- Email: [email protected]
Historians and race
Historiographical
essays
nip Journal of Medieval History has adopted a variep of policies concemiq book reviews. The oripnal intention was to include not reviews, but publishers’ announcements. The idea was thus to gibe immediate, even advance, notice of important publications in thejield. Gradually there was a sh$I towardr the inclusion of brief comments, of&n, but not always, by the General Editor, on books abea& published which have latter@ appeared under the title Bookshelf. AU innovation has been the occasional identjlfcation of one or two books which were thought to have been of special importance, and which thergore have been B’ven mucll&ller attention. The diJcul& remains the pat& coveragethat is bound to resultjom reliance on those publishers who send copies of their publications to thejournal. Advantqe has therefore been taken of the major changes in the appearance of thejournal to implement a new poliq ?he emphasis henceforth will be on hisloriographical essays. A particular in&rest of this journal in bound to be changes in the study of medieval history, and it is to this tfleme tflat thejrst such essays, trial balloons, will be dedicated. However, space must and will be providedfor consideration of new advances in spec$c areas, such as ffteenth- centmy EnglLshpolitical and social histov, where there has been a large number of new publications. In the forthcomi& Spantill issue the theme will be, predictab& an aspect of the history of the Span& kingdoms. It is hoped to include survgs of other fields, and those interested in contributiq are cordially invited to write to the General Editor, indicatiq what area of research thg would be willing to address.
Historians and Race David Abulafia Recent work b A4ichael Burleigli Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich, Cambridge, 1988) has exposed the involvement of Gelman medieval historians in the racial mapping of eastern Europe at the time of the Second World War. i%s essay is an attempt to place his evidence in the context of ‘racial’ intqpretations of the Middle Ages duling tfre IVeimar, Nazi and post-war periods. It is now possible, thanks to the work of Michael Burlcigh, to see some of the ways historians, mainly medieval, reacted to the rise of the dictatorships in Europe, and to suggest that their role was not inconsiderable in helping to define the central
Journal
issues of Nazi and Fascist policy.’ The historians were able to provide apparently exact infotmation about population movements, political frontiers and the emergence of the state in central and eastern Europe, not to mention the economic function of the Jews, all of which enabled the Nazi regime to move beyond the vague emotional talk of Lebensraum and Germandom, and to formulate precise methods of dealing with the ethnic variety the German conquerors found in the east of Europe. This involvement by historians who wcrc not themselves all outspoken Nazis raises questions about the limits to which scholarship can go in serving government: It presents us with a picture of enthusiasts for their discipline who found the flattery of the highest in the land irresistible, and who slowly came to the conclusion that their first duty was indeed to place the desires of the state and the supposed interests of the Volk before the dispassionate exercise of their discipline. In the second place, we see a group of historians who readily accepted a current trend in historical thinking, based on racial theories, and were as keen to abandon it after the Second World War as they had once been to preach it. German conservatives of the mid-nineteenth century led by von Treitschke had already been preaching the civilising mission of the medieval Tcutons in Slavdom and the Baltic. Treitschke’s study of the Teutonic Knights, renamed T’ei!.whke’s Origins of Prussianism, was translated into English during the Second World War in London in order to provide proof to Engiish readers of the apparent opposite: The brutality and insatiable acquisitiveness of the Germans since time immemorial.* It thus appeared alongside a translation of Sienkiewicz’s diatribe against all things German, his novel ne Tdonic [email protected] But of course to von Treitschke the German ‘civilising mission’ was not supposed to mean the elevation of naturally subject peoples to the level of German institutional and economic attainment. The Estonians were lucky to bc rescued from the extreme disorder of their primeval forests and to be virtually enslaved by the Teutonic Knights. “A considerable part of their [the Knights’] greatness”, he said, “resulted from their utter lack of that kindliness which is wrongfully declared to be an essential virtue of the Germans”. More chilling, perhaps because it also suggests British complicity, is a passage describing how to treat the conquered: Thus did our people, upon this narrow stage, forcsrall those two main trends of colonial policy which were subsequently to guide Britain and Spain with equal success upon the vast cxpanscs of America. In the unhappy clash between races inspired by fierce mutual enmity, the blood-stained savagery of a quick war of annihilation is more humane, less revolting, than the specious clemency of sloth, which keeps the vanquished in the state of brute beasts while either hardening the hearts of the victors or reducing them to the dull brutality of those they subjugate.” I
Michael Burleigh, Gemtary hums Ew~ards. A SIU@ of Os~&rsrha~tg in IIIP third Reich (Cambridge: $ambridgc University Press, 1988, E30.00, ISBN 0521 35120 0, reissued in paperback, 1991). TrtilxW~ Or&s oJRussianism (Tile Teatonic hit&h&j, transl. Eden and Cedar Paul (London, 1942). 1 Treitschke’s
98
Origins
of lksianism,
55 -6.
Von Treitschke compares the ability of the Baltic peoples to receive German culture, by way of German speech, making relatively polite noises in favour of the Old Prussians - a people related to the Lithuanians and Latvians - but despising the Latvians themselves and still more the Estonians (a Finno-Ugrian people of ‘Asiatic’ origins). Even the Old Prussians, however, were incapable of forming a national state; it is interesting to note that the failure to form a state of their own was later taken as a sign of the inferiority, indeed parasitic nature, of the Sinti and Roma Gypsies and the Jews. There are such striking similarities between von Treitschke’s words and those used in the 1930s by historians seeking to justify German ambitions in the east, not to mention Nazi politicians, that the influence of this book and of his other writings can clearly not be underestimated. Active in political life, von Treitschke had started his career as a liberal but turned into an antisemitic conservative who used his considerable skills as a historian to offer prophecies about Germany’s destiny. The message for Poland (in his day itself a historical memory) was particularly clear; the Poles had always stood obstinately against the German mission by stealing German lands and conspiring with the other Slav peoples to undermine the Ordenstaat of the Teutonic Knights. A contemporary debate raged over whether medieval Germany had been right to engage in adventurism (as some saw it) in Italy, consequent upon the acquisition by Otto the Great of the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. Such concerns of the medieval emperor which were believed to have resulted in neglect of German interests and to have formed Germany’s identity as a fragmented land of petty principalities, had real immediacy at the time of the emergence of the Second Reich. It was possible to argue that the lure of the Mediterranean had distracted Germany from its true obligations and ultimate destiny on the Eastern Front. By 1900 it is fair to say that German medieval historical writing was increasingly dominated by other approaches. There had emerged a strong emphasis on the scientific skills required of a historian before he could begin to make sense of his material. The study of charters and other documents became the history of medieval Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. Within this exact framework, the writing of history was rarely politicised, and was rarely politicisable: The sober narration of all the facts left little room for speculation about the soul of the nation. The series ofJuhrbtic/w, yearbooks that chronicled the careers of the great medieval emperors, gave little hint as to the opinions ofthe contributors about contemporary or even medieval politics. They still read like telephone directories. Moreover, there were several respected and powerful Jewish medieval historians - Jaffe, Simonsfeld, Brcslau - who were instrumental in making medieval history w&enschafllicli. It was a German Jewish historian who threw down the gauntlet in 1927. Ernst Kantorowicz was a Prussian first, and a Jew second; in the early days of his career he was perhaps a litttrsleur first and a historian second. He also had definite 99
political views. In 19 18 he had helped to man the barricades in Berlin against Communist insurgents. He was devoted to the cause of restoring Germany’s greatness. Like some other Jews, it did not at first occur to him that this task would be reserved for those of Nordic descent. In the 1920s he was closely associated with the prominent romantic nationalist poet Stefan George, who set his circle of young followers a noble task. They were to write the biographies of those great heroes who had possessed a power to command or whose careers marked a decisive moment in &-man history. Julius Caesar fell into the former category, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen into the latter. Friedrich Gundolf set to work on Caesar, while Kantorowicz was let loose on the tigurc whose career might have been said to mark the divide between a Germany that played the major role in the politics of all Europe and a Germany whose internal fragmentation dcprivcd the country of any initiative in international affairs. For Gcorgc and Kantorowicz the message was clear. The so-called Sibylline Oracles of the Middle Ages had foretold the coming of a new leader who would rcdccm the emperor’s followers; around Frederick II and his grandfather Barbarossa thcrc developed a vigorous cschatology, promising the return of the Third Frcdcrick who would bring order to Germany. Sources anterior to Frcdcrick II (the Sibyllinc Oracles) and post&or to him (the cult of the new Frederick) wcrc used to define Frcdcrick II’s place in German history: ‘I’hc weary Lord of the Last Day has nought to say to thr lirry Lord of the Bqinning thr scdurrr, the deccivcr,the radiant,the merry, the cvcr-young, the strrn and mighty judge, the scholar, the sage who leads his armed warriors to the h4uses’dance and song, hr \vho slumbers not nor sleeps mountain would today stand empty wc’rc it not but ponders how hc can rcncw the ‘Empire’. for the son of Barbarossa’sson. The greatest Frederick is not yet rcdremrd, him his people knrw not and s&iced not. “Lives and lives not”, the Sibyl’s word is not for thr Emperor, but for the German pcopk4
’I’hc
Amid this bizarre amalgam of pagan and Christological images a message does poke through: The desire for renewal and for leadership. This is not simply nostalgia; the author addrcsscs those who propose lo rebuild Germany in the era of its final disgrace. Kantorowicz’s subject, a German Emperor who was born in Sicily and was also King of Sicily, posed interesting problems of racial definition. In fact a racial purist would have been reasonably, if not entirely happy with Frcdcrick, since his Sicilian blood came from the Norman conquerors and was thus almost as Nordic as one could wish (his great-grandmother was, admittedly, a mcrc Italian). And this issue was duly discussed in 1943 by the rabidly Nazi medievalist Erich
4 E. KantoroAcz, Frtdcrkk the Smrrd I 194. I250 (London, I93 I), 689; Dabid Abtthtftit, ‘Kantorowicz and Frederick II’, Hi&ryG2 (1977). 193 210, and SW also Nain Bourcau, Hk/oire.s d’tm Itirloticn, h%n/omwicz (Paris, 1991).
100
Maschke in his shameful little book Das Geschfaht der Stqfm (recently reissued5). But Kantorowicz neither accorded Frederick a clean Aryan birth certificate nor did he avoid the ‘racial’ question. Frederick was an ideal combination of two types, Nordic and Mediterranean. He possessed an intellectual vitality and a breadth of outlook which was derived from the Italian setting in which he was educated, and which led him to (for instance) a measured tolerance of and appreciation for Jews and Muslims. But he also embodied the German capacity for Empire; he was born to command, and the tragedy of his reign lay in the failure of the popes to leave him free to order Europe. It was he who launched the Teutonic Knights on the great mission to conquer Prussia, Latvia and Estonia; he too took the leadership of the crusade out of the hands of the pope and entered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, thereby making plain his role as the new universal David. Against this, we have Kantorowicz’s vicious portrayal of Frederick’s early opponent and rival for the imperial crown, Otto IV of the House of Welf. Otto’s main problem was quite simply that he had an English mother: Tall and strong, he was a misguided hero, “heroic to foolhardiness”, “he displays many an English trait: A frugality bordering on parsimony, .. . an amazing lack of education, a poverty of intellect”. We have to recall that this man sprang from the race that had in 1918 humiliated Germany. The English were to be despised rather than admired for their victories. In any case, the praise heaped on the Italians earned Kantorowicz the striking accolade of an Italian translation published after the Fascist race laws prohibited the publication of works by Jews. Presumably as a foreigner Kantorowicz was exempt: but it is abundantly clear that his work had long met with enthusiastic approval in ultra-nationalistic circles. Kantorowicz himself hoped for a time to bc counted as a good Jew, on the basis of his record fighting at the barricades against the leftists; it is said that the biography of Frederick was for a time Hitler’s bedside reading. What Kantorowicz was trying to do was to break away from what he saw as the stultifying close analysis typical of the Juhrbticher, and to make the sources live. But it was axiomatic in George’s circle that such a task involved the idealisation of past rulers. The function of biography was to set models and inculcate political awareness. Kantorowicz’s work never tried to hide that it was the product of a literary school with strong political leanings. The German academic establishment was understandably jealous of the book’s commercial and critical success. This secmcd to threaten the maintcnancc of rigidly severe standards of scholarship; after all, the book did not even have any footnotes! The assault on Ftidrich der 4 Published in Munich, 1943, reissued in Aalcn in 1970 by Scicntia Verlag, who should know better, considering how well they have done out OFreprinting the works of those who were victims or Nazi pcrsccution, on at least one occasion without trying IO find the survivor.
101
&eile was led by an older Prussian historian, Albert Brackmann.” He was easily able to show that Kantorowicz had confused propaganda with fact, for the book dealt with a period when the bitter struggle of pope and emperor generated some vicious diatribes from the papal curia and from the imperial court. Underneath Brackmann’s criticism of points of detail appeared to lie a deep resentment at the politicisation and scnsationalisation of the past, expressed in his scathing comment that “onp can write history ncithcr as a pupil of George nor as a Catholic nor as a Protestant nor as a Marxist, but only as an individual in search of truth”. As we shall we, Brackmann did not always practisc what he preached. The debate about Friedrichder
,I
On this debate, see G. Wolf; SrrrporAfun~i (Rrst cdn., Dannstadt,
pWid
Cited by Burlcigh, C;mtrq
102
turnsf!!huard, 46.
19%); Abulafia, ‘Kantor-
The recognition that ambition drove Brackmann, and that he could offer something in return for favours, was (as Burleigh shows) an acute enough analysis of the man. His delight in being able to influence government policy was probably more important to him in the late 1930s and early 194Os, than any sense of commitment to the racial and political theories of the Nazis. His power de&cd from his position as head of the Prussian Archives (from 1929) and briefly as a leading figure in the archives of the Reich (in 1935-6). He became interested from the start in the possibilities of using the archives as a base from which to cxplorc German claims to lost territories in the east. The central problem was that of relations with the Poles. Brackmann appears to have subsrribcd to the view that Poland had little real right to exist, so his dealings with Polish scholars wishing to work in his archives were, to say the least, delicate. The question was a political one even where the documents were hundreds of years old. Brackmann had no obvious qualms about banning a selection of potentially troublrsomc East European scholars from the archives; at the same time carefully vetted exchanges of visits with Polish archives were useful in gaining access to documents nccdcd by German scholars, rather than in the interests of real international scholarly cooperation. Under the leadership of Brackmann and the patronage of the Ministry of the Interior, there emerged a special department known under the anodyne name of Publikulionsslelle (PuSte), which had the task of collecting politically valuable information about the castcrn lands. Burleigh’s revelations about its work are nothing less than chilling. This information included notes on historians working in the Slavonic count&, whcthcr hostile or friendly to Germany, and the preparation for the press of historical works that might legitimise German claims in eastern Europe. It has to bc stressed that this institution began work before the Nazis gained power, and that in the carlicst days it even included a Russian Orthodox Christian of Jewish birth, Scrgci Jakobson (the brother of the famous Roman Jakobson), whose task was the apparently innocuous one of editing Prussian ambassadorial reports from cightccnt!r-century Warsaw. But the rise of the Nazis soon cxcludcd him from PuSte, since Jews were not permitted to hold civil scrvicc appointments. Marc controvrrsial was likely to be the work of Erich Maschkc, soon to bccomc prominent in race-theory circles, on A CulturalHistog of Gemandom h Poland.Maschkc was born in 1900 but was still in need of a settled position - a figure in that rcspcct fairly typical of those who received research grants from the PuStc. In his twenties hc had cnthuscd over the Teutonic Knights and had no doubts about their humanising mission. By 1937 Brackmann had every reason to congratulate himself. Burleigh reveals that the work of the PuStc attracted attention at the very top of the party ladder. Its works were set before Himmler and others, and apparently read with satisfaction. Justifying the work of one young Ost&scl~, Horst Ost, Brackmann wrote 103
to the German Foreign Office that it “would lead to irrefutable proof against Polish claims to these territories [West Prussia], of German civilisation in these lands.“8 Yet there were many possible ways to develop such an argument. Was the population of these lands significantly more ‘German’ than that of other parts of eastern Europe? Or was such territory part of the area needed for Lebensraum? Could the native population be Germanised, assuming it was partly Aryan already? These were questions that also passed through the perhaps more dangerous hands of the racial anthropologists, and yet Brackmann appears to have encouraged such collaboration across the pseudo-disciplines. An especially important example of the dilemma that the PuSte and its allies faced in classifying the peoples of eastern Europe is provided by the Slav nation known as the Sorbs, Lusatians or Wends, who live in the Spreewald south of Berlin. For them the changes in r+ime in what became the so-gennante German Democratic Republic have meant violent oscillations in their fortunes. Until 1990 lionised as a remnant of Slavdom within a Soviet-founded state, the Sorbs were the subject of anxious discussion around 1938. The continued expression of their culture, by, for instance, the publication ofworks in Sorbian, could not be tolerated. Yet the Nazis were aware that this would also generate quarrels with Slav neighbours: The government of Czechoslovakia was known to take a protective interest in the Sorbs, even though their language is actually closer to Polish than to Czech. By 1938 worries about Czech diplomats had entirely cvaporatcd, and PuSte was able to present a case to the government that “there arc no Sorbs in the German Reich, merely Wends or Wendish-speaking Germans”.” The change of terminology from ‘Sorb’ to ‘Wend’ was intended to indicate a negation of the Slavic view of Sorbian nationhood. The Wends were Germans who had no special national identity, and the fact that so many of them spoke a Slavonic language did not mean they were not Germans. But because of foreign interest in their fate, it was best to suppress all attempts to study their culture as something distinct from that of Germany as a whole. This was in accordance with a wider policy of trying to incorporate into the German Volk marginal groups of Slavs who wet-c believed to be racially acceptable. The Masurians, a Polish group, were argued to be Germans who spoke Polish. Even so, this did not exempt these groups from humiliating anthropological investigations, which became more enthusiastic after Poland was invaded in 1939. The task, in which PuStc and analogous organisations helped, was the identification of racially ‘useful’ elements in the Polish population. By 1941 it was being argued that the Sorbs had actually died out long ago. What was left was the Sorbian language, a mcrc fossil. An article in a journal of racial politics published by the NSDAP argued that: ”
‘I
104
Cited lay Burlcigh, Cited by Burlcigh,
Sorbiandom was not destroyed by war or exterminated, but slowly died out. It went under in a competition with people of Germanic origin because it did not have such an unshakeable will to exist or so great a strength for life as the people who set out to create Lebensraumand a homeland for themselves and their children in the East.“’
Brackmann himself contributed to the dcbatc over the future of eastern Europe by writing a booklet in 1939 entitled Crisis and Consh-uctioniu Easkm Europe, which Burleigh analysts. The message was that the destiny of Germany lay eastwards, and that Germany had a right to Lebeusraum in the East. His publisher was none other than the publishing house of the SS. It is fair to say that Brackmann was not himself responsible for all the quotations from Mein Kampf that littered the book; he seems to have deluded himself into thinking that he was writing a scholarly publication that would dcterminc certain aspects of future foreign policy rather than an outspoken propaganda tract in which Germany would use a still widely rcspcctcd scholar to state its case. Yet there is some consistency between the little book and tbc rest of Brackmann’s work on castcrn Europe, stretching back thirty years or so. His mcssagc was that: ‘L‘hr German prople were thr only hcarets of civilisation in the East, and as the main power in Europe, delindrd wcstcrn civilisation and brought it to the unciviliscd nations. For centuries Germany formrd an castcrn bulwark against lack of civilisation and protcctcd Europe from barbarism.
’’
Around the time of the invasion of Poland it was Brackmann’s proud boast that “WC have t-cached the position whereby WC will bc comprehensively consulted on the drawing of future boundaries”. The mcdicval historian had proved his worth. As war broke out, Brackmann’s team bccamc more and more enthusiastic about the part they wcrc playing in their nation’s destiny. Burleigh’s evidence is unequivocal. In fact WC find Brackmann stating in so many words that the point had been rcachcd when historical rcscarch must bc placed cntircly at the disposition of the state, in order to pursue the intcrcsts of the state. More decisive still was the view of his colleague in Ostj&scltung, Hcrmann Aubin, who wrote to Brackmann at the time of the invasion of Poland to say: \\‘r must make use or our cxpcricncc, which wc have dcvclopcd over many long years Scholarship camtot simply witit until it is rallcd upon, hut must make itself heard.”
of effort.
This fitted well with Aubin’s aggrcssivc approach to population problems in the East. Early on hc was involved in the drawing up of plans, at this stage still fairly schematic and unspecific, for the rcscttlcment of the Poles in the area of the Generalgouvernemenl and “the removal of the Jews from Res~ob”. What was
IO
II 12
Cited by Burlcigh, &trttig Cited by Burlcigh, &many Cited by Bttrlrigh, Gcmtary
WIS Eastward, turns Ez.dward, turns Eastward,
212. 151. 165.
important was that the criteria for determining the future of eastern Europe should be racial ones: Brackmann himself echoed this view with the statement that he “agreed completely with the view that ‘we need Raum but no Polish lice in the fur”‘; not untypically he guarded his rear by adding that there were people who thought otherwise. From this point onwards Brackmann was inescapably involved in planning the clearance ofJews, Sinti and Roma (Gypsies) and other ‘hybrids’ from areas of new German settlement.13 With the conquest of much of Poland the PuStc was joined in its increasingly unwholesome efforts by the Institute for the German East set up in Cracow in the buildings of the now-closed Jagiellonian University. Rcscarch expanded as the Reich expanded: New conquest brought a variety of Slavic and Finnic peoples into the range of the racial theorists and historians. An interesting episode was the discovery in Lithuania of a small group of Karaitc Jews who were clearly much at risk from the Germans; research - possibly in this case altruistic determined their origin to be Turkic and their distinctive form ofJudaism to !X unJewish, which saved their lives - a few even became collaborators. They were probably descendants of the Jewish Khazars of the Crimea who had come to the arca in the service of early Lithuanian dukes. Others wcrc less fortunate. Professor Peter-Heinz Seraphim claimed special cxpertisc on the history of eastern Europe’s Jews. His emotionless reports of massacres ofJews, and of the economic needs of the conquered territories in the light of the removal of ‘surplus mouths’ make revolting reading. His c-7llcagucs wcrc also actively promoting statistical surveys of population in eastern Europe that inflated the percentage of German heads by removing the Jews from the total population figures. This strcngthcncd arguments that the lands in question wcrc part of Gcrmandom. The reports were often, of course, confidential, but the mcssagc was spread as scholars such as Maschkc and Aubin travcllcd in Poland delivering lccturcs to German audiences in Cracow and elsewhere on Germany’s destiny and rights in the area. Even the cultural achievements of medieval and early modern Poland wcrc resolutely declared to be German: The artist Veit Stoss was a German; Copernicus was a German; the Jagiellonian University was the second German university to bc founded (the first being in Prague!), and so on. Everything suggests that the work conducted by these scholars facilitated the plarming of the Final Solution. By 1942 thcrc was plenty of exact information about the whereabouts of ‘undcsirablc’ elements in the population; in addition, the whole series of apparent justifications for a German prcscncc in the East was wclcomcd by Himmler and others in whose hands lay the fate of millions. Even if Brackmann, and at rarer points Aubin, cxprcssed reserve about racial theories,
i
9
they knew with whom they were working and accepted the results of those theories. It is an appalling record, not least in the case of the elderly Brackmann who had already had his chance to retire from the archives and from active Ostjirschutg. It is striking too that the end of the war did not necessarily lead to disgrace. Burleigh follows through the fortunes of the leaders of Ostjirschuq after 1945. Brackmann restored his academic standing rapidly, though he died in 1952 in East Germany. Erich Maschke disappeared from view into a Soviet prisonerof-war camp, and it took him some years to reemerge in West Germany primarily as a sober historian of the late medieval German town. Even then he did not abandon his old enthusiasms entirely, speaking in an autobiographical note, attached to a collection of his articles, of his early interest in the problems of German minorities in the East, but emphasising his affection for Kantorowicz’s view of Frederick II rather than dwelling on the Rassenkunde approach to the great emperor. He also became heavily involved in the writing of a history of Stalin’s mistreatment of the German war prisoners. This was a genuine enough subject, but - as will bc plain in a moment - it was seen as a way to counterbalance the mistreatment of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. More remarkable was the career of Hermann Aubin, who managed to ensure that he was presented as a scholar who had kept his distance from the Nazis, and yet who also managed to maintain his unsavouty research interests in a new and acceptable guise. The Cold War made talk of the frontier between the Free World and eastern barbarism respectable again, and he was able to introduce a new journal on Ost&rschungwith the words: ‘I’hciiwnticrs
of IWO distinct sphrrcs of civilisation
forms of rxistcncc collide against one another into two irreconcilable camps.’
’
run straight through
whose dilkrcnccs
Europe.
threaten
World
views and
IO tear the world
apart
And then he went on to speak of the abduction and extermination of twelve million ‘Germans’ from the East. Not surprisingly his selective memory earned him ridicule in the Soviet Zone of Germany; but the onslaughts of East German propaganda actually scrvcd to strcngthcn his position in the west as a wise prophet. Enough West Germans wcrc, after all, described as Fascist stooges in the 1950s for the label to do littlc real harm. In fact, one old Os~rsc/zut~ hand, Theodore Obcrlandcr, cvcn managed to sccurc a place in Adenauer’s cabinet. The unedifying spcctaclc of the honours hcapcd upon Aubin after the war serves as a rcmindcr that German historians wcrc keen to obliterate the recent past and this seems a strange activity for historians. In a sense, of course, they had swum with the tide, credulously accepting as valid racial theories that led to the death of millions of Jews, Poles and other peoples they discussed in their sober and apparently scientific reports. Similar questions have been raised about other
107
collaborators with the r&jme, notably the physicist Heisenberg and several musicians: There was a tendency to push on with the work and leave the moral dimension to others, in the spirit of Cain’s words “Am I my brother’s keeper?“. But the evidence does not suggest that the historians were only obeying orders. They helped to initiate terrible policies. The second conclusion has to be that these German medieval historians did leave a legacy as a result of their emhusiastic politicisation around 1939. Since 1945 the emphasis has once again shifted to precise studies of charters, chronicles and so on. The German medievalist often takes refuge in a sober recotu&g of the facts without speculation or much interpretation. This can reach absurd extremes, as when the present author’s lift of Frederick II was published in German with many of the interpretative passages simply excised, and sections that might cause ‘&YCC’ , snch8sthr +criptinn of the destruction of the Naples archive by the Wehrmuch~,omitted.15 Playing politics is too dangerous. But it may bc regretted that the pendulum has swung the whole way in the other direction. Documents themselves are not history; they are the products of the past and guides to its shape. The supreme irony is that Brackmann berated Kantorowicz in 1929 for failing to remember that he was in the first instance a diligent searcher after truth, and then within a dozen years was overtly writing history to please his Nazi masters. The supreme consolation is perhaps that his career, and that of Hermann Aubin, Erich Maschke und so we&r, could not bc explained away quite so easily as thcsc historians hoped. Full tribute K:‘ust be paid to those such as Dr. Burleigh who have exposed their dealings; his study of Oslforschutg is obligatory reading for all historians of medieval Europe. Such latter-day historians who are not in thrall to them have rightly uncovered their role in awful events, not for the sake of scandal, nor to expose hypocrisy, but bccausc their original assumptions about the importance of their work in the history of the world were proved most tragically to be true, at the cost of about fifty million lives, including six million Jews.
Ii
David Abulafia, ffcrmha .gc.isr/wn h
changes (including
108
a drastic altrration
hihtrtn. Frirhirh II. WI IIoh~t~~~~fi~t (Berlin,
ol’thc orginitl
I~nglish title) wrc
madr without
I99I);tltr
consultation.
essays
nip Journal of Medieval History has adopted a variep of policies concemiq book reviews. The oripnal intention was to include not reviews, but publishers’ announcements. The idea was thus to gibe immediate, even advance, notice of important publications in thejield. Gradually there was a sh$I towardr the inclusion of brief comments, of&n, but not always, by the General Editor, on books abea& published which have latter@ appeared under the title Bookshelf. AU innovation has been the occasional identjlfcation of one or two books which were thought to have been of special importance, and which thergore have been B’ven mucll&ller attention. The diJcul& remains the pat& coveragethat is bound to resultjom reliance on those publishers who send copies of their publications to thejournal. Advantqe has therefore been taken of the major changes in the appearance of thejournal to implement a new poliq ?he emphasis henceforth will be on hisloriographical essays. A particular in&rest of this journal in bound to be changes in the study of medieval history, and it is to this tfleme tflat thejrst such essays, trial balloons, will be dedicated. However, space must and will be providedfor consideration of new advances in spec$c areas, such as ffteenth- centmy EnglLshpolitical and social histov, where there has been a large number of new publications. In the forthcomi& Spantill issue the theme will be, predictab& an aspect of the history of the Span& kingdoms. It is hoped to include survgs of other fields, and those interested in contributiq are cordially invited to write to the General Editor, indicatiq what area of research thg would be willing to address.
Historians and Race David Abulafia Recent work b A4ichael Burleigli Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich, Cambridge, 1988) has exposed the involvement of Gelman medieval historians in the racial mapping of eastern Europe at the time of the Second World War. i%s essay is an attempt to place his evidence in the context of ‘racial’ intqpretations of the Middle Ages duling tfre IVeimar, Nazi and post-war periods. It is now possible, thanks to the work of Michael Burlcigh, to see some of the ways historians, mainly medieval, reacted to the rise of the dictatorships in Europe, and to suggest that their role was not inconsiderable in helping to define the central
Journal
issues of Nazi and Fascist policy.’ The historians were able to provide apparently exact infotmation about population movements, political frontiers and the emergence of the state in central and eastern Europe, not to mention the economic function of the Jews, all of which enabled the Nazi regime to move beyond the vague emotional talk of Lebensraum and Germandom, and to formulate precise methods of dealing with the ethnic variety the German conquerors found in the east of Europe. This involvement by historians who wcrc not themselves all outspoken Nazis raises questions about the limits to which scholarship can go in serving government: It presents us with a picture of enthusiasts for their discipline who found the flattery of the highest in the land irresistible, and who slowly came to the conclusion that their first duty was indeed to place the desires of the state and the supposed interests of the Volk before the dispassionate exercise of their discipline. In the second place, we see a group of historians who readily accepted a current trend in historical thinking, based on racial theories, and were as keen to abandon it after the Second World War as they had once been to preach it. German conservatives of the mid-nineteenth century led by von Treitschke had already been preaching the civilising mission of the medieval Tcutons in Slavdom and the Baltic. Treitschke’s study of the Teutonic Knights, renamed T’ei!.whke’s Origins of Prussianism, was translated into English during the Second World War in London in order to provide proof to Engiish readers of the apparent opposite: The brutality and insatiable acquisitiveness of the Germans since time immemorial.* It thus appeared alongside a translation of Sienkiewicz’s diatribe against all things German, his novel ne Tdonic [email protected] But of course to von Treitschke the German ‘civilising mission’ was not supposed to mean the elevation of naturally subject peoples to the level of German institutional and economic attainment. The Estonians were lucky to bc rescued from the extreme disorder of their primeval forests and to be virtually enslaved by the Teutonic Knights. “A considerable part of their [the Knights’] greatness”, he said, “resulted from their utter lack of that kindliness which is wrongfully declared to be an essential virtue of the Germans”. More chilling, perhaps because it also suggests British complicity, is a passage describing how to treat the conquered: Thus did our people, upon this narrow stage, forcsrall those two main trends of colonial policy which were subsequently to guide Britain and Spain with equal success upon the vast cxpanscs of America. In the unhappy clash between races inspired by fierce mutual enmity, the blood-stained savagery of a quick war of annihilation is more humane, less revolting, than the specious clemency of sloth, which keeps the vanquished in the state of brute beasts while either hardening the hearts of the victors or reducing them to the dull brutality of those they subjugate.” I
Michael Burleigh, Gemtary hums Ew~ards. A SIU@ of Os~&rsrha~tg in IIIP third Reich (Cambridge: $ambridgc University Press, 1988, E30.00, ISBN 0521 35120 0, reissued in paperback, 1991). TrtilxW~ Or&s oJRussianism (Tile Teatonic hit&h&j, transl. Eden and Cedar Paul (London, 1942). 1 Treitschke’s
98
Origins
of lksianism,
55 -6.
Von Treitschke compares the ability of the Baltic peoples to receive German culture, by way of German speech, making relatively polite noises in favour of the Old Prussians - a people related to the Lithuanians and Latvians - but despising the Latvians themselves and still more the Estonians (a Finno-Ugrian people of ‘Asiatic’ origins). Even the Old Prussians, however, were incapable of forming a national state; it is interesting to note that the failure to form a state of their own was later taken as a sign of the inferiority, indeed parasitic nature, of the Sinti and Roma Gypsies and the Jews. There are such striking similarities between von Treitschke’s words and those used in the 1930s by historians seeking to justify German ambitions in the east, not to mention Nazi politicians, that the influence of this book and of his other writings can clearly not be underestimated. Active in political life, von Treitschke had started his career as a liberal but turned into an antisemitic conservative who used his considerable skills as a historian to offer prophecies about Germany’s destiny. The message for Poland (in his day itself a historical memory) was particularly clear; the Poles had always stood obstinately against the German mission by stealing German lands and conspiring with the other Slav peoples to undermine the Ordenstaat of the Teutonic Knights. A contemporary debate raged over whether medieval Germany had been right to engage in adventurism (as some saw it) in Italy, consequent upon the acquisition by Otto the Great of the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. Such concerns of the medieval emperor which were believed to have resulted in neglect of German interests and to have formed Germany’s identity as a fragmented land of petty principalities, had real immediacy at the time of the emergence of the Second Reich. It was possible to argue that the lure of the Mediterranean had distracted Germany from its true obligations and ultimate destiny on the Eastern Front. By 1900 it is fair to say that German medieval historical writing was increasingly dominated by other approaches. There had emerged a strong emphasis on the scientific skills required of a historian before he could begin to make sense of his material. The study of charters and other documents became the history of medieval Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. Within this exact framework, the writing of history was rarely politicised, and was rarely politicisable: The sober narration of all the facts left little room for speculation about the soul of the nation. The series ofJuhrbtic/w, yearbooks that chronicled the careers of the great medieval emperors, gave little hint as to the opinions ofthe contributors about contemporary or even medieval politics. They still read like telephone directories. Moreover, there were several respected and powerful Jewish medieval historians - Jaffe, Simonsfeld, Brcslau - who were instrumental in making medieval history w&enschafllicli. It was a German Jewish historian who threw down the gauntlet in 1927. Ernst Kantorowicz was a Prussian first, and a Jew second; in the early days of his career he was perhaps a litttrsleur first and a historian second. He also had definite 99
political views. In 19 18 he had helped to man the barricades in Berlin against Communist insurgents. He was devoted to the cause of restoring Germany’s greatness. Like some other Jews, it did not at first occur to him that this task would be reserved for those of Nordic descent. In the 1920s he was closely associated with the prominent romantic nationalist poet Stefan George, who set his circle of young followers a noble task. They were to write the biographies of those great heroes who had possessed a power to command or whose careers marked a decisive moment in &-man history. Julius Caesar fell into the former category, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen into the latter. Friedrich Gundolf set to work on Caesar, while Kantorowicz was let loose on the tigurc whose career might have been said to mark the divide between a Germany that played the major role in the politics of all Europe and a Germany whose internal fragmentation dcprivcd the country of any initiative in international affairs. For Gcorgc and Kantorowicz the message was clear. The so-called Sibylline Oracles of the Middle Ages had foretold the coming of a new leader who would rcdccm the emperor’s followers; around Frederick II and his grandfather Barbarossa thcrc developed a vigorous cschatology, promising the return of the Third Frcdcrick who would bring order to Germany. Sources anterior to Frcdcrick II (the Sibyllinc Oracles) and post&or to him (the cult of the new Frederick) wcrc used to define Frcdcrick II’s place in German history: ‘I’hc weary Lord of the Last Day has nought to say to thr lirry Lord of the Bqinning thr scdurrr, the deccivcr,the radiant,the merry, the cvcr-young, the strrn and mighty judge, the scholar, the sage who leads his armed warriors to the h4uses’dance and song, hr \vho slumbers not nor sleeps mountain would today stand empty wc’rc it not but ponders how hc can rcncw the ‘Empire’. for the son of Barbarossa’sson. The greatest Frederick is not yet rcdremrd, him his people knrw not and s&iced not. “Lives and lives not”, the Sibyl’s word is not for thr Emperor, but for the German pcopk4
’I’hc
Amid this bizarre amalgam of pagan and Christological images a message does poke through: The desire for renewal and for leadership. This is not simply nostalgia; the author addrcsscs those who propose lo rebuild Germany in the era of its final disgrace. Kantorowicz’s subject, a German Emperor who was born in Sicily and was also King of Sicily, posed interesting problems of racial definition. In fact a racial purist would have been reasonably, if not entirely happy with Frcdcrick, since his Sicilian blood came from the Norman conquerors and was thus almost as Nordic as one could wish (his great-grandmother was, admittedly, a mcrc Italian). And this issue was duly discussed in 1943 by the rabidly Nazi medievalist Erich
4 E. KantoroAcz, Frtdcrkk the Smrrd I 194. I250 (London, I93 I), 689; Dabid Abtthtftit, ‘Kantorowicz and Frederick II’, Hi&ryG2 (1977). 193 210, and SW also Nain Bourcau, Hk/oire.s d’tm Itirloticn, h%n/omwicz (Paris, 1991).
100
Maschke in his shameful little book Das Geschfaht der Stqfm (recently reissued5). But Kantorowicz neither accorded Frederick a clean Aryan birth certificate nor did he avoid the ‘racial’ question. Frederick was an ideal combination of two types, Nordic and Mediterranean. He possessed an intellectual vitality and a breadth of outlook which was derived from the Italian setting in which he was educated, and which led him to (for instance) a measured tolerance of and appreciation for Jews and Muslims. But he also embodied the German capacity for Empire; he was born to command, and the tragedy of his reign lay in the failure of the popes to leave him free to order Europe. It was he who launched the Teutonic Knights on the great mission to conquer Prussia, Latvia and Estonia; he too took the leadership of the crusade out of the hands of the pope and entered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, thereby making plain his role as the new universal David. Against this, we have Kantorowicz’s vicious portrayal of Frederick’s early opponent and rival for the imperial crown, Otto IV of the House of Welf. Otto’s main problem was quite simply that he had an English mother: Tall and strong, he was a misguided hero, “heroic to foolhardiness”, “he displays many an English trait: A frugality bordering on parsimony, .. . an amazing lack of education, a poverty of intellect”. We have to recall that this man sprang from the race that had in 1918 humiliated Germany. The English were to be despised rather than admired for their victories. In any case, the praise heaped on the Italians earned Kantorowicz the striking accolade of an Italian translation published after the Fascist race laws prohibited the publication of works by Jews. Presumably as a foreigner Kantorowicz was exempt: but it is abundantly clear that his work had long met with enthusiastic approval in ultra-nationalistic circles. Kantorowicz himself hoped for a time to bc counted as a good Jew, on the basis of his record fighting at the barricades against the leftists; it is said that the biography of Frederick was for a time Hitler’s bedside reading. What Kantorowicz was trying to do was to break away from what he saw as the stultifying close analysis typical of the Juhrbticher, and to make the sources live. But it was axiomatic in George’s circle that such a task involved the idealisation of past rulers. The function of biography was to set models and inculcate political awareness. Kantorowicz’s work never tried to hide that it was the product of a literary school with strong political leanings. The German academic establishment was understandably jealous of the book’s commercial and critical success. This secmcd to threaten the maintcnancc of rigidly severe standards of scholarship; after all, the book did not even have any footnotes! The assault on Ftidrich der 4 Published in Munich, 1943, reissued in Aalcn in 1970 by Scicntia Verlag, who should know better, considering how well they have done out OFreprinting the works of those who were victims or Nazi pcrsccution, on at least one occasion without trying IO find the survivor.
101
&eile was led by an older Prussian historian, Albert Brackmann.” He was easily able to show that Kantorowicz had confused propaganda with fact, for the book dealt with a period when the bitter struggle of pope and emperor generated some vicious diatribes from the papal curia and from the imperial court. Underneath Brackmann’s criticism of points of detail appeared to lie a deep resentment at the politicisation and scnsationalisation of the past, expressed in his scathing comment that “onp can write history ncithcr as a pupil of George nor as a Catholic nor as a Protestant nor as a Marxist, but only as an individual in search of truth”. As we shall we, Brackmann did not always practisc what he preached. The debate about Friedrichder
,I
On this debate, see G. Wolf; SrrrporAfun~i (Rrst cdn., Dannstadt,
pWid
Cited by Burlcigh, C;mtrq
102
turnsf!!huard, 46.
19%); Abulafia, ‘Kantor-
The recognition that ambition drove Brackmann, and that he could offer something in return for favours, was (as Burleigh shows) an acute enough analysis of the man. His delight in being able to influence government policy was probably more important to him in the late 1930s and early 194Os, than any sense of commitment to the racial and political theories of the Nazis. His power de&cd from his position as head of the Prussian Archives (from 1929) and briefly as a leading figure in the archives of the Reich (in 1935-6). He became interested from the start in the possibilities of using the archives as a base from which to cxplorc German claims to lost territories in the east. The central problem was that of relations with the Poles. Brackmann appears to have subsrribcd to the view that Poland had little real right to exist, so his dealings with Polish scholars wishing to work in his archives were, to say the least, delicate. The question was a political one even where the documents were hundreds of years old. Brackmann had no obvious qualms about banning a selection of potentially troublrsomc East European scholars from the archives; at the same time carefully vetted exchanges of visits with Polish archives were useful in gaining access to documents nccdcd by German scholars, rather than in the interests of real international scholarly cooperation. Under the leadership of Brackmann and the patronage of the Ministry of the Interior, there emerged a special department known under the anodyne name of Publikulionsslelle (PuSte), which had the task of collecting politically valuable information about the castcrn lands. Burleigh’s revelations about its work are nothing less than chilling. This information included notes on historians working in the Slavonic count&, whcthcr hostile or friendly to Germany, and the preparation for the press of historical works that might legitimise German claims in eastern Europe. It has to bc stressed that this institution began work before the Nazis gained power, and that in the carlicst days it even included a Russian Orthodox Christian of Jewish birth, Scrgci Jakobson (the brother of the famous Roman Jakobson), whose task was the apparently innocuous one of editing Prussian ambassadorial reports from cightccnt!r-century Warsaw. But the rise of the Nazis soon cxcludcd him from PuSte, since Jews were not permitted to hold civil scrvicc appointments. Marc controvrrsial was likely to be the work of Erich Maschkc, soon to bccomc prominent in race-theory circles, on A CulturalHistog of Gemandom h Poland.Maschkc was born in 1900 but was still in need of a settled position - a figure in that rcspcct fairly typical of those who received research grants from the PuStc. In his twenties hc had cnthuscd over the Teutonic Knights and had no doubts about their humanising mission. By 1937 Brackmann had every reason to congratulate himself. Burleigh reveals that the work of the PuStc attracted attention at the very top of the party ladder. Its works were set before Himmler and others, and apparently read with satisfaction. Justifying the work of one young Ost&scl~, Horst Ost, Brackmann wrote 103
to the German Foreign Office that it “would lead to irrefutable proof against Polish claims to these territories [West Prussia], of German civilisation in these lands.“8 Yet there were many possible ways to develop such an argument. Was the population of these lands significantly more ‘German’ than that of other parts of eastern Europe? Or was such territory part of the area needed for Lebensraum? Could the native population be Germanised, assuming it was partly Aryan already? These were questions that also passed through the perhaps more dangerous hands of the racial anthropologists, and yet Brackmann appears to have encouraged such collaboration across the pseudo-disciplines. An especially important example of the dilemma that the PuSte and its allies faced in classifying the peoples of eastern Europe is provided by the Slav nation known as the Sorbs, Lusatians or Wends, who live in the Spreewald south of Berlin. For them the changes in r+ime in what became the so-gennante German Democratic Republic have meant violent oscillations in their fortunes. Until 1990 lionised as a remnant of Slavdom within a Soviet-founded state, the Sorbs were the subject of anxious discussion around 1938. The continued expression of their culture, by, for instance, the publication ofworks in Sorbian, could not be tolerated. Yet the Nazis were aware that this would also generate quarrels with Slav neighbours: The government of Czechoslovakia was known to take a protective interest in the Sorbs, even though their language is actually closer to Polish than to Czech. By 1938 worries about Czech diplomats had entirely cvaporatcd, and PuSte was able to present a case to the government that “there arc no Sorbs in the German Reich, merely Wends or Wendish-speaking Germans”.” The change of terminology from ‘Sorb’ to ‘Wend’ was intended to indicate a negation of the Slavic view of Sorbian nationhood. The Wends were Germans who had no special national identity, and the fact that so many of them spoke a Slavonic language did not mean they were not Germans. But because of foreign interest in their fate, it was best to suppress all attempts to study their culture as something distinct from that of Germany as a whole. This was in accordance with a wider policy of trying to incorporate into the German Volk marginal groups of Slavs who wet-c believed to be racially acceptable. The Masurians, a Polish group, were argued to be Germans who spoke Polish. Even so, this did not exempt these groups from humiliating anthropological investigations, which became more enthusiastic after Poland was invaded in 1939. The task, in which PuStc and analogous organisations helped, was the identification of racially ‘useful’ elements in the Polish population. By 1941 it was being argued that the Sorbs had actually died out long ago. What was left was the Sorbian language, a mcrc fossil. An article in a journal of racial politics published by the NSDAP argued that: ”
‘I
104
Cited lay Burlcigh, Cited by Burlcigh,
Sorbiandom was not destroyed by war or exterminated, but slowly died out. It went under in a competition with people of Germanic origin because it did not have such an unshakeable will to exist or so great a strength for life as the people who set out to create Lebensraumand a homeland for themselves and their children in the East.“’
Brackmann himself contributed to the dcbatc over the future of eastern Europe by writing a booklet in 1939 entitled Crisis and Consh-uctioniu Easkm Europe, which Burleigh analysts. The message was that the destiny of Germany lay eastwards, and that Germany had a right to Lebeusraum in the East. His publisher was none other than the publishing house of the SS. It is fair to say that Brackmann was not himself responsible for all the quotations from Mein Kampf that littered the book; he seems to have deluded himself into thinking that he was writing a scholarly publication that would dcterminc certain aspects of future foreign policy rather than an outspoken propaganda tract in which Germany would use a still widely rcspcctcd scholar to state its case. Yet there is some consistency between the little book and tbc rest of Brackmann’s work on castcrn Europe, stretching back thirty years or so. His mcssagc was that: ‘L‘hr German prople were thr only hcarets of civilisation in the East, and as the main power in Europe, delindrd wcstcrn civilisation and brought it to the unciviliscd nations. For centuries Germany formrd an castcrn bulwark against lack of civilisation and protcctcd Europe from barbarism.
’’
Around the time of the invasion of Poland it was Brackmann’s proud boast that “WC have t-cached the position whereby WC will bc comprehensively consulted on the drawing of future boundaries”. The mcdicval historian had proved his worth. As war broke out, Brackmann’s team bccamc more and more enthusiastic about the part they wcrc playing in their nation’s destiny. Burleigh’s evidence is unequivocal. In fact WC find Brackmann stating in so many words that the point had been rcachcd when historical rcscarch must bc placed cntircly at the disposition of the state, in order to pursue the intcrcsts of the state. More decisive still was the view of his colleague in Ostj&scltung, Hcrmann Aubin, who wrote to Brackmann at the time of the invasion of Poland to say: \\‘r must make use or our cxpcricncc, which wc have dcvclopcd over many long years Scholarship camtot simply witit until it is rallcd upon, hut must make itself heard.”
of effort.
This fitted well with Aubin’s aggrcssivc approach to population problems in the East. Early on hc was involved in the drawing up of plans, at this stage still fairly schematic and unspecific, for the rcscttlcment of the Poles in the area of the Generalgouvernemenl and “the removal of the Jews from Res~ob”. What was
IO
II 12
Cited by Burlcigh, &trttig Cited by Burlcigh, &many Cited by Bttrlrigh, Gcmtary
WIS Eastward, turns Ez.dward, turns Eastward,
212. 151. 165.
important was that the criteria for determining the future of eastern Europe should be racial ones: Brackmann himself echoed this view with the statement that he “agreed completely with the view that ‘we need Raum but no Polish lice in the fur”‘; not untypically he guarded his rear by adding that there were people who thought otherwise. From this point onwards Brackmann was inescapably involved in planning the clearance ofJews, Sinti and Roma (Gypsies) and other ‘hybrids’ from areas of new German settlement.13 With the conquest of much of Poland the PuStc was joined in its increasingly unwholesome efforts by the Institute for the German East set up in Cracow in the buildings of the now-closed Jagiellonian University. Rcscarch expanded as the Reich expanded: New conquest brought a variety of Slavic and Finnic peoples into the range of the racial theorists and historians. An interesting episode was the discovery in Lithuania of a small group of Karaitc Jews who were clearly much at risk from the Germans; research - possibly in this case altruistic determined their origin to be Turkic and their distinctive form ofJudaism to !X unJewish, which saved their lives - a few even became collaborators. They were probably descendants of the Jewish Khazars of the Crimea who had come to the arca in the service of early Lithuanian dukes. Others wcrc less fortunate. Professor Peter-Heinz Seraphim claimed special cxpertisc on the history of eastern Europe’s Jews. His emotionless reports of massacres ofJews, and of the economic needs of the conquered territories in the light of the removal of ‘surplus mouths’ make revolting reading. His c-7llcagucs wcrc also actively promoting statistical surveys of population in eastern Europe that inflated the percentage of German heads by removing the Jews from the total population figures. This strcngthcncd arguments that the lands in question wcrc part of Gcrmandom. The reports were often, of course, confidential, but the mcssagc was spread as scholars such as Maschkc and Aubin travcllcd in Poland delivering lccturcs to German audiences in Cracow and elsewhere on Germany’s destiny and rights in the area. Even the cultural achievements of medieval and early modern Poland wcrc resolutely declared to be German: The artist Veit Stoss was a German; Copernicus was a German; the Jagiellonian University was the second German university to bc founded (the first being in Prague!), and so on. Everything suggests that the work conducted by these scholars facilitated the plarming of the Final Solution. By 1942 thcrc was plenty of exact information about the whereabouts of ‘undcsirablc’ elements in the population; in addition, the whole series of apparent justifications for a German prcscncc in the East was wclcomcd by Himmler and others in whose hands lay the fate of millions. Even if Brackmann, and at rarer points Aubin, cxprcssed reserve about racial theories,
i
9
they knew with whom they were working and accepted the results of those theories. It is an appalling record, not least in the case of the elderly Brackmann who had already had his chance to retire from the archives and from active Ostjirschutg. It is striking too that the end of the war did not necessarily lead to disgrace. Burleigh follows through the fortunes of the leaders of Ostjirschuq after 1945. Brackmann restored his academic standing rapidly, though he died in 1952 in East Germany. Erich Maschke disappeared from view into a Soviet prisonerof-war camp, and it took him some years to reemerge in West Germany primarily as a sober historian of the late medieval German town. Even then he did not abandon his old enthusiasms entirely, speaking in an autobiographical note, attached to a collection of his articles, of his early interest in the problems of German minorities in the East, but emphasising his affection for Kantorowicz’s view of Frederick II rather than dwelling on the Rassenkunde approach to the great emperor. He also became heavily involved in the writing of a history of Stalin’s mistreatment of the German war prisoners. This was a genuine enough subject, but - as will bc plain in a moment - it was seen as a way to counterbalance the mistreatment of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. More remarkable was the career of Hermann Aubin, who managed to ensure that he was presented as a scholar who had kept his distance from the Nazis, and yet who also managed to maintain his unsavouty research interests in a new and acceptable guise. The Cold War made talk of the frontier between the Free World and eastern barbarism respectable again, and he was able to introduce a new journal on Ost&rschungwith the words: ‘I’hciiwnticrs
of IWO distinct sphrrcs of civilisation
forms of rxistcncc collide against one another into two irreconcilable camps.’
’
run straight through
whose dilkrcnccs
Europe.
threaten
World
views and
IO tear the world
apart
And then he went on to speak of the abduction and extermination of twelve million ‘Germans’ from the East. Not surprisingly his selective memory earned him ridicule in the Soviet Zone of Germany; but the onslaughts of East German propaganda actually scrvcd to strcngthcn his position in the west as a wise prophet. Enough West Germans wcrc, after all, described as Fascist stooges in the 1950s for the label to do littlc real harm. In fact, one old Os~rsc/zut~ hand, Theodore Obcrlandcr, cvcn managed to sccurc a place in Adenauer’s cabinet. The unedifying spcctaclc of the honours hcapcd upon Aubin after the war serves as a rcmindcr that German historians wcrc keen to obliterate the recent past and this seems a strange activity for historians. In a sense, of course, they had swum with the tide, credulously accepting as valid racial theories that led to the death of millions of Jews, Poles and other peoples they discussed in their sober and apparently scientific reports. Similar questions have been raised about other
107
collaborators with the r&jme, notably the physicist Heisenberg and several musicians: There was a tendency to push on with the work and leave the moral dimension to others, in the spirit of Cain’s words “Am I my brother’s keeper?“. But the evidence does not suggest that the historians were only obeying orders. They helped to initiate terrible policies. The second conclusion has to be that these German medieval historians did leave a legacy as a result of their emhusiastic politicisation around 1939. Since 1945 the emphasis has once again shifted to precise studies of charters, chronicles and so on. The German medievalist often takes refuge in a sober recotu&g of the facts without speculation or much interpretation. This can reach absurd extremes, as when the present author’s lift of Frederick II was published in German with many of the interpretative passages simply excised, and sections that might cause ‘&YCC’ , snch8sthr +criptinn of the destruction of the Naples archive by the Wehrmuch~,omitted.15 Playing politics is too dangerous. But it may bc regretted that the pendulum has swung the whole way in the other direction. Documents themselves are not history; they are the products of the past and guides to its shape. The supreme irony is that Brackmann berated Kantorowicz in 1929 for failing to remember that he was in the first instance a diligent searcher after truth, and then within a dozen years was overtly writing history to please his Nazi masters. The supreme consolation is perhaps that his career, and that of Hermann Aubin, Erich Maschke und so we&r, could not bc explained away quite so easily as thcsc historians hoped. Full tribute K:‘ust be paid to those such as Dr. Burleigh who have exposed their dealings; his study of Oslforschutg is obligatory reading for all historians of medieval Europe. Such latter-day historians who are not in thrall to them have rightly uncovered their role in awful events, not for the sake of scandal, nor to expose hypocrisy, but bccausc their original assumptions about the importance of their work in the history of the world were proved most tragically to be true, at the cost of about fifty million lives, including six million Jews.
Ii
David Abulafia, ffcrmha .gc.isr/wn h
changes (including
108
a drastic altrration
hihtrtn. Frirhirh II. WI IIoh~t~~~~fi~t (Berlin,
ol’thc orginitl
I~nglish title) wrc
madr without
I99I);tltr
consultation.