The Dedication

A column by Mr. Liepmann will appear every Sunday in the Jewish Daily Bulletin.

Though the incident which I propose to relate concerns me, I consider it sufficiently typical and significant for discussion. Modesty in this instance would be false modesty.

First of all, I must state the following: while still in Germany, I wrote three novels. These did not deal with Jewish questions. Jews played no larger part in them than they do in the actual world. Only after these books were publicly burned in Germany, because they supposedly reeked of that spirit of disintegration with which the new Germany expects to dispense, did I realize that the quality designated as “Jewish decomposition” is really a kind of yeast whose function is that of leaven in the process of all cultural creation.

After I escaped from the Witmoor concentration camp, forever robbed of my health, I wrote a “photographic record” of present-day Germany, at the request of my American publisher; “Murder-Made in Germany” was the result. (In the European editions the book was called “The Fatherland.”)

I wrote this book in Paris during July and August of last year. It was a hot summer. Deathly sick, my whole body bruised and battered, I did not expect to survive the summer. I wrote the book in two months at white heat. Of all the material at my disposal, I could only select the seven-times attested and weighed. I was convinced that despite the fact that I sat in France, saved, I was doomed to die with the comrades who had remained in the camp. There I had belonged to a “Jewish group,” consisting of six. Two have been released. Of the other four, one is already dead.

MET WITH REPROACH

I was well aware that this book would be read in all civilized countries, as it was. I dedicated it to the “Jews murdered in Hitler Germany.”

I have thought a good deal about this dedication. It brought me many attacks. Among hundreds of personal, hateful objections, one kept recurring: “Human beings have been slaughtered in Germany. Of course, Jews also, but what of the others?”

I should like to answer this reproach. A writer is a writer—not a tradesman or politician. Inevitably, he is a political writer. Socrates was one; so were Dante, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Heinrich Heine and Zola. All writers who have a love of mankind, a passion for ethical concepts, are in the last analysis, political. An invalid can only be cured if the physician can make a diagnosis. The world can only be improved if it is portrayed.

An account of a railroad accident in a newspaper seems commonplace, yet people who have experienced such an accident, can never forget it. The task of the writer is to portray the world in order to better it. He must portray it not like a news item, but in such a fashion that the reader will experience the picture as though he were a part of it.

VICTIMS OF EVERY EPOCH

In this sense, I wrote “Murder-Made in Germany.” Although the Jews represent only a fraction of the victims of German barbarism, I had to dedicate the book only to these Jews, because the Jews are not merely the victims of German barbarity; they have been the victims of every barbaric epoch in human history. The present sufferings of the German Jews are the sufferings of the eternal victims of barbarity, extending far beyond the German manifestation.

When a writer of my type writes a book against Hitler, Hitler can only serve as an example. Hitler’s victims, like the victims of all savage periods in world history, are always Jews.

Obviously, many more-non-Jews in Germany are suffering the same and worse. Their sacrifice is even greater, because it is voluntary. Political opponents die for their convictions.

But even this circumstance moved me to dedicate the book to the Jews. Hitler’s political opponents perish for their beliefs. The Jews, however, suffer and die for nothing. The political opponents had decided of their own free will to struggle against Hitler. They were prepared to defend their convictions. The Jews, however, merely lived their lives and became victims. To be a Jew is not a matter of conviction, but of fate.

Therefore, because the heroes of the battle are chiefly to be found among the non-Jews, I must speak of the Jews. They are heroes senselessly; they are the truly tragic figures of history, tragic and symbolic beyond all measure, because they not only suffer, but suffer in vain. Neither their lives nor their works ennobled mankind, but their guiltless death aroused the indignation of the world.

A writer today should be permitted to record the tragic tremors of our earth. “Here is the boundary line,” said Friedrich Schiller in his note on Maria Stuart, “where the political writer becomes a moral writer.” For this reason I dedicated my book to the murdered Jews of Hitler Germany

A column by Mr. Liepmann will appear every Sunday in the Jewish Daily Bulletin.