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”:
“One party blames the shortcomings in the economy and the problems in the administration on the other and finally on those who, despite all the obstacles, do their daily work with dutiful loyalty. It is here with wage earners and employees, where it is easy to juggle the books, that the financial screws are applied. Why are there so many Jews sitting in the government and in the administration? Because these people have an instinct that tells them that there is something to be earned.” (20 Nov. 1929)
Göll got to anti-Semitism before he got to the Nazis, who were a marginal party in 1929, but he was an adherent of Nazism by the time he wrote the following commentary on current events in 1932. He seemed to be passing along knowledge that he considered obvious:
“What is Jewish being and what distinguishes it from the German? . . . What the Germans find so repugnant and dangerous about the Jews is their elaborate and immoral business conduct. In business, the Jew always employs the means of camouflage, opening back doors, laying traps, and exploiting ruthlessly. . . . The Jew is simply more intelligent, someone who has a more pronounced instinct to gain personal advantage.” (10 Oct. 1932)
Later, with the establishment of the Third Reich, Göll is no longer sure about Nazism and mocks its anti-Semitism, but without completely getting rid of the “us/them” schema. After anti-Jewish pogroms in 1938, he wrote:
“There are no empty spaces in nature . . . now that we have squeezed the Jews out of their specific economic living space, a vacuum has been created . . . that is, the racial Jews have been pushed out and suitable ‘new Jews’ will fill this gap once again.” (14 Dec. 1938).
For Göll, the “new Jews” were the Nazis, but he still evoked the power of the “old Jews.” With Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Göll saw much more clearly. Few German diaries passed on this specific knowledge about the Final Solution:
“It is an open secret that they are proceeding against the Jews in the most rigorous way with sterilization, removal to the eastern territories . . . expropriation by the state of private inheritances, jewelry, and other valuables. The National Socialists are actually masters in the expropriation of private property, the exploitation of human beings, and other machinations.” (3 July 1941)
The entry is reminiscent of Paul Celan’s line from his poem “Death Fugue” (written in 1944), “Death is a Master from Germany.” Göll concluded the diary entry at this point with the words “Germany, awake!” Even so, Göll never completely got rid of his anti-Semitism. Long after the war, in 1977, he mused:
“Now that some distance has been gained from the Third Reich, we have to admit that back then Jewish influence in certain sectors such as medicine, law, banking, culture (theater, film, media, science), and politics represented a brewing danger for our own way of life, whereby I certainly do not want to reevaluate or excuse the inhumane implementation of the final solution to the Jewish question.” (17 Jan. 1977)
This is very careful, awkward phrasing, suggesting considerable agreement with the premises of Hitler’s anti-Jewish actions.