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Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Natural Law Does Not Lead to the Unbound Executive
In 2016, I was studying the rise of the National Socialist movement. My project was to investigate the philosophical origins of the National Socialist German Worker's Party—that is, the Nazi Party. That story is a complicated one, since National Socialism was not a cohesive philosophical movement in itself. It was constituted by a variety of different threads: the master morality of Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosophy of Otto Weininger, Darwinian population medicine, and a number of other influences. It was during this work that I encountered the work of Nazi jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt, famous for his legal justification of Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Back in 2016, Schmitt's work was coming again into the public eye, thanks in large part to the influential Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule. Schmitt's sharp critiques of liberalism and his theories of law and politics, Vermeule argued, could be separated from his Nazism, and that to ignore these insights on account of Schmitt's politics was mere 'puritanism.' More recently, Vermeule has made waves with his idea of 'common good constitutionalism,' a new theory of legal interpretation arguing the executive branch can read into the law its own determinations about what serves the common good. (This is in contrast to the traditional notion that the courts make final determinations on constitutional questions.) In making this case, Vermeule makes liberal use of classical philosophical terms like 'common good' and 'natural law.' Vermeule's theories, however, should not be taken as representative of the tradition whose language he borrows. Rather, his project is fundamentally Schmittian and should be distinguished from wider theories about natural law and the common good. The significant and serious risks in Vermeule's project are not inherent in either natural law or common good political thought themselves. It would be a shame to throw out a tradition of thought, the tradition of natural law, that has so much to offer our public life because of a certain odorous bathwater. For the past several decades, Adrian Vermeule has been making an extended case for a more powerful executive branch of government. In the wake of the Iraq War, he co-authored The Executive Unbound, which made the case that legal constraints on the executive are really a fiction, and that American legal thinkers have overblown the need for separation of powers and the rule of law. In the modern era, given how quickly technology, markets, and foreign policy dynamics shift and how complex governance is, the legislature and courts are increasingly irrelevant. The executive is, or at least ought to be, 'legally unconstrained,' he wrote. Vermeule draws this line of thinking from Schmitt, a legal academic in early 20th century Germany and the 'crown jurist' of the Nazi Party. Schmitt played an important role in the early days of the Reich as chief legal counsel in party meetings. He wrote legal opinions for the party, drawing on his theories about the executive and the state of emergency, in order to justify Hitler's rise to dictatorial power and the extra-legal murders during the Night of the Long Knives. As the executive, sole power for determination with regard to the state of emergency—when to declare it, what it meant, and how long it would last—rested with the fuhrer. In this historical case, one element of the emergency was the existence of enemies of the party in important public positions. The fuhrer was, therefore, according to Schmitt, well within his proper role in ordering their killing or removal. Just as Vermeule claims that the executive's power rests not on what is granted to him by law but on the support of the people, so Schmitt claimed that Hitler's acts were justified because he had a special 'affinity' with what was popular among the German citizenry. Vermeule and his coauthor, Eric Posner, argue in The Executive Unbound that it is unreasonable to be afraid of tyranny on the part of an executive who is legally unconstrained, because public opinion itself will limit the administration's power (they have to worry about being ousted or about a lack of political will among the people). This, however, is precisely why Schmitt thought Hitler was justified in his policies: namely, because the German people wanted them. In the ensuing years, Vermeule has applied a Schmittian analysis to the administrative state—that is, to federal agencies acting under the executive. In articles like 'Our Schmittian Administrative Law,' and books like Law's Abnegation, he has argued that, inevitably, legislatures leave gray areas and gaps in the law, within which agency officials would have an unlimited breadth of action and judgment. The rise of the administrative state has long been a concern for originalists, who bemoaned the legal doctrine known as Chevron deference (overturned last year by the Supreme Court) which held that courts should defer to agency judgments in matters of the agency's own expertise. Many originalists regarded the legal doctrine as a problematic violation of the separation of powers since it gave unelected members of the executive wide latitude to exercise lawmaking power via regulations, unchecked by the courts or by Congress. Such a vast expansion of executive power opens the door to abuses of power, they maintained. But for Vermeule, this is a feature of the administrative state, rather than a bug. It is precisely with the executive, unfettered by law, that this kind of power should rest. 'As for the structure and distribution of authority within government,' Vermeule writes, 'common-good constitutionalism will favor a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy, the latter acting through principles of administrative law's inner morality with a view to promoting solidarity and subsidiarity. The bureaucracy will be seen not as an enemy, but as the strong hand of legitimate rule.' Finally, in Common Good Constitutionalism, his most recent book, Vermeule argues that it is within the executive's prerogative to read into the text of the law its own judgments on what serves the common good. This prerogative, further, ought not be limited by ideas about the original public meaning of the Constitution or later statutes. Originalists have long argued for their position on the basis that straying from the original public meaning of the text in favor of 'reading into' the text the policy priorities of a given judge effectively untethers judicial and executive action from the law altogether. It provides no principled limit to a judge's ability to disregard the actual meaning of a law in favor of his or her preferred policy objectives. Here again, this kind of wiggle room is what Vermeule likes, and he likes it not just for judges but for administration officials. In Common Good Constitutionalism, as legal scholars William Baude and Stephen Sachs note, Vermeule's motivation for attacking originalism seems to be that it has failed to achieve his preferred policy ends (among these are a stricter public health regime, the curbing of elite liberal wealth, and forming 'better beliefs' among the public). For Vermeule, the limitations of original public meaning are too constraining. Despite the introduction of natural law and common good language in his most recent book (following on Vermeule's recent conversion, in 2016, to Catholicism), that work's project is the same Schmittian one that Vermeule has been on for decades. Additionally, the elements of Schmitt's thinking that Vermeule affirms were not incidental to Schmitt's support for Hitler, but constitutive of it. It was on the basis of the very theories that Vermeule affirms that Schmitt gave to the Nazi party the justifications it needed for dictatorship and political murder. I do not think this is the outcome Vermeule wants. But it is a grave misjudgment to think there's a nugget of gold hiding within the mottled stone of Nazi jurisprudence. Again, Vermuele's latest work has a distinct flavor from his earlier writing, in that it makes liberal use of 'the common good' and 'natural law' and of quotations from Thomas Aquinas. The term 'natural law' refers chiefly to a tradition of ethical, not legal, thought. It is a tradition as broad as it is deep, and includes ancients like Aristotle and the stoics, medievals like Aquinas and Ibn Sina, and moderns like Hugo Grotius and Jean-Jaques Burlamaqui. On the other side of the world, it includes also the epochal philosophers Mengzi and Zhu Xi. These thinkers are united by the idea that ethical truths can be drawn from facts about human nature. Within the natural law legal tradition in America today, Vermeule is decidedly on the outskirts. The leading thinkers in this world are people like Jeff Pojanowski, Kevin Walsh, and Robert P. George, none of whom would agree with Vermeule's particular application of classical or natural law terms and traditions. Where Vermeule sees the meaning of law as open to the unconstrained interpretation of the executive, Pojanowski and Walsh ably argue that the classical tradition has more to say in favor of faithfulness to the original public meaning of duly promulgated law. The differences between these thinkers is enough to show that Vermeule's line of thought should not be taken as representative of the natural law legal theorists at large. The strength of natural law theory is that it holds that ethical and political debates may be grounded in facts about human nature that are accessible to all. This does not mean that the answers to moral and political questions are obvious or easy. It simply means that it is possible for us to argue, disagree, deliberate, and reason together constructively, because we all have access to some degree of common ground upon which to argue. To understand natural law in the American tradition, you might turn to Hugo Grotius, the Dutch natural law legal theorist of the Early Modern era and an influential figure in the legal landscape that shaped America. Working mostly in the early 17th century, Grotius was facing a newly diverse, pluralistic, and interconnected world, one in which the dictates of particular religious traditions would not have universal sway. Was it ever possible to come to any kind of agreement about moral life and the law? Grotius thought so, because essential facts about our human nature, like the fact that we are rational and social animals, are universal, and can ground our deliberation about what constitutes the human good. In his great work, De Jure Belli, Grotius argued that natural law is 'a dictate of right reason' based upon human nature, one which could ground the laws of engagement between diverse nations. We still find ourselves in the same situation: a pluralistic and diverse society. Natural law allows us to govern together based on certain fundamental facts about human nature. We will all bring our own biases and interests to the table, but—unlike the executive branch Vermeule would make all powerful—the legislature is specifically designed for bargaining, reasoning, deliberating, and accommodating in order to achieve stable, moderate, and reformable governance through law. Natural law theory supports the idea that this kind of deliberation is possible, and that politics can be something more than raw expression of preference and power. In a legislative body, members will bring many resources to bear in making judgments about what is and is not good law. For deliberation to be possible, however, there must be some common ground, some public set of reasons accessible to all. Otherwise the parties are at an impasse. Natural law holds that this realm of public reason really is accessible to us through observation of human nature. In the rationality and freedom of the human person, for instance, we might be able to ground arguments about rights; in the sociality and fellow-feeling of human nature, we might be able to ground arguments about duties. This does not mean everyone will come to the same easy conclusions, it just means that there is a common, non-sectarian discourse within which reasons can be exchanged. Natural law holds that there really are objective claims we can make about what is good and bad for the human person. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, makes his famous 'function argument' to express how this works. In looking at any natural thing, we determine what is good or bad for it based on its characteristic functions. Thus, we know that it is better for a dog to be able to run and play and be with other dogs than to be legless, caged up, and alone. This is because we can observe the nature of the dog is to run, to play, to be social. So it is with human beings. Our characteristic functions include our health, security, but they also include distinctly human things, like our freedom, sociality, and rationality. Early Americans thought that the law should protect certain liberties, like freedom of speech, worship, and expression, because these were conducive to the characteristic functions of free and rational creatures. But this exchange of reasons, this deliberative practice where, as a group, we try to come to practical arrangements in accordance with human flourishing and the common good, does not satisfy Vermeule. He would like government to instantiate his own conception of the common good without compromise and deliberation. In his picture, the executive will be in the best position to decide difficult questions of politics and morality. But how can we be sure the executive will use this awesome power well? On the one hand, in The Executive Unbound, he says that public opinion will constrain the executive, but in Common Good Constitutionalism, Vermeule claims that the executive will do what's best for the people whether they like it or not. How we guarantee that the executive will be so wise, restraining itself from using its unchecked power tyrannically, remains a mystery. Vermeulism also should not be taken as 'the Catholic position.' Although Vermeule quotes St. Thomas Aquinas—a towering figure in the natural law tradition—in support of his legal theory, whether Vermeule's view represents Aquinas's, let alone the actual teaching of the Catholic Church, is debatable. Pope John Paul II, in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus annus, affirmed that there should be a balance of power between executive, legislative, and judicial, with the law reigning over all. 'This is the principle of the 'rule of law',' John Paul II wrote, 'in which the law is sovereign, and not the arbitrary will of individuals. … Authentic democracy is possible only in a State ruled by law.' What is more, Vermeule bases his thinking on the political theology of Carl Schmitt. But no less an authority than Joseph Ratzinger, who would later become Pope Benedict XVI, wrote in 1970 that it was 'impossible' for a Catholic to adhere, as Vermeule seems to, to Schmitt's 'political theology.' Our constitutional system, inspired by the writing of Aristotle among others, is designed with human weakness in mind. An unbound executive was precisely what it meant to avoid because the Founding Fathers recognized, as Aristotle did, that an executive unconstrained by law is a tyranny, and that those in whom such power was concentrated were likely to be corrupted by power. Aristotle thought that it would be lovely to have a perfectly wise and just monarch, but recognized that, human nature being what it is, a tyrant was much more likely. The solution of our founders was the elaborate system of separation of powers and of checks and balances. And even further, the founders, as expressed in The Federalist and elsewhere, did not believe that their system was self-enforcing or self-constraining. They understood that it could devolve into tyranny in various ways. As John Adams said, our Constitution is only fit for a moral and religious people, and any other would 'go through it like a whale goes through a net.' The founders also believed that, fallen as human nature is, it could still rise to virtue under the right cultural influences and within a well-designed constitutional system. The Constitution is designed for people who have the virtue to adhere to, rather than violate, its limits. As administrative law scholar Adam White argued in his review of Law's Abnegation, the rise of a more imperial presidency is not a historical inevitability, but a consequence of a lack of public virtue. The loss of the rule of law is, in some respects, a matter of choice. Today, perhaps, we face a choice. Do we still believe in the Constitution handed down to us, or do we want to slide toward Schmitt's authoritarian vision? It is a vision that could be embodied on the right or the left theory and that of the founders both made use of the idea of natural law. If we accept Vermeulism, let us at least not say that natural law made us do it.
DW
16-05-2025
- Politics
- DW
Roma Resistance Day: From Nazi era to present day – DW – 05/16/2025
On May 16, Sinti and Roma across Europe commemorate the resistance against National Socialism and the Nazi genocide. They are still fighting against antiziganism today. Looking back at his childhood, Holocaust survivor Mano Höllenreiner recalled how his father, his uncles and other Sinti and Roma joined forces to fight to the death against the SS paramilitary Nazi organization in 1944 inside the Auschwitz extermination camp. Höllenreiner was only 10 years old at the time, and he later spoke about the men in his family: "They had been in the military, they weren't afraid." Together, they defended themselves against imminent transportation to the gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. In the camp, they and their families suffered from hunger, thirst, cold, disease, brutal violence and unbearable hygiene conditions in the so-called "gypsy camp." The children were the first to die. A memory of the carefree time before deportation to Auschwitz: Mano Höllenreiner (left) with his father and his sister Lilly Image: privat Auschwitz 1944: Resistance under unbearable conditions After they received a warning about a major SS operation, the prisoners armed themselves with stones, sticks and shovels they had been able to smuggle into their barracks from their forced labor sites. They entrenched themselves behind the entrance, ready to fight, and refused to come out. The guards finally left, Höllenreiner remembered. "Even as a child, you understood that they got the message, that this time the people would fight back," he said. He added that the guards knew that a few of them might lose their lives in the attempt to squash the resistance, and that they would not be able to gas all the inmates without fierce opposition. Many prisoners who were fit for work were then transferred to other concentration camps. Cousins Hugo and Mano Höllenreiner, along with their parents and siblings, thereby escaped being murdered in Auschwitz. However, the approximately 4,300 remaining prisoners — children, mothers, the elderly and the sick — were herded onto trucks in the night from August 2 to 3, 1944. They fought back with all their might, a Polish prisoner observed: "Women were the toughest fighters — they were younger and stronger — and defended their children." But they were all murdered in the gas chambers. That very night, according to the observer, black smoke from the crematorium drifted over the camp. August 2 is now observed as European Roma Holocaust Remembrance Day. Anxiety over Berlin memorial to murdered Sinti, Roma To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Sinti, Roma fight for survival together The resistance of the Sinti and Roma in Auschwitz has not been researched comprehensively, historian Karola Fings told DW, adding that for a long time no one was interested in it. Fings, from the Antiziganism Research Center at Heidelberg University, is the editor of "The Encyclopedia of the Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma in Europe," compiled to make documents available online and encourage new research. The atmospherically dense reports, said Fings, show the struggle for survival and the joint search for strategies. In view of the horror in Birkenau, it is incredible how people came together in solidarity in order to survive, she said. Germany remembers Nazi genocide of Sinti, Roma with culture To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Sinti, Roma women protest deportations Sinti and Roma families in Auschwitz were not divided into men's and women's blocks like other prisoners. This also has to do with their earlier resistance to persecution, according to Fings. "When Sinti and Roma families were separated, there was fierce resistance," she said. As early as 1938, when several hundred Sinti and Roma men were deported to concentration camps, it was mainly the women who protested. "The wives, mothers, sisters and daughters traveled to Berlin and campaigned for the release of their male relatives. They often accepted that protesting in public could mean they themselves would be deported to concentration camps because they were so unruly," explained Fings. At the time, Sinti and Roma activists called in lawyers and sent letters of protest to all state authorities, from the criminal investigation department to the office of dictator Adolf Hitler. After the Nazi era, resistance continues After World War II, the racist persecution and genocide of the Sinti and Roma at the hands of the Nazis were widely denied in West German society. The justice system was rife with supporters of the Nazi regime, and Nazi perpetrators made a career in academia or the police and harassed members of the minority during compensation proceedings. "It was a terrible struggle for survivors," said Fings. Heinz Strauss survived Auschwitz and lost many relatives in the Holocaust. His son, Daniel, is involved in the civil rights movement today, as chairman of the State Association of German Sinti and Roma in the state of Baden-Württemberg. "We have achieved recognition as a national minority, we have achieved recognition of the genocide," said Strauss. What is the German government doing for Sinti and Roma? In its coalition agreement, the new federal government has committed itself to the fight against antisemitism and the protection of Jewish life. However, Sinti and Roma are not mentioned in the document, nor is the fight against antiziganism. Lawyer Mehmet Daimagüler told DW that this omission concerns him. Daimagüler was the previous government's commissioner for antiziganism and has campaiged for the rights of Sinti and Roma in Germany. Many measures — developed by the Independent Commission on Antiziganism — were adopted during his term of office, but they now need to be implemented. The commissioner was an important bridge between the government and members of the minority, Roma activist Renata Conkova told DW, adding that abolishing the office would be a mistake. Conkova offers counseling for immigrant Roma families in the eastern German state of Thuringia, especially those from Ukraine. Despite much progress and political commitment, people from the minority are still being discriminated against in kindergartens and schools, in government offices, when looking for housing and in the workplace, said Conkova. "We want to solve the problems," she said, adding that this can only be done together with politicians and authorities. This article was originally written in German. While you're here: Every Tuesday, DW editors round up what is happening in German politics and society. You can sign up here for the weekly email newsletter Berlin Briefing.
Epoch Times
11-05-2025
- Politics
- Epoch Times
Germany Wrestles With AfD ‘Extremist' Label Battle: What to Know
The right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party—which came a close second in recent federal elections—is now locked in a legal battle with the state to avoid being branded an 'extremist' right-wing movement. The controversial label was imposed by Germany's domestic intelligence agency on May 2, to only then be put on pause amid the transition to a new power-sharing government following a legal challenge. Here is what we know about this particular aspect of German law—forged post-war to protect against a return to fascism—and the implications for society and politics. What Is the Legal Battle? In post-World War II Germany, the 1949 Basic Law was adopted to prevent any return of National Socialism, and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) was established to safeguard the country's democratic order from internal threats. After classifying the AfD as a suspected extremist movement in 2021, BfV formally May 2 . The BfV argues that the party poses a threat to the country's democratic order, and accuses the AfD of 'disregarding human dignity' through 'ongoing agitation' against illegal immigrants, which the party says when occurring en masse, threatens German social peace, national identity, and security. The government agency compiled an 1,100-page report that remains undisclosed to the public. Related Stories 5/8/2025 9/7/2024 The BfV says the AfD's approach to ethnicity is 'not compatible with the free democratic basic order,' noting the party does not consider German nationals with an immigration background from predominantly Muslim countries equal members of the German people. After six days under the extremist label, the AfD won a reprieve on May 8 when a court If the AfD loses its lawsuit, the label could be reimposed. What Does the 'Extremist' Label Mean? The label means the AfD was elevated to the BfV's highest tier of domestic intelligence monitoring. 'They can be surveyed all across Germany; the entire organization. This is the sharpest sword that this domestic intelligence service has against the AfD,' political analyst at the conservative think tank MCC Brussels Richard Schenk told The Epoch Times. However, surveillance does not automatically trigger criminal charges, as that remains the police's purview, nor does it imply harassment, he said. But it does carry consequences. Many banks are 'really skeptical of organizations that are under surveillance,' he said, and venues or employers may shy away. There are also career risks as civil-service applicants, teachers, police, and soldiers must disclose AfD ties. 'You are in fear of losing your job or not getting the job that you want because you are a member of the AfD. So it is putting a lot of pressure on them. It already has consequences,' he added. How Does the Surveillance Work? The BfV handles various threats such as counterintelligence, extremism, Islamism, and left-wing and right-wing radicalism. Legally, once the BfV flags a group, there are : preliminary monitoring, heightened observation, and then full surveillance, which is the stage of monitoring that the AfD is facing. 'Whenever they identify a political group that might be a threat, they are legally obligated to disclose to a certain degree [...] that they have placed this organization or individual person under surveillance,' Schenk said. How Is this Connected to the New Government? Since February, the AfD has been shut out of power by a 'cordon sanitaire,' a cross-party pact between the ruling centre-right Christian Democrats and their coalition partners in the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). On May 6, Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democrats became chancellor and the party's Alexander Dobrindt took over as interior minister, overseeing the BfV. Dobrindt 4: 'I'm skeptical, because the aggressive, combative nature of the party against our democracy must be a defining characteristic. The Constitutional Court was right to set high hurdles for banning a party. [I am] convinced that the AfD does not need to be banned; it needs to be governed away, and we need to talk about the issues that have made the AfD so big.' However, the Social Democratic Party has AfD ban. Schenk said while the Christian Democrats takes a more pragmatic view in the hope of bringing back AfD votes back into their fold, he said that Germany's mainstream political left, also with the Social Democrats, see any kind of compromise on policies with the AfD and their voters as kind of 'heresy.' Merz's thin coalition is fragile and Schenk said that a nuclear option could be used to bypass the chancellor and implement an AfD ban. 'So they could go through the state governments, which have the votes in the upper house, and use those votes to initiate a party ban this way, to circumvent the responsibility of the federal government through this,' he added. What Is the AfD? Originally a protest movement, the AfD to dominance last September in Thuringia and Saxony, winning one-third of the vote in both states, emerging as the dominant political force in eastern Germany, which was behind the Soviet Iron curtain until 1989. It also came second in the national elections in February on staunch positions, which were by social media platform X owner and former Democrat Elon Musk. Its policies include strong support for traditional marriage between a man and woman and family life, the preservation of national independence in the face of the European Union's increasing power, German culture in the face of 'European integration' and Islamization, and border security including the expulsion of illegal immigrants. Its Young Alternative Thuringia was also as 'right-wing extremist' in March 2024. A German court AfD Saxony can also be designated as a right extremist group by authorities. AfD joint leaders Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel have repeatedly denied that the party is extremist. Could AfD be Banned? Under Article 21(2) of the Basic Law, the Federal Constitutional Court has to date outlawed only two parties: the Sozialistische Reichspartei (Socialist Reich Party, SRP), a neo-Nazi-style party banned in 1952; and the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany, KPD), banned in 1956. In the noughts, there were two major attempts to outlaw the extreme-right, ultranationalist party the National Democratic Party (NDP) of Germany. However, that was shot down by the Constitutional Court in 2017. 'The NPD pursues anti-constitutional goals but at the moment, there is an insufficient weight of evidence to make it appear possible that their behavior will result in success,' the court's top judge at the time. Political scientist Werner J. Patzelt, visiting professor of research at MCC Brussels, told The Epoch Times the bar for banning a party is high. He said that even those who argue against certain constitutional principles, such as calling for a monarchy, do not qualify as extremist parties. And if a party is simply 'too insignificant to present a concrete danger for the existence of the liberal order of the state itself,' then proportionality principles prevent a ban. When a ban does occur, such parties are forbidden and dissolved, with their property expropriated. 'It is unlawful to entertain a follow-up organization to such a political party,' Patzelt said. The extremist designation is also anything but straightforward, he says. Patzelt suggested the BfV-compiled dossiers would contain proof that many AfD politicians are 'radicals.' But he warned that banning the AfD would not erase their underlying grievances, often tied to, but not cemented to, working class voters. 'Even if banning the AfD would be successful, the problems, nor mindsets, nor the convictions, nor the emotions of those Germans would disappear,' he said. James Baresel and Guy Birchall contributed to this report.
The Guardian
10-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
I was Hitler's neighbour: ‘If he'd known we were Jewish, we'd have been sent to Dachau'
The odds were against Edgar Feuchtwanger reaching the age of 100. He was born on 28 September 1924 into a time of poverty and political turmoil in post-first world war Germany. He was also born into a Jewish family in a society that was about to turn to National Socialism, an ideology that would ultimately be responsible for the murder of 6 million Jews. In 1929, when Feuchtwanger was five, something happened that made his long life even more unlikely. He got a new neighbour: Adolf Hitler. In October that year, Hitler moved into the grand second-floor flat at Prinzregentenplatz 16 in Munich. His previous flat, on the other side of the Isar, the river that divides Munich, had become too small. Munich to him was the 'Capital of the Movement', a title he awarded the city officially in 1935. From 1929 on he lived in nine rooms in this corner building, with its long balconies and baroque facade. His staff moved in with him, and, soon, devotees and high-ranking SS officers were flocking to the flats nearby. Diagonally opposite, at Grillparzerstrasse 38, with a direct view of Hitler's flat, lived the Feuchtwanger family. Edgar Feuchtwanger, whom his parents called Bürschi, grew up in a respected and wealthy family that employed a chef and a nanny. His father, Ludwig, was a publisher and lawyer; his mother, Erna, a pianist. Intellectuals of the early 20th century were constantly in and out of the family home: the writer Thomas Mann; the lawyer Carl Schmitt, who later became a Nazi legal theorist and party member. And, of course, Ludwig's brother, and Edgar's uncle, Lion Feuchtwanger, the author of the novels Jew Süss and Success. Hitler and the Feuchtwangers lived across the street from each other for years – until the family emigrated to England in 1939, just before the outbreak of the second world war. 'Nowadays, I am perhaps the only living witness who saw and experienced Hitler directly and had some kind of contact with him,' says Feuchtwanger. We are sitting in Feuchtwanger's living room in his home near Winchester in Hampshire. The sun shines through the large window, directly on to him, and he must be incredibly warm in his suit, complete with shirt and tie. He is of the generation that dresses smartly for appointments like this, his daughter Antonia Cox tells me. Sitting on the sofa, he doesn't look 100 years old. But he doesn't hear so well any more, and needs a walking frame to get around and a wheelchair for longer distances. Cox and her brother Adrian Feuchtwanger have warned me that he will need to take regular breaks during our interview. We talk in German. The stories he tells me are a mixture of his own experiences and those told to him by his parents. Some things he no longer remembers. He has forgotten, for example, that he stood in Hitler's flat in Munich around 10 years ago, but Cox is there to help him out. The apartment has been a police station since 1949, to prevent it becoming a pilgrimage site for old Nazis and neo-Nazis. Feuchtwanger visited it and looked out through the window at the flat where his family once lived. Other things he remembers very clearly. The years when he lived opposite Hitler are deeply embedded in his memory. Twelve years ago, with the French journalist Bertil Scali, he wrote everything down in his book Hitler, My Neighbour. The Feuchtwangers first noticed that they had a new neighbour because of one banal detail: their morning delivery of milk was missing. Hitler, the milkman explained to Edgar's mother, had claimed most of it for himself. He presumably needed it for his SS bodyguards. As a five-year-old, did he even know who Hitler was? 'Well, I knew that this was a man who was not very – how should I put it?– well disposed towards us as Jews. He had already tried to come to power in Munich in the so-called Beer Hall Putsch, in 1923,' says Feuchtwanger. On the evening of 8 November, Hitler and his brownshirts stormed into the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, declared the government of the German Reich dismissed and called for revolution. The putsch failed. Hitler was arrested, charged with high treason and sentenced to five years in prison in April 1924. He was granted early release at the end of the year, having started work on Mein Kampf. In the Feuchtwanger household, Hitler was spoken of as a 'ridiculous figure' because of this failed coup, Feuchtwanger remembers. 'People believed that Hitler was a temporary phenomenon,' he says. In particular, his uncle Lion wavered between feeling alarmed and remaining calm. In his satirical novel Success, which he published in 1930, Lion portrays Hitler as a hysterical man named Kutzner who tries to seduce the people with nationalist ideas but ultimately fails. 'Although he regarded Hitler as very dangerous, he saw him as someone to be made fun of. Hitler was supposed to continue as a ridiculous figure and then he would somehow disappear from the scene,' Feuchtwanger says. Did his father, Ludwig, urge Lion not to write this book? 'I don't know whether he actually advised him against it, but he certainly didn't want my uncle to put himself in even more danger. It was a matter of luck that Lion was on a reading tour in America when Hitler became Reich chancellor in 1933. Fortunately, the German ambassador there was not a Nazi. He realised immediately that my uncle couldn't go back to Germany; he would have been killed.' Lion, who had also publicly mocked Mein Kampf, was one of the first to be stripped of his citizenship by the National Socialists, and his books were banned and burned. Soon, Feuchtwanger's parents spoke of nothing but politics and the danger posed by Hitler. Did he feel threatened, I ask. 'Well, nobody actually knew that it would become so threatening until it really did. As a child, I grew up very sheltered.' Everything seemed rather harmless to him, Feuchtwanger says. Hitler and National Socialism remained an abstract threat. He saw Hitler's silhouette in the flat opposite, as the cars drove up and chauffeured him to the Berghof, his residency near Berchtesgaden. 'Whenever I went to school, I had to pass the house of his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, where Hitler was often in the garden. He was lying in a deckchair. So it all seemed quite – how should I put it – normal and unthreatening.' It was in 1933, when Adolf Hitler had just become Reich chancellor, that Feuchtwanger met him face to face for the first time. 'Down from Prinzregentenplatz you could go out on to the meadows, get some fresh air, which was of course always important to the nannies. Once, when we were on our way, Hitler had just come out of his house. There was a car that he obviously wanted to get into and he saw that we had stopped to let him pass and he thanked us.' Until then, he had only ever seen him from a distance. Now he was standing in front of him. 'He was actually just an ordinary person. There was nothing special about him,' Feuchtwanger says. That was the only time he met him up close? 'Yes, and he didn't know who we were then. He just saw a woman with a small boy.' Hitler was unaware that the boy was Jewish; that he was a Feuchtwanger, related to Lion. What would have happened if he had known all this? 'He would have done something. Without a doubt.' When I ask what he means by 'done something', he replies: 'I'm sure we would have been killed in Dachau.' Feuchtwanger seems tired at this point in the conversation. While he dozes, his son shows me pictures from Feuchtwanger's childhood, where he is with friends and wearing lederhosen. All over the house are piles of books and folders with documents from his childhood in Nazi Germany; family photos and awards hang on the walls. Next to Feuchtwanger is the German edition of his latest book, written with Cox, entitled Letters from a Child Exile (it will be published in the UK in spring 2026). The book compiles letters he wrote in 1939 to his parents from England while he waited for their arrival. After a few minutes Feuchtwanger tells me he's ready to continue. In his memoir, I say, there is the following quote from his father: 'Right in front of his eyes we are safer. His genius is so great that he forgets to look out of the window.' As his neighbours, they were hiding in plain sight. Feuchtwanger no longer remembers his father saying this, he says, 'but it was certainly not the intention to emigrate. My father was very connected to German culture. That was his life.' As time went on, what Feuchtwanger saw from his room on the second floor changed. He had noticed how the counterdemonstrations had diminished, how people now stopped in front of the Führer's apartment with their arms outstretched and shouted 'Heil Hitler', how the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain came to visit. Chamberlain was invited to Hitler's private flat after they had signed the Munich agreement in the Führerbau, the building that symbolised the Nazis' power, together with the Italian prime minister, Benito Mussolini, and France's prime minister, Édouard Daladier. The Feuchtwangers' lives were also changing. 'We noticed that Hitler was a very clever man, the way he managed everything. It wasn't good for us either,' says Feuchtwanger. While Hitler's world was growing, his was shrinking. After the Nuremberg race laws were enacted in 1935, the Feuchtwangers lost their staff and Edgar his nanny, because Jews were no longer allowed to be employers. They were not allowed to enter shops. His father lost his job at the publishing house. Schoolmates turned against Edgar because they did not want to be friends with Jews. As a child, did he even realise the significance of being Jewish? 'Jewishness didn't play a big role in my life before the rise of National Socialism. It did in my father's life, because my grandparents were Orthodox Jews. But by my time that had completely faded away. I didn't know much about it,' he says. After Hitler came to power, the family became more conscious of it. 'He turned it into something. And I didn't really understand that. Back then, at primary school, I was like the other children at first. I went along with all the Nazi stuff. Have you seen my exercise books?' He leans forwards and reaches for a worn notebook. A few sheets almost fall out. There is a huge swastika on the first page. He drew it himself when he was about eight years old. 'The teacher's name was Miss Weikl, and she was very pro-Nazi right from the start, I think. She gave us tasks as children.' She dictated poems, had the children write birthday greetings to Hitler and make drawings of the 'true' map of Germany, including the regions that the teacher said had been taken away from them. Did he ever question what he was drawing? 'No. I did what the teacher wanted me to, and my parents said: 'Do what the teacher says.'' What did his parents say about the drawings? 'Nothing. They didn't want trouble; they didn't want me to fight back.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion If his parents had believed until then that Hitler was only a temporary phenomenon, that they were perhaps safer living right under his nose, they now realised that they needed to flee. 'The point where it became really dangerous was when Vom Rath was shot. My father knew straight away that this was going to be very serious.' The German diplomat Ernst vom Rath had been killed in Paris on 7 November 1938 by a Jew. The assassination was part of the justification for what followed. Two days later came the November pogroms, sometimes known as Kristallnacht: synagogues were set on fire, Jewish shops were destroyed and looted, and Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps – among them Feuchtwanger's father, Ludwig. 'They came in the evening and took him to the concentration camp in Dachau, half an hour away from Munich. Later, they seized his books – I remember that well. My mother tried everything to get him out of the camp,' says Feuchtwanger. Was he aware of what concentration camps were back then? 'Everyone knew that Dachau existed, that it could easily be deadly.' Deadly meaning that people were shot? 'Yes. It was winter and they had to stand still for hours. If a person fell down, he was usually killed. The Nazis wanted people to know that, so that they wouldn't resist them.' Six weeks passed, during which Feuchtwanger's mother called numerous offices, travelled to the Dachau concentration camp herself and handed over some food for her husband at the gate, on which was written 'Arbeit macht frei' as on many other concentration camps. Then, suddenly, Ludwig came home. Feuchtwanger doesn't know why he was released. But he remembers that his father looked frighteningly thin, that he had to go to bed immediately. 'He was seriously weakened.' As soon as his father was back on his feet, the family started making preparations for their departure. Many friends, including Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, to whom Edgar had often delivered books on loan from Ludwig's library, had long since left Germany. With money from Lion and other family members, they were able to obtain a family visa for England at a cost of £1,000, a vast sum back then. Two months passed before Feuchtwanger boarded the train in Munich. His father accompanied him as far as the Danish border, then travelled back to Munich, while Feuchtwanger got on a boat to England. He was 14 years old at the time. It was an adventure for him, he says. 'The day I crossed the border was 19 February 1939 and it felt as if I had left an evil empire.' In England, he stayed with a family in Cornwall. He quickly learned the language and got a scholarship for college, but he worried about his parents. The letters that Feuchtwanger wrote during this time bear witness to this, such as this one dated 28 February 1939: 'Dr and Mrs Dyson, I repeat, are particularly nice people. But the other people are very nice too … Come as soon as possible. Until then, all the best, 1,000 kisses. Your Bürschi.' He kept everything; his mother, Erna, did, too. When I ask him whether he would describe the Feuchtwangers as a family of collectors, he laughs. The past fills the house. A mirror and a painting from the Munich flat hang in the dining room. In the penthouse, as Feuchtwanger jokingly calls the room above the garage, is the grand piano from Munich that he and his mother used to play. His parents packed everything up when they fled, filled two 5-metre-long transport crates, and managed to get permission to have them shipped to England. Feuchtwanger's parents arrived three months after him, and soon moved to Winchester. But his father never felt at ease in England. 'He was a fish out of water. He couldn't do anything here. He couldn't speak the language. After the war, he wanted to go back to Germany. My mother didn't really want to; she'd had enough of Germany.' His father's plans never became reality: he died in 1947. Lion Feuchtwanger never returned to Germany, either. He lived first in exile in France, until the Nazi invasion forced him to flee. In 1941, he and his wife emigrated to the US, where he died in 1958. By contrast, Edgar quickly felt at home in England. He studied history, gained his doctorate at Cambridge and lectured at the University of Southampton. He and his wife, Primrose, bought a house in Winchester after their marriage in 1962, and it was there they brought up their three children, Antonia, Adrian and Judith. He now has three grandchildren. Primrose died in 2012. Since then, he has lived alone. In his work as a historian, Feuchtwanger focused initially on his new country – the Victorian era, Disraeli – and later on the country of his past – National Socialism and the Third Reich. Did he ever want to go back permanently? 'I made connections with the University of Frankfurt and was a visiting professor. But I didn't want to move back. It was too far away from my life. I mean, English is my everyday language. I can speak German perfectly well, but normally I speak in English.' Is he still a Bavarian? 'I am a Bavarian at heart. And I'm, wait, it says here somewhere …' He fumbles for his magnifying glass and opens a copy of his autobiography, looking for a quote from a friend. 'It says here: an honorary Englishman – that's what I am.' The confirmation of this, the OBE awarded by the then Prince Charles at Windsor Castle in 2021, dangles from his suit. It was given for his contribution to Anglo-German relations. He also received the German Federal Cross of Merit in 2003. Looking back, he considers himself lucky. 'I'm still here at over 100 years old, while most of them are gone. Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, they were all wiped out.' He laughs. As for his tips on reaching such an impressive age, he never smoked, he says. Is he a brave person, I ask. 'A what?' I speak louder. He laughs and says immediately: 'No, no, no!' His book tells the story of how in 1930 six-year-old Edgar and his half-sister, who was visiting from Switzerland, went to see whether the nameplate by the doorbell said Hitler. It didn't. The name written there was Winter, the Führer's housekeeper. Quite brave, I say. And travelling alone to England – that was also quite brave. 'I had to go along with it. Even back then, when my father accompanied me on my escape to the border, the SS people came on the train and said to my father: 'Why don't you escape, too?' And my father told them: 'I'll prepare everything.' He left the train and I was just driven on. Of course, it was shocking. But there was nothing else I could do.' So, he is sticking with no? 'Absolutely. I'm a person who goes along with everything. I take it as it comes. I don't fight against what I can't change. I know I don't make the world turn; it turns without me.' He remains determined to speak as a contemporary witness about the rise of the Nazi era. 'It was a good thing that I wrote my memoirs when I did. I couldn't do it now.' More than a decade has passed since he published his book about being Hitler's neighbour. That was a completely different political time, I say. Western democracies have experienced a shift to the right, and the rise of populism. In Germany, the far-right AfD became the second-largest party in the recent federal elections. 'It's very unpleasant that something like this is rising again in Germany,' Feuchtwanger says. 'You look at it with fear.'
Daily Tribune
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Tribune
German Embassy in Bahrain Marks 80 Years Since WWII's End with Solemn Commemoration
AB bahrain The German Embassy in Bahrain commemorated the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe and the liberation from National Socialism at the Residence of the German Ambassador in Saar today. Hosted by His Excellency Ambassador Clemens Hach, the evening brought together high-level guests and dignitaries in remembrance and reflection. The event was attended by His Excellency Ambassador Khaled Yousef Al-Jalahma, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Bahrain, as the guest of honor, as well as H.E. Jamal Mohamed Fakhro, First Deputy Chairman of the Shura Council. Also in attendance were Vice Admiral George M. Wikoff, Commander of the United States Naval Forces Central Command, numerous ambassadors accredited to the Kingdom of Bahrain as well as the national senior representatives from the Combined Maritime Forces stationed in Bahrain. The celebration featured a piano performance by Ukrainian pianist Olha Kochura, who paid tribute to the victims of war through a carefully curated program of classical works reflecting themes of peace, loss, and resilience. Ambassador Hach emphasized the importance of remembrance in his address, stating that remembering the suffering caused by war was part of the enduring responsibility we carry to promote peace, democracy, and human dignity.' He also reaffirmed the commitment to maintain the International rules based order that was developped based on the lessons of World War II as the base of a peaceful international order.
