Naumann spread a seed that will be capable of bearing fruit even in a hundred years’ time. Stöcker’s work had almost faded into nothingness even before his death.
Stöcker was the greater speaker, Naumann the greater human being.
Up to the thirtieth year of my life, I was an antisemite; at first, instinctively, then by conviction, and finally troubled by critical doubts.
To begin with, every human being is the product of his or her environment and education. A person who grew up in an archconservative castle in the most conservative constituency of Prussia can hardly be expected to share the mentality of the Association for the Defense against Antisemitism. As a child, I only got to see Jews in the form of the “fur and bag” Jews who came to our estate to buy and sell. These people were poor devils of embarrassing servility, the sort of people who, when thrown out the front door, come in again through the back. No one hated them, but people despised them. Inferior race!
Anyway, that was the conception with which I was raised: The Jews are different from us and are on a lower level. They do not want to work, just to haggle. They know no morality other than making money at any price. Therefore, one ought to beware of them. The best thing was to avoid them. For the saying went: Qui mange du juif en meurt. [Literally: Those who eat from the Jew perish from it].
This was the formula I followed at grammar school. We had half a dozen Jewish classmates at the most. We did not beat them up. The “rough fighters” were first produced by the Hitlerite mindset. But we snubbed them. We locked our few harmless Jewish classmates into an intellectual-social ghetto, as it were. I only became a rational antisemite, if one can use the expression at all, through the education I received in the Association of German Students. I joined this association to find opportunities to be politically active as early as university. “Politics, I live for you, politics, I’ll die for you,” I wrote back then in a letter to my mother, which she has carefully preserved. The only student fraternities getting involved in politics in the 1880s were the Association of German Students on the right and the Free Academic Association on the left. Of course, for me as a Junker, the rightist organization was the only possibility.
What lured me to the “V. d. St.” [Association of German Students] in particular was the fact that members benefitted from lessons in public speaking. The "Cours d’Improvisation" in Geneva had aroused my passion for impromptu speaking. Now, as a member of the “V. d. St.,” I encountered the “Speaking Hall.” It organized an open-discussion evening every week. I participated in it with such enthusiasm that I was already elected head of the Speaking Hall in the second semester. Since most of us held virtually the same political convictions, the debates were destined to become monotonous rather soon. For this reason, I nominated a co-speaker for each debate, someone who had to act as the devil’s advocate, advancing our adversaries’ arguments and defending them. This enlivened our evenings in a remarkable fashion.
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