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be quoted and paraphrased by anti-Semites and by self-hating Jews like
Walther Rathenau for the next six decades:
Year after year th ere pours over our Eastern fron–
tier ... from the inexhaustible Polish cradle, a host of ambitious,
trouser-selling youths, whose children and children's children are
one day to dominate Germany's stock exchanges and newspa–
pers .... Right into the most educated circles, among men who
would reject with disgust any thought of ecclesiastical intolerance or
national pride, we can hear, as if from one mouth, "The Jews are our
misforLune. "
Ein Wort ilber unser Judentum. (1880)
Mommsen challenged Treitschke in open letters and in a pamphlet,
Auch ein Wort uber unser Judentum
(1880). But he was skeptical and
full of despair about the prospects of answering the anti-Semites with
rational arguments. Some years later he expressed his sense of futility
to the writer Hermann Bahr with full appreciation of the psychologi–
cal nature of the emotions they were trying to counter. He told Bahr:
You are mistaken, if you believe that I could achieve
anything in this matter. You are mistaken if you assume that
anything at all could be achieved by reason. In years past I thought
so myself and kept protesting against the monstrous infamy thal is
anti-Semitism. But it is useless, completely useless. Whatever I or
anybody else could tell you are in the last analysis reasons, logical
and ethical arguments to which no anti-Semite will listen . They
listen only to their own hatred and envy, to the meanest instincts.
Nothing else counts for them.... There is no protection against the
mob, be it the mob of the streets or of the parlors.
Canaille
remains
canaille.
It
is a horrible epidemic, like cholera-one neither can
explain nor cure it.
The essence of the crippling effect of persecution is that the victim
internalizes in his own self-image and conduct the values of the
persecutor. The sadist and the masochist form an exquisite dyad in
which each identifies with parts of the other in executing the act of
humiliation.
The twentieth-century analogue to the musical relationship of
Hermann Levi and Richard Wagner was the collaboration between
Stefan Zweig and Richard Strauss. In 1931 Strauss was desperately
looking for a librettist to replace Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who had
died in 1929. Strauss, who was sixty-seven, felt his ability to continue to
compose depended on collaboration with an author who could inspire
him. He knew that he no longer had the creative freshness required for
