9783039118458 Intro 002.Pdf

Introduction Crypto-Public Domains within the Third Reich […] heroism […] is to venture wholly to be oneself, as an individual man, this definite individual man, alone before the face of God, alone in this tremendous exertion and this tremendous responsibility […]. — SØren Kierkegaard The Sickness unto Death (1848) This study concentrates on an analysis of public spheres in National Social- ist Germany in order to identify, locate, and investigate circumstances of possible resistance to Adolf Hitler’s regime. The plural use of the word “sphere” is programmatic, since in every society there exist several realms that can function as places of public discourse. We focus on the space of the crypto-public, defined as a politicized private sphere, as a potential realm for anti-state activism. Based on the activities of four organizations operating in Germany between 1933 and 1944—the Jüdischer Kulturbund Berlin ( Jewish Cultural Alliance Berlin), the Kreisauer Kreis (Kreisau Circle), the Scholl- Schmorell-Kreis (Scholl-Schmorell Circle),1 and the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack Organisation (Schulze-Boysen/Harnack Organization)—we analyze how this social locus functioned to foster resistance to National Socialism. We examine the artifacts of these groups—leaflets, pamphlets, politico- 1 Traditionally this group has been referred to as Weisse Rose (White Rose); yet, as Sönke Zankel has pertinently argued, that name is misleading, as the Weisse Rose comprised merely the beginning phase of the activities undertaken by the student group sur- rounding Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell (Sönke Zankel, Mit Flugblätter gegen Hitler. Der Widerstandskreis um Hans Scholl und Alexander Schmorell (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2008) 13). Henceforth this study employs the name coined by Zankel: Scholl-Schmorell-Kreis. 2 Introduction economical treatises, and, in the case of the Kulturbund, three theater per- formances that marked the different stages in the alliance’s evolution—in order to establish models of crypto-public spaces and evaluate their pos- sibilities and limitations as sites of resistance. Our use of the verb resist favors the meaning to withstand: we see the merit of these organizations in their efforts at “preserving, on an unofficial basis, a form of society or polity that [was] threatened by an imposed regime.”2 We identified three such spaces: a ghetto public sphere Ghettoöffent( - lichkeit) for the Jüdischer Kulturbund, a passive counter-public sphere (Gegenöffent lichkeit) in the case of the Kreisauer Kreis, and an active Gegenöffentlichkeit in the case of the Scholl-Schmorell-Kreis and the Schulze- Boysen/Harnack Organisation. At first glance, there seem to be only a few elements linking the following four organizations: an exclusively Jewish cultural forum existing with the permission of Joseph Goebbels’ Reich Ministry for People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda; a loose network of liberal intel- lectuals planning for the time after Hitler’s fall; a group of students without a distinct political orientation; and a leftist, pro-Soviet group infiltrating the ranks of various ministries. The first offered a mode of survival for Jews who did not or could not leave Germany, the second never moved beyond the planning for “Day X and Zero Hour,”3 the third expressed open protest, and the fourth actively opposed the regime. Yet what we believe they all had in common was the goal of resisting National Socialism. As Hannah Arendt has shown, in order for a state to exercise abso- lute control over its members and become totalitarian, it is not the public sphere that the state needs to dominate and render ineffective, but rather the private sphere. No state is safe from criticism and opposition as long as it allows the existence of an unrestricted private sphere. In this space, where each person can function as a homo faber even if s/he is politically or socially isolated from her/his fellow citizens, lie the beginnings of anti- 2 Peter Pulzer, “The Beginning of the End,” Die Juden im Nationalsozialistischen Deutschland/The Jews in Nazi Germany 1933–1943 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1986) 17–27, here 25. 3 Freya von Moltke, Erinnerungen an Kreisau (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1997) 66. Crypto-Public Domains within the Third Reich 3 state activism.4 We claim, along with Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, that the notions of public and private should not be considered “as some ubiqui- tous and constant structural opposition, but as a field of disagreement and conflict in which the very fact of constant use, discussion, and contention produces and reproduces a sense of continuity.”5 Public and private are denominators that always shift their meaning, depending for part of their reference code on the context in which they are used. Hence, the meaning of the dichotomy becomes relative, as the distinction is fractal: any action or form of behavior can be divided into private and public elements, which in themselves can be broken down again along the same lines. The result is that within any public sphere, one can establish a private realm, and any private realm harbors a potential public sphere.6 This latter public domain, which we call crypto-public, brings together people of similar convictions and may mobilize them into a front that stands in disagreement with the state, yet ultimately remains isolated and confined, both in its actions and importance, to the small group of initiators. This space offers the possibil- ity to resist, i.e. withstand, the state, but offers no guarantee that acts of opposition will emerge from it. In order for actions occurring within it to become opposition, they must undermine the entire power structure of the opposed system and strive for the abolition of the regime. From the onset of National Socialist rule in Germany, an official, dictatorial public sphere dominated by the Reich Ministry for People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda and the Gestapo coexisted with crypto- public spaces. We take the concept dictatorial public sphere to designate a political system imposing upon its followers a kind of messianic discourse that declares the system to be the will of a people’s community (Volksgemein- schaft), and on behalf of this community demands complete control over all social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of society. At the same time, this political system displays a highly bureaucratized administrative 4 Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985) 474. 5 Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) 41. 6 Ibid. 4 Introduction structure and censorship mechanism that subordinate everything to the power or will of a leader. Through their control of both the state and the ruling Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), the National Socialists succeeded in depriving the German public sphere of uncensored social and political interactions as they made themselves, the figure of the Führer, and their followers the only officially sanctioned inhabitants of this realm. Eventu- ally, they annulled the pluralistic public sphere of the Weimar Republic, and they suffocated this space with self-celebrations and reenactments of what the Party or Führer considered, or rather, decided, was the truth. They turned a space of expression into one of oppression and “institu- tionalized lies”7 with no room for negotiation or nuance of meanings, only ideological domination. They revoked what Jürgen Habermas later called the public sphere of civil society, an arena of deliberative exchange in which rational-critical arguments, rather than mere inherited ideas or personal status, could determine agreements and actions.8 Acting within the space of National Socialist Germany became a ritual performed in a formalized language, deprived of contact with reality, an induction into a predetermined semiotic system that replaced reality with an ersatz-reality, in which only state-approved models of expression were considered accept- able. Yet a dictatorial power mechanism, while excluding and oppressing, also generates counter-actions that it cannot neutralize, as “power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared … power is exercised from innumerable points,”9 and thus enables individuals to be simultaneously subjects and objects of socio-political systems. These counter-actions set off multiple and sometimes competing counter-publics, each marked by specific terms of exclusion (in this case, race, class, and political affiliation), 7 Jacques Rupnik, “Totalitarianism Revisited,” Civil Society and the State, ed. John Keane (London, New York: Verso, 1988) 263–289, here 269. 8 Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied und Berlin: Luchterhand Verlag, 1962) 42–46. 9 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980) 94. Crypto-Public Domains within the Third Reich 5 yet at the same time understanding itself as a nucleus for an alternative organization of society. As a result of their desire to distance themselves from the new authori- ties, several groups inside Germany came together in order to engage in actions which criticized the National Socialist regime. Since the existence of these groups proved constitutive for a public sphere that was radically different from the official one, one can talk about them

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