Notes on the Illustrierte Beobachter
Fixing a Meme
This comparison has been doing the rounds since 4th November. It’s truthful – in that the Mail’s headline is evocative of horrors – but inaccurate, which undermines its value. It’s worth unpacking the reality, because that reality is arguably worse than the meme suggests.
First, here’s the original page from the Nazi propaganda magazine Illustrierte Beobachter (the Illustrated Observer) – the clearest version of it I’ve found so far:
The headline reads in essence: “Enemies of the People ejected from the German Polity.” More literally, it says “People-betrayers pushed out of the German people’s community.” German stacks a lot of nuance and meaning into its compounds, so it’s worth looking at the bits of that last word “Volksgemeinschaft.” The first bit is simple enough: “Volk” is “People” – we have the same word, “folk” – and it is if anything a bit more tribal than the English usage, especially in 1933. Then you have “Gemeinschaft”, which needs a bit of unpacking:
What’s being done here is absolutely primal. The people in the photographs are being declared no longer part of the German common identity. They are not part of the German people’s together-ness.
They’re not judges, by the way. Alfred Apfel, bordered in red in this image, was a lawyer and socialist. Friedrich Stampfer was a journalist. Georg Bernhard was a left liberal newspaper publisher. Inevitably, given the period, these “Enemies” are Jews, journalists, political opponents of Nazism.
Of course, Fascism at that time was still a sort of racily respectable fad in the UK, and by coincidence, 1933 is also the year the Mail’s owner, the period’s Viscount Rothermere, published a celebratory leader called “Youth Triumphant” which began:
I write from a new country on the map of Europe. Its name is Naziland.
Well, the Mail’s past dalliance with the Blackshirts is not a secret. Moving on: that phrase “Enemies of the People”. There’s an Ibsen play, but that’s hardly the first thing you think of when you read the words. Nor is the Roman senate’s declaration that Emperor Nero was a hostis publicus (thank you, Wikipedia). No, the reference, intentional or not, is something like Robespierre:
The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation; it owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death.
If 1793 seems too remote, don’t worry. The happy phrase was kept alive in Soviet Russia:
… all leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party, a party filled with enemies of the people, are hereby to be considered outlaws…
Once again: political opponents are to be cut off from the body politic and considered lawbreakers. It didn’t go well for Lenin’s targets, any more than for Hitler’s.
The article under the headline is markedly less splenetic. A blue inset box notes with approval that Lord Thomas is “impatient with the tricks of immigration lawyers” – a more depressingly ugly endorsement would be hard to come by – and the tone and content of the main text are almost dull. It doesn’t matter. You can’t unring the hate bell with a few column inches of factual reporting. I don’t believe the Daily Mail writers intended to say that three senior British judges should be considered unpersons and killed for doing their job. I don’t believe they intended to identify the Leave movement with both Hitlerism and Soviet totalitarianism. I don’t imagine they intended to bring up the Mail’s terrible error in espousing Nazism. But all that is absolutely inescapably the historical context of the 4th November front page.
