Emigration and the Foundation of West Germany, 1933-1963 By Noah Benezra Strote A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Martin Jay, Chair Professor David Bates Professor John Connelly Professor John Efron Spring 2011 Abstract Emigration and the Foundation of West Germany, 1933-1963 By Noah Benezra Strote Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Martin Jay, Chair This dissertation traces the development of German national life from the disintegration of the Weimar Republic in 1933 to the end of the foundational period of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1963. Charting the alliances between previously hostile groups formed in emigration in response to National Socialism, I offer a way of understanding the ideological strength of reconstruction and nation-building after Hitler. The study covers four principal areas of activity: law and politics, humanistic culture, higher education, and religion. It takes as representative case studies the careers of young Weimar-era leaders who fled the Nazi regime in the 1930s and returned to help build the infrastructure of the Federal Republic after 1945. Extensive use is made of their personal papers and other archival material from the institutions with which they were affiliated. Examining the legal, cultural, intellectual, and theological response to the failure of Germany’s first democracy, I challenge arguments that have privileged economic success as the driving cause of postwar democratization in West Germany. Instead, the dissertation points to the indispensability of social and ideological reconciliation as preconditions for development. 1 To my parents i TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................................1 Chapter I. CHRISTIANITY, SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE WEST GERMAN STATE.................12 The Dispute over Law and Guardianship of the State under the Weimar Constitution.......................................................................16 The “Judaic Spirit” and the Dethroning of Law in Nazi Ideology..................21 The Rapprochement of Christianity and Social Democracy in Emigration...26 Remigration and the Foundation of West German Social Rule of Law..........39 Conclusion: Christianity, Social Democracy, and the Jewish Question.........52 II. THE “WESTERNIZATION” OF GERMAN LIBERAL HUMANISM........55 The Roman West, the Occident, and the Crisis of Bildung in Weimar..........59 The De-Liberalization of German Humanism in Nazi Ideology.....................65 The Westward Turn of German Liberals in Emigration.................................70 Remigration, Denazification, and the Formation of a “Western” Ideal..........81 Conclusion: Exile, Antisemitism, and the Cold War......................................94 III. THE EMBOURGEOISEMENT OF CRITICAL THEORY..........................97 The Frankfurt School’s Marxist Critique of Bourgeois Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Weimar..................................................................................101 ii World War II and the Turn to Freud.............................................................106 The Return of Critical Theory to the Federal Republic.................................114 Conclusion: Conservatives as Allies.............................................................137 IV. THE TRANSVALUATION OF CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS......139 The Conflict between the Christian and Judaic “Spirits” in Weimar...........142 The De-Judaization of German Christianity under National Socialism.......150 The Reluctant Alliance of Christians and Jews in Emigration.....................153 Remigration and the “Christian-Jewish” Foundation of West German Society..........................................................................................................164 Conclusion: Antisemitism from Jewish Problem to Christian Problem......179 BIBLIOGRAPHY...........................................................................................................181 iii Introduction “Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was ‘I am a Roman citizen.’ Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘I am a Berliner.’” To audiences watching on television or listening on radio as U.S. President John F. Kennedy proclaimed those words in 1963, it was a clear moment of Western triumph in the longest and most hotly contested battle of the Cold War: the struggle over Germany. Seventy-five percent of Germans now lived in a country allied with the West in the fight against the spread of communism in Europe. For many whose memories stretched back to World War II, the fact that the hearts and minds of Germans—or at least most of them—had been won for liberal democracy was an admirable feat. When Kennedy closed the speech by saying, “I take pride in the words ‘I am a Berliner,’” he was boasting not only for the people of that city but for the ability of the West to promote stabilization, liberalization, and democratization.1 Ever since, Western leaders have held up Germany as the great success story of post-crisis development. In the 1970s and 1980s, theorists pointed to the market welfare system of the Federal Republic as the solution for struggling South American countries on the verge of Marxist revolution.2 Upon the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, policy makers again looked to the experience of post-Nazi Germany for strategies to transition Eastern Europe away from command economies and one-party politics toward a Western paradigm of pluralism. And after 2001, American leaders utilized the history of their country’s occupation of Germany from 1945 to 1949 as a kind of primer for incubating democracy in the Middle East. Noah Feldman, a specialist in Islamic law who served as a constitutional adviser to the American authorities in Iraq, remembered that as he made his way on a government plane to Baghdad in 2003 his colleagues were “without exception reading new books on the American occupation and reconstruction of Germany and Japan.”3 Reproducing the “miraculous” rise of German liberal democracy elsewhere has been an American foreign policy goal for a half-century. 1 John F. Kennedy, “Ich bin ein Berliner” (1963), reprinted in My Fellow Americans: The Most Important Speeches of America’s Presidents, ed. Michael Waldman (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2010), 183-84. To those German-speakers outside of Berlin, Kennedy was of course also unintentionally saying that he was a type of jelly doughnut (known as “Berliner”). 2 When the U.S. supported anti-Marxist opposition in Latin America, it was often in anticipation of a promised “economic miracle” on the order of West Germany in the 1950s. See Mike Mason, Development and Disorder: A History of the Third World since 1945 (Hanover, NH: University of New England, 1997), 80. 3 Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation-Building (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1. For the policy uses of German history in Iraq, see James Dobbins et al., America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003). 1 Meanwhile, the views of historians who research the factors responsible for that rise have changed. For many years—especially during and just after the Cold War— scholars emphasized the centrality of security and economics. Despite internal disputes about its mechanics, most agreed that the establishment of a strong market under the auspices of the Western occupying powers had been the bedrock of German democratization.4 More recently, however, historians have shown that regime change and economic development were necessary, but insufficient, conditions for the sustainability of West German liberal democracy.5 They have demonstrated that police power and prosperity alone cannot account for what became, in the words of Tony Judt, the “most dramatic instance of political stabilization in post-war Europe.”6 Furthermore, it is now clear that though many West Germans watched John Wayne films and listened to “Voice of America” radio in the 1950s, opinion polls, newspapers, and university lectures consistently revealed their resistance to what were considered peculiarly American styles of thought.7 Instead of focusing on “Americanization,” then—as one tended to do in the 1980s and early ‘90s—historians are now moving toward examination of the indigenous cultural, institutional, and generational conditions that facilitated the creation of a stable West German nation.8 4 The disputes typically revolved around the decisiveness of foreign intervention in the so-called economic miracle of the 1950s. Werner Abelshauser in his essay “West German Economic Recovery, 1945-1951: A Reassessment,” Three Banks Review 135 (September 1982), 34-53, downplayed the significance of stimulus such as the Marshall Plan, while Henry Turner in his The Two Germanys Since 1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) and Charles Maier in his In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1988) tended to play it up. See the controversy in the collection edited by Charles Maier and Günter Bischof, The Marshall Plan and Germany (Oxford: Berg, 1991), 116. Policy makers of different political orientations in turn mined these conflicting interpretations for historical evidence