There are thoughts that one can and sometimes even should forgive, because they are among those possible alternatives of action and thought that are not reprehensible in themselves, even if their consequences often turn out to be ghastly. Personally, I was well aware that a large part of the German as well as the Austrian population wanted to limit immigration – including the influx of asylum seekers – to an acceptable level. In this sense, although on many issues tending much more to the left, I had no objection to a right-wing government led by the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), and I understand the attitude of Eastern countries opposing the European Commission.
Undoubtedly such a policy is cold and inhumane (North African heads of state have been and continue to be paid by the EU for securing border security by brutal means, so that we can wash our hands in innocence). On the other hand, if we were to simply open our borders, we would behave inhumanely to our own people, for without those watchdogs millions of migrants from the South and East would head for Europe. Germany and Austria not even managed to fully integrate those people of foreign descent who already live in our countries so that they become equal and equally respected fellow citizens. It is with a constant shaking of head, that I listened to politicians and parties who for quite a while wanted to convince us that our countries could and should accept a potentially unlimited number of strangers.
There are problems where every clear-cut solution leads to inhumanity, and the problem of unlimited immigration is certainly one of them. Therefore, I feel unable to condemn anybody who votes for one or the other alternative. There are still other political schemes that can not be rejected as immoral in themselves – some of them are just superfluous or inapplicable in a particular historical constellation. This includes, for example, the long-felt desire expressed by the Austrian FPÖ for a merger of all German-speaking people in a larger political entity.
The desire of people speaking the same language and sharing similar values is quite natural and to be found throughout history – it also motivated the German reunification. We may, of course, argue that the political independence of culturally related people also has its merits, because it allows for the realization of different political concepts and, therefore, a greater unfolding of different ideas and institutions. At the present time, it will further be noted that it makes little sense to shift boundaries within a united Europe. The idea cherished by some in the FPÖ of a newly emerging Greater German Reich is so far removed from reality, that it seems best to dismiss it as raving fantasy. Nevertheless, it seems to me important to see in it no more than a denial of reality. As long as these people do not consciously play with fire, it can not be called morally reprehensible.
Nor is it, in my view, disgusting to belong to some fraternity. It is well known that many renowned individuals were members of such organizations, among them Max Weber who belonged to the so-called Allemannia Heidelberg for no less than 36 years. Student leagues have fallen into disrepute because they tend to glorify their own people and traditions while vilifying those of foreign countries. But it is characteristic of the best German-Austrian tradition to be highly receptive to foreign ideas and influences – see Max Weber. This is no objection against patriotism but rather its logical completion. Patriotism in the sense of responsibility on the part of individuals and political communities to make the best of their own lives and existence – albeit in constant engagement with the ideas of others – not only appears to me perfectly right, but I see in it the source of a life guided by reason, because individuals as well as political communities have no other life than their own. Germans are not responsible for what happens in Japan and Japanese not responsible for what happens in Austria or in Germany. In this sense I call myself a patriot, for I admire every institution, including fraternities, so long as they understand the legacy of Max Weber in this precise way.
Unfortunately, the reproach of misjudging reality may probably be turned against myself in this case. Max Weber is hardly listened to in any present-day student league. Blatant chauvinism, ie beer-bellied stupidity, is far more likely to prevail. After all, Max Weber himself finally decided to quit Allemannia.
The reader of these lines quite correctly guessed that I felt a certain amount of sympathy for the new government, because a pronounced sense of reality does not characterize the left-wing camp either. But now something has happened that no Germans should shut their eyes to. Until 1933 they had as much reason to be in peace with their own history, and be even proud of it, as all other great nations. But then came a man who sullied the common past in a way that continues to put shame on the cheeks of the after-born. He stigmatized parts of his fellow-citizens, who had long since become Germans – many of them by skill and intelligence even exemplary Germans – as subhumans that must be eradicated. He murdered millions of defenseless people in the most cowardly way. The Nazis and their incorrigible admirers especially like to talk about honor, but no time has besmirched German honor so ghastly as the thirteen unhappy years of Nazis’ millennial kingdom. In the short span of their rule the Nazis managed to create an image of Germans that had never before existed: Germans of abysmal mendacity and shameless dishonor.
I even go so far as not to condemn the man as a diabolical figure of history, for his having used the painful peace agreement of Versailles for the purpose of turning it propagandistically into a stab-in-the-back myth so he could unleash another war. Wars always cause the greatest calamity – nothing but mutual killing and destroying everything that previous generations have painstakingly created – but then we should condemn all those warmongers, starting with Alexander and Napoleon, who up to now are revered by most people as if they were adorable heroes. It is not altogether impossible to see Hitler as a successor of those statesmen who, like Charlemagne, Charles the Fifth and Napoleon, sought to forge Europe into a united political body by force of arms. Admittedly, this is the rather tortuous way some would like to explain the man’s aggression and thus impart to the horror of war a minimum of sense.
But no conceivable excuse, no possible subterfuge, and no extenuation whatsoever is possible in the face of the mass murder perpetrated against defenseless citizens, be they Sintis, Romas, Jews or the Armenians of other countries. The German-Austrian history is rich in ideas, great minds, and, of course, rich in absurdities and disruptions like all history. But the cowardly slaughter of women, children, and defenseless men is nothing but hellish defilement. People who still boast of it are criminals in my eyes.
And criminals are all those too who do not cry out when they read lines like these: „Speed ahead, you old Germans, we will murder the seventh million as well“. Not only the pensioner who put these words on paper, but all those who sang them, or only heard or read them without screaming with horror – and I am afraid that this applies to all members of the Germania – have to be singled out as dishonored spoilers, polluters, besmirchers of history. They continue to defame it as the Nazis had done before. Such people are not patriots who make the most of the common history – they are its gravediggers. I would like to call them – with conscious pathos – the disciples of Satan, because only those who are in the service of the devil can rejoice in the slaughter of a further million people (and do so while singing!). These men must be considered the enemies of everything good and noble Germans and Austrians have achieved in the past. But they are enemies of the future too, as they poison it for generations to come.