A Hero in Germany:
I mentioned below that I was reading Eichmann in Jerusalem earlier this week. One of the issues raised by the book is nonviolent resistance to the Nazis' plans for extermination of the Jews in occupied Europe, which author Hannah Arendt showed to be more common than is often realized, and generally effective where practiced. She is particularly clear in her praise of the Danish people.
Of course, given time, it is quite likely that the Nazis would have overcome these obstacles. There was likewise the necessity of physical force to stop the Nazi regime. One of the attempts famously came from the German military itself. Arendt is somewhat dismissive of it.
What had sparked their opposition had been not the Jewish question but the fact that Hitler was preparing war, and the endless conflicts and crises of conscience under which they labored hinged almost exclusively on the problem of high treason and the violation of their loyalty oath.... To the last, their greatest concern was how it would be possible to prevent chaos and to ward off the danger of civil war. (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 98.)
Now, these are from my perspective highly proper concerns for military men to hold in their hearts. Violation of an oath must be very carefully considered; treason is no matter for a man of honor to take lightly. The danger of a civil war is a severe one under the best of circumstances, which do not include having the Red Army advancing on your position.
Nevertheless, one can appreciate the objection that their concerns were patriotic, and not motivated by a human feeling for Jews as such. For that reason, I found
this essay by Alan Wolfe both surprising and fascinating.
Bonhoeffer believed that states were necessary to secure conditions of social order. But when a state violated the prior order established by God, as the Nazis had clearly done, what should a Christian do? Bonhoeffer expressed his answer in an essay called “The Church and the Jewish Question” in 1933, which he wrote out of his disgust with the German Christians and their worship of naked power. Without Judaism, he declared, there could be no such thing as Christianity. Christians therefore had to stand in opposition to such explicitly anti-Semitic policies as the Aryan Paragraph. But Bonhoeffer went further. Christians, he continued, were under a positive duty “not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.” Any church that allied itself with an evil regime was not a church, and could not therefore speak for God. “What is at stake,” Bonhoeffer insisted, “is by no means whether our German members of congregations can still tolerate church fellowship with the Jews. It is rather the task of Christian preaching to say: here is the church, where Jew and German stand together under the Word of God; here is the proof of whether a church is still the church or not.”
The implications of Bonhoeffer’s thinking became obvious in May 1934, at the meeting that produced the famous Barmen Declaration and the birth of the Confessing Church. “If you find that we are speaking contrary to Scripture,” the Declaration proclaimed, “then do not listen to us! But if you find that we are taking our stand upon Scripture, then let no fear or temptation keep you from treading with us the path of faith and obedience to the Word of God.”
Bonhoeffer was a crucial member of the conspiracy, one who spoke openly but also worked as a secret agent for the benefit of the Jews. He is clearly someone that Arendt leaves out of her calculation that 'to the last' the conspirators were chiefly worried about worldly things.
Wolfe is somewhat bothered by this.
As admirable as Bonhoeffer’s actions were, there nonetheless remains something disturbing—we should be candid about this—in his willingness to jettison so many centuries of moral and ethical reflection on the good life and how it should be led. “Principles are only tools in the hands of God,” he wrote. “They will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful.” But it is precisely because we recognize the fragility of ethical principles that we work to preserve and protect them when they are under attack. If all men were Bonhoeffers, ethics might be dispensable. But they are not, and so we need Kant and his successors....
I would be less than honest if I did not admit that bringing this man—and his intransigence on all the important questions of our time—so vividly to life raises awkward questions for the liberalism in which I put my own faith. How, precisely, would a Rawlsian have acted in those dark times? Must we not move beyond this-worldly conceptions of politics as a struggle for power to other-worldly concerns with repentance and days of judgment, if we are to grasp how the Nazis were able to combine their own rational plans to kill millions with satanically inspired ideas about a Thousand Year Reich, and also how some people were able to resist those plans? Is it possible to face death with courage without knowing that a better life awaits? Can one be loyal to one’s collaborators in the resistance without being loyal to some higher power? Can faith help overcome torture? Lurking behind all such questions is the major one: if the problem of evil is not one that humans can solve, have we no choice but to rely on God for help? Does Bonhoeffer’s greatness prove his rightness?
We can see the problem clearly if we return to Arendt for a moment. She was plainly a Kantian -- her final argument for the execution of Eichmann in spite of all legal difficulties pertaining to the case is essentially drawn from Kant's
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Her final writing at the end of her life was on Kant's practical and political philosophy.
She also notes, however, that Eichmann claimed to be a Kantian.
[Eichmann] declared and with great emphasis that he had lived his whole life according to Kant's moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty.... "And, to the surprise of everybody, Eichmann came up with an approximately correct definition of the categorical imperative. 'I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws'.... Upon further questioning, he added that he had read Kant's Critique of Practical Reason.... Whatever Kant's role in the formation of 'the little man's' mentality in Germany may have been, there is not the slightest doubt that in one respect Eichmann did indeed follow Kant's precepts: a law was a law, there could be no exceptions. (Arendt, 135-7)
I'm not quoting her strident and plain objection to Eichmann's application of Kant's principles. She also noted that Eichmann himself admitted that he was failing Kant when he agreed to work on the Final Solution.
However, the Final Solution followed two previous 'solutions' -- forced emigration and concentration camps. Apparently both of these were in line with Eichmann's formulation and understanding of the categorical imperative. That's not quite as unreasonable as it sounds: the conflict in the will in 'formulating a maxim' that people be killed is that, if it were universalized, you would also be killed and thus unable to will. Since that is a logical contradiction, the maxim cannot be approved by Kant's mechanism. There's no similar contradiction in a universal maxim that people should be expelled from their homes. However uncomfortable, it doesn't stop me from
willing.
This is really the problem with Kant's practical philosophy. His clear idea (which becomes much more explicit in the "Doctrine of Virtue," in his later
Metaphysics of Morals) was to prove that Christian morality was capable of being generated by pure practical reason. There are good arguments that he failed to do this; in fact, there are a lot of good arguments, too many to address fairly even in sketch.
Even if he had come up with a mechanism that would let a Christian legislate for himself the principles of the faith, however, it is really a problem for the model that Eichmann could reasonably claim to be relying on it for his own earlier 'solutions.'
Probably a lot of people in Nazi Germany had read Kant: doubtless he was a point of Aryan pride if even Eichmann got around to it. Ultimately, it does not appear that his model inspired anyone to do from reason what Bonhoeffer did for God.
