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Danilo Kiš's Fictionalization of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

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“The Conspiracy, or The Roots of the Disintegration of European Society.” Danilo Kiš’s Fictionalization of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion Dagmar Burkhart Keywords Danilo Kiš; collective memory; thanatopoetics; conspiracy; Book of Kings and Fools; Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion; pogroms Conspiracies have probably been a part of life ever since societies started to be- come more complex and at a time when those in power developed conflicting in- terests. The basic, literal meaning of the verb conspire (from the Latin conspira- re and its derivative, conspiratio, “agreement, union, unanimity”) is “to breathe together,” whereby breathing together was taken to mean “to agree, to concur to one end,” whether that purpose be good or evil (e.g. Genesis 37,18; “They con- spired against [Joseph] to slay him”). Since the middle of the fourteenth century conspiracy has been used in English to mean, first and foremost, “a plotting of evil, unlawful design; a combination of persons for an evil purpose.” The word conspire has, thus, assumed primarily negative connotations: “to secretly plot or make plans together, often with the intention to bring bad or illegal results.”1 Most conspiracy theories are generated in times of crisis. They occupy the space between political constellations and psychological mechanisms. They have much in common with paranoia: the loss of one’s ability to put things into per- spective, a static perception, the narrowed outlook of an extremely egocentric or 1 See “conspire” in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/con- spire 314 | Burkhart group-driven point of view.2 One of the conspiracy theories that has been most relevant in building an enemy stereotype is based on anti-Semitism, which sup- plied the greatest impetus for the persecution of Jews and legitimated the use of violence against them. Johannes von Frankfurt published his Malleus Iudaeorum (Hammer of the Jews) in 1420, in which he elaborates upon the pejorative figure of thought portraying the Jew as a corrosive force striving for domination.3 This attitude was adopted in later writings, such as the Judenspiegel (A Mirror of the Jews) by Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky (1821). The term “anti-Semitism” be- came popular for a hatred of the Jews based on race in the territory of the Ger- man Empire, founded in 1871; it was sparked by historian Heinrich von Treit- schke’s polemical works and pamphlets by the journalist Wilhelm Marr such as Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (The Victory of Judaism over Teutonism, 1879). After the First World War, Germany was flooded with anti- Semitic pamphlets. During the Weimar Republic, the ‘völkisch’ or populist or- ganizations mounted campaigns aimed at defaming the first democratic state on German soil as a “Jewish Republic.” Anti-Semitic works started to appear, such as Arthur Dinter’s best-selling novel Die Sünde wider das Blut (The Sin Against the Blood, 1917) or Paul Bang’s Judas Schuldbuch (The Dept Register of Judah) published in 1919 under the pseudonym Wilhelm Meister, or the first non- Russian edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published by Gottfried zur Beek and titled Die Geheimnisse der Weisen von Zion (The Secrets of the Wise Men of Zion). The second edition in German was published in 1920 by Theodor Fritsch’s anti-Semitic publishing house in Leipzig, the “Hammer-Verlag,”4 enti- tled Die Zionistischen Protokolle: Das Programm der internationalen Geheim- regierung. (The Zionist Protocols: Program of the Secret International Govern- ment). Walther Rathenau, a German Jew and Foreign Minister of Weimar Ger- many, was targeted by anti-Semitic terrorists. He was murdered in 1922 by right- wing radicals who saw him as one of the “Elders of Zion,” a conspiratorial group they believed really existed. By the time the Nazis seized power in 1933, 33 edi- tions of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been published in Germany. Starting in 1920, translated versions of the Protocols were also circulated in 2 Cf. Jaworski 2001: 22. 3 Cf. Schreckenberg 1994: 502. 4 The völkisch Hammer-Verlag, the publishing house Theodor Fritsch founded in 1902 (the name alluding to the inflammatory anti-Semitic Mallus iudaeorum/Judenhammer (Hammer of the Jews) also produced a magazine called Der Hammer: Blätter für deutschen Sinn (The Hammer: The Paper for German Essence) for which Fritsch per- sonally penned the lead articles. Danilo Kiš’s Fictionalization of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion | 315 France, Great Britain, other European countries, and in the USA (funded by Henry Ford).5 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Their Fateful Propagandist Success The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the most widely read anti-Semitic publica- tion. One major reason why the conspiracy tale was, and continues to prove so successful, is because it presents a simple explanation of the world owing to the fact that all manner of unpopular phenomena (e.g. the trappings of moderniza- tion) may be blamed upon on a single scapegoat, the Jews. The Protocols first appeared in the early 20th century—the first Russian edition was published in 1903 in Tsarist times: the anti-Semitic journalist and member of the Duma, Pavel A. Krushevan, published the work under the title Programa (sic!) zavoevan’ia mira evreiami (Programme for the Conquest of the World by the Jews) in Au- gust/September 1903 in the St. Petersburg newspaper Znamia (Banner) no. 190– 200 (10 September 1903–20 September1903). In 1905, Sergei Nilus, an impov- erished landowner turned mystic, published Protokoly sobranii Sionskikh mudre- cov (Protocols of the Meetings of the Elders of Zion), an expanded version of Krushevan’s text, in the appendix to the second edition of his apocalyptic work Velikoe v malom i Antikhrist, kak blizkaia politicheskaia vozmozhnost’ (The Great within the Small and Antichrist as an Imminent Political Possibility) in Tsarskoe Selo. Another edition was printed in Moscow in 1911. At the heart of this text is a secret Jewish association whose alleged aim is to corrode Christian peoples through materialism and atheism, and to wear them down by revolution and anarchy in order to attain world dominion. The final stage would be reached when all peoples submit to a Jewish king from the Da- vidic line who would then rule over a perfectly controlled, but contented, world as a benevolent dictator. The text is divided into 24 “meetings,” each chapter purporting to be the minutes of a speech given before the “Elders of Zion.” Presenting the text as minutes, or “protocols,” is intended to make the content more credible. Never- theless, doubts were soon voiced about the veracity of the text. As early as 1921, Philip Graves wrote a series of articles in The Times in which he revealed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be forgeries. Between 1933 and 1935, the doc- ument was examined by a Swiss court which concluded that the text was to be 5 Cf. Abbott 2004: 129–31. 316 | Burkhart classed as “pulp fiction” and was a plagiarism. The authors of the Protocols had plagiarized and changed the intention of works such as the satire by Maurice Joly Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel (Dialogue in Hell be- tween Machiavelli and Montesquieu) published in 1864 and directed at the au- thoritarian policies of Napoleon III. They also probably borrowed from Herzl, Sauvages, Barruel, Sue and Dumas.6 Crucially, the narrative setting is taken from one of Ottomar Friedrich Goedsche’s novels, who used the pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe and worked for the Prussian secret service. The scene is found in his novel Biarritz (1868) which is set in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. Every hundred years, according to the novel, representatives of the twelve tribes of Is- rael meet there to discuss progress towards global conquest. The author attrib- utes the key political and economic developments of the second half of the nine- teenth century to conspiratorial activities on the part of the Jewish minority. He thus provided a reference text on which other authors could base their writings. From 1881 onwards, this particular scene was published separately as Rede eines Oberrabbiners in geheimer Versammlung (The Speech by a Chief Rabbi at a Se- cret Meeting) and was translated into numerous languages. To this day, the loca- tion, the means by which the Protocols were written, and how they were dissem- inated remain unknown; however, fabrications and false assertions abound on the topic. Therefore, they are surrounded by “an aura, which is both stigmatizing and fascinating.”7 Even though the Protocols had been shown to be forgeries and a plagiarized fabrication in 1921, with the help of Mikhail Raslovlev, the text nevertheless continued to be widely read. In terms of the propaganda effects of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, however, whether they are genuine or not is of secondary importance. Evidence that the Protocols were fake was dismissed (by Hitler and others) as lies spread by Jewish media moguls, and this phantasm itself became part of the legend disseminated. In the Protocols of the Elders of Zion one reads of an alleged Jewish global conspiracy, a concept also anchored in the thought structures behind Nazi anti- Semitism. Leading National Socialists repeatedly referred to the Protocols in their own speeches and writings, e.g., Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf (1925) or when talking to close companions. Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg devoted numerous articles in the party newspaper to this topic and also wrote a book on the subject, Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion und die jüdische Weltpolitik (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Jewish Global Policy) which was re- 6 Cf.
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