Bettine Le Beau

VOLUME 6 NO. 3 MARCH 2006 wis journal mm I^^H ^ Association of Jewislr Refugees Peoples, cars and people's cars The 70th anniversary of the production in unleashed 20 years of war on Europe. 1936 of the VW3, the prototype of the Ik. im/M '-^55?* When nationhood came to Gennany in Volkswagen, underlies the historical irony /' 1871 in the wake of Bismarck's victories that an industrial product so closely over Austria and France, the democratic, associated with National Socialism and C^ popular element in the concept of the 'Volk' Hitler personally should have become an weakened further as Western, liberal icon of the anti-war left in 1960s America. ^Tc©© © notions of the 'the people' lost ground in face Readers of a mawkish disposition will recall of the increasingly aggressive self-image of that it even metamorphosed into the 'Love • * k Germans as a powerful, expansionist Bug' in the Disney HlmHerbie. i national group. The bombastic words In 1933 Hitler discussed with the engineer i^C^^^g^^H ( engraved on the new Reichstag building, Ferdinand Porsche his idea of a Volkswagen, 'Dem Deutschen Volke', expressed a new a people's car that could carry five people and &^ «^v^^^^^^^| sense of national unity and identity forged cruise at 100 kph, was economical on fuel, not from a liberal consensus out of the and cost only 1,000 Reichsmark. Porsche's democratic process, but on the battlefield out ideas for a small car dovetailed with Hitler's of conquest and a dangerous illusion of vision of a car available to all Germans and so national superiority. the sturdy little Beetle with its air-cooled, With the advent of racial ideology in the •jl^^^ ' ^,^0 <« rear-mounted engine was born. later nineteenth century, the identification of But the cloven hoof of Nazism was evident the Volk with the national unity escalated from the start. Control of the company that E3TW into the exclusive notion of the pure produced the prototype was vested in the ^V^JHI^K Germanic race 'cleansed' of any alleged Deutsche Arbeitsfront, the Nazi impurity of blood or birth deriving from organisation into which German workers other, 'inferior' racial groups. From this had been dragooned after the abolition of free efface the crimes of its recent past by emerged the Nazi concept of the trade unions in 1933. In 1938 Hitler renamed reinventing itself as a democratic, Volksgemeinschaft or 'people's community', a the car KdF-Wagen, absorbing it into the egalitarian society where technological term stripped of any popular democratic 'Kraft durch Freude' (Strength through Joy) advances and economic efficiency worked to connotations and denoting instead a racial programme that sought to bribe German the advantage of the people as a whole. The collective organised on totalitarian lines and workers into supporting the regime with parliamentary democracy of the Bonn bound together by mythical ties of 'blood and consumer goods, sea cruises and the like. regime was underpinned by the economic soil' - groups that supposedly threatened its The Volkswagen was unmistakeably democracy of a system where the German racial purity and health, Jews for example or spawned by the Nazi state, part of its people shared in the prosperity the German the disabled, had to be eliminated. campaign to woo the masses and later of its people had created. Thus was the concept of the 'Volk' war effort, where it was known as the K- This comes close to the concept of the corrupted, as extreme nationalism Wagen or Kiibelwagen beloved of the people common in Western parliamentary culminated in the pseudo-popular system of Wehrmacht. One can argue that Volkswagen democracies where in theory all citizens, the Nazi racial state. The Fuhrer's 'people's was a brand as heavily contaminated by its regardless of class, wealth or rank, have car' was intended only for a select racial association with Nazism as Messerschmidt equal rights and participate on an equal basis group, though that was obscured post-war by or Heinkel. A product from the same stable in the political process, a concept enshrined the huge success of the Volkswagen in as Stuka dive-bombers and V-1 flying bombs at the dawn of democracy in the export markets worldwide. Eventually it could easily have had an image problem, for constitutions ofthe newly independent USA overtook the Model T Ford as the bestselling Doodlebug and 'Love Bug' were in reality and revolutionary France. But 'le peuple model of all time and drove its principal kindred beetles. frangais' meant not only the newly European competitor, the British motor In the 1950s though, the Volkswagen enfranchised French masses seeking to industry, into terminal decline. One crumb of became the prime symbol of the affluence assert their democratic rights against the consolation for supporters®bf British that spread across West Germany in the hierarchy of king and nobility, as a self- manufacturing industry: the recently wake of the Wirtschaftsuiunder, the governing, autonomous people. It also revamped version of the Beetle is plainly economic wonder that apparently united meant the French nation which, having inferior to the revamped Mini, which is Gennan society by dispensing consumer established itself as sovereign in its own produced on the site of the Morris plant in prosperity across the classes. The Beetle lands, sought to assert its sense of national Cowley, Oxford - by BMW. exemplified West Germany's attempts to ascendancy as 'la grande nation' and Anthony Grenville AJR JOURNAL MARCH 2006 Poor Bert Brecht Sacred mission Anthony Grenville While visiting my daughter who is studying in Jerusalem, I recently had The title of Bertolt Brecht's the famous poem 'An die the privilege to act as an emissary for autobiographical poem 'Vom armen Nachgeborenen', in which he the AJR and to deliver to Yad Vashem B. B.', with its memorable opening appealed to those born in a later, some 400 testimonies the AJR has lines 'Ich, Bertolt Brecht, bin aus den more peaceful age to pass received from members whose schwarzen Waldern./ Meine Mutter compassionate judgment on his relatives perished in the Holocaust. I trug mich in die Stadte hinein/ Als generation, forced to confront the was met in the Hall ofNames within the ich in ihrem Leibe lag. Und die Kalte evils of Fascism and capitalism in a Yad Vashem museum complex by its der Walder/ Wird in mir bis zu world of apparently irredeemable director, Alexander Avraham. meinem Absterben sein', came to cruelty and hatred - the anguished mind when an article in The Times plea of the moralist unable to avoid The new museum, a prism-like compared Brecht unfavourably with soiling his hands with violence. structure, presents the history of the - of all people - Max Beerbohm. To A deeper issue here is to what Holocaust with the individual stories compare one of the giants of extent one's judgment of a work of highlighted in the unfolding historical modern theatre with the author of literature should be determined by narrative. Using more than 2,500 Zuleika Dobson is a masterpiece of knowledge of the private life, authentic artefacts including blinkered insularity, even by the beliefs and activities of the author. testimonies, photographs, film clips standardsofthe Murdoch press. Is Arthur Koestler's analysis of and works of art, the museum weaves The Times's real quarrel with Stalin's show trials in Darkness at over 90 personal accounts into a Brecht was, of course, political, not Noon any the less artistically thematic and historical narrative, thus literary: Brecht was a convinced compelling because we know of the telling the story of the Holocaust Marxist at a time when Marxist author's record of violence against through the voice ofthe individual. orthodoxy meant loyalty to Stalin. women? Is the superbly crafted The Hall of Names is a conical room But those who accuse Brecht of humanity of Theodor Fontane's designed to represent the towers of the unquestioning acceptance of novels less satisfying because we gas chambers. Along the inside of the Stalinist ideology and practice, like know of his aversion to Jews, from cone are hundreds of pictures of Jews of the renegade Communist Ruth his letters to his friend Georg every background who perished. Fischer, whose misreading of his Friedlaender (a Jew, of course)? Do Mirroring the pictures is a deep hole play Die MaBnahme led her to call we rank Ezra Pound's Cantos lower with water at the bottom. I was told this him 'the bard of the GPU' (later because the poet ended up a KGB), misunderstand his position. ranting advocate of Italian Fascism? was because water represents life and, if you look down into it, you see not only It was, after all, Brecht who wrote It is easy to argue that no work your own reflection but the reflection of a marvellously sly poem after the that expresses support for an the faces in the pictures. In this manner, crushing of the East German ideology as abhorrent as National your face and theirs are entwined. workers' uprising of 1953, in which Socialism can have literary merit - he asked the Communist but then how do we judge Around the walls are black folders, government, which had blamed the acknowledged masters like the poet each one containing the testimony of people for forfeiting the regime's Gottfried Benn and the novelist about 350 people murdered by the confidence, why it did not simply Ernst Junger, camp followers of that Nazis and their collaborators. At dissolve the people and elect ideology for all that they avoided present, Yad Vashem has a list of 3 another in its place.

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