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into dogma, not the other way around. The exploitation of man by the
state in place of exploitation of man by man did not lead to positive
results. The absorption of private property by the state led not only to
economic disaster, but to people becoming the property of the state. In
place of banal political demagoguery between parties, we had absolute
demagoguery of the one-party system. The cultural chaos of the free–
market economy, the vulgarity, cacophony, and commerce, was replaced
by the ideological censor, the schizophrenia of taboos and enforced
complicity. And the abolition of selfish competition through the intro–
duction of the Party Book led to pathological perversion that in the end
ruined the entire structure of society.
To call the terror "bad" is an understatement.
It
was brutal, bloody,
crazy, grotesque. Not just the Stalinist terror with its nightmarish Gulag,
not just the crimes in China and Cambodia or in the "Marxist" African
states, but the everyday terror of surveillance and suspicion protected by
a legislation serving only the party authority, never the individual.
The understandable discontent many have today with advanced cap–
italism-with all its contradictions and conflicts, repulsive cynicism,
and total domination by capital-should never lead to another Com–
munist experiment. There are, I still dare hope, more sensible ways to
change than that which transforms the bad into the worst.
EK: What is your relationship with present-day Germany?
NM: With the Holocaust, Germany became inextricably chained to the
fate of the Jews.
I
can't answer that question simply as an individual, as
I always like to do.
The Holocaust came at the end of an intensive cultural Germaniza–
tion of the Jews stretching back over centuries. Heine believed that Jews
and Germans were the two "ethical peoples" of Europe, who together
would construct the spiritual citadel of the continent. There is no trace
of his otherwise ever-present irony when he claims that old Palestine
itself had been a "Germany of the Orient." In the Hitler years, Leo
Baeck, the last great German rabbi before the catastrophe, changed his
habit of reading a passage from a Greek tragedy after his morning
prayer into one in which he recited passages from texts of biblical
prophets alongside Kant, Goethe, and Schiller. How many Jewish intel–
lectuals didn't see a perfect harmony between Kant and Judaism?
German culture seemed to be on the path to Germanness, and even
the perfection of Judaism. Thus, all the more shocking was the National
Socialist catastrophe. Understandably, then, the survivors of the Holo-
