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There is a famous saying in Talmud, attributed to the sage Tarfon: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to neglect it.” For Tarfon, “the work” was the study of Torah, that is, the unfinishable task of trying to understand God’s word, which remains the task for the orthodox.
I am, after all, writing this introduction to one of the last masterpieces of German Jewish culture, Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns. It is not your duty to finish this novel, but neither are you free to neglect the history it preserves with such artistry, agony, and passion.
The Oppermanns immerses us in these oppositions, and in our own contradictions, and reminds us, every time we leave the page to check our phones, that just reading a novel about the German 1930s—a novel about pervasive surveillance and militarized policing, and about how the fake-news threats of “migrants” and “terrorism” can be manipulated to curtail civil liberties and crush democratic norms—will never be enough to prevent any of that from ever happening again.
“There is nothing the rabble fears more than intelligence. If they understood what is truly terrifying, they would fear ignorance.” —Goethe
“It is the very strength of this party that it disregards reason and appeals to instinct.
It was the girl Ruth Oppermann, aged seventeen, who had been silent the whole evening and now suddenly burst out: “You all have such excellent theories, you explain everything so cleverly, you know everything. The others know nothing, they don’t care a rap if their theories are stupid and all contradictory. But they know one thing. They know exactly what they want. They act. They do something. I tell you, Uncle Jaques, and you, Uncle Martin, they are going to do the trick and you will get left.”
Once more Goethe was right: “There is nothing the rabble fears more than intelligence. If they understood what is truly terrifying, they would fear ignorance.”
Such will be the character, as I see it, of the future national state. A military power beyond conception, a judiciary power with severe, restrictive laws, and a school system to educate senseless brutes in the ecstasy of self-sacrifice;
“What do you imagine is going to happen? What are you afraid of? Do you believe they will forbid our customers to buy from us? Do you believe our shops will be closed down? Do you believe your capital will be confiscated? Because we are Jews?”
He stood up and marched with stiff and energetic strides around the room, breathing heavily through his fleshy nose. “Don’t try to frighten me with your old wives’ tales. There are no pogroms in Germany nowadays. That’s all over. It’s been over for more than a hundred years. For one hundred and fourteen years, to be precise. Do you believe that this whole nation of sixty-five million people has ceased to be a cultured people because it has conferred freedom of speech upon a few fools and scoundrels? I don’t believe it. I am against paying attention to a few fools and scoundrels. I am against
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I am as sure as that, that this Nationalist business will come to a bad end. But when the end will come and how, and whether the country will be ruined over it—” She shrugged her shoulders.
calmly. “I simply tell myself that it is easy to let the barbarians loose but difficult to get them back into their box. Barbarism has its charm. I am, myself, often quite strongly drawn to barbarism, I should be telling a lie if I did not admit it. The majority of other people probably have a still more definite leaning toward it.”
Don’t forget, Edgar, that our opponents have one tremendous advantage over us; their absolute lack of fairness.
That is the very reason why they are in power today. They have always employed such primitive methods that the rest of us simply did not believe them possible, for they would not have been possible in any other country. They have simply shot down most of the important leaders of the Left, one after the other.
“Certainly this arson has been managed clumsily and stupidly,” he said. “But everything they have done has been clumsy and stupid; nevertheless, so far, they haven’t made a single miscalculation. They have gambled on the stupidity of the masses with alarming accuracy.
They had ruthlessly broken their solemn pledges, trampled law underfoot, and substituted caprice, disorder, and brutality for civilization and order.
“They have smashed the standards of the civilized word to pieces.”
In Nationalist Germany there was no worse crime than the profession of reason, peace, and honorable sentiments.
Externally, the country appeared the same as usual; trams and cars continued to run; shops, restaurants and theaters, many of them under coercion, maintained their activities. The newspapers all had the same headlines and used the same type. But internally the country grew daily more barbarous, more poverty stricken, more corrupt, more demoralized. It reeked with lies and brutality; life was fast becoming nothing but a rotten sham.
Inconsistency and deceit were the underlying characteristics of all the actions of their leaders. Their speech was deceitful, and so was their silence. They got up with a lie, and they went to sleep with a lie. Their discipline was a lie, their code of laws a lie, their judgments a lie, their German a lie, their science a lie, their sense of justice and their faith were lies. Their nationalism, their socialism were lies, their ethical philosophy was a lie, and so was their love. Everything was a lie, only one thing about them was genuine: their hate!
