German editor specializes in educating about Nazi era

FRANKFURT, Feb. 18 (JTA) — Walter Pehle has made a career out of educating Germans about the Nazis. Pehle, an editor at the Fischer publishing house here, publishes books delving into every aspect of Nazism and the Holocaust in an attempt to educate fellow Germans about the past and investigate the roots of homegrown evil. It’s part of a mission that he calls “A Marshall Plan for the Mind” after the U.S.-sponsored Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. “Hannah Arendt spoke about the banality of evil,” Pehle said in a recent interview in his book-lined office, he said, referring to the famous phrase coined by the author in her book on the Adolf Eichmann trial. “I feel the contrary. It’s not the banality of evil, but the normality of evil. That’s what they have to learn here. That’s why I publish books, and why it’s important to have exhibitions, conferences. “Only the normality explains the mass acceptance of Nazism by the people,” he said. Pehle, a historian, is the founder and editor of Fischer’s series of books on “The Age of National Socialism” — popularly known as the Black Series, both for the subject matter and for the distinctive black covers. The series, with more than 120 titles in print since 1977, is “the oldest and most extensive series of its kind” whose central idea, Pehle said, is “remembering for the future.” Fischer had published a number of books on Nazism, the Nazi period and the Holocaust in the 1950s and 1960s, including “The Diary of Anne Frank,” but most went out of print in the 1970s. Pehle initiated the Black Series with the republication of several books from Fischer’s back list, starting with “Nuremberg Diary,” by the U.S. court psychologist at the Nuremberg Trials, Gustav Gilbert. Within two years, new titles were added. One of the series’ most successful titles was a book on the American television miniseries “Holocaust,” which caused a sensation in Germany when it was shown on television there in 1979. A book quickly published on the show, “Holocaust, the TV Film: A Nation Feels Concern,” sold 40,000 copies in 12 weeks. Few other books in the series have sold more than 10,000 copies, but Pehle is convinced that the mere fact that the books are published remains important. His passion for his publications dates to his own student days. Now in his 50s, Pehle, like many other Germans of his generation, began questioning his parents about what they did during the Third Reich in the 1960s. “I asked questions, but I didn’t get any answers,” he said. “I had fantasies about my father because he was silent.” Eventually, Pehle researched his father’s past and found that he had been “harmless.” Still, he said, he knew that “hundreds of thousands of these normal people were the basis of the Nazi state.” The Black Series includes books by German and foreign historians, sociologists and psychologists, as well as memoirs by Holocaust survivors and others. Books touch on all aspects of the Third Reich — from education to the judicial system, to the role of women, medicine, religion and music. Themes and studies directly related to the Holocaust and the destruction of European Jewry, including books by the scholar Raul Hilberg, also form a central component of the series. “What especially interests me is Nazi ideology,” Pehle said in a speech at the Jerusalem International Book Fair last April. “What was it that fascinated the Germans so much that they dropped everything and hastened to become Nazis?” Perle did not publish Daniel Goldhagen’s best seller “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” which was a phenomenal success in Germany, selling 200,000 copies in its German translation. The Black Series had published two books by Ernst Klee in 1988 and 1989 — “The Good Old Days” and “God is With Us” — which similarly depicted ordinary Germans as accomplices to the Holocaust, he said. “Did they come too early?” he asked. “No, for they reached a relatively broad public and were reviewed unusually often.”