1. The Birth of Auto-antisemitism
The psychology of a Jew hostile to his people was described in the early twentieth century by the psychologist Otto Weininger, a specialist in self-hatred and one of the greatest Jew-haters among Jews: “Whoever hates the Jewish essence (Weininger himself. – A. G.), hates it, first of all, in himself. The fact that he ruthlessly pursues everything Jewish in another person is an attempt to free himself from it in this way, […] a person hates only the one who causes him unpleasant memories of himself.” Weininger made an attempt to rid himself of himself as a source of self-hatred in the early morning of October 4, 1903 in Vienna: in the house where Beethoven died, he shot himself in the chest. Just before he died, he wrote: “I kill myself so that I will not be able to kill others…”. He was twenty-three years old.
Weininger, a fellow student of Stefan Zweig, earned his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Vienna at the age of twenty-one, and at twenty-two published one of the most famous and scandalous books on psychology in the twentieth century, Sex and Character. This book made Otto Weininger, a baptized Jew, one of the most famous misogynists and anti-Semites in the world. What Weininger hated about Jews was their isolation and isolation from other nations. He believed that such aspirations lead to the degeneration of Jewry: “In the physical degeneration of modern Jewry, not the least of these has been the fact that among Jews, far more often than anywhere else in the world, marriages are contracted not for love but through intermediaries”.
2. The Hannoverian Prophet
The phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred, vividly manifested in Weininger’s book, was analyzed by Theodor Lessing, professor at the Hannover Technische Hochschule, a German philosopher of Jewish origin.
Lessing was born in Hannover in 1872. He was a philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, poet, critic, writer, physician, lecturer, publicist, author of over two thousand articles, books and pamphlets, and one of the founders of the Hannover Volkshochschule. The ancestors of his father, the physician Sigmund Lessing, had lived there for more than 200 years. “With Hannover,” he wrote, “I am connected with my whole life. […] It is my land and my destiny. And I love it.”
Lessing was born into an assimilated Jewish family. His father was a prosperous physician in Hannover and his mother was the daughter of a banker. Lessing recalled his school years as miserable: ‘This humanistic German gymnasium, specializing in patriotism, Latin and Greek, […] this institute for the promotion of stupidity, half of it built on white-collar jumping, the other half on lying banal German nationalism, was not only incredibly irresponsible, it was utterly boring. […] Nothing, nothing could ever make up for what those fifteen years had destroyed in me. Even now, almost every night I am reminded of the torture of my school days.”
In 1892, the twenty-year-old Lessing entered the medical faculty in Freiburg, then transferred to Bonn. From 1895 he studied psychology with Theodor Lipps in Munich, and in 1899 he received his doctorate in philosophy from Erlangen. In 1901 Lessing began a career as an educator at the national training center Haubind. From 1904 he taught at a rural school near Dresden and made lecture tours throughout Germany. In 1906 Lessing published his first major philosophical work, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche: an introduction to modern German philosophy.
Lessing spent the years 1906–1907 in Göttingen, where he studied with philosopher and creator of phenomenology Edmund Husserl with the aim of obtaining the title of associate professor and worked as a theater critic in the local newspaper. In 1907 his book was published, Theater=Soul. A Study on Stage Aesthetics and Theater Art. Continued reflections on the theater, published after 1907 in various periodicals, in 1912 were combined in the book The Merry Source of Folly: Thoughts on Theater, Actor, Drama. To the theatrical ideas of Lessing addressed famous Russian theater and film directors Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold. The philosopher severely criticized the gaining popularity of Freud’s ideas, asserting and leaving his aesthetic norm in the sphere of the supersensual, not the physical.
In 1908 Lessing received an associate professor’s degree at the Technical University of his native Hannover. Here, in 1919, his book History as the Comprehension of Nonsense, a reflection on the First World War, was published. Its publication was delayed by the censor until 1919 because of its uncompromising anti-war stance. In his memoirs of World War I, published in Prague in 1929, he wrote cynically, “I became a draft dodger. All through the war, all four years, I received summonses every month. It became harder and harder to dodge the draft, but I kept inventing and inventing valid reasons.” “I became skeptical of the beauty and greatness of the German mind. It is different in England. The average person there is more eccentric and unique than we are,” – Lessing wrote in an essay on English drama, written at a time of growing discontent between the two nations and reprinted in Culture and Nerves. In 1920 Lessing co-founded the Free People’s University (now the Ada and Theodor Lessing Community College), where he served as a guest lecturer while teaching at the Technical University of Hannover until 1926, with brief interruptions.
3. History as the Comprehension of Nonsense
Lessing’s philosophy of history, set forth in the book History as the Comprehension of Nonsense, is worth emphasizing. The book has a characteristic subtitle – The Birth of History from Myth. In his opinion, history is born out of fantasy and contains the fulfillment of desires and encouragement of hopes, so history is not reality, it is a liberation, salvation from reality, and again turns into myth, and in modernity and comforting lies. It is characteristic of man to seek to order chaos, to bring “reason” into history as a belief in fate. History begins in the irrational but ends in the symbolic, for reality is neither life nor truth. Probably each of us could give examples of the “birth of history from myth”. It is enough to look at the wars going on in our time.
4. Struggle with Society
In 1924 Lessing became an enemy of the nascent Third Reich after reporting on serial killer Fritz Harmann, a sadist and pervert, a vampire, a “Hannoverian werewolf” who took the lives of dozens of people. The peculiarity of this gruesome case was that the killer was a police informant, which made it easier for him to commit crimes. Everyone called for the quickest possible conviction and execution of Harmann, seeing only in him the source of evil. Lessing, on the pages of a number of newspapers (above all, on the pages of the Prager Tagblatt, a German-language newspaper in Prague), reminded of the guilt of society, including the police. The publicist warned of the possibility of a miscarriage of justice against Harmann’s accomplice and called for the day of the execution to be declared the “Day of Universal Repentance” in Hannover. In the early days of the trial against Harmann, Theodor attended the trial as a psychologist, but after his newspaper articles, the judge forbade Lessing to appear in the hall, explaining his decision as follows: “Psychology has no place in court.” Lessing’s position angered not only the judge, but also many of his fellow citizens, who saw the philosopher and publicist as a renegade and traitor to the interests of society.
Theodor Lessing was one of the most hated men in the Weimar Republic. As a Jew, he was, unlike the German Jewish patriots Walter Rathenau and Fritz Haber, an anti-patriot. During the 1925 German presidential election, he infringed on one of Germany’s holiest shrines, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, a patient of his physician father. In Prague’s anti-German newspaper Prager Tagblatt (Prague Daily), Lessing published an article, Zero-Nero? against the honored Field Marshal, describing him as a “simpleton,” “subhuman,” and a “ferocious wolf.” Hindenburg himself said with soldierly candor about his intellectual development: “In my life I have read to the end of only one book – The New Testament”. Lessing claimed that Hindenburg would be another “Nero.” Field Marshal Hindenburg, the future president of the Weimar Republic, was a cult figure in Germany, like Admiral Nelson in England and George Washington in the United States. Throughout World War I, he was Germany’s top military leader – commander of the Eastern Front, later Chief of the General Staff – and both the people and the troops loved him. At the age of 77, he decided to get back into action to help his devastated homeland.
Lessing’s behavior toward the hero of the German nation aroused hatred against him and led to a rise in popular indignation against the Jews. He sharply denounced Hindenburg and accurately predicted the imminent establishment of an open military dictatorship in Germany with the assistance of the Field Marshal. This article aroused the dislike of the nationalists, and his lectures were soon disrupted by protesting anti-Semites. Lessing received limited public support, and even his colleagues said he had gone too far. The day after the torchlight procession celebrating Hindenburg’s election victory, articles appeared in Hannoverian newspapers reproaching Lessing for insulting a “national hero.” This was immediately followed by numerous anti-Semitic antics, demonstrations and threats, so-called “self-defense of the people” actions, calls to protect Germans from the insults of the “arrogant Jewish professor”. The culmination was a demonstrative march of students from Hannover to Braunschweig. The students marched through the city, gathered at the main station, where they were assigned a special train, and with placards “Jews away! Lessing away!” headed for Brunswick, where students from the local high school were waiting for them.
The months-long confrontation between Lessing and the rampaging “German society” ended in a relatively peaceful compromise. Lessing was forbidden to teach: on June 18, 1926, Prussian minister Karl Heinrich Becker yielded to public pressure by expelling Lessing indefinitely from the university with a reduced salary. Lessing was deprived of the chair of professor of philosophy at Hannover, which he had held for eighteen years. In a note Jewish Destiny, written in 1926, after three years of severe harassment of Lessing by nationalists and just German philistines, he wrote: “With Hannover I am connected with my whole life. I know that there are more beautiful lands, more friendly people. But this is my land and my destiny. And I love it. And even hatred was love.”
5. The Philosophy of Jewish Self-hatred
In 1930 Lessing published a book entitled Jewish Self-Hatred. As examples of self-hatred, he also cites the biographies of Paul Rae, Arthur Trebitsch, Max Steiner, Walter Keil, Maximilian Garden and Otto Weininger, men whose philosophy was based on a rejection of their own Jewish identity.
Lessing apparently took the basic idea of his book from Otto Weininger’s life and from one of his articles. In his article On Henrik Ibsen and his work Per Gynt, Weininger wrote about Nietzsche as an individual who had a particular hatred of himself. Theodor Lessing adopted the concept of “self-hatred” (Selbsthass) from this article to explain the psychic characteristics of many Jewish cultural figures, including Weininger himself. According to Lessing, this inwardly directed aggression motivated both Weininger’s conversion from Judaism to Protestantism and his early death.
Lessing studied self-hatred on himself. As a student, he, a typical German Jew who had not received a Jewish upbringing, had been influenced by anti-Semitism, imbued with hatred for his people, and converted to Lutheranism. Feeling that the anti-Semitic attacks against him were not weaker, he returned to Judaism, exhibiting sympathy for Zionism. He married, was baptized, divorced, re-adopted Judaism, and defended his doctoral thesis in philosophy. He returned to his hometown as a privat-docent of the Technical University (now Leibniz University of Hannover). At the outbreak of World War I, Lessing volunteered to go to the front as a military doctor.
Lessing understood “self-hatred” as a “life-killing disease,” which psychologically consists of adapting to the negative image of Judaism held by non-Jews. He saw Jews as an Asian people displaced on the European stage and forced to occupy a position between the cultures of two continents. He noted that the weakness of the Jews lay in their detachment from the soil, as a result of which this people had become overly spiritualized and decadent. He saw the solution to the Jewish problem in a return to the exhausted soil of Palestine. The restoration of the land and the people, he, as a member of the party Poalei Zion, saw in the synthesis of socialism and Zionism.
In The Jewish State (1896), Theodor Herzl criticized opponents of the plan to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, calling them “disguised anti-Semites of Jewish origin”. He was the first to speak not only about the creation of a Jewish state, but also about the phenomenon of Jewish anti-Semitism.
Jewish self-hatred was provoked by the hatred of the Jews by the hatred of the dominant population of the host countries in which the Jews lived, and where they were considered a lower-ranking minority – the “other,” the “born strangers.” Self-hatred arose as a response to the pushing of Jews by the dominant nation to the margins of society. This feeling arises in Jews as a reaction to the way the dominant nation sees them. They radiate restlessness and anxiety, pushing away their belonging to their own people and artificially elevating themselves above other tribesmen. Jewish self-hatred was a neurotic reaction to the growing power of anti-Semitism and an expression of the fear of fighting it for spiritual national self-assertion.
Lessing classified the Austrian satirical writer Karl Kraus as a self-hating Jew, calling him “the most eloquent example of Jewish self-hatred.” His conclusion was apparently based on Kraus’s criticism of the liberal, cosmopolitan press, which was run by assimilated Jews and to which Kraus himself belonged. Kraus wrote: “My hatred of the Jewish press is exceeded only by my hatred of the anti-Semitic press, whereas my hatred of the anti-Semitic press is exceeded only by my hatred of the Jewish press.” Kraus’s satire was imbued with the spirit of a cosmopolitan refugee from Judaism. He passionately opposed a review of the Dreyfus case and criticized sympathy for him because his “guilt or innocence is not proven.” In his view, the campaign in defense of the accused deserved more censure than anti-Semitic attacks on him. Kraus’s attacks on famous Jews, Heine, Dreyfus, Freud, Herzl, and colleagues in the liberal press betray his Judeophobic attempts to “purge” himself of Jewishness.
6. Murder
Lessing predicted the Nazis’ rise to power. He declared that whoever voted for Hindenburg in the election would vote for Hitler. Lessing’s courageous behavior in the Hindenburg story was rare for Jews. A deserter, an abuser of national hero Hindenburg, and a critic of Nazism, Lessing became one of the new government’s greatest enemies. When the Nazis won the 1933 elections and President Hindenburg instructed Chancellor Hitler to form a government, Lessing fled with his daughter Ruth to Prague on March 1 – the same day the Brownshirts broke into his home with an arrest warrant. Lessing was soon joined by his second wife Ada, and the family settled in Marienbad. In vain loved ones persuaded them to go to Holland, Belgium, England – even in Palestine or China. Czech President Tomas Masaryk provided Lessing with police protection. When a bounty of 80,000 Reichsmarks was put on Lessing’s head, he joked: “I never imagined that my head could earn so much” (Mein Kopf, my head, a parody of Hitler’s Mein Kampf).
Lessing wrote: “The greatest prejudice is to consider your prejudice the most reasonable.” Although a prize of 80 thousand Reichsmarks was announced for his head, he made plans for the future, he was going to open an orphanage, rented a villa “Edelweiss”. His office was on the third floor of the villa. On August 30, 1933, Lessing returned suddenly from Prague without alerting the Czech police who were guarding him. His assassins, members of the Sudeten National Socialist Workers’ Party (DNSAP), were following him. Climbing up an extension ladder to the windows, they shot the victim with two pistols. Running in, Ada saw her husband bleeding to death – he died at the hospital around 1:00 a.m. On the grave of Theodor Lessing, in the Jewish cemetery of Marienbad, there is an inscription: “The first victim of fascism in the Czecho-Slovak Republic”. The murderers received the promised 80,000 Reichsmarks from the Nazis. One of them – the chauffeur Rudolf Tsishka, having changed his name to Rudolf Körner, lived quietly until 1978 in the German Democratic Republic (communist East Germany).
The story about Lessing I conclude with his statement: “From a peaceful German writer I became a refugee. Every defensive attempt would have made my situation worse. To the fact that I am still alive I am grateful to a few of my kind friends. I am a German and I want to remain one, I am a Jew and I want to remain one, I am a socialist and I want to remain one. […] Everything I have written I have signed with my name. I am fighting for justice against my own country, which I love.”