Harvard University Press Blog

Killing for Coal, in Prime-Time

A new television show in the hard, dirty men doing hard, dirty work genre premieres tonight on the Spike network. The show, called Coal, follows a company of West Virginia miners as they face the dangers of their work. A description from Spike’s website:

Every aspect of the job will be covered, from the dangers behind the super-charged explosions needed to open surface mines, to the well-publicized daily dangers of working in the dark recesses of the earth's crust in a traditional shaft mine. As they face the daily pressure to keep the mine up and running and their workers safe, family men Crowder and Roberts will rely on the support of their loved ones to tackle the mine's daily demands.

And their trailer:

 

Certainly looks like the makings of great television. Drama, daring, dirt. And the very real threat of serious danger to men you can't help but like. The show is laced with human interest, with its focus on the miner’s lives and families, but that danger is really the hook. The show’s marketing material is full of miners matter-of-factly explaining that they’ll die in that tunnel, and with mine collapses ever-present in the news it’s hard not to take them at their word.

That threat of danger is what’s driven the success of shows like Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, and Ax Men, all also from the creators of Coal. In a smart piece earlier this week Dana Jennings remarked on the vaguely educational promise of these shows (some of them run on the History channel), and also on the rarity of seeing and hearing working class men discuss their difficult lives on television. But, as Jennings notes, the men on these shows “end up as commodified as the natural resources that control their destinies.”

It’s an interesting take, as Jennings notes that the featured miners apparently aren’t paid for their appearance in the series. Which isn’t to say they don’t benefit from the exposure. They are men who clearly take rightful pride in their work, and we shouldn’t discount the ability of this type of theater to bolster it. But given the countless number of miners whose lives have been taken by our unending need for energy, it’s more than a little unsettling to have their days now offered as vicarious thrills for our Wednesday nights.

The William Cronon Affair

Last week in this space we heard from Christopher Newfield about the deliberate unmaking of public higher education through increasingly drastic budget cuts. As many of you who follow academia are surely already aware, there’s a troubling assault on public education proceeding right now on a different front, in the form of the Wisconsin Republican Party’s attempted intimidation of University of Wisconsin–Madison professor William Cronon.

On March 21st a Cronon-penned op-ed ran in the New York Times. In the piece, titled “Wisconsin’s Radical Break,” Cronon brought a historical perspective to bear on the effort to strip public employees in Wisconsin of their right to collectively bargain. As Cronon explained, the push is at odds with the past of the Wisconsin Republican Party, which was the force behind many of the state’s 20th century advances:

“Wisconsin was at the forefront of the progressive reform movement in the early 20th century, when the policies of Gov. Robert M. La Follette prompted a fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, to call the state a ‘laboratory of democracy.’ The state pioneered many social reforms: It was the first to introduce workers’ compensation, in 1911; unemployment insurance, in 1932; and public employee bargaining, in 1959.”

Cronon contrasted that past with the actions of Governor Scott Walker:

“Wisconsinites have long believed that common problems deserve common solutions, and that when something needs fixing, we should roll up our sleeves and work together — no matter what our politics — to achieve the common good…  Mr. Walker’s conduct has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War.”

Cronon’s denunciation of the Wisconsin Republican Party’s “abusively nontransparent” exercise of power is scathing, to be sure, but it was built on a fair-minded account of the state’s past. In other words, William Cronon’s op-ed is exactly what we need public historians to do. His was a call for a return to openness in a state that has long valued it.

Cronon’s op-ed wasn’t from out of the blue, as a week prior he’d written similarly on his blog, aptly titled Scholar as Citizen. In response to Cronon’s increasingly public writing, the Wisconsin Republican Party has made their own push towards openness: they want to open Cronon’s email. Specifically, under Wisconsin’s open records law, they have demanded “Copies of all emails into and out of Prof. William Cronon's state email account from January 1, 2011 to present which reference any of the following terms: Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell.”

As explained over at Daily Kos:

“It's hard to conceptualize this as anything but an attempt by the Republican Party of Wisconsin to discredit all of their critics by looking for a couple of questionable emails in the personal files of one of their critics. Further, the request cuts against the spirit of transparency laws, which are intended to help relatively powerless individuals learn about the activities of very powerful organizations. In this case, a very powerful organization, the Republican Party of Wisconsin, is using the law to go after one of it's [sic] relatively powerless critics.”

An Ordinary Berliner on the Nazi Exhibition of "Degenerate Art"

In The Turbulent World of Franz Göll, historian Peter Fritzsche sifts through the lifetime of diaries kept by an ordinary twentieth century Berliner. A few weeks back, Fritzsche offered excerpts from the diaries to present the evolution of Göll’s attitude towards Germany’s Jews. Below, he gives us Göll’s thoughts on his 1938 visit to the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibition staged by the Nazis as an attack on modernism.

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Hitler’s Third Reich wove a series of extraordinary spectacles through the fabric of daily life. The Nuremberg Rallies, May Day rallies, and Führer birthday celebrations all attempted to testify to the unity and enthusiasm of the German population. Huge propaganda exhibitions also aimed to show Germans new, more racially sound ways of looking at the world. One of these was the exhibit on “Degenerate Art,” which opened in Munich in summer 1937 (the cover of the exhibit program is pictured at right). The exhibit was designed as a horror show of modern art, which the Nazis believed was unhealthy because non-representational, abstract, and cosmopolitan. The pictures, including paintings by Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee, were hung to produce a chaotic, dizzying effect. Since the exhibit was closed to children, it had a built-in shock appeal, and most of the three million Germans who visited probably walked through the exhibit room snickering their outrage and incomprehension. But aside from the propaganda barrages produced by the exhibit itself, historians do not really know how individual Germans reacted. However, the diarist Franz Göll left behind a revealing and lengthy response upon visiting the exhibit when it arrived in Berlin.

On the eve of Germany’s march into Austria in March 1938, Franz Göll took a look to see what all the fuss was about. His response:

“Supported by the Propaganda Ministry and organized by the Nazi Party, the exhibit is designed to arouse the regime’s abhorrence of the mentality of this sort of art among the broad masses and to justify, substantiate, and strengthen the required opposition . . . The exhibit displays . . . a picture, ‘The War.’ This picture is not pretty; it is horror-inducing, shattering. But the repulsion you feel is not because of the representation, but the subject of representation, war with its ruination and destruction of property, blood, and soul. It presents a cross-section of the war, not as the general staff would see it, for whom the individual is merely materiél to be thrown into battle, but as the front soldier experiences it.” (12 March 1938)

In front of Otto Dix’s masterpiece, Franz came to the extraordinary conclusion:

“The picture is not a bloody-minded depiction of the degenerate, war is.”

He continued on through the exhibit:

“Moreover, there is another picture to be seen, entitled ‘War Cripple.’ Today one sees this picture as mocking the war wounded. But I actually read it as depicting the great and quiet spiritual tragedy in the life of a severely wounded war veteran. A picture of great sadness that really strikes a chord. A war invalid who wants to tenderly draw his wife to him with his prosthetic arms. He awkwardly places his artificial arm outfitted with a claw hook around his wife. From their expressions, it is obvious that this caress is not regarded as a moment of bliss, but as a painful disappointment over a happiness that is gone forever.”

Historians have almost no responses of ordinary Germans to the exhibit. However, Franz Göll’s diary provides one extraordinary example. It shows that Germans by no means all believed the propaganda they were fed and could use the propaganda to come to their own, even diametrically opposed opinions. Göll sympathized with the weak and vulnerable, the frightened soldier and the wounded veteran, and he recalled Dix’s vision when he recorded the news of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, a war that Hitler believed would leave only the “Annihilated” and the “Survivors.”

Design Across The Pond

Recently the folks at Flavorwire laid out a side-by-side comparison of US and UK book jackets, prompting our friends down the road at the Harvard Book Store to ask “Why are British book covers always so much cooler?”

To that we say “Ouch.” And respectfully offer some side-by-sides of our own, just off the tops of our heads.  HUP on the left, UK editions on the right.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, US versus UK book design...

We like our side of the pond just fine on that front.  

In fact, we liked that sheep design up there enough to make a little slideshow about it last year:

 

Further Unmaking the Public University

We published Christopher Newfield’s Unmaking the Public University a  few short years ago, just as the country was descending into a financial crisis that has had enormous implications for public higher education.  We’ve just released a paperback edition, and so we invited Newfield to explain some of what's occurred since the book’s original publication.

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Unmaking the Public University appeared in mid-2008, and offered a genealogy of this pivotal institution’s unsustainable financial and cultural situation. Since then, that situation has gone from bad to worse. There is some good news that I will discuss, but mostly we have seen the undesired validation of the book’s main claim that the public university hadn't just hit an economic rough patch in the 2000s, but was being systematically unmade. Reviewing the convergence of the cultural and financial campaigns, I also claimed that this unmaking has been intentional.

The book explains in detail that we have been witnessing a decades-old effort to give the public university a lesser place in American society, which in turn downgraded its major social creation, a racially-mixed mass middle class, one whose professional knowledge and cultural sophistication had by the 1960s entitled its members to a much larger slice of the political and economic pie. The crisis that surfaced with the collapse of Lehman brothers in the fall of 2008 has created widespread awareness of the threat to the future of the mass middle class that I described in the book.

One arm of the pincers movement I described—the budget war—has intensified in the wake of the financial meltdown. What we can call the Great Liability Shift from private to public debt now provides an automatic, one-size-fits-all justification of any scale of public burning of state outlays, from the nearly 20% one-year cut offered to California higher education by Democratic governor Jerry Brown, to the delirious 52% cut currently proposed by Pennsylvania’s Republican governor for the state’s flagship campus.

The other arm of the pincers movement—the culture wars—has found new life in widespread attacks on the public sector in general and on teachers in particular. Public sector workers—teachers and also nurses, firefighters, paramedics, psychological counselors, surveyors, assessors, just for starters—typify the skilled workforce that the post-war public university helped to make solidly middle class. The current campaign to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees is a campaign not simply to reduce the cost of the public sector but to reduce its confidence, status, and perceived value to the society as a whole. This attempt at a wholesale cultural demotion of the public sphere includes the continuing deprofessionalization of teaching through the reduction of teacher control over the classroom, but is not limited to that. We are witnessing an increasing—and increasingly desperate—effort to discredit a core belief of democratic culture, which is that the public sector plays a formative role in social development.

Unmaking shows how the conjunction of the American right’s cultural and budgetary crusades created traps into which middle class voters and higher education officials have fallen again and again. Middle class voters found it convenient to forget that economic advancement depends on the general provision of high-quality health, educational and other services that only the public sector will provide. They have in effect been voting for the increasing mediocrity of non-elite higher education that has undermined their own ability to compete. Similarly, higher education officials still appear to believe their own claim that cuts in public funding for public universities can be replaced with private funds, if only these are pursued with sufficient entrepreneurial zeal.

Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection

The general story we tell about boys’ friendships does not include a lot of intimacy. We tend to think boys mostly bond over sports and roughhousing. Not a lot of emotional vulnerability there, we think; that's for girls’ friendships. Niobe Way’s Deep Secrets is an ethnographic study of boys’ friendships that helps us to rewrite those stories we tell.

As Way learned through years of watching boys develop, their friendships in early adolescence are often marked by intense emotional feeling. She quotes a fifteen year old as saying of his closest friend “My best friend and I love each other. That’s it. You have this thing that is deep. So deep it’s within you. You can’t explain it… I guess in life sometimes two people can really really understand each other, and really have a trust respect and love for each other. It just happens, it’s human nature.” Such responses are typical of 14 and 15 year old boys, she found.

However, usually around age 16 boys begin to experience what Way calls a “crisis of connection” as they grow up and encounter the pressures imposed by our hypermasculine culture. Boys, in other words, are not “naturally” emotionally detached and “independent”; rather, they learn how to be this way, at the cost of their relationships with their friends. The consequences can be extreme, as Way notes that the suicide rate for boys in late adolescence spikes to four to five times the rate of girls just at the age when boys lose the emotional language that they had in early and middle adolescence.

We had a conversation about the topic with Niobe Way on the Harvard Press Podcast, which you can hear by clicking the icon below, or pointing your browser here.

 HUP Podcast - Niobe Way

As she explains in the conversation, the crisis being faced by boys and young men is not necessarily their lack of male role models, as is often assumed. What boys need, she says, is what everyone needs: “People that allow them to express a full range of human capacity. So (they) are allowed to be empathic, allowed to be emotional. Have intimate friendships, express the desire for those intimate friendships. They need models in their lives that foster those kinds of human needs and allow boys to thrive.”

Those models don't have to be men. Way shows how, in fact, male role models sometimes can compound the problem, in that they’re often products of this same culture and thus can serve to reinforce the crisis of connection. Deep Secrets helps us to break through the stereotypes around the dominant culture of masculinity that all too often result in strict and harmful images of boys and men in society. The book tells a sadly unfamiliar story that has important implications for parents, teachers, and others who work with and live with boys.

William Stuntz [1958-2011]: An Enduring Search for Wisdom and Mercy

Harvard Law School Professor William J. Stuntz died of cancer at age 52 on March 15th. Elizabeth Knoll, HUP Senior Editor for the Behavioral Sciences and Law, writes below of Professor Stuntz’s important forthcoming book, and of his determination to complete it in the time that he had.

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When I last saw Bill, at a law school workshop some months ago, he was deep in conversation with a colleague. At one point he laughed, and I thought, “For a dying man you look amazingly alive.”

He stayed wholeheartedly alive and engaged with the world until the end. He talked about his approaching death as matter-of-factly as most of us would talk about an inconvenient business trip–in fact, with a lot less complaining. What he seemed to want most was to be with his family and to finish his book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, which we will publish this September.

In the book, Bill argues that the liberal Warren Court’s emphasis on procedural protections for those accused of crimes, followed by a backlash of increasingly draconian criminal legislation and law enforcement, has created an overburdened and unjust system in which too many people—especially poor black men—are imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. Jury trials have all but vanished, to be replaced by plea bargaining deals. If you are arrested and charged, and you don’t have a lawyer, you will almost certainly end up having to plead guilty to something. On the other hand, defendants with resources can often focus on procedural issues to avoid facing the substance of the case against them. With pungent insights on every page, Bill’s book is a clear-eyed, rigorous, and humane account of how truly unjust our system has become.

As Bill shows, the disparities that result from our system affect victims as well as the accused. He noted as much in a post on his blog a couple of years back:

The bottom line is as simple as it is awful: When whites are robbed, raped, beaten, and killed, their victimizers are usually punished. When the same crimes happen to blacks, the usual result is: nothing. No arrest, no prosecution, no conviction.

The Collapse of American Criminal Justice documents more thoroughly than any previous study the developments that have led us to this point and the reforms required to work towards a more just system.

As Bill would surely agree, no one really writes a book alone (at least not a book that’s any good). Everyone needs help. The best books are written by the people who have the best friends. Being acutely–if not excessively–aware of his possible blind spots, Bill sought and heeded advice. When the three outside reviews arranged for by HUP gave him praise as well as warnings, his response characteristically thanked the reviewers for their generosity, and spent five times as much space judiciously considering their criticisms. Not every author of Bill's stature is so willing to listen so carefully to people who disagree with him.

He sent us the final manuscript in the week that he went on hospice care. He admitted wryly that he would be looking for distraction, so in the next few weeks we sent possible titles, catalog copy, and art back and forth by email. He wrote of Jill Breitbarth’s jacket design, “The more I look at it, the better I like it. The trees connote prison bars, but they are also living, breathing things. And the picture has something of the sense of sinking, as though the water were rising and cannot be stopped.”

One afternoon about eighteen months ago, as we were talking about the incomplete first draft of the manuscript, Bill worried aloud about how he could finish it, given his limited time. “I don’t want to publish a bad posthumous book,” he said, with a little frown.

It’s safe to say that he won’t. The waters rose around him at last, but his book will remain. Its extraordinary astuteness, range, and sense of justice are a testament to the enduring search for wisdom and mercy. Many of us can only see and hope for wisdom and mercy in the human realm. Bill could sometimes glimpse it in the divine.

As he always said, he was a fortunate man.

Tuning in to Cricket Radio

It’s the second beautiful day in a row here in Cambridge, cause for outright glee in these heavily wintered parts. Spring can’t be too far off, soon after that will be summer, and somewhere in all this weather will come those night-singing insects, the crickets and katydids. These bugs emit such beautiful calls, but we usually tune them out, mostly noticing them only as a signal of silence. It’s a strange thing, really, how the presence of these distinct calls largely illustrates for us a broader absence of noise. John Himmelman’s new book, Cricket Radio, is all about tuning back in.

Himmelman, the author and illustrator of dozens of nature books, explains the human brain’s propensity for tuning out ever-present sounds and then makes the case for how and why we should reawaken our brains to the sounds of these night-singers. As Himmelman tells it, opening our ears to insect calls can be more than just an escape from the cacophony of modern life. It can be a little bridge to the sounds of the past. He’s driven by a love for a neglected corner of our everyday lives, and is determined to share it.

And share it he does, in Cricket Radio. He takes us along with him as he hunts insects, through the silent approaches, the painstaking waits, and the frustration of a cricket bounding off before it can be properly photographed and recorded:

After every step or two, stop and listen. If the insect is still calling, chances are you haven’t been seen or heard yet. If it has stopped, don’t resume moving until it calls again. While you’re waiting for your original caller to begin singing, listen for others nearby, should you need to abandon that one. Giving up on a particular individual you may have been stalking for fifteen minutes is a tough call to make. You’ve already invested the time in this one. However, there’s a chance that if it remains silent for too long, it could be because you are right on top of it. If this is the case, it will stay hidden until you move on. Of course, as soon as you give up and move toward the next one, it will start calling again. I am not above swearing at a bug.

If you’ve never given it a second thought, crickets are just crickets. But cricketing is a lot like birding, in that there are vast numbers of these bugs, each with their own look and call.  Cricket Radio explains the endless variety, and Himmelman’s ability to tell them all apart by sight and by sound is fascinating. Each is distinct, and when Himmelman brings them home to observe more closely he has to build different types of environments for each. In the book’s last chapter, he explains how to build your own cricket radio at home, the perfect summer project for nature lovers. And don’t think you need pristine fields in which to hunt—one of the book’s best tales is of a chase that begins in a motel parking lot. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Himmelman’s “enchantment with the entomological soundscape is so complete that he can turn the most unpromising site—his Connecticut backyard, for example—into an insect lover's terra incognita, shimmering with possibility.”

To give you a sense of the variety of night-singing insects and the challenge of telling them all apart, we’ve put together a little web page where you can see and hear six different insects. Internet streaming cricket radio, if you will.  Bookmark the page and listen for awhile whenever you want some moments of calm or a shot of summer. But also to get yourself primed for appreciating the real bugs outside. Then find a copy of Cricket Radio when you’re ready for your next lesson in tuning in.

Listening to Louie on St. Patrick’s Day

George Bornstein’s The Colors of Zion is a challenge to the story told by the often-chronicled fissures in the relationships between Blacks, Jews, and Irish in the years from the Irish Famine until the end of World War II. In this revelatory transatlantic study, Bornstein shows that the sympathies and cooperative efforts between these three oppressed groups were far greater than generally acknowledged. In the piece below, Bornstein takes the occasion of St. Patrick’s Day to reflect on Louis Armstrong, who embodied the interethnic, cross-cultural affinity that The Colors of Zion documents.

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When making his breakthrough recordings with his Hot Five in 1926, young Louis Armstrong took care to include a new song on which he had collaborated with Percy Venable. Sandwiched between the better-known “You Made Me Love You” and “Willie the Weeper,” came “Irish Black Bottom,” a Celtic take on the original New Orleans jazz classic “Black Bottom.” With Armstrong breaking into raucous laughter at the line “And I was born in Ireland,” the tune ends with the lines, “All over Ireland you can see / The people dancin’ in / Cause Ireland’s gone Black Bottom Crazy now.”

The playful racial masquerade, a reversal of more traditional Irish contributions to blackface minstrelsy, signaled Armstrong’s lifelong artistic devotion to racial and cultural hybridity. “It’s no crime for cats of any color to get together and blow,” he once remarked. “Race-conscious jazz musicians? Nobody could be who really knew their horns and loved the music.”

Such boundary crossing started early for Satchmo. In an interview with Life magazine he listed among his early influences the all-white “Original Dixieland Jazz Band,” the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso and sopranos Amelita Galli-Curci and Luisa Tetrazzini (for whom the dish turkey tetrazzini is named), and especially “the Irish tenor, John McCormack—beautiful phrasing.” Later Armstrong became one of the first jazz musicians to play to large audiences in Ireland, with his wildly successful Belfast concert of 1962 and two shows in Dublin five years later attended by 4,000 people.

Armstrong’s connection to other groups than his own didn’t stop with the Irish. Perhaps most important among the others were Jews, beginning with the Karnovsky family who hired, mentored, and looked after him as a boy after he left the Colored Waif’s Home in New Orleans. According to his moving late memoir Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans they fed him regular meals and staked him to his first horn. In tribute to them he wore a Star of David around his neck regularly after that. The jazz photographer Herb Snitzer created a famous photo of Louis on bus tour in 1960 with striped white shirt open, cigarette in hand, and the necklace clearly visible. “He wore the Star his entire life,” recalled Snitzer. “He was the least prejudiced musician I ever knew.”

Satchmo practiced what he preached, welcoming musicians of all backgrounds into a majority African American enterprise. He even dedicated Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family to his Jewish manager Joe Glaser, calling him “the best friend that I've ever had.” Similarly, he featured in concerts and recorded numerous hits by white composers, including Irving Berlin's early “Alexander's Ragtime Band.” Louis recorded duets with Ella Fitzgerald of celebrated Berlin classics like “Cheek to Cheek,” “Isn't This a Lovely Day,” and “I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm.” He liked Jewish-themed songs, too, such as his “Shadrach” retelling of the Biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the Book of Daniel.

Such crossovers pervade the history of jazz and of popular music. The African American stride pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith born four years before Satchmo described his own ancestry as French, Spanish, Negro, and Mohawk Indian, calling himself “an American pianist” in the subtitle of his autobiography. After discovering that he had a Jewish ancestor too, he converted to Judaism, had a Bar Mitzvah, and even served as a cantor between jazz stints. Reciprocally, the Jewish-born clarinetist and saxophonist Mezz Mezrow, who briefly became Armstrong's manager, did his best to be as Black as possible. He moved to Harlem, married a Black woman, and even insisted in prison on being housed with African American inmates. Like Armstrong, he believed that jazz transcended color and brought one of the first mixed-race bands to Broadway. Mezzrow wrote of Jewish religious music that “when I add Negro inflections to it they fit so perfect, it thrills me.”

The linkages and mixtures favored by Armstrong and the others pervade our past. A son of Irish immigrants, mayor John Hynes of Boston slyly undercut fantasies of purity half a century ago in introducing at a rally the first Jew to become mayor of Dublin. “We have here with us two fine fellows—an Irishman and a Jew,” he told the crowd. “I give him to you now, Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe.” Satchmo would have agreed in his consistent opposition to barriers that divide us into separate categories. As he told a group of journalists who challenged his including Israel on a tour of the Mideast with his All Stars, “Let me tell you something, man. That horn. You see that horn? That horn ain't prejudiced. A note's a note in any language.”

The Making and Unmaking of an Anti-Semite

While conducting research in the state archives of Berlin in 2003, the historian Peter Fritzsche discovered the remarkably rich diary of an obscure Berliner named Franz Göll. The man was born in 1899, and kept the diary from 1916 until his death in 1984. As Fritzsche shows in his new book, The Turbulent World of Franz Göll, the diary is a remarkable record of Göll’s reactions to the history unfolding around him. In Göll’s evocative portraits of Germany’s political and ecomomic calamity, and also his documenting of his own frustrating experiences with work, war, sex, and consumerism, Fritzsche presents a complete picture of an “ordinary Berliner” living and writing the twentieth century.

While Göll’s writings often share the racialist logic of the Nazis—he tended to cast things in social Darwinist terms of the strong vs. the weak—his own feelings on Germany’s Jews varied over time. In the pre-war period, his diaries are openly anti-Semitic, but as WWII wore on, he became increasingly critical of the Final Solution without ever fully abandoning his tendency to think of people in strict racial categories. In the space below, Peter Fritzsche quotes from Göll’s diary to present the evolution of his attitude towards Germany’s Jews.

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As a young adult, in the years after the German Revolution, Franz Göll rejected anti-Semitism. In his political manifesto, “A Path to Salvation,” written in 1921, Göll explains:

“Several party factions believe that they have found the answer by waiting for the world revolution. But we cannot wait for prophetic events which lie in the dark womb of the future. . . Other party factions believe that we will be out of danger only if we restore the old regime. But we do not live in the past, but in the present and we should live for the future. There are also adherents of the opinion that they have found the way to internal and external liberation in anti-Semitism. . . . [Yet] every German has the right to be recognized and treated as a German. The savior of the German people can only be a man who embodies the concept of Germandom in our time. An idealist in character and a realist in ideology, he must force the parties to dissolve themselves through his strong and compelling greatness.” (20 Feb. 1921)

Göll did not distinguish between Germans and Jews, although he hankers for some sort of great man or “Führer” to save Germany.

However, in these years Franz also imagined vicious enemies who endangered the virtuous, beleaguered German people, an “us/them” schema which would enable his subsequent anti-Semitism. During the “Great Inflation” the enemies included:

“blowhards, the shammers, the wheeler-dealers, the prigs” (2 Feb. 1922)

During the “Golden Twenties,” a new cast of enemies had appeared:

“sports stars (boxers, cyclists, footballers etc) and unscrupulous go-getters” (10 Feb. 1930)

In the depths of the Great Depression, Göll switched the characters once again. Now the problem was:

“The ruthless hotshot, the con man, the spy, the Jew etc.” (22 March 1931)

Since 1922, the format of anti-German predator versus German prey had not changed, but by 1931 it contained anti-Semitic content. Indeed, already in 1929, Göll proved to be fluent in anti-Semitic diatribes, and distinguished between German and Jew. He moved effortlessly from the German party system to “the Jews”: