their history of rivalry and live together not only in peace, but under some degree of common institutions. But that hasn’t proved to be the case for two reasons, one internal to Europe and the other external. The internal reason is that the institutional design of the European Union and the expansion of its membership has made it virtually ungovernable. Institutions that were believed to lay the basis for a kind of cooperative federalism have come to feel very coercive and incompatible with traditions of national self-determination. And I think we see that in the resistance to every proposal for a European Constitution, which has been rejected by voters in various countries. The external challenge has been the growth of non-European immigration. This immigration did not begin after the fall of communism in 1989. In fact, it began a great deal earlier, almost immediately after the Second World War, when European countries like France and Germany began to import foreign labor to replace the mostly young men who had been killed or maimed in the war itself, and to work in factories and rebuild national industry. In addition to those flows of guest workers, as the European states began to wind up their overseas empires and as travel and bound obstacles to movement began to fall, these flows were increased exponentially. Finally, in the middle of this decade, with the Syrian crisis and the expulsion of millions of people, not only from Syria, but also from neighboring regions, that tension has come to seem unbearable. The decision of Germany’s governing coalition led by Angela Merkel to admit more than a million Syrian refugees really seemed to be a breaking point. Since then, there has been really a dramatic revival of again what was thought a settled question, the national question. That is to say, arguments about where borders should be drawn, how hard those borders should be, and, even more fundamentally, what it really means to be German or to be French or to be Italian. And it’s in response to that situation that I wrote this essay.
Drew Griffin
So much of the actions that Europe has taken collectively since World War Two have been reactionary, right? They’re reacting to, in a span of, you know, between 1917 and 1945, you had two massive continent-wide, worldwide conflagrations. It all began kind of there in Germany, or between Germany and its neighbors, and so in written reaction, they’re trying to knit together some sort of cohesive pan-European utopia where such things and such rivalries are no longer going to be the case. But it points to this reactionary element—this reflex, I would say—that we see, maybe even particularly, in Germany, and you talk a little bit about this in your piece, that there’s a unique German problem here. There’s a unique German taste to this kind of struggle that we see many of the European nations having with the European Union, both the internal and external you just mentioned. But there’s something unique about the German problem, so dig in a little bit to your piece now into the particularities of this, the German situation.
Sam Goldman
Right, so, compared to France, for example, these tensions seem to be particularly severe. France certainly has its own history of exclusive nationalism, of chauvinism, of imperialism, and so on. But, France also has a strong culture of assimilation, a sense of France as a universal nation with a mission to the whole human race that counterbalances some of these concerns about national identity; Germany really doesn’t in the same way. That’s not to say that there is no history of a German national mission. In fact, some of the earliest theorists of German nationalism made precisely this case, people like the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his famous addresses to the German nation. But, as it turned out, the most assertive version of German exceptionalism and the strongest claim on a world-historical role for the German nation was made by Hitler and the Nazis. The result of that was not only the murder of six million Jews, but three or four million others who should not be forgotten in this discussion, as well as the destruction of much of the continent. So, whereas members of some other European countries have been able to draw on different elements of their histories as they’ve tried to construct a more peaceful, cooperative, and open conception of what their national identity means, for Germans, the wall of history seems to be dropped. There, it’s much harder to reach back into the past to find examples or inspirations for the present. The essay to which I respond in my piece—I call an essay, it’s really a very short book, maybe a pamphlet would be a better term—is a meditation on that problem. So it is a posthumous publication by the historian and environmental theorist
Rolf Peter Sieferle, that appeared in 2017, the year after his suicide, and it’s a meditation on this burden of history, in particular, from the perspective of a writer who was born in the late 1940s, and therefore had no direct role in the Third Reich. What Sieferle is asking is, what does German history mean? Is it a curse, a burden, or even a cross—and I use that term advisedly, for reasons I think we’ll go on to discuss—that we have to bear for all time, or can we Germans forgive ourselves for what we have done, especially what we have done between 1933 and 1945, and move on to chart an independent course for ourselves as a nation?
Drew Griffin
So, if so much of Europe is reacting to World War Two in general, Germany is reacting specifically, like you said, to Nazism, but, I mean, almost the embodiment of that, the avatar for all of that, is the Holocaust, right? The Holocaust is the main priority, the main example, the historic embodiment of an event that is what, since the end of World War Two, Germany has been trying to eschew and trying to separate themselves from. It’s caused the way in which Germans and the way in which really the world and even here in the United States—which we’ll talk about maybe in a minute—deals with the Holocaust is fascinating, and is that the root of your essay and the root of this kind of controversy? Because Der Spiegel, the main kind of publication there in Germany, failed to include Sieferle’s book in their top ten bestsellers, even though it was a bestseller, even though it was a very popular book. Their failure to include in the top ten best list did not dampen its sales. If anything, just like always, if you say, well, don’t read this book, everyone’s going to go read this book. But they didn’t include it because he talks about the Holocaust and uses language that many people say he’s trying to deny the Holocaust, or he’s trying to, say, minimize it, perhaps. And it gets to the way in which Der Spiegel, the way in which I think the whole German nation, has been dealing with Sieferle’s book, is this little encapsulation of the problem that he’s trying to address in the book, right? It’s just a little test case. So, lay out some of the criticism, some of the responses to the criticism, and the way in which Sieferle is trying to address the particular burden that the Holocaust presents to modern Germany.
Sam Goldman
So, probably the most important of the offending passages that led Der Spiegel to blank the book on its bestseller list was one in which Sieferle speaks of what he calls the myth of the Holocaust, and this was taken in particular, I think, by people who hadn’t really read the book, as an expression of Holocaust denial. You know, we are familiar with Holocaust deniers like Fred Leuchter or David Irving who might speak of the myth of the Holocaust, meaning this is something that didn’t happen. That’s not at all what Sieferle means by myth, although I do think that he chose provocative language intentionally. What Sieferle means by myth is not a falsehood, but a truth that has been put beyond question or criticism. It’s an idea and event, perhaps, that becomes the focus of an almost religious reference. And [he] secretly goes on to argue that in Germany, Holocaust remembrance has become a kind of public cult, a kind of civil religion that is not really about getting to the bottom of the moral and historical problem, but is actually a form of self-congratulation, and that Germans have come to believe that because they participate in these rituals of remembrance, and they pay obeisance to this myth that therefore they can move on. And yet they can’t. The duality is that the myth of the Holocaust becomes a kind of anchor that infuses everything and the mood that Sieferle is capturing, which I think is one that other German intellectuals have explored in different ways, is one of being trapped by the past and sort of fixated on the National Socialist past, but also believing that the fixation in itself somehow justifies moving forward.
Drew Griffin
So, one of the parallels that you elucidate in your article that is fascinating is this parallel of almost the Holocaust as a religion, as a cult, that it takes on almost… And using the terminology “myth,” we’re really talking about almost a divine nature. It’s unapproachable; it’s unassailable. But it’s also, as Sieferle points out, it’s kind of you can’t expiate it; you can’t ever seem to get rid of it. If you can’t touch it or address it or question it or even really deal with the reality of it, it becomes something that is a millstone around the neck of the German people, and so much of what they have done in terms of education has been talking about saying never again, to talk about, you know, defining themselves about what they are not and what they are against, rather than really who they are. And there’s, I think, a tendency I see in secularism. If you remove any kind of divine source of truth, or any kind of extra-human source of truth, what you’re left with is just you’re defined by your own humanity. You’re defined by your own acts; you’re defined by your own horrors in the past, and there seems to be… There seems to be no hope; there seems to be no sense of redemption. But even I feel uncomfortable talking about this, right? I mean, I feel uncomfortable using the words redemption and Holocaust in the same sentence. And I feel like I can hear critics in the background, much maybe like he did of just people… If you even begin to talk about, somehow, moving on from the Holocaust, it makes people very uncomfortable. So, talk a little bit about what hope you see in the future for Germany, for anybody. I mean, it’s like, okay, if it is… it has reached this kind of mythic, kind of divine status, and he’s arguing that that has created cultural and identity problems for Germany, and in reaction to those cultural and identity problems, they have bent over backwards to let people in their country and to expunge any trace of Nazism out of the country. And yet, it hasn’t prevented genocide, it hasn’t prevented antisemitism, it hasn’t prevented a rise of the alt-right in their country. So, what future… How do Germans, how do Americans, how do we deal with the Holocaust? What’s the appropriate way if not to treat it as something that is kind of sacrosanct and horrible and worthy of, you know, veneration? What’s the middle ground between that and saying, ah, let’s just move on; it doesn’t really matter anymore?
Sam Goldman
Well, I wish I knew, and I think if I did, they might give me the Nobel Prize. This is precisely the existential problem that the Holocaust raises because, of course, there have been other incidents of massacre and genocide and destruction in the past, and no doubt there will be in the future. So, to say that the Holocaust is entirely unique seems to be a way of denying those similarities. At the same time, there really does seem to be something different about this set of events, partly because—and I think Sieferle is quite insightful on this—partly because it was harder to dismiss as the expression of backwardness or lack of civilization.
Drew Griffin
So he makes the… draws the analogy between the Soviet Union and their myriad of crimes, many of which would equal, if not exceed, what the Germans did in terms of loss of life and oppression [and] are almost treated—since it’s sort of this weird Asiatic, barbarous, backward, Russian kind of thing—that it’s somehow less important, it’s somehow maybe a little bit more explainable, but because the German crimes arose out of modernity and rose out of the Enlightenment and secularism that it’s… they’re more acute; they’re more guilty of it.
Sam Goldman
Yeah, or another way of putting it is that there really is a kind of double standard. Germans, and not only Germans, are willing to excuse or minimize the bad behavior of those who are not thought fully civilized. Germany didn’t have that excuse, and that made its crime seem particularly severe. The other element to which Sieferle alludes in other passages that were controversial is the specific focus on Jews whose story lies through Christianity at the heart of Western civilization. I think Sieferle points out with some justice that you can get away with killing Gypsies, or Ukrainians, or
Kulaks because nobody really cares. Maybe they and their descendants care, but they don’t seem to have a world-historical significance. But the Jews are the world-historical people par excellence. The idea of world history, as it was developed in Western culture by German philosophers like Hegel, revolves around the Jewish story. So, to attack Western civilization at its core further magnifies the crime beyond the body count.
Drew Griffin
So, let’s talk a little bit about how this translates over to America, because there are, you know… America deals with its own set of historical sins that I think in similar ways sometimes carry a significant amount of generational guilt that… There are many in society… Let’s say slavery is probably the most analogous kind of instance of something that happened in America’s past that is horrible, horrendous, and as much of our history has been defined against us moving away from that, and defining our culture by that “we are not that anymore,” and yet we struggle with it. Talk a little bit about maybe the role of guilt, the role of generational guilt in forming national identity, and how do you see… Cause we’re in our own kind of existential crisis in America right now. We’re trying to decide who we are. There’s some people that say, let’s go back to the past; the past was great. And then there are other people who say, how could you say that? The past was horrible. If you were an African American in the 1950s, you might think it was a horrible time. If you were White and you look at 1950s, you think it’s Leave it to Beaver, and it’s perfect. Can you talk maybe a little bit about maybe the role of generational guilt in forming national identity and maybe some of how what we’re seeing in Germany of how they contend with the Holocaust maybe translates here?
Sam Goldman
Well, I think we certainly have our own version of generational guilt. I noticed in the news just a few weeks ago that it was revealed that Mitch McConnell is a descendent of slaveholders, which probably isn’t very surprising to anyone, but was supposed to impose on him some special burden of guilt, even though he’s removed by many more generations than Sieferle or even younger Germans are from the crime itself. And in some of the responses I got after the publication of the piece, people said, well, you really should have talked about America because in slavery especially we have our own original sin to be forgiven. But I think that America is actually lucky in this respect, luckier than Germany, in that we still possess relatively healthy religious communities and institutions that are devoted to precisely these problems. You know, it’s not the only thing that religion—or anyway Judaism and Christianity—are about, but one of the things that they’re about is the problem of sin and guilt and redemption. And I think that actually until recently, it has been the influence of religion that has allowed us to come to terms with our past in a relatively successful way. And it’s, you know, it’s very easy to resort to clichés here, but it’s not an accident that many of the leaders of the Black Civil Rights Movement were ministers, or had deep roots in religious communities. They knew how to talk about sin and guilt in a way that did not result in a permanent stain, in a permanent burden. Or, at least, they could suggest that that was not a necessary outcome. In Germany, those traditions are almost entirely dead, and one of my criticisms of Sieferle is that when he turns to this religious language, specifically Christian language of forgiveness, I can’t help but wonder if it’s merely instrumental.
Drew Griffin
Right, it’s like a vestigial thought in his head of just—
Sam Goldman
Or, rather, I think he perceives that this is the only language in which one might deal with these problems in a morally satisfying way, but he can’t quite bring himself to take it altogether seriously. In this respect, he’s not alone. One of Sieferle’s self-chosen intellectual masters was a German writer named Ernst Jünger, who is actually the most decorated surviving soldier of the First World War. During the 1920s and early 1930s, [he] became a leading figure among the so-called conservative revolutionaries. These were right wing intellectuals who were not Nazis necessarily, and some of them, like Jünger, became opponents of the Nazis, but did encourage a kind of authoritarian, militaristic, national uprising. Then, during the war, Jünger was deployed in Paris where he served in the German occupation force, but as early as 1943 Jünger wrote a pamphlet called
Der Friede, The Peace, in which he suggested that the only hope for a restoration of Europe after what he saw, at that point, as the inevitable Allied victory was a kind of religious revival. And, in fact, the Allies liked this pamphlet so much that they printed copies and dropped them by airplane on German positions, and some of Jünger’s critics, including the legal theorist Carl Schmitt with whom he had sort of a “frenemy” relationship, thought that this was why Jünger came out quite well. After the war, he became a major figure in German literary and intellectual life. But there, too, just like Sieferle, there’s an instrumental quality that’s very hard to take seriously. So, when someone like Pope John Paul II expresses a desire for forgiveness, confesses his own guilt, not in a personal sense—he didn’t do anything wrong—but on behalf of his people and his co-religionists, one can take that seriously, whether or not everyone accepts precisely the terms in which he expressed that wish. With Sieferle, it’s much harder. So, whereas he articulates the problem in really, I think, a profound way, he remains trapped by it, and that may have been part of the deep pessimism and depression that characterized his work even before his suicide.
Drew Griffin
So do you see that tendency to use religious language in kind of an instrumental way without the trappings of the religion? We see that, I think, in the United States currently, and I think there is this… There’s a lot of language that the left—a lot of language that the secular environment—uses that’s very inherently moral language. And they’re seeking justice. But they have a difficult way of articulating what that justice looks like or how to achieve that justice and that it crosses into history, and actually it kind of crosses over into even the history of World War Two and the Holocaust when you look at people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Congresswoman from New York, and she’s… When they’re talking about the internment camps, immigrant internment camps on the border, they call them concentration camps, right? They’re using a certain language to evoke the horrors of that, and it kind of brings us back around to the use of the Holocaust and the appropriation of it. How do you… How do you assess that in light of the German problem? Or, how do you assess that in light of how we’re using the Holocaust—how we’re searching for justice—maybe without the means to achieve it, and religion?
Sam Goldman
Well, I think one lesson that was drawn from the Holocaust, including by some of the architects of the European Union, was that nation-states had to be abolished, or at least their role had to be made as small as possible. And I think that echoes through the rhetoric of people like AOC, whose description of these detention centers as concentration camps, although probably true in a literal sense, was also a way of evoking a very different and much darker history and trying to link the enterprise of border enforcement, which has been regarded as legitimate for many centuries, to extermination. And that is clearly not a connection that can be supported. So there, I think, the wrong lesson was drawn from the Holocaust. What is the right lesson? Again, I wish that I had the answer, and it may be ultimately the mythic quality of the Holocaust, that it does not bear any human response. That’s what the philosopher Robert Nozick thought that its ultimate significance was, that the Holocaust defied rational analysis. That means that we just have to live with it and continue as best we can. That will mean different things in different countries.
Drew Griffin
So, one of the reasons why Providence exists, you know, we are a journal of Christianity and American foreign policy, but we’re trying to equip the American mind to engage the real world by injecting into a certain sphere—the foreign policy sphere, the public policy sphere—religious language and redeem it in the sense that it’s not just a matter of aesthetic interest. There’s a reality there. But, as culture is increasingly secular, the problem that is besetting Germany right now—and that they become obsessed with these other identity markers, whether it’s past sins or past struggles or past historic kind of identities—as we increase and become increasingly secular here in the United States, do you see a potential future where we’re similarly kind of struggling with our identity in such a way that we become hamstrung by our own past that we’re unable to move into any kind of hopeful future of a positive identity of who we are as Americans because we are so embroiled with the misdeeds of our forbearer?
Sam Goldman
I think secularism makes it much more difficult and to—or secularization, not quite the same thing as secularism—and to return to something you said earlier, one of the striking features of social justice movements or the so-called “wokeness” as people say, usually in a dismissive way, is how they reproduce religious features and religious concepts and rhetoric but drain them of their religious significance. In particular, they drain them of the possibility of reconciliation or forgiveness. So, the journalist Matt Yglesias has spoken of “The Great Awokening,” which I think he meant as a joke, but it is actually a very helpful concept. We are engaged, possibly for the first time in American history, in a great moral struggle or a great moral conflict in which the resources of religion are almost absent. And that’s bad. It was believed for a long time that religion was primarily a source of conflict, and therefore the way to have harmony in public life was to avoid invoking religious concepts or using religious language. There are historical reasons to believe that, but what I think we’re now seeing is that a secular public sphere is no less contentious and maybe more.
Drew Griffin
Right, because there seems to be no mechanisms for forgiveness. There are no mechani—there’s no way to transcend what we’re dealing with now. It’s like all we have is the present. All we have is each other. If you eliminate God and the transcendent from the equation, then all you have is the here and now. And it seems to… It robs us of our, maybe, ability to interact with one another, but I think it robs us of a certain measure of hope. My guest today has been Sam Goldman, associate professor of political science and director of the Loeb Institute at George Washington University, also the author of God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America by Pennsylvania University Press. Professor Coleman, thank you.
Sam Goldman
Thank you.