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psychotic delusion about the Jews. It's something I find utterly incom–
prehensible. We don't have the conceptual tools. As to Dr. Ash's intol–
erance for ambiguity: I would like to recommend a book that was re–
cently published by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas,
Being a Charac–
ter.
He talks about the fascist state of mind, which oversimplifies things.
Mitchell Ash:
Yes, but this does not refute what I said. If you remem–
ber the proceedings of the experiments you cited, those students were
persuaded to torture other people because they were told it was neces–
sary. But there was a follow-up experiment, I think in the early 1970s,
where a person who knew about the conditions and enlightened the
other participants and asked whether they thought what they were do–
ing was right, and suggested they should think about it. The response
was surprising. About sixty percent of the participants were hesitant to
continue that experiment.
David Gress:
Any questions for Wilfried Bredow? All of the discussion
so far has been on psychology. Perhaps we could combine that with a
question about politics.
Gaspar TaIllas:
I just want to make a comment on your quotation
from Franz Neumann, which, I think, is important in shaping the future
of democracy everywhere. This is the relationship between the
Reichsstaat
and democracy and what is called constitutional fetishism. First of all, I
always get slightly uneasy when I say
Reichsstaat
in English. The word ac–
tually comes from the German translation of Edmund Burke, which ren–
dered the words "rule of law" as
Reichsstaat.
It means only that in Ger–
many and in new democracies there again was a firm attitude that tried
to anchor basic rights and liberties, and and to prescribe in detail what
these should be. Well, this is caused by fear. We lived in countries where
there were no guarantees under the law. So I think we should have
some understanding of legal and constitutional fetishism and the
tendency by the framers of constitutions in new democracies to anchor
every little detail in the constitutional text, because we don't trust the
texture, the fabric of society, our habits, our traditions, our mental
makeup.
David Gress:
Does anyone want to respond?
Jeffrey Herf:
About German unification. Mikail Gorbachev gets the li–
on's share of credit in a great deal of commentary, but I was pleased to
