Lie as a state principle

Lies as a state principle is an unpublished political pamphlet by Bruno Frank against the Nazi regime. The essay was written in July and October 1939, shortly before and after the outbreak of World War II, in Bruno Frank's exile in California. It was intended as a contribution to a series of brochures planned by Thomas Mann against the Nazi state. However, the project was not implemented.

Emergence

Bruno Frank, the son of Jewish parents, had made a respected name for himself in Germany as a poet, storyteller, novelist and playwright by 1933. On the night of the Reichstag fire in 1933, he and his wife Liesl Frank decided to leave Germany immediately. They had previously witnessed the acts of violence of the brown hordes and their leader Hitler in Munich at close range and were very familiar with the racial ideology and the criminal intentions of the Nazis. The couple then stayed for a few years in England, Austria, France and Switzerland. In October 1937 Bruno and Liesl Frank left Europe and settled in Beverly Hills , where Frank initially worked as a screenwriter for Hollywood.

On May 14, 1939, Thomas Mann, who was also living in exile in America, wrote to his brother Heinrich Mann : “Over the course of about 12 months, I would like to have about 24 brochures entered the country, which are being written for the Germans by representatives of the German spirit should. The series of publications is by no means intended to have a political character; it is intended to appeal to the better instincts of our compatriots, while Hitler only knows how to evoke their most dangerous ones. A committee of American friends (Chairman Dr. Frank Kingdon, President of Newark University ) will finance the project. ... We anticipate a circulation of at least 5000 copies per brochure - each copy will be read multiple times. "

In addition to his brother Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann invited friends and colleagues to participate, including Wilhelm Dieterle , Bruno Frank, Leonhard Frank , Lotte Lehmann , Max Reinhardt , René Schickele , Erwin Schrödinger , Paul Tillich , Fritz von Unruh , Franz Werfel and Stefan Zweig . However, the project failed due to political developments when the Second World War broke out a few months later.

It is not known whether Thomas Mann wrote his planned project contribution. Bruno Frank's contribution remained unpublished. The typewriter manuscript of his essay is in the Monacensia , the literary archive of the Munich City Library.

content

The essay consists of 26 typewriter pages and is divided into four chapters I – IV (Roman numerals in brackets: chapter numbers).

Overview

(I) Bruno Frank proves that Hitler's maxim is based on lies and that he also founded his party on this foundation. (II) The "state-supporting" party of the NSDAP transfers these principles of injustice to the German state and suppresses every human impulse to live in the country by means of an "embroidered atmosphere". (III) The German people - believes Bruno Frank - have recognized the true character of the regime after the annexation of the Czech Republic and are turning away from it. In his opinion, the rest of the world will judge Germans according to their cultural achievements and not according to their regime. (IV) After the outbreak of the Second World War, only the desperate hope remains that the German nation will get rid of “its molesters” itself.

The party of lies

(I) When the Reichstag went up in flames on the night of February 28, 1933, the Frank couple decided to leave Germany. Bruno Frank was as clear as day “what would happen tomorrow: arrest of the opposition leaders, banning of the anti-Hitler press, ostracizing all socialists. ... The whole previous history of the Hitler party and its chief had taught that there - besides animal brutality - there was absolutely no other means of political struggle than fraud, forgery, breaking a word and oath. "

The lie began with the fraudulent party name "National Socialist German Workers' Party", which in reality was "anti-socialist" and "anti-working class". She was "the child ... of the armaments industry", which could only help "a new threat to world peace" from its post-war low. The “Bolshevik danger” was talked about as well as the allegedly threatening economic impoverishment. Likewise, “the term on which they promised to build this Third Reich”, the “Aryan race”, was fraudulent nonsense, because the word “Aryan” denotes “people who speak a certain group of languages”. Hitler's racial propagandist Alfred Rosenberg , a racially “particularly brightly colored bastard”, was “an unsurpassable party symbol as a lie on two legs”.

The “anti-Semitic campaign aimed at in all of this” was based on falsified figures, as Bruno Frank shows using the example of naturalized Eastern Jews, Jewish officials and Jewish ministers between 1919 and 1933. "And just as the party lied its enemies together, so it lied its heroes together." So Horst Wessel , a notorious pimp who was murdered by a rival, was elevated to a hero and martyr of the "movement".

Bruno Frank, who had lived in and around Munich since 1915, was “in a privileged position to study their living Messiah himself. Here he walked in the flesh. He came through Munich's beautiful streets, which he has since ruined, in his smart belt coat. Here he preferred to fall into a trance, carried away with roaring fits of his "mission," an enraptured seer who at the right moment, when he was happily foaming at his mouth, pressed the button at the bottom of the lectern to turn the headlights towards him conduct. ”Bruno Frank also does away with the fairy tale of the heroic“ messenger ”in the First World War, when Hitler hyped himself, and denounces the notorious cowardice of Hitler, who fled the 1923 Hitler coup and abandoned his fellow putschists.

Frank's conclusion: "The whole National Socialist company was swindled, the whole" mission "swindled, their slogans swindled, their heroic staff swindled, swindles from the Odin's lock to the cross of honor, their overlord. ... And just like their substantiating act [the Hitler putsch], so did their state. "

The state of lies

(II) “In the sixteenth century, the Italian Machiavelli tried to legitimize the breaking of words as a political means.” He considered “a falsehood to be permitted and advisable under certain circumstances”, since people are bad, foolish and weak and easy to deceive. Machiavelli codified "what has always occurred in political practice".

Hitler took this principle to extremes. In “Mein Kampf” he wrote: “In the size of a lie there is always a certain factor of being believed, since the broad mass of a people with the primitive simplicity of their minds falls victim to a big lie more easily than a small one, since they themselves do sometimes lying on a small scale, but would be ashamed of too big lies. ... She will not be able to believe in the possibility of such a tremendous impudence of the most infamous perversion in others either. "This passage in Hitler's book" offers the key to all of this person's endeavors and actions. She is the quintessence of all insights he has ever had in life. It is his contribution - his only one - to the development of the human spirit. ”While Machiavelli considered the lie to be permitted in some cases, for Hitler the lie was the basic principle of his actions.

When the National Socialist Wilhelm Gustloff was murdered in 1936, Hitler dared to tell the cheeky lie: "I must solemnly state here that there is not a single enemy murdered by us on the path of our movement." Bruno Frank points to the endless series of blood crimes since 1930 that, contrary to Hitler's hollow words, murder and manslaughter and the glorification of the murderer are the lifeblood of his movement. He describes the oppressive atmosphere that has spread like "poison gas" in the country since the seizure of power . Hitler "seems close to his goal - that of burying an entire people in the abyss of its own moral depravity."

Just as Hitler rages through lies and deceit in his own country, he also deals with foreign states. Bruno Frank states: “The National Socialist state only concludes contracts with the intention of breaking them.” Breach of contract follows breach of contract, often combined with the annexation of defenseless neighbors (Danzig, Austria, Sudeten, Czech Republic). In between, Hitler swears over and over again holy oaths not to have any territorial claims on his neighbors. Bruno Frank sums it up as follows: "The world listens to him" and Hitler "sinks in". “The guy's blotting of the world seemed complete. It wasn't her. "

The people

(III) With the occupation of the Czech Republic (“a terrible warning signal for the peoples”), Hitler’s building of lies collapses. Now, at the latest, all of Europe will recognize Hitler's true face. The English politician Alfred Duff-Cooper insulted the German “head of state” in front of the House of Commons as the “three times oath-broken traitor”. Bruno Frank is certain that in spite of “all the deep-rooted tendencies to compromise” there is now “no longer a statesman on earth who thinks differently”.

Bruno Frank claims that the German people have also lost faith in their "Führer", despite the hermetic isolation from abroad, despite "every hour pounding propaganda through the microphone", despite the "mountains of dirty swindling paper" and despite the omnipresent informer system. The queues in front of the grocery stores are a sign of "deprivation and economic devastation" that are expected of the people.

Bruno Frank believes that the “physical impoverishment”, “not even the danger of death in world politics ... is felt most deeply by the Germans”. The most unbearable is the "embroidery atmosphere of mean slander, blackmail, poisonous spying". According to the opinion of the world, a people should not be judged according to the “mud existences” that wield the scepter, rather it is “honored according to the high that it has produced”, according to its poets and thinkers, “who have one thing in common: more passionate Drive to truthfulness ”.

The transcript from July 1939 ends with the hopeful sentence: "The day will come, it is near, on which the German people, freed from that mockery of lies and ardor for revenge, will take their honorable place again in the ring of nations."

The world fire

(IV) The prophecy with which Bruno Frank concluded his writing in July 1939 did not come true. In October 1939, one month after the outbreak of World War II, he added to his previous analysis, which has not lost any of its validity since then. On August 22, 1939, Hitler astounded the civilized world with a cabinet piece of his philosophy of lies, because “suddenly he embraced what he had spat out the day before” and concluded a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. Over the years he had presented himself to the Western nations as a "soldier against world Bolshevism", and they had rewarded him with their "lack of resistance" to his criminal foreign policy.

Bruno Frank believes that the war is directed "entirely against the suckers and gravedigger" of the German people and that the opponents of the war are only waiting for "since the German nation gets rid of its molesters and thus saves itself and the world the last most terrible victims" . And he closes his polemic, which was never delivered to its addressees, with the pleading words: “Every day is precious. May the terrible one not come, on whom, for the world, the face of the German people merges with the dishonorable grimace of its executioner! "

reception

Since Bruno Frank's essay was never published, there were no reviews either. Seventy years later, only his biographer Sascha Kirchner subjected “his great essay on Hitler's Germany” to a more detailed analysis.

The essay was aimed at a wider audience. Thomas Mann's daughter Erika Mann admonished Bruno Frank in a letter: “Are you thinking of our brochure? and do you also think that our illiterate compatriots should be addressed quite simply? I mean, I believe: the more directly you address them and the more directly you go into their daily life with everything you say, the better you will touch them. ”Bruno Frank names things by name in his contribution and substantiates his theses concrete facts and events. Thomas Mann found Frank's essay "just the right thing, worthy and common understandable", and his daughter said: "It will have a good effect."

The first two chapters of the pamphlet are literally peppered with facts. It remains to be seen whether he could have reached others than those who were already convinced. In the third chapter, Bruno Frank develops a daring thesis about the state of mind of the German people, which in his opinion had already come to an end with the Nazi regime. Sascha Kirchner says: “In the third part of the essay, Frank suggested - undoubtedly with a view to the German readership - that with the invasion of Prague, the dictator had now discredited himself not only in front of the world, but also in front of his own people. That was just as much wishful thinking as the talk of the imminent end of the regime. ”Bruno Frank's evocation of the cultural heritage of the Germans, which is perceived abroad as representative of the German people, is completely bold. "He encouraged his potential readers", says Sascha Kirchner, yes, he tried to instill courage himself. What he wrote was well meant, but the helplessness of the humane gentleman in front of the monster screams out every line.

The language and style of his polemical pamphlet are very unusual for the circumstances of an otherwise measured writer like Bruno Frank. He is consistently at the level of an agitator, even if he often gives factual reasons. His settlement with the Nazis is interspersed with contemptuous terms for their leader (man from the gutter, the work-shy tramp, the poisonous tramp brother, chief). His characterization of Hitler's rhetoric is unsurpassable: "The hysterical comedian he is, he has received one single gift from nature: to lie up through screaming, screeching and howling convulsions into states of excitement, which he controls in an ice-cold manner."

literature

See also: Bruno Frank, literature .

• Thomas Mann : Brother Hitler. In: Peter de Mendelssohn (editor): Collected works: in individual volumes. Frankfurt edition. To the moral world: political writings and speeches in exile. Afterword by Hanno Helbling. Frankfurt am Main 1986, pages 253-260.
• Hans Wysling (editor): Thomas Mann / Heinrich Mann. Correspondence 1900–1949. Frankfurt am Main 1984.

Footnotes

1. ↑ # Wysling 1984 , pp. 268-269.
2. ↑ #Wysling 1984 , page 269th
3. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , pages 284–285.
4. ↑ #BF M 4 .
5. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 284.
6. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , pages 284–287.
7. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 284.
8. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 285.
9. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 286.
10. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 286.