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2 Friday, March 26, 1982
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Purely Commentary
An Injustice Perpetuated:
Guilt Toward Heinrich Heine
Arouses the Protesters
West Germany possesses the conscience-stricken who
protest perpetuation of injustice.
This is in evidence in the revival of concern over the
prejudicial treatment of the very memory of Heinrich
Heine, whose "Lorelei" alone gave him inerasable status in
German history.
Three faculties of Dusseldorf University, medicine,
science and the arts, voted, 44 to 41, to reject the proposal
that the university be re-named after Heinrich Heine.
Protesting the failure to grant due honor to that city's
famous son, the Stuttgarter Zeitung, in its issue of Feb. 12,
declared editorially:
"Maybe it is just as well. Dusseldorf University as it
stands has demonstrated in free self-determination that it
doesn't deserve to bear Heinrich Heine's name."
Commenting on the university's vote, the Stuttgarter
Zeitung said:
It was a democratic decision but did scant cre-
dit to either Dusseldorf and its university or the
academic world in Germany as a whole .. .
All political parties were in favor of the idea, yet
Germany, this time in the shape of Dusseldorf
University students and staff, has again refused
to give the 19th Century Romantic poet and critic
of Germany what ought long to have been his due.
The Dusseldorf de-
cision defies a com-
mon sense explana-
tion but is only too
well in keeping with
the treatment Heine
has been given in his
own country for the
past century-and-a-
half.
In the 19th Century
his books were ban-
ned in Gottingen,
where he took his
PhD, for lampooning
the city and the uni-
versity.
In 1933 his books
HEINRICH HEINE
were burned by the
Nazis In the Federal Republic of Germany too,
despite its claims to be the best-ever state on Ger-
man soil, Heine has a hard time of it.
There always seem to be hysterical confronta-
tions whenever a school or university is to be
named after the Lorelei poet or the Harzreise
travelogue writer.
Germans have always been keen to name
streets and just about everything that does not
move after someone or other, and this is a habit
one may well criticize.
But Goethe, or even Morike, would never be
given such a rough treatment as Heine, the Jew
and critic of his country. And this treatment is
more than coincidence.
It can only be a trauma extending to irrational
depths no one is keen to plumb. As for Dussel-
dorf's decision, could it be a case of academics
getting their own back on a writer who, although
only a poet, saw and portrayed his times more
cogently and tellingly than German university
professors have ever been able?
No indeed! But reasons for the ruling are not
available. The vote was taken behind closed
doors.
The vice chancellor of Dusseldorf University
has come up with a threadbare explanation, a
justification that verges on cynicism.
The decision, he says, was very much in keeping
with Heine himself: inconvenient and anything
but opportunistic. The Dusseldorf convocation is
progressive, we are given to understand.
This is because it is not misled by unqualified
and emotional arguments put forward by suppor-
ters of Heine, who himself would never have
dreamt of allowing himself to be taken in by such
public relations work. And so on.
Will this protest arouse the conscience of the "scant"
majority whose actions registered officially in behalf of the
Dusseldorf University would otherwise perpetuate the
shame that disgraced the German people during the Nazi
era?
The controversy and the hatred are not new. It echoes
an earlier Dusseldorf debate over a proposal to have a
German stamp issued in Heine's honor. It was discussed in
a Purely Commentary column, Oct. 13,1972. A portion of it
relates to the current experience:
Another chapter is being added to the German
atonement story. The Nazi crime is continually
being relegated to a state of condemnation. The
Heinrich Heine Draws Upon Sense of Atonement of Justice-
Seeking German Citizens Who Resent Action of Dusseldorf
University ... Expose of PLO-Comforting by the Quakers
New Germany repudiates the Hitler insanities,
and the inanities even of the less guilty are re-
jected as abominations.
As example of the new attitudes is the honor
being accorded to one of the great heroes of the
moral resistance to terror — Janusz Korczak.
Now we are about to witness a new demonstra-
tion of decency: the renewal of recognition of the
genius of Heinrich Heine.
His name had been erased from German re-
cords by the Nazis. The most popular of all Ger-
man songs, "Die Lorelei," .. .
Ich weiss nicht wass zoll es bedeuten
Das ich so traurig bin .. .
has been credited to an anonymous author by the
Hitlerites. Whatever exsted of knowledge about
Heine had been hidden. Now Germany worships
him anew, and the man who has been called Ger-
many's greatest poet-singer has been returned to
the legacies of Germany's great literary ac-
complishments.
Early this year it was announced in Bonn that
under the leadership of A.D. Otto Schoenfeldt the
Dusseldorf Citizens- Committee succeeded in its
efforts to have the West German Post Office issue
a stamp honoring Heine. Federal Minister for
Postal Services Georg Leber dropped his opposi-
tion, and it was decided that a Heine stamp be
issued on Dec. 13, 1972.
Heine was born in Dusseldorf in 1797. He died a
pauper in Paris in 1856. The International Associ-
ation for the Protection of German Language
Writers, of which Dr. Edwin M. Landau of Zurich,
Switzerland, is the chairman, simultaneously
with the campaign for a Heine postage stamp,
inaugurated a drive to have the University' of
Dusseldorf celebrate Heine's 175th birthday date
with "the utmost solemnity" in the city of his
birth. While efforts to have the university re-
named in Heine's name have failed, the celebra-
tion is becoming a reality."
The conscience of Germany is being awakened. Not all
carry with them guilt for the inhumanities perpetrated by
the bestialties during a degenerated period in that nation's
history. Hope must never be abandoned that the conscience
of a great nation will lead it to total atonement for atrocious
crimes.
Quakers: Their Origin Is Peace,
Now They Comfort Terrorists
The Quakers' American Friends Service Committee
pursues a policy that has placed the religiously-oriented
movement, originally emphasized as a peace-searching and
advocating movement, on the side of the terrorists.
This becomes even more evident in a revealing essay
by Robert J. Loewenberg, associate professor of history at
Arizona State University. Writing in the current (March
1982) issue of Midstream, under the title "The Violent
Quakers," Prof. Loewenberg states:
Of all the disillusionments suffered by estab-
lishment and liberal Jews in the last 15 years none
has been more troubling than the defection of the
Quakers. Not only have the Quakers, along with
other liberals and radicals, taken up- the Arab
side, the Quakers are the world's stalking horse
for the PLO.
While the progressive and reform forces of
Judaism can still make common cause with the
World Council of Churches, in spite of that or-
ganization's routinely anti-Israel pronounce-
ments, because the WCC, with this single excep-
tion, shares the fierce religious opposition of
Jewish progressives to the Moral Majority, the
Quakers' obsession with Israel and with its de-
struction has forced all but the most radical Jews
to part company with them.
At the root of Jewish confusion regarding the
Quakers is the history of Quaker identification
with everything that liberal Jews hold dear. From
the standpoint of liberal Jews, Quaker support of
the PLO is an aberration. The PLO, explicitly
committed to violence, stands in flat contradic-
tion to Quakerism, long the world's outstanding
organized representative of peace and pacifism.
How is it, Jews wonder, that pacifists can support
the PLO? How can supporters of progressive
change, of equality and peace, like the liberal
Jews and the WCC, also support the world's most
notorious band or murderers? Are the liberal
Jews in contradiction or is it the Quakers?
Liberal Jews are evidently convinced that
common sense and logic are on their side. Support
for peace and for the PLO is, they think, a con-
tradiction too obvious to require argument.
But is this contradiction really obvious? May it
not be that the Quaker position, itself only a more
explicit form of the position of the WCC or of the
world's-liberal and Left populations, is -actually
,
By Philip
Slomovitz
the consistent one? Put another way, may it not be
the liberal Jews who are in contradiction insofar
as they, largely alone within the family of modern
liberalism, support Israel, however qualifiedly,
while everyone else who shares the rest of the
liberal program, sides with Israel's enemies?
Prof. Loewenberg analyzes the Quaker role in the pre-
sent Middle EAst situation, asserting:
The politicization of religion or the sanctifica-
tion of the political helps to explain how Quakers,
and others who stand in the traditions of radical
Protestantism and modern political theory, can
love peace and democracy and support terror - -1
Fascism.
Delving into the history of Quakerism, Prof. Loewen-
berg traces the movement's origin and the influence of a
sect called the Ranters, explaining:
During the ministry of George Fox, the founder
of Quakerism, there existed a sect or movement
called the Ranters .. .
The doctrine shared by these two groups was
exactly that radical, ultimately antinomian view
of the Incarnation according to which God is ac-
tually in the world, in man, as a matter of fact. The
Ranters for their part, lacking the intellectual
sophistication of Fox and the Quakers who were
as a rule several cuts above the Ranters socially
and economically, often combined, even in the
same person, the contradictions of materialism
and pantheistic idealism to which their radical
version of the Incarnation led them.
In the words of their historian, the Ranters'
"identification of God with man and with the
natural universe had two apparently opposite
consequences. It might lead to a mysticism which
found God (in) everyone; equally it might lead to a
virtual materialism which in practice dispensed
with him altogether."
Actually the Ranters delighted in positions that
embraced contradictions. As relativists and
dialecticians of a Marxian sort three centuries
before it became declasse to be anything else, they
believed that "truth (was) a reconciliation of op-
posites."
The support given by the American Friends Service
Committee to the PLO draws from Dr. Loewenberg the
following revealing comment:
The pacifism of the Quakers is not in theoretical
opposition to the violence of the Ranters or, more
in point, to that of the PLO. The pacifist response,
expressing a contempt for the world (or a love for
all that is divine in man) entails a support for
violence since it places the pacifist on the side of
peace as the highest and only virtue. Naturally
there can be no other virtue in "the world" where
mere manmade good and evil prevail. The only
real justice is beyond good and evil, i.e. beyond
"the world" and its petty and arrogant claimants
to justice.
As the political writings of the Ranters have
been characterized as active pacifism, so the ac-
tion, as opposed to the writing, of modern Quak-
ers is plausibly characterized as passive violence.
The record of the American Service Committee
in Israel is one of unabashed support of terrorism
and of the murdering of Jews. The Quaker is then
a speaker of peace but a supporter of terror. But
this contradiction is of the essence of the Gnostic
traditions in which Quakerism, and other forms
of radical, once heretical Protestantism arose.
When contemporary Protestant spokesmen, for
example Robert McAfee Brown, speak out in
support of terrorism as virtuous, they draw from
the same sources sustaining holy terror and the
principle of contradictoriness that impel the
Quakers to smile on the countenance of Yasir
Arafat and extend to him the hand of fellowshi- -
Resort to these views is mandatory at this time in v,
of continuing pro-PLO propaganda stemming from Quaker
sources, with some emphasis on statements issued by the
Quakers from their Ann Arbor office. The latest from them
is a call for "a drastic reassessment of U.S. Middle East
policy, to focus on the key questions of Palestine statehood
and Israeli security and direct discussions between the
United States and the PLO."
The news release from Ann, Arbor is about the en-
dorsement of such talks included in a new book sponsored
by the Quakers, "A Compassionate Peace: A Future for the
Middle East" by Everett Mendelsohn. It is part of the prop-
aganda which tragically blurs a movement whose aims
have always been interpreted as directed toward peace. The
horror stemming from the three-lettered terrorist PLO
movement negates these widely hailed principles.
The expose in Midstream could not have been more
timely. The situation aggravated by the Quakers is deplor-
able.