In the U.S., German scholars are constrained to teach only the works of Germans of Jewish background, their courses dwelling on persecution and genocide. Indeed, it is not too far fetched to suppose that German culture as a culture of Germans has disappeared entirely, replaced by the culture of the Holocaust. The Holocaust has not only become a quasi religion capable of eradicating the remnants of German culture, Jews have become sanctified as a people. (Kevin MacDonald, Preface to the paperback edition, The Culture of Critique).

The city of New Ulm, Minnesota, founded in 1854 by a group of German immigrants, is home to an imposing statue of the Germanic chieftain, Hermann. In the year 9AD, a coalition of Germanic tribes under Hermann for the first time in the history of the Germanic tribes ambushed and defeated three invading Roman legions commanded by Quinctilius Varus. The defeat, in the Teutoburger Forest, caused Caesar Augustus and his successors to forego conquering north central Europe. A new imperial policy changed European history for the people of central Europe, who developed independently of Roman rule.

In 1897, the Sons of Hermann, an American national fraternal organization of German Americans, proud of its heritage and desiring to keep it alive for future generations, commissioned a monumental statue of Hermann to be erected in a New Ulm city park. The Hermann Monument is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On September 24, 2009, a two thousand year ethnic celebration commemorating the victory of Hermann the German against foreign aggression took place in New Ulm, MN.

The Hermann Monument, New Ulm, Minnesota

The Hermann celebration was an isolated example of German ethnic identification in this country, even though Germans represent the largest ancestry group in the US. California and Texas have the largest populations of German origin, while the states of the Midwest, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Minnesota have the most concentrated German populations.

In spite of their numbers, however, the study of the language and literature of the German people has dropped drastically nationwide. In 2006, only 6% of students learning a foreign language nationwide were enrolled in German. Many schools no longer offer German as a subject of study. Some colleges have eliminated whole departments of German and replaced them with departments of non-European languages. The University of Southern California, for example, after dropping its doctoral program about a decade ago, recently eliminated its entire German department. Spanish, of course, continues to grow, though most of its speakers on this Continent are of non-European descent. The languages that are experiencing tremendous growth nationwide in numbers of learners include Mandarin, Japanese, Urdu, and Arabic.

What does this mean for people of European descent? Unfortunately, it means a serious loss of connection to their European heritage and culture. Language is intrinsically connected to ethnic identity and allegiance to the group with which one shares ancestral links. Even where modern day ethnic groups can claim no country of their own, as in the case of the Welsh, the Basques, and the Kurds, retaining their language has enabled these groups to remain viable.

The elimination of German from the curriculum is occurring even in those areas of the country which have a majority German-American population. Notwithstanding Garrison Keillor’s stereotype of Minnesota as majority Lutheran-Norwegian, Minnesota is actually home to 36.7% people of German ancestry. Those of Norwegian background total 17.3%, Irish 11.2%, Swedish 9.9%, and English 6.3% (US Census Bureau Report June, 2004).  A significant number of mestizos have taken residence in Minnesota since the last census, and the Federal Government has placed large numbers of Hmong, a South-east Asian people, and  Somalian Negroes into the Twin City area, no doubt altering the proportions somewhat. The largest faith group is Catholic. Jews comprise .9% of the population.

Suppressed during the two World Wars, German re-established its place as one of the two most popular languages after each War. Until recently, many of the students in German language courses were “heritage learners,” students who wanted to remain connected to the language of their forefathers. In addition, German, along with French, has always been considered a language of research and cultural refinement. Now, however, English has become the language of research, cultural refinement is passé, and economic interests have displaced cultural connections for Whites. Perhaps school districts are receiving directives to remove German. Possibly also the continuing revilement against Germans caused by the unceasing barrage of venomous anti-German Holocaust memoirs, films, and television programs has contributed to the decline in German language learning.

For whatever reasons, the result is that German has all but disappeared from public high schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Currently, of the seven public high schools in Minneapolis, all offer Spanish (multiple classes at each level), 6 offer French, 3 Mandarin, 2 Japanese, 1 Arabic, 1 Latin, 1 Ojibwe, (a Native American language), and 1 German. (See here.) The situation is similar in St. Paul. (See here.)

Like the public schools of the Twin Cities, the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, is a tax-supported institution and many of its 51,000 students are residents of the State.  UM does not appear on the Hillel list of the 60 colleges and universities with the largest Jewish student enrollments. In the past, significant numbers of high school German teachers were trained at this campus. Students who obtained their Ph.D. were frequently offered positions on the faculties of smaller Midwest colleges.

As mentioned earlier, a number of colleges in the country have eliminated their German departments entirely. Others have rescued them from extinction by changing their concentration away from the traditional study of language and literature to the vocational study of “Business German.” UM retains a foreign language requirement and the University’s German Department (German, Scandinavian and Dutch) continues to offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in language and literature.

The focus of its teaching and research has shifted, however, from analyzing literary merit to promulgating politically correct social causes. The following is a comment not only on the state of German studies, but an excellent case study of what university departments in the humanities have become — bastions of the left influenced deeply by Jewish concerns and by Jewish intellectual movements, particularly the Frankfurt School. The following dissertation titles, course descriptions, and faculty publications all reflect the change in direction which the study of German literature has taken.

[adrotate group=”1″]

Some recent representative dissertation titles include:

Toward a Multiculturalism for the 21^st Century: German and Scandinavian Literary Perspectives, 1990–2005

Projecting Deviance/Seeing Queerly: Homosexual Representation and Queer Spectatorship in 1950’s Germany

Reading and Revising the Topography of German culture: Christina Reining on Gender and Sexuality

Representing the Afro-German in Early West German Cinema

The Space of Words: Diaspora and Exile in the Works of Nelly Sachs

Off the Road: Remapping the Shoah Representation from the Perspectives of Ordinary Jewish Women

Negotiating the German-Jewish: the Uncomfortable Writing of Karl Emil Franzos

Writing against Objectification: German Jewish Identity in the Works of Grete Weil and Ruth Klueger

Represented here are the favorite topics of “cultural criticism”: sexism, racism, homophobia, diversity, immigration, multiculturalism, and Jewish victimization. No work from the rich canon of German literature is the subject of a dissertation. Sadly, the literary criticism that grew out of the Frankfurt School and has monopolized the interpretation of literature in English and foreign language literature departments for the last thirty years will no doubt continue. Complacent non-Jewish graduate students are being recruited and trained to enshrine the politically correct ideology permanently into the American University system.

Below is a quick overview of some key faculty members — all graduates of elite Eastern universities, who publish, teach graduate courses, and advise grad students on dissertations. They also recommend students for grants and fellowships and future employment. Quotations are from the annual magazine of the German Department.

Professor Ruth-Ellen Joeres, Department of German

“She has a vision about how to open up the canon of German Literature and a determination to rewrite history to include women….In Nov. 2006 an interdisciplinary conference titled, ‘Gender, Genre, and Political Transformation’was held in her honor… (on teaching Goethe’s Faust) she has the students read through the lens of their choice: Bakhtian, Freud, gender theory, or queer theory’…. I don’t believe in objectivity.”

Courses include:

Women Writers in German Literature: Writings and Films of Minority Women. “In this course the contributions of ‘German’ women of ethnic heritage such as Afro-German, Turkish-German, Japanese-German women are studied. What does it mean to be called, ‘German”?

Topics in Literature and Diversity: Diversity Troubles. One of the required texts for this course is the novel, Der Vorleser, by the contemporary German novelist, essayist, and judge, Bernard Schlink. Published in English in 2008, as The Reader, it was recently made into an American film. The novel deals with the guilt of an illiterate German woman for her actions in a German concentration camp. In 2005, while filming The Reader, Kate Winslet, its star, stated, “I don’t think we need another film about the Holocaust, do we? … No, I’m doing it because I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust (you’re) guaranteed an Oscar.” (She was right!)

Incidentally, in one of his essays, the author, Bernhard Schlink, son of a Protestant minister, makes the theologically astonishing claim that German guilt for the Holocaust is hereditary and will be carried by subsequent generations of Germans (Vergangenheitsschuld, Diogenes, Zürich, 2007). This inverts a fundamental teaching of Christianity. Christianity teaches that the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are the central events of history and that the Jews are forever responsible for the unforgivable crime of deicide. Schlink, however, suggests that Germans are and will be responsible for the Holocaust for all time, thus ostensibly substituting the Holocaust for the Crucifixion as history’s greatest crime and central event.

Professors Rembert Hueser and Richard McCormick, Department of German

These professors of German Film Studies specialize in feminism, Nazi Cinema, Weimar culture, and gender studies. Recent publications include, “Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity.

Courses include:

German Cinema of the Weimar Republic: Aesthetics and Politics, Gender, and Sexuality, Modernism and Modernity. “Of importance is the question of Weimar sexual ‘decadence;’ was it … something that facilitated the rise of the Nazis? Or was it about the emancipation from rigid gender and sexual identities, something that threatened the Nazis and their sympathizers? Something ‘postmodern’ — or even ‘queer’ in a positive sense?”

In addition to courses in the German Department, students of German are strongly encouraged to participate in classes of affiliated departments. Recommended faculty of affiliated departments include:

Prof. Gary C. Thomas, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature

Specialties include: 17^th– and 18^th-century German literature, gender/sexuality studies, and cultural musicology

Publications include: Queering the Pitch: the New Gay and Lesbian Musicology

Courses include: Queer Theory

Professor Richard Leppert, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature

Publications include: Theodor Adorno – Essays in Music

Courses include: Adorno/Aesthetic Theory

It is indeed puzzling why so many non-Jewish faculty members have adopted the teachings of the Frankfurt School, promoting its agenda to degrade Western culture by glorifying deviancy, multiculturalism and Jewish victimization. One wonders whether they are actually adherents of a position totally inimical to their own White racial interests, or have chosen to be academic Uncle Toms for the sake of tenure and the dependable pay check. Some are clearly part of the homosexual-left culture that is so prominent at the university these days. Their identity as a homosexual victim of cultural oppression is far more important to them — and far more lucrative professionally — than identifying as a White person and having a sense of White interests.

Incidentally, the glorification of Jewish victimization has achieved official academic legitimacy in the rather new discipline of Jewish Studies. Begun only about thirty years ago at colleges with majority Jewish faculties and student bodies, Jewish Studies has quickly grown. The Association of Jewish Studies is now a large network of 1800 members with independent departments on most campuses across the country.

Two influential German Department professors specialize in Jewish Studies and are exceptional in the large number of works they have published, in the number of grants and fellowships they have been awarded, and in the range of affiliated departments to which they belong. Unlike the previously mentioned non-Jewish professors, who corrupt their own ethnic Western interests by adopting the tenets of the cultural revolution, these Jewish faculty members overtly and militantly employ the Frankfurt School’s ideology and methods to promote their specifically Jewish interests. The promotion of specifically Jewish interests was not shared by Jewish professors of the former generation. Until they were replaced by the individuals described below, three German-born Jewish professors, because of their vast knowledge and love of their subject, were highly regarded members of the German faculty. More German than Jewish they promoted German, not Jewish, culture.

Professor Jack Zipes, Department of German (recently retired)

At the present time Amazon is briskly selling an amazing 21 of Jack Zipes’ books about fairy tales, including several pricey compendia. Pertinent to the discussion here are two types of his works about fairy tales: the theoretical, dealing with Frankfurt School deconstruction of fairy tales, and the practical, the use of fairy tales in the public schools.

In Breaking the Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, Zipes provides a Marxist interpretation of folk and fairy tales through the filter of Frankfurt School criticism. His aim is to interpret the socio-historical forces that shaped the tales and to deconstruct and/or reconstruct them to influence and help form the society of the future.

An early chapter in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature is devoted to a discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno about the Marxist utopian function of the fairy tale.

With the manual, Creative Storytelling: Building Community, Changing Lives, Zipes suggests practical ways to encourage children to deconstruct traditional tales. Co-founder of the theatrical method named, “The Neighborhood Bridges Project,” Zipes has introduced a technique of re-interpreting fairy tales. Used by Minneapolis Public Schools since 1997 it seeks to expose the sexism, racism, and classism in the traditional value system of the fairy tales and of society. For his outstanding contributions to the field of Children’s Literature, Zipes has won several significant awards plus an honorary degree from the University of Bologna!

Prof. Zipes specialties include: Critical Theory (i.e., Frankfurt School theory); Fairy Tales (or rather their deconstruction); Jewish Studies

Publications include

Political Plays for Children

Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion

Don’t bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales

Down with Heidi, Down with Struwelpeter: Three Cheers for the Revolution:

Towards A New Socialist Children’s Literature in West Germany

The Potential of Liberating Fairy Tales for Children

Don’t Bet on the Prince: Feminist Fairy Tales

Walter Benjamin and Children’s Literature, in The Germanic Review

Marx as Moralist

Negating History and Male Fantasies through Psychoanalytic Criticism

Adorno May Still be Right

Marx and Engels Without Frills

Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis 1945-2000 (with Leslie Morris, below)

The Yale Companion of Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture

Germans and Jews since the Holocaust

The Operated Jew: Two Tales of Antisemitism

Disparate Jewish Voices and the Dialectic of the “Shoah Business” in Germany

Holocaust Survivor as Literary Pope in Germany

Jewish Life as Stigma, in: Simon Wiesenthal Center Report

Germans and Jews since the Holocaust

Lessons of the Holocaust, in: New German Critique

The Operated German as Operated Jew, in New German Critique

The Negative German-Jewish Symbiosis

Contested Jews: The Image of Jewishness in Contemporary German Literature

The Holocaust and the Vicissitudes of Jewish Identity in New German Critique

Professor Leslie Morris, Department of German

While Prof. Morris holds a tenured position in German, she is also a member of four affiliated centers. Two of these affiliations are especially noteworthy. She is a member of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and a member of the Center for Jewish Studies, of which she was director from 2002–2009

Prof. Morris specializes in 20^th and 21^st (sic) German/Austrian Literature and in Jewish Studies.

According to her biography in the German Department Magazine: “She is interested in issues of exile and Diaspora that are central to the experience of Jews, especially since the 1930’s… to gain a deeper understanding of what ‘Jewishness’ means. (The name) Morris morphed out of Moskowitz.”

Publications include:

Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945–2000 (with German Prof. Jack Zipes)

Berlin Elegies: Absence, Postmemory and Art after Auschwitz

How Jewish is it? The Question of Contemporary German-Jewish Writing

Der modifizierte Jude als Stigmatext

In her book, Unlikely History, the Changing German Jewish Symbiosis, Prof. Morris addresses the topic of holocaust memoirs. She has two concerns. Not only is there a problem with future supply since the last holocaust survivors are succumbing to old age, but Prof. Morris finds many of the memoirs to be intrinsically dull and of limited literary value. She compares the authentic memoirs to the many fraudulent “memoirs,” originally marketed as first person accounts, but later found to be fakes, much to the embarrassment of their publishers. She judges these fake “memoirs” to be more imaginative, moving, and of greater literary value than the genuine accounts. Disregarding standards of academic ethics she suggests that the fraudulent accounts ought to be redeemed and accepted into the body of holocaust literature as genuine memoirs. Not only are the fakes better than the genuine accounts, but their production is unlimited!

Courses include:

Approaches to Analysis: Required readings — “Archive Fever”: Derrida, “History of Sexuality: Foucault, “Moses and Monotheism”: Freud, “Three Case Histories”: Freud

Seminar in 20^th Century German Literature and Culture: Listening to German Anxiety — “We will think about the specificity of German anxiety — anxiety about modernity, anxiety about the Jews…”

~Required readings — “We will start with Freud’s, ‘Problem with Anxiety,’ and move to works by Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, Schoenberg…”

So close is the German Department to the Center for Jewish Studies, with which Prof. Morris is affiliated, that the two Departments recently jointly sponsored a University of Minnesota tour titled, “Jewish Life in Berlin and Prague.” The informational meeting for the trip was held at a community center in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. Affectionately known as “St. Jewish Park,” by both Jews and gentiles, this modern day Jewish ghetto has been the home of many successful Jews. These include Thomas Friedman, New York Times journalist, Al Franken, the junior senator from Minnesota, and the Coen Brothers, film makers. In fact, the newest Coen Brothers film, “The Serious Man,” is set in the St. Louis Park of the 60’s. Ari Hoptman, UM German instructor, plays a department head.

The nine day University of Minnesota tour to Berlin and Prague was jointly led by German Department, Prof. Leslie Morris and History Department, Prof. Gary Cohen. Prof. Cohen is also Director of the Center for Austrian Studies, and a faculty member of the Center for Jewish Studies. The UM-sponsored tour included visits with the chief rabbis of both Berlin and Prague, with members of the Israeli Council in Berlin, and Shabbat services and Shabbat dinner with Berlin congregations. Lunch was planned at kosher restaurants.

A Center for Catholic or Christian Studies does not exist at the University of Minnesota. Therefore, there will be no University-sponsored trip titled, “Christian Life in Europe,” with Mass at the Cologne Cathedral and an audience with the Pope.

The most recent issue of German Quarterly, from summer, 2009, explores the possible reciprocal effects of German and Jewish Studies. Responding to the title of this issue, “How Jewish is German Studies? How German is Jewish Studies?” Prof. Morris states in the introduction:

VERY….What I hoped to do with this special issue was to move the discussion about Germans and Jews beyond merely establishing affinities between historical expression and cultural expression. Part of the ‘thought experiment’ behind this special issue was to see what might happen if we were to slip within the hyphen separating ‘the German’ and ‘the Jewish’ and begin a ‘queering’ of German-Jewish Studies that would rupture the intact diacritical mark of the hyphen and destabilize the markers of ‘German’ and ‘Jew.’

Rethinking the links and the ruptures contained within the ‘German Jew’ also necessitates a new conceptualizing of Jewish and ‘queer’ identity; to pull apart the hyphen that sutures the ‘German Jew’ is at the same time to expand ‘queerness’ beyond sexual practice and ‘experience’ and to disrupt what R. block has termed a ‘geographic transversal’ that links Germany and Zion. My calling for a ‘queering’ of German Jewish Studies is a strategy to move us away from ‘constructions of the Jew or the German as either positive or negative, stereotyped or ‘authentic,’ and to consider an approach to German Jewish text that will push the very boundaries of the German and the Jewish. I propose instead that we consider German Jewish writing as inhabiting a new space of a trans-, or a newly imagined community that exists in a border zone of textual and historical memory, projection and fantasy, pathology and desire, and that will always exceed the geographic, linguistic, and ethnic/national markers in which they are enacted.

The next activity jointly sponsored by the University of Minnesota German Department and the Center for Jewish Studies is scheduled in the spring. On April, 13, 2010, Prof. Leslie Morris will present a public lecture titled, “Why Germany Loves the Jews.” The lecture will be delivered at Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul.

HERMANN, BE THERE!

Trudie Pert is the pen name of a teacher.  Email her.

Unless otherwise noted all material is from the official University of Minnesota website.

A non-White immigrant residing in Europe or America must be bewildered, bedeviled and bemused by the spectacle offered by his White hosts. On the one hand he must be scared to death of those unpredictable, self-assured, conceited White males and their attractive White women who are capable of walking on the moon and curing plague in his jungle or his desert. On the other, he gleefully rejoices when he hears stories of endless religious and ideological conflicts amidst his White hosts. The pristine, pastoral and puerile picture of the White race, so dearly longed for by modern White nationalists, is daily belied by permanent religious bickering, jealousy and character smearing within the White rank and file. Add to that murderous intra-White wars that have rocked Europe and America for centuries, one wonders whether the proverbial and much vaunted Aryan, Promethean, and Faustian man, is worthy of a better future.

For the Greater Glory of God

Surely, the White man saved Greco-Roman Europe from the Levantine Hannibal’s incursion, which nearly resulted in a catastrophe in 216 b.c. at Cannae, in southern Italy. The White man also stopped Attila’s Hunic hordes on the Catalaunian Fields in France in 451 a.d. The grandfather of Charlemagne, Charles Martel, defeated Arab predators near Tours, in France in 732. One thousand years later in 1717, a short and slim Italo-French Catholic hero, Prince Eugene of Savoy, finally removed the Islamic threat from the Balkans.

But the unparalleled White will to power, couched later on in Christian millenarianism, had also prompted large crusades against “infidels.” Their commander in chief, the pious Godfrey de Bouillon, did not have pangs of consciousness after his knights had put to the sword thousands of Muslim civilians in captured Jerusalem, in 1099 a.d.  All was well meant for the greater glory of Yahweh!

The power of the newly discovered universal religion and the expectancy of the “end of history,” later to be followed by bizarre beliefs in “global democracy,” often eclipsed racial awareness among Whites. As a rule, when White princes ran out of Muslim or Jewish infidels — they began whacking each other in the name of their Semitic deities or latter day democracies. The  6’4” tall Charlemagne, in the name of his anticipated Christian bliss, went on the killing spree against his fellow pagan Germans. In 782 a.d. he decapitated several thousand of the finest crop of Nordic Saxons, thereby earning himself a saintly name of the “butcher of the Saxons” (Sachsenschlächter).

And on and on the story goes with true Christian or true democracy believers. No Jews, no Arabs, no communists have done so much damage to the White gene pool as Whites themselves. The Thirty Years War (1617–1647) fought amidst European Christians with utmost savagery, wiped out two thirds of the finest German racial stock, over 6 million people. The crazed papist Croatian mercenaries, under Wallenstein’s command, considered it a Royal and Catholic duty to kill off Lutherans, a dark period so well described by the great German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller. Even today in Europe the words “Croat years” (“Kroatenjahre”) are associated with the years of hunger and pestilence.

Nor did Oliver Cromwell’s troops — his Ironsides — during the English civil war, fare much better. Surely, as brave Puritans they did not drink, they did not whore, they did not gamble — they only specialized in skinning Irish Catholic peasants alive.  Not only did their chief, the Nordic looking fanatic Cromwell consider himself more Jewish than the Jews — he actually brought them back from continental Europe, with far-reaching consequence both for England andAmerica.

A slim, intelligent, Nordic looking, yet emotionally unstable manic depressive, William Sherman, burnt down Atlanta in 1864 — probably in the hopes of fostering a better brand of democracy for the South. We may also probe some day into the paleocortex of the Nordic skull of an airborne Midwest Christian ex-choir boy, who joyfully dropped fire bombs on German civilians during WWII. The results may not be too difficult to detect considering that the same Biblical mindset was reenacted in 2002 in Iraq by G. W. Bush and his advisors enraptured by Talmudic tales of “weapons of mass destruction.”  Biblical or liberal-democratic crimes, when couched in political choseness and theological messianism are perfect tools for a perfectly good consciousness.

Many European White nationalists are dazed at good looking Nordic men and women from the Bible Belt raving, ranting and dancing on TV in trance to Christian-Zionist tunes. Equally stunned are American White nationalists when they observe blood-stained victimhood quarrels pitting Irish against English nationalists, Serb against Croat nationalists, Ukrainian against Russian nationalists, Walloon against Flemish nationalists, Polish against German nationalists, and so on and on.

[adrotate group=”1″]

The Faith or the Sacred?

No subject is so dangerous to address among White nationalists as the Christian religion. It is commendable to lambast Muslims, who are on the respectable hit-parade of the Axis of Evil. Jews also come in handy in a wholesale package of evil, which needs to be expiated — at least occasionally. But any critical examination of Judeo-Christian intolerance is viewed with suspicion and usually attributed to distinct groups of White people, such as agnostics or modern day self-proclaimed pagans.

Why did the White man accept the Semitic spiritual baggage of Christianity even though it did not quite fit with his racial-spiritual endowments? The unavoidable racialist thinker Hans Günther — a man of staggering erudition and knowledgeable not only of the laws of heredity, but also of comparative religions — reminds us that the submissive and slavish relation of man to God is especially characteristic of Semitic peoples. In his important little book, The Religious Attitudes of the Indo-Europeans, he teaches us about the main aspects of racial psychology of old Europeans.  We also learn that Yahweh is a merciless totalitarian god who must be revered — and feared.

Ancient Europeans did not believe in any kind of salvation. They believed in inexorable destiny. Gods were their friends and enemies, as seen in ancientGreece and Rome. Among old Europeans the notion of polarity between Heaven and Earth, between soul and body, i.e., dualism of any kind, was nonexistent. Man was part of an organic whole, embedded in his tribe and race, and tolerant of others’ religious ideas:

Mutual tolerance of religious forms is a distinctive feature of the Indo-European. The memorial stones in the Roman-Teutonic frontier region reveal through their inscriptions that the Roman frontier troops and settlers not only honoured their own Gods, but also respected the local deity of the Teutons, the genius huius loci. (p.36)

The messianic, chiliastic, or “communistic” mindset was unknown among ancient Europeans. They could not care less which gods other races, other tribes or other peoples believed in. Wars that they fought against the adversary were bloody, but they did not have the goal of converting the adversary and imposing on him the beliefs contrary to his racial heritage. Homer’s epic the Iliad is the best example. The self-serving, yet truly racist liberal-communistic endeavour, to wage “final and just war” in order to “make the world safe for democracy,” was something inconceivable for ancient Europeans.

Zeal to convert and intolerance have always remained alien to every aspect of Indo-European religiosity. In this is revealed the Nordic sense of distance between one man and another, modesty which proscribes intrusion upon the spiritual domains of other men. One cannot imagine a true Hellene preaching his religious ideas to a non-Hellene. (p.36)

A German-British racialist author of the early 20th century, Houston Stewart Chamberlain in his The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century writes that“a final judgment shows the intellectual renaissance to be the work of Race in opposition to the universal Church which knows no Race (p. 326). Unlike Christianity, which preaches individual salvation, for ancient Europeans life can only have a meaning within the in-group — their tribe, theirpolis, or their civitas. Outside those social structures, life means nothing.

In the 1st century, words of far-reaching consequence for all Whites were pronounced by a Jewish heretic, the Apostle St. Paul, to the people of Galatia, an area in Asia Minor once populated by the Gauls (i.e., Celts). Galatia was then well underway to become a case study of multicultural debauchery — similar to today’s Los Angeles:  “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” (Galatians 3:28).

Christianity became thus a Universalist religion with a special mission to transform the Other into the Same. The seeds of egalitarianism — albeit on the religious, not yet on the secular level — were sown. The pagan notion of the mystical sacred was gradually being displaced by the dogmatic notion of one omnipotent faith:

Yahweh in the Bible is not just the only and unique god who wields power. He is only and unique in the sense of his Absolute Otherness. He is only and unique in his own kind — that is to say he is the Absolute Other away from this world. The essence of biblical monotheism is its constitutive dualism …. Where paganism establishes bridges and links, the monotheism of the Bible creates fractures, ruptures, and forbids anybody to span them. Yahweh forbids mixtures between Heaven and Earth, between Man and the Divine, between humans and other living beings, between Israel and the “nations.” (Alain de Benoist, “Sacré païen et désacralisation judéo-chrétienne” in Quelle religion pour l’Europe?[Which Religion for Europe?]1990, pp 30-31, my trans.)

Although Christian Churches never publicly endorsed racial miscegenation, they did not endorse racial segregation either. This was true for the Catholic Church and its flock, as observed by the early French sociologist and racialist Gustave Le Bon. Consequently, Catholic Spaniards of White racial stock in Latin America could not halt decadence and debauchery in their new homelands as WASPs in North America did — at least prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Naturally, it is not only in politics that decadence of the Latin race, which inhabits the south of America, manifests itself. It is in all elements of its civilization. If they were reduced to themselves, these unhappy republics would return to barbarism. All industry, all commerce is in the hands of foreigners, English, Americans and Germans. Valparaiso has become an English town. Nothing would remain of Chile if its foreigners were removed. (p. 86). Gustave Le Bon,  Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples, 1895, my trans.).

Later, in 1938, in light of eugenic and racial laws adopted not only in Germanyand Italy, but also in other European countries and many states in America, Pope Pius IX made his famous statement: “It is forgotten that mankind is one large and overwhelming Catholic race.” This statement was to become part of his planned encyclical under the name “The unity of the human race.”

“The unity of the human race”, as noble as these words may sound, is a highly abstract concept. On a secular level communist and liberal intellectuals constantly toy with it — in order to suppress real tribes, real nations, real peoples and their real racial uniqueness.  Even if this white race, constantly defamed as “wicked”, “racist” , “bigoted” and “fascist,” disappeared from the face of the earth, non-White immigrants know that they would soon have to climb back onto their native tree or return to their despotic cave.

To be continued.

Tom Sunic (http://www.tomsunic.info; http://doctorsunic.netfirms.com) is author, translator, former US professor in political science and a former Croatian diplomat. He is the author of Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age (2007). His new book of essays, Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity, prefaced by Kevin MacDonald, will soon be released. Email him.

“Living so long in exile and so often in danger, we have cultivated a defensive and apologetic account, a censored story, of Jewish religion and culture.”

Michael Walzer, quoted in Kevin MacDonald. Separation and Its Discontents, p. 217

The $100 million-dollar film Where the Wild Things Are was released last October. Older readers might remember the 1963 children’s book on which the film is based. The original book was penned by Jewish American writer Maurice Sendak, who grew up in Brooklyn. Today I will consider whether or not the writer’s Jewish background played a role in the book’s creation.

Many accounts of the book (and film) ignore the Jewish angle. For example, right around the time of the release of the film, The New York Times carried Bruce Handy’s review of the book. No mention at all was made of Jewishness.

Just to bring the reader up to speed, let me share Handy’s summary of the story:

Max, a young boy in a wolf costume, makes mischief of one kind and another, is called “wild thing” by his unseen mother, and is sent to bed without supper. As he stews, his room transforms into a jungle. He finds a boat and sets sail across the sea to discover a land full of real wild things — big monsters with “terrible teeth” and “terrible roars.” Max tames them, plays with them, sends them to bed without their suppers and then returns home, where he finds dinner waiting for him. “And it was still hot,” the book concludes — a lovely and reassuring grace note.

Handy relates how he only came to appreciate the book upon rereading it as an adult, perhaps because Sendak himself was revealing his adult anxieties in the book. As Sendak said in 1966, “It’s only after the act of writing the book that, as an adult, I can see what has happened, and talk about fantasy as catharsis, about Max acting out his anger as he fights to grow. . . . For me, the book was a personal exorcism. It went deeper into my own childhood than anything I’ve done before.”

I suspect Sendak is being honest when he says it goes deep into his childhood. But one angle I think he is describing is his urban Jewish view of the non-Jews around him. And his book — which he also illustrated — likely represents his view of the world outside the Polish shtetl of his parents and relatives. That unknown world, malevolent and dangerous, was, in Sendak’s mind, full of lurking creatures. Brandeis professor Stephen J. Whitfield, a specialist in American Studies, realizes the extent to which Jewishness animates Sendak’s work. Sendak, Whitfield notes, “wrote out of personal obsessions rather than formulas.”

To be sure, we all have various aspects to our personalities, so Sendak may indeed be mixing various memories and such. For instance, according to his Wikipedia bio, he admitted in an interview that he is homosexual, which may or may not influence his individual stories. (In the Night Kitchen is a 1970 story about a naked boy — roughly three years old — who is almost baked into a cake. Sendak’s drawings depict the boy’s penis and testicles, which caused many parents to object to libraries stocking the book.)

To further challenge my thesis that Jewishness played a role in Where the Wild Things Are, we must also consider this: “The monsters in the book were actually based on [Sendak’s] relatives who would come to weekly dinners. Because of their broken English and odd mannerisms, they were the perfect basis for the monsters in Sendak’s book.”

I believe his relatives may have provided a rough frame on which to hang the fleshed-out monsters, but I still think Sendak’s primary inspiration for the book was his conscious and unconscious views of the wider non-Jewish world. I think this because it jibes so well with other accounts by contemporary Jewish Americans, thus revealing a shared Jewish mindset.

Let me start with this account of what West Coast Jews think of their non-Jewish fellow countrymen, as related by social scientists Martin Lipset and Earl Raab:

In 1985 about a third of those affiliated with the Jewish community in the San Francisco area said, in response to a questionnaire, that Jewish candidates could not be elected to Congress from San Francisco. Yet three out of the four congressional representatives from that area — as well as the two state senators and the mayor of San Francisco — were, in fact, well-identified Jews at the time the poll was conducted. And they had been elected by a population that was about 95 percent non-Jewish.

In 1981 nine out of ten respondents in the same regional Jewish population said that they felt “comfortable” in America. But seven out of eight also believed that anti-Semitism is a serious problem in this country. Nationally, about eight out of ten affiliated Jews voiced serious concerns in 1990 about anti-Semitism, while the same overwhelming proportion replied that they felt “close” or “very close” to the American people.

Clearly, many American Jews are battling with cognitive dissonance when it comes to assessing their safety and welfare in America. Objectively, there is very, very little that has threatened American Jews financially, socially or physically. Yet deeper inside their psyches, there is something telling them that all non-Jews are potentially dangerous and unfriendly anti-Semites. (As the old saw goes, “Scratch a goy, find an anti-Semite.”)

This fear and defensiveness may stem from what Professor Salo Baron, a prominent Jewish historian, has called the “lachrymose view of Jewish history.” Or, as Barbara Fuerlicht writes, “The diaspora is often presented as 2,000 years of uninterrupted martyrdom.” Again, however, we find that paradox spawned by the incongruity between reality and perception. Consider, for example, that one scholar wrote, “Most medieval Jews in most places in most years were not the targets of pogroms. Most lived lives that, protected by geniz charters [i.e., charters specifying Jewish rights] and privileges, were far more secure and prosperous than the overwhelming percentage of non-Jews around them.”

For example, this charter for the Duchy of Austria from 1244 is summarized as follows:

This document is important because it was soon adopted, with some changes, by most East European countries to which the masses of Jews finally drifted: Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, Silesia, and Lithuania. This charter — a very favorable one — was issued to encourage money-lending among the Austrian Jews and probably also to attract moneyed Jews to migrate to this outlying German state which was in need of ready credit. Every effort is therefore made in this Latin constitution to grant the Jews ample opportunity to sell their wares and, above all, to lend money. They were given adequate protection: they were subject to the direct jurisdiction of the Duke who guaranteed them safety of life and limb. The right of the Jews to govern themselves in communal and religious matters was not specified by the Duke, but this was taken for granted. We may assume, indeed, that the Jews of Austria enjoyed extensive political autonomy under this pact.

In any serious study of Jewish history, one is surprised to see how true this is for accounts of many different times and places. As we’ve seen, however, this sense of defensiveness continues to haunt Jews in America, as social historian David Gerber details in his insightful 1997 essay “Ill at Ease: The Insecurities of American Jewry”:

The almost universal feeling of anxiety American Jews have about intergroup relations raises many complex questions. Do Jews feel threatened because they really are threatened? Does objective evidence indicate a resurgence of the anti-Semitism that is widely acknowledged to have declined in the decades immediately following World War II? Or, is it the case that little objective evidence is needed to make a people whose conditions of life have historically been so insecure feel threatened, even in the apparently benign American diaspora? [p.95]

Philip Weiss, writing in New York magazine (January 29, 1996), suggests psychological reasons for this defensiveness:

Jews cherish feelings of exclusion not just because there is wisdom in foreboding but because these feelings are useful. They preserve our position as outsiders, a status that has certain moral and practical advantages. As an outsider, you have motivation: to get in. And you get to be demanding without any particular sense of reciprocity . . . Perhaps most important, these feelings solidify Jewish identity.

A personal account that got my attention was one by New Yorker Karen Brodkin, who spent summers in Vermont with her friends and family in a bungalow colony of Jewish families:

Late one summer night, a group of us tied up all the rowboats that belonged to our group of families out in the middle of the lake. We looked forward to parental surprise when they woke up, but we weren’t prepared for their genuine alarm: This could only be an anti-Semitic act by angry Yankees. What did it portend for our group? We were surprised on two counts: that the adults didn’t assume we had done it, since we were always playing practical jokes, and that they thought our Jewishness mattered to Vermont Yankees.

There is no shortage of similar accounts. For instance, American Israeli journalist Ze’ev Chafets relates how his maternal grandmother, born in Sterling, Illinois, maintained a mental map of Jewish and non-Jewish America:

Pontiac [Michigan] never had enough Jews for a Jewish neighborhood, but from the time I was a small boy I was aware that it had a special Jewish geography, and my grandmother was its da Gama. She would point out an unremarkable brick home on a leafy street and confide, “That’s a Jewish house.” Downtown she would pause near a certain store and say, “This is a Jewish business.” Occasionally, when we passed a parking lot, she would point out a Chevrolet or Plymouth and say, “There’s a Jewish car.” None of these cars, shops, or houses impressed me as being especially Jewish, but I was prepared to take her word for it.

At first I thought that mastering Pontiac’s Jewish geography was some sort of Sunday school lesson, like memorizing the Hebrew alphabet or the kings of Judea. But as I grew older, I realized that my grandmother mapped out the town reflexively, more for her benefit than mine. Jewish houses, stores, and offices were safe havens, places she could count on if, for example, she needed to use a bathroom, or was being chased through the streets by a sex-crazed Cossack rapist.

Jewish historian Peter Novick describes the “the fortress-like mentality” of many American Jews, where the institutional imperative was to promote “a wary suspicion of gentiles.” Consider three examples he provides from three “otherwise apparently sensible American Jews” to show how they had internalized these Jewish “collective memories — memories that suffuse group consciousness.” First, a university teacher writes, “When I move to a new town, I give great thought to whom, among my gentile friends, I might entrust my children, should that ever become necessary.” Next, a prominent Jewish feminist shares this thought: “Every conscious Jew longs to ask her or his non-Jewish friends, ‘Would you hide me?’ — and suppresses the question for fear of hearing sounds of silence.” Finally, a professor of psychology reports:

Many Jews report that the unspoken question they ask themselves when interacting with a non-Jew is, “Would she or he have saved me from the Nazis?” I have asked myself this question innumerable times: sometimes I surprise myself by answering, “I don’t know,” when asking this question of a non-Jewish friend I had otherwise assumed was close to me. The answer is the ultimate standard by which to measure trust in a non-Jewish person.

Honestly, do you want to live with such irrationally suspicious people? Worse, do you want to live under such “fellow” Americans now that so many of them dominate the controlling heights of this country?

Take Harvard, for instance. A leading law professorship there is a powerful position. And that’s precisely what Orthodox Jew Alan Dershowitz has held for years. Never mind that this fourth-generation American can write: “It was at Yale that I met and befriended my first Wasps, blacks, and even non-Orthodox Jews.” Are we really living in the same universe?

Dershowitz admits he is so highly invested in the “Holocaust mentality” that the world in which he sometimes lives borders on the horrifically imaginary. Witness his feelings as he sat watching the accused concentration camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk on trial in Israel:

I kept looking at Demjanjuk for another reason. I imagined him as my killer. At the time he was murdering babies, I was five years old. . . . I could have been one of the thousands of nameless and faceless babies he grabbed out of the hands of screaming mothers and shoved into gas chambers. I imagine him laughing with sadistic joy as he killed entire families, ending their seed forever, after taunting and torturing them gratuitously.

This vicarious sense of suffering is intense for Dershowitz and haunts not only his future but the future of Jewish children: “Every time I attend a gathering of Jewish children — at a family event, at a Bar Mitzvah, at Simchath Torah — I imagine SS guards lining up these children for the gas chambers.” Isn’t this evidence enough that Dershowitz needs, at a minimum, counseling?

How might such a mentality be constructed in a place where daily life never offers the chance to experience real persecution? Try this: Jewish American journalist Marjorie Miller relates a childhood story regarding her religious school. In addition to learning the Hebrew alphabet, she also learned about the Holocaust. One Sunday her teacher, “in a scared voice,” called the students to attention and told them to listen carefully: “Had we heard the radio? The government was telling the Jews that we had to convert or leave the country.” This, the teacher explained, “was the first step . . . maybe the beginning of another Holocaust.” Not surprisingly, “Many children in the class began to cry.”

This mentality is reminiscent of interviews done in the 1970s with noted Jewish men, where the question “Do you think it could happen here?” never needed “it” defined.  Nearly unanimously, the reply was the same: “If you know history at all, you have to presume not that it could happen, but that it probably will,” or “It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when” [quoted in MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, p.245].

Reader, think about it: If you’re an average American, you quietly pay your federal taxes, likely knowing that some goes to aid Israel. (On top of that, many of you Christian Zionists support Israel further through donations and political support.) Further, it’s highly improbable that you’ve ever committed a crime against a Jew, let alone actually harmed one. The thought has probably never even crossed your mind.

Yet a good percentage of American-born Jews still consider you a lethal threat simply because you are not a Jew. At this stage in history, is there any excuse for that? Worse, such Jews are often able to translate their fantasy-based fears about goyim into cultural products such as films and TV shows—and books like Where the Wild Things Are. Through the activism of groups like the ADL, they are also able to affect legislation such as the new Hate Crimes Law that may well target people like you for potentially thinking the wrong thing. This is not good.

In any case, it will be interesting to see how the film has been adapted from Sendak’s book. My guess is that the live action animation will not have a theme about dangerous non-Jews, but I should wait until I see it before saying more. Still, it’s got the typical Jewish background of a Hollywood production. For instance, Spike Jonze, born Adam Spiegel in 1969, is the film’s director, replacing earlier director Eric Goldberg. Let’s just hope Jonze is not one of those paranoid Jewish Americans always wondering if “it” could happen here.

Edmund Connelly (email him) is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.