David Frum: The Day of Fate
The Day of Fate
Kristallnacht, on its 80th anniversary, still offers a potent lesson: We all face the choice between right and wrong, responsibility and recklessness, conscience and complicity.
7:01 AM ET
David Frum
Staff writer at The Atlantic
At an evening news conference on November 9, 1989, a spokesman for the East German Communist government made a history-altering mistake.
The spokesman had been authorized to say that travel restrictions on East German citizens would be lifted the next day, November 10. Instead, he said that the restrictions were lifted effective immediately.
Within minutes, hundreds of thousands of East Berliners rushed to the checkpoints of the Berlin Wall. Since the erection of the wall in 1961, border guards had killed more than 750 people seeking to escape East Germany. That night, the border guards had heard the same news as everyone else. Their license to kill had been withdrawn. They stood aside. The long-imprisoned citizens of East Berlin rushed out into West Berlin that night, in what became the greatest and best street party in the history of the world.
Soon, Berliners east and west began to attack the hated wall, smash it, rip it apart, in what would become the overture to the reunification of the long-divided nation into a single democratic republic.
One of the first orders of business of that reunified Germany was to establish a new national day. What more obvious candidate was there than the ninth of November, the day the wall came tumbling down?
But, no. Germans call November 9 the “day of fate.” Over nearly two centuries, November 9 has been the day when the profoundest choices, for good or ill, are thrust before German leaders and people. On this day, the most hopeful possibilities and the darkest realities have presented themselves—reminding Germans and not only Germans that of all history’s forces, human agency can be the most powerful and most mysterious. On November 9, again and again, paths have diverged between better and worse futures—not only for Germans, but for the world. November 9, 1989, could not be a day of celebration in reunited Germany, because the date also conjured one of the most evil events in German history: Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938.
Until November 1938, the Nazi program for Germany’s Jews was one of humiliation, segregation, and exploitation. Recent scholarship has drawn uncomfortable parallels between the Nazi subordination of the Jews before 1938 and the Jim Crow system of the American South at the same time. In the half decade leading up to 1938, German Jews were expelled from the civil service and from teaching posts. They were forbidden to marry Gentiles and risked murderous punishment for nonmarital sexual relations. They lost their licenses to practice medicine and law. They were barred from using park benches and swimming pools. They were excluded from Germany’s universities, then its high schools. They were expelled from orchestras and other cultural institutions. At every turn, they were economically defrauded and robbed: subjected to economic boycotts, punitively taxed, denied health insurance and other social benefits, and forced to sell assets at knockdown prices to regime cronies.
Yet through the end of 1937, it remained possible to hope that the Nazi persecution might still respect some last limits of humanity. While many individual Jews suffered assaults and some were murdered in the early years of the regime, systematic killing of Jews solely because of their religion still hovered over the horizon. Surely in an advanced and cultured nation, some decency must still constrain uttermost barbarity?
Eighty years ago this week, the last of those illusions was smashed like broken glass.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/eighty-years-after-kristallnacht/575410/
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