This is what I heard every day in the Association of German Students and from my peers and in the antisemitic meetings. Thus, I read chiefly right-wing newspapers – of course, I did not touch any “Jewish rags.” Added to this was the type of literature widespread in our circles.
To me – who knew no Jew, so to speak – the image of Jewry was all the firmer: they were a people marked by blatant materialism, only out to make money; they shrank from hard work, were unproductive on account of a devotion to trading, indiscriminate in their means, and therefore well-represented in criminal statistics; they had a destructive (rather than constructive) bent, and were cynical and lascivious – overall, a Mephisto turned people.
Certainly, I began to have doubts soon enough. Though in my youth, I had the blinkered perspective of the milieu; still, these blinkers had not grown on me.
I went into raptures about Heinrich Heine, bathed in the delight of his irony, whereas the poets extolled by my fellow [antisemitic] travelers struck me as incredibly dull. I was astonished by Karl Marx’s life’s work, which appeared extremely constructive to me. [Ferdinand] Lassalle’s speeches fired my enthusiasm, and I felt they represented the pinnacle of the German language. I admired the idealism of Eduard Bernstein, who preferred eating the hard bread of exile to tasting the sweet cake of subjugation. I saw how people who never had enough curse words for the Jews unfailingly sought out Jewish expertise when it was a matter of life and death.
And then I was fortunate enough to come into close personal contact with intelligent conservative men who were not antisemitic. Adolph Wagner and the Court Preacher Frommel as well as the provost Baron von Liliencron told me of their experiences with great Jews, whom they had known as great human beings and great Germans.
I began dealing with the history of Jewry beyond the catechism of the antisemites.
Why did the lawyers only become lawyers and almost never judges? It could only be because the few Jews who had a chance of becoming judges at all always got stuck at the earliest stages.
Why were the Jews so nonbelligerent? Because in Prussia, not only were they barred from the career of officer; they could not even become reserve officers.
Why were there so few Jewish craftsmen? Because they had been excluded from guilds up to the time of Jewish emancipation.
Why were they not farmers? Because until 1812, they were not allowed to acquire any landed property.
Why did so many deal in financial transactions? Because under canonical law, only Jews are allowed to carry out financial business.
Of course, I could have – and should have – known all this before taking a position on the Jewish question. But does Adolf Hitler actually know this today?
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