What explains the strange violation of common sense so often encountered in the postwar recollections and excuses offered by major cultural figures of the Nazi period? To any Western European or American viewer, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will is a blatantly political film, both for its choice of a Nazi Nuremberg Rally as subject matter and for its treatment of the subject in a style glorifying Nazism, Hitler, and the German race. Yet Riefenstahl herself has always claimed that Triumph of the Will was an apolitical work of art, not propaganda but merely the artistic documentary filming of an event: “Work and peace are the only messages of Triumph of the Will ,” she recently declared — not the glorification of Hitler.[4] Few Western critics — including modern German critics — have been convinced by these almost pro forma justifications, since the Western mind finds it hard to comprehend how politics and art can be separated in such a self-contradictory and indeed absurd way.
The same may be said of the notorious case of Heidegger. The philosopher claimed to be “apolitical,” but to an outside observer he seems to have been mired in practical Nazi politics in 1933–34, seeking to Nazify the German university system, making rectorial speeches at Freiburg in favor of the Nazi revolution, and proclaiming Hitler as the embodiment of German history, past and future. Yet for Heidegger, who thought in German categories, his unshaken faith in the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism was not a “political” attitude, but rather an unpolitical existential commitment. After the war, of course, even Heidegger recognized that these outspoken remarks needed some glossing if they were to pass the scrutiny of his Western readers, though some of these postwar justifications of his Nazi involvement in themselves must strike a Western reader as bizarre. His depiction of his conduct during the Nazi years as having even been a clear declaration of “spiritual resistance” to the regime — even though he remained a Nazi party member until 1945 — seems almost laughable when viewed in the crisp light of Western common sense. Nevertheless, even if Heidegger’s various efforts at self-justification are permeated with the sort of half-truths and evasions that are so characteristic of German apologies, they still acquire a certain logic, reasonableness, and consistency when interpreted through the preconceptions of German mentality: Supporting Hitler and wearing a Nazi badge are not really expressions of political belief, but rather of a moral inner closeness to the deepest apolitical ideals of the Nazi regime — work, peace, authenticity, humanity.[5]
The same kind of puzzle is found when we turn to figures who were less tarred with Nazism than Riefenstahl and Heidegger. The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler had held serious doubts about the Nazi regime, attempting (unsuccessfully) in 1933–34 to defend Jewish musicians and declining to conduct “officially” (though willing to do so in a “freelance” capacity) in occupied France. Yet how is one to close one’s eyes to the active and uncritical collusion with Nazism so vividly to be seen in those famous photographs of Furtwängler conducting for a row of Nazi dignitaries
...But so profound was the conditioning of the apolitical that even [Thomas] Mann could slip back, in that same essay, into peculiar habits of German thinking (e.g., the idea of the “two Germanies,” one artistic and innocent, the other political and evil), which outraged his American readers of the time. Even in his “liberal” period and despite his wife’s being of Jewish ancestry, Mann could also evince — like Heisenberg — a peculiarly German antisemitism. After the war, of course, Mann was never forgiven in Germany by those literary colleagues who had stayed on to profit from the patronage of the Nazi regime. Their view, uttered without a tinge of shame, was that by becoming an “outer” political emigrant Mann had betrayed the Germany of art and inner freedom, whereas they, by staying on, had effectively emigrated “innerly,” preserving the inner freedom of art and so actually “resisting” Nazi tyranny: Mann had spent his years abroad in comfort, while they had suffered the mental agony of being successful protégés of the Nazi regime! Faced with this incredibly immoral foolishness, Mann refused to live in Germany after the war.
...But to believe that terror alone forced the German people to support Hitler is historically naive. The Gestapo was statistically only a small force; Hitler counted instead on his appeal to profoundly respectable elements of German mentality and tradition to attract the German people and win their consent, if not enthusiasm; the traditional elements that Hitler invoked were military and civic obedience, self-sacrifice, respectability, dignity, and so forth — all virtues in a liberal system, but debased when they served an evil system. As to the excuse that one was not “political,” this is persuasive because a Western listener has grown up in a system that actually assumes that everyone is political, in the sense that all have a civic duty that obliges them to act politically whenever moral standards are violated. But in the German context, this is not so. Of Zivilcourage , as one German pastor who did resist Hitler put it, “we Germans have no concept, and indeed no authentic German word for it,” only a Germanized French term. …This explains the frequently encountered circular sequence of passing the buck of “conscience” in the Nazi period: The Church passes the duty of resistance on to the politicians, who then pass it on to the military, who return it to the Church, and so on.
...The mundane liberal-democratic ideals of the Weimar Republic lacked appeal — and legitimacy. It was hardly more than a dispensable interregnum between the German past and the German future, an imposition of victor’s justice after the unmerited defeat of 1918, something lacking truly German roots and reality, and as such destined to pass away. To Westerners, of course, this inclination for an old authoritarian empire or a new revolutionary one, and the associated aversion to Weimar democracy, appear as political points of view. But to Heisenberg and many others, their support of such illiberal states remained distinctly “apolitical”: Their support was spiritual, patriotic, social, national, cultural, moral, natural—indeed, anything but the detested “political” behavior that defense of the Weimar Republic represented. “Politics” was participation in Weimar and illicit, whereas sympathy for anti-Weimar sentiments was defended as a decently “apolitical” stance....Already in 1922 Heisenberg had been so converted to the ideal of German salvation through the spread of German culture that he was simply unable to understand why his patronizing visits as an emissary of victorious Nazi Germany twenty years later should give offense to Dutch or Danish scientists (any more than Martin Heidegger could understand why wearing a Nazi badge during his visit to Rome in 1936 should injure the feelings of an exiled former student he met there). [16]
...Another comforting self-deception that paralyzed any meaningful reaction to Hitler was the notion of the “good side of Nazism.” This “good side” was spring-cleaning the tired and decadent life of Germany and restoring a sense of dignity and honor to it. In October 1933 Heisenberg sagely observed that “much that is good is now also being tried and one should recognize good intentions.”[4]
Truth can be as strange as fiction. From Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture, Rose 1998: