Hermann Ahlwardt
THE SEMITIC VERSUS THE TEUTONIC RACE
In the following reading, Hermann
Ahlwardt (1846—1914), an anti-Semitic member of the Reichstag and author of The
Desperate Struggle Between Aryan and Jew, addresses the chamber on March 6,
1895, with a plea to close Germany’s borders to Jewish immigrants. His speech
reflects the anti-Semitic rhetoric popular among German conservatives before
World War I. The material in parentheses is by Paul W. Massing, translator and
editor.
It is certainly true that there are
Jews in our country of whom nothing adverse can be said. Nevertheless, the Jews
as a whole must be considered harmful, for the racial traits of this people are
of a kind that in the long run do not agree with the racial traits of the
Teutons. Every Jew who at this very moment has not as yet transgressed is
likely to do so at some future time under given circumstances because his
racial characteristics drive him on in that direction….
My political friends do not hold the
view that we fight the Jews because of their religion. . . . We would not dream
of waging a political struggle against anyone because of his religion. . . . We
hold the view that the Jews are a different race, a different people with
entirely different character traits.
Experience in all fields of nature
shows that innate racial characteristics which have been acquired by the race
in the course of many thousands of years are the strongest and most enduring
factors that exist, and that therefore we can rid ourselves of the
characteristics of our race no more than can the Jews. One need not fight the
Jew individually, and we are not doing that, by the way. But, when countless
specimens prove the existence of certain racial characteristics and when these
characteristics are such as to make impossible a common life, well, then I
believe that we who are natives here, who have tilled the soil and defended it
against all enemies—that we have a duty to take a stand against the Jews who
are of a quite different nature.
We Teutons are rooted in the
cultural soil of labor. . . . The Jews do not believe in the culture of labor,
they do not want to create values themselves, but want to appropriate, without
working, the values which others have created; that is the cardinal difference
that guides us in all our considerations….
Herr Deputy Rickert[1]
here has just expounded how few Jews we have altogether and that their number
is steadily declining. Well, gentlemen, why don’t you go to the main business
centers and see for yourselves whether the percentages indicated by Herr
Rickert prevail there too. Why don’t you walk along the Leipzigerstrasse (in
Berlin) or the Zeil in Frankfurt and have a look at the shops? Wherever there
are opportunities to make money, the Jews have established themselves, but not
in order to work—no, they let others work for them and take what the others
have produced
by their labor.
Deputy Hasse . . . has committed the
grave mistake of putting the Jews and other peoples on the same level, and that
is the worst mistake that we could possibly make.
The Jews have an attitude toward us
which differs totally from that of other peoples. It is one thing when a Pole,
a Russian, a Frenchman, a Dane immigrates to our country, and quite another
thing when a Jew settles here.
Once our (Polish, etc.) guests have
lived here for ten, twenty years, they come to resemble us. For they have stood
with us on the same cultural soil of labor. . . . After thirty, forty years
they have become Germans and their grandchildren would be indistinguishable
from us except for the strange-sounding names they still bear. The Jews have
lived here for 700, 800 years but have they become Germans? Have they placed
themselves on the cultural soil of labor? They never even dreamed of such a
thing; as soon as they arrived, they started to cheat and they have been doing
that every since they have been in Germany....
The Jews should not be admitted, whether or not there is overpopulation, for
they do not belong to a productive race, they are exploiters, parasites….
(Answering Rickert’s arguments that
. . . it would be a shame if fifty million Germans were afraid of a few Jews,
Ahlwardt continued:)…
Herr Rickert, who is just as tall as
I am, is afraid of one single cholera bacillus—well, gentlemen, the Jews are
just that, cholera bacilli!
Gentlemen, the crux of the matter is
Jewry’s capacity for contagion and exploitation….
How many thousands of Germans have
perished as a result of this Jewish exploitation, how many may have hanged
themselves, shot themselves, drowned themselves, how many may have ended by the
wayside as tramps in America or drawn their last breath in the gutter, all of
them people who had worked industriously on the soil their fathers had
acquired, perhaps in hundreds of years of hard work. . . . Don’t you feel any
pity for those countless Germans? Are they to perish unsung? Ah, why were they
foolish enough to let themselves be cheated? But the Germans are by no means so
foolish, they are far more intelligent than the Jews. All inventions, all great
ideas come from the Germans and not from the Jews. No, I shall tell you the
national difference: The German is fundamentally trusting, his heart is full of
loyalty and confidence. The Jew gains this confidence, only to betray it at the
proper moment, ruining and pauperizing the German. This abuse of confidence on
the part of the Jews is their main weapon. And these Jewish scoundrels are to
be defended here! Is there no one to think of all those hundreds of thousands,
nor of those millions of workers whose wages grow smaller and smaller because
Jewish competition brings the prices down? One always hears: you must be humane
toward the Jews. The humanitarianism of our century . . . is our curse. Why
aren’t you for once humane toward the oppressed? You’d better exterminate those
beasts of prey and you’d better start by not letting any more of them into our
country.
(Taking issue with the liberals’
argument of Jewish achievements in the arts, Ahlwardt declared:)
Art in my opinion is the capacity
for expressing one’s innermost feelings in such a way as to arouse the same
feelings in the other person. Now the Jewish world of emotions (Gefühlswelt)
and the Teutonic world of emotions are two quite different things. German art
can express only German feelings; Jewish art only Jewish feelings. Because
Jewry has been thrusting itself forward everywhere, it has also thrust itself
forward in the field of art and therefore the art that is now in the foreground
is Jewish art. Nowadays the head of a family must be very careful when he
decides to take his family to the theater lest his Teutonic feelings be
outraged by the infamous Jewish art that has spread everywhere.
The Jew is no German. If you say,
the Jew was born in Germany, he was nursed by a German wetnurse, he abides by
German laws, he has to serve as a soldier—and what kind of a soldier at that!
let’s not talk about it—he fulfills all his obligations, he pays his taxes—then
I say that all this is not the crucial factor with regard to his nationality;
the crucial factor is the race from which he stems. Permit me to make a rather
trite comparison which I have already used elsewhere in my speeches: a horse
that is
born in a cowshed is far from being
a cow.
A Jew who was born in Germany does
not thereby become a German; he is still a Jew. Therefore it is imperative that
we realize that Jewish racial characteristics differ so greatly from ours that
a common life of Jews and Germans under the same laws is quite impossible
because the Germans will perish….
I beg you from the bottom of my
heart not to take this matter lightly but as a very serious thing. It is a
question of life and death for our people….
We wouldn’t think of going as far as
have the Austrian anti-Semites in the Federal Council (Reichsrat) and to move
that a bounty be paid for every Jew shot or to decree that he who kills a Jew
shall inherit his property. We have no such intention. We shall not go as far
as that. What we want is a clear and reasonable separation of the Jews from the
Germans. An immediate prerequisite is that we slam the door and see to it that
no more of them get in.[2]
[1] Heinrich Rickert, a leader of the Progressives and an outspoken opponent of anti-Semitism, had pointed out that the Jews constituted only 1.29 percent of the population of Prussia. What enraged the German Right was that the Jews accounted for 9.58 percent of the university students in Prussia.
[2] At the end of the debate a vote was taken, with 218 representatives present. Of these, 51 voted for, 167 against the motion.