While that old parlor game of button – button – who’s-got-the-button? has been replaced in Germany by a mad scramble for “Aryan” grandmothers, along comes one man who takes unction at the mere suggestion that he is entitled to classification as an “Aryan.”
He is Graf Soudenhove-Kalergi, the leader of the Pan-European movement. A German Graf, they tell me, is the equivalent of a count.
Well, this Graf picked up the Hakenkreuzbanner, a Berlin Nazi newspaper, at the breakfast table one morning, and imagine his surprise and horror when he read an article in that journal which referred to him as an “Aryan!”
The writer undoubtedly felt he was paying the Graf a delicate compliment, but the Graf couldn’t see it that way.
The Graf nearly tipped over his coffee in his rush for a sheet of writing paper and a pen. After all, a man in public life must expect his share of insults, but this was carrying things a little too far.
“An ‘Aryan,’ am I?” he muttered. “I’ll tell them a thing or two!”
So he wrote the editor of the Hakenkreuzbanner a letter, which in substance was somewhat as follows:
“I suppose you newspapermen are frequently at wit’s end in your hunt for stories, but, that, to my mind, is no reason for falsifying facts.
“Your base and scurrilous reference to me in today’s issue of the Hakenkreuzbanner as an ‘Aryan’ has caused me untold mortification and mental suffering.
“If I were an ‘Aryan’ (whatever that is), I wouldn’t be ashamed to admit it, because I believe no man should be held responsible for the misfortunes of birth.
“Some of my best friends, in fact, are ‘Aryans’—or think they are. I entertain no feeling of prejudice against them on that account, and I have instructed all members of my household to be very careful not to cause any embarrassment by making deliberate or blundering references to their ancestry.
“I try to keep my home free from prejudice of any kind, and this attitude holds true even where ‘Aryans’ are concerned. My Jewish and my Negro friends are all equally considerate of my more sensitive guests, and when a stray ‘Aryan’ happens to cross my threshold we all do everything possible to make him feel comfortable.
“But since you have seen fit to bring up the subject of my own background, let me tell you that I come from a Good, Impure Stock, and I have geneological tables to prove it.
“As a matter of fact it is ridiculous even to discuss this subject, because I have first-hand witnesses who can bear me out when I say that my own mother—only one generation back, mind you—was a Japanese.
“I suppose if I wanted to be nasty I could bring this matter into the courts and sue you for libel, but I think that if you will print this letter, or a retraction in some other form, I may be able to see my way clear to forget the insult.
“I don’t like to ‘put on dog’ over my own impure racial origin, but I do feel that the misfortune of ‘Aryanism’ could be wiped out by a careful application of scientific eugenics.
“If we who already are free from the taint of ‘Aryanism’ could entirely forget our natural feeling of revulsion against unions with pure ‘Aryans’—and I for one am perfectly willing to do exactly that if I can be of service to humanity—we would undoubtedly eventually achieve the ultimate ideal of racial admixture.
“That ideal would mean a European-Negroid strain, magnificently impure in make-up, and the ‘Aryan’ taint would be so well diluted that it would evidence itself, I believe, in only occasional traces of insanity.
“But these scattered throwbacks would tend to destroy themselves by their own violence, so that within a few generations all traces of this blemish undoubtedly would be lost.
“In my race Utopia, Jews, of course, would constitute the intellectual aristocracy.”
The above is, of course, pure improvisation. The Graf did, however, say some of the things attributed to him. He did declare for a European-Negroid race, with an intellectual aristocracy of Jews, and he did indignantly deny his own. “Aryanism,” while pointing out that his mother was Japanese.
The German newspapers found his letter too shocking for serious comment. They contended themselves with hurling insulting remarks at the Graf and expressed unfeigned astonishment at the fact that a man would voluntarily turn down the gratuitous brand of “Aryan.”
All of which is further evidence that Nazi “logic” is consistent.
—A. J. B.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
