Hagemeister, Michael Die ‘Protokolle der Weisen von Zion’ vor Gericht: Der Berner Prozess 1933–1937 und die ‘antisemitische Internationale’ (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 790 Hagemeister, Michael. Die ‘Protokolle der Weisen von Zion’ vor Gericht: Der Berner Prozess 1933–1937 und die ‘antisemitische Internationale’. Veröffentlichungen des Archivs für Zeitgeschichte des Instituts für GeschichtederETHZürich,10.Chronos,Zurich,2017.645pp.Illustrations. Notes. Biographies. Bibliography. Index. €54.00. In a monograph first published half a century before the volume under review, Norman Cohn’s widely-translated Warrant for Genocide raised the question of whether the Holocaust might have been avoided if fewer people had read (and read about) the Protocols and more people had realized how dangerous a concoction it was (and in various parts of the world still is today). Some books doindeedhavetheirownveryspecialdestinyandaffectthedestiniesofmillions of their readers and non-readers alike. Take, for instance, a booklet from 1848, The Communist Manifesto, and a short work by Lenin called What is to be Done?, dating from 1902, the year before the anonymous Protocols, a weird and stodgy compilation largely translated from the French, were first published as a serial in a right-wing St Petersburg newspaper. An online English translation is easily available without payment, but Hagemeister provides an adequate summary on pp. 38–40. It appeared in German translation in due course, and Hitler referred to it but appears not to have been particularly excited by it, and for some reason it was not reprinted in Nazi Germany after 1939 (pp. 49–53). Whether Stalin read it is not known, but it enjoyed some success with the right wing of the anti-Soviet Russian emigration. The fate of the Protocols (there are various titles in various languages) is (or should be) of great interest to all those studying Central and Eastern European Jewry, forgeries, literary fabrications, conspiracy theories, censorship, myths, legends and compromising materials (kompromat). The text might take on a new life in post-truth circles in which fake news seems to be playing an ever increasing role. This is particularly the case in Russia, where the very concept of truth is split into pravda and istina, with preference often being given to the former. And more broadly, it is not only Russians who accept the notion of credo quia absurdum (p. 299). If the Soviet leaders had creatively misused and adapted Cohn’s title shortly after his book was published, they would have stamped down on the Prague Spring well before the autumn, and put a brake on glasnost´ twenty years later, thereby preventing what the current President of Russia has called the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. But did the leaders of the USSR really believe that Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and Siniavskii were as dangerous as the Protocols? Hagemeister seems to think that Cohn, with the best of intentions, was exaggerating. In Switzerland in 1933, some Jews and non-Jews evidently felt that it was better to raise the alarm than to hope that ‘it would all blow over’. The Great REVIEWS 791 Depression was far from its end, the Reichstag had been set alight in February, shortly after Hitler had come to power, democratically if populistically. Curiously enough, both the German National Socialists and the Soviet International Communists were busy building up strong states and tightly controlled societies that were in some ways rather similar both to what the Wise Men of Zion had purportedly long been planning (see pp. 209, 229 and 329, for instance), and to what Zamiatin had envisaged in the early 1920s and to what Orwell was to describe at the end of the 1940s. The First Zionist Congress had taken place in Basel in 1897, and some of the contents of the Protocols were said to derive from an ultra-top-secret back-stage gathering of several enormously powerful Jewish leaders while the more public sessions of the Congress were diverting the attention of the general public from what really was being planned for the next stage of the strategy to rule over the entire world. If this text was, as is now more widely thought, concocted not at the end of the nineteenth century but at the beginning of the twentieth, one might have thought that the compiler(s) could have been inspired not only by Ivan...