The Nazi Loop

by Herman Rapaport (1996)

The Nazi-Loop (or n-loop) is a virtual circuit that adapts itself only too well to a number of different turns. To begin with, the Nazi-Loop is to be considered a noose or circuit, for example, a computer loop that structures a social network that concentrates its energies on the task of hating. In keeping with Nacht und Nebel tactics, the n-loop is invisible and automated, an electronic stealth loop that works via computerized telecommunications, including, of course, the internet. The n-loop criss-crosses the net even as it tries to surround us as a kind of ready-made entanglement whereby victims are encircled and targeted. Goal of the n-loop: to transform the terminal into a terminator. But is this not already what video games have prepared young people for? The use of the terminal or joystick as a extension of Sega and Nintendo. Hate is the cheap ante one has to pay in order to cross over from merely playing at murder to realizing the killing potential of the computer. One starts with ordinary anger and frustration and cultivates it using the terminal or n-loop as mentor. There are even anti-Semitic video games to help youngsters make the transition.

The n-loop is also to be thought of as a loop of exchange, a means of circulating disinformation back and forth about the past and the future. The purpose of this exchange of disinformation is to lower the threshold of murder so that in the end it is not even seen as murder anymore. Indeed, the circulation of disinformation around the misrepresentations that then end up circulating along neural pathways of the brain. The n-loop therefore could be thought of as a circuit that has the capacity to jump or switch from cybernet to neuro-net. Think of it as the construction of a thought virus in hyperspace. This virus can take the form of an addiction or obsession with the capacity to structure and concentrate all thought on just one thing: self-purification. Walter Benjamin is referring to something of this kind when he speaks of the destructive character as someone for whom culture is valuable only to the extent that culture is worthy of the destructive character’s will to exterminate. Such a will is obsessive to the extent that things can never be purified enough!

Think of the n-loop, too, as a formal structure of historical and political recurrence, always from below, that is accepted more or less grudgingly as our destiny, as the inevitable. Hence the general malaise in the face of rhetoric in the former Yugoslavia about ethnic cleansing. Given that once the n-loop is established it turns into a track or rut around which people more or less mindlessly run, we are conditioned to accept it as a form of political recurrence that is as familiar and inevitable as catching the flu. Hans Blumenberg has noticed in very different historical contexts that even long after certain conceptual structures have been overthrown or defeated that there is always the capacity for people to “reoccupy” them as if they were a system of fortifications that enable one to make the world predictable and reliable. These structures are useful as battlements against chaos. That the n-loop is in essence the reoccupation of Nazism by Identity Christians, Skinheads, and others conforms to Blumenberg’s idea that vacant beliefs are often resettled by individuals or groups in search of ready-made definition. The n-loop functions as a circular horizon of certainty that has been given in advance as if it were some sort of natural homeland. Consequently, dwellers of the n-loop are by definition native to the loop.

There is a sense, again, in which the loop could be thought of as an interlacing of the political right which, in the United States, is less homogeneous than one might think. The n-loop is a loose noose that binds racists, religious sects, nationalists, opportunists, industrialists, the morally scandalized, the paranoid, the unsuccessful. The n-loop is inscribed in networks of generalizations that do not always converge around the same law of rhetorical and political production. It therefore performs a series of crossings, switchings, detours, couplings, reroutings, branchings that never quite constrict around the exact same formal principle. Perhaps it is because there is no absolute idiom that would be proper to the n-loop that the n-loop is so lethal. One never quite recognizes it back as the Same, even if the insignia, the gestures, the tones of voice, the individuals appear similar enough. For example, when we see skinheads on afternoon television, we wonder what it is we are really seeing. Are these Nazis or kids dressing up like Nazis? By means of this loosening, the stricture performs a banding or tightening whose tourniquet is never taken seriously enough. Therefore even in Nazi Germany there were those in the mid 1930s who thought of the anti-Semitic aspect of National Socialism to be some kind of excess that was exceptional and not closely bound to the thoughts of the Führer. Therefore the n-loop functioned as an exceptional structure enabling persecution. The loop-hole of death.

The law or stricture of the loop, in other words, is a structure outside of the structure. It is the structure most internal to the structure that appears least directly or essentially connected with it. For that reason we could think of the n-loop as a loose end or stray thread of history that if pulled unravels the structure to which it hardly seems to be so formally connected. A snare, this loop functions as a device of historical entrapment, not least, of an entrapment of our perceptions about what is most internal to Nazism. As the stricture of an exception — but also of an obsession — the n-loop’s noose is always exempted from the crime, as if it were somehow not really a part of the structure which authorizes its implementation. In this sense the n-loop is directly analogous to any technology that is exempted from blame as if somehow an apparatus such as a revolver weren’t ever anything more than an unwilling accessory to a crime. This NRA type of logic is itself fundamental to the stricture of the n-loop’s structure: that everything be cast in the light of an exception.

In the context of the whole of Germany’s fascist history, this means that the past turns into one gigantic n-loop of self-exclusion whereby post-war Germany exculpates itself of any wrong doing. This, of course, is itself the structure of a revisionist stricture that is inherent in the Nazi-loop and whose legacies are everywhere apparent today. Consider, for example, that a major Holocaust museum had to be built in Washington D.C. as if the crimes committed were so exceptional to Germany that they couldn’t be remembered in, say, modern day Berlin. Or consider how Ronald Reagan exculpated himself from being in the Nazi-loop when clearly he was standing in the charmed circle of a Waffen SS cemetery of Bitburg. Or consider how very recently American soldiers from Fort Brag who murdered African-Americans for the sake of winning a Neo-Nazi spider tattoo were excepted as if somehow this had nothing to do with anything that could be politically or socially connected with the military itself, an institution which must have done a poor job of screening applicants or of training its personnel if race murder is something the Army strongly opposes.

Because the Nazi-loop can be so easily excused, excepted, or ostracized, it is never incorporated into our understanding of the structures and strictures whereby we live. This is clearly one of the Nazi-loop’s best survival skills, something that explains why neo-Nazis, Skinheads, Identity Christians, the Aryan Nation and others make themselves appear so odious in our eyes: they want us to reject and thereby except them from history so that in the future others like them can inherit and manipulate the loop for themselves. The Nazi-loop: structure of an inheritance.

“ANYONE WHO HATES FOREIGNERS IS ALWAYS AN ANTI-SEMITE, TOO.”

-Ignatz Bubis, Chairman of the Central Council of Jews for the past year and involuntary principal witness for “stable German democracy”

by Rüdiger Scheidges

The letter came by registered mail, like so many others these days. And in it Heinrich F. from Darmstadt speaks his mind. “I told you on 12/4/1992 that all citizens of Israel are murderers. And you too. You didn’t respond to my letter.” The recipient is Ignatz Bubis, Chairman of Germany’s Central Council of Jews for the past year. In that time he has received two or three such abusive letters each day. Most of them from senior citizens, many of whom are scholars, or architects and engineers. Most emphasize this and proclaim that they are neither left- nor right-wing extremists. Bubis will continue to leave these letters unanswered, although the authors no longer hide themselves in the dark cloak of anonymity, as they used to do. “That’s something new. Apparently one need not hide one’s anti-Semitism anymore. The taboo is broken,” he says with utter calm, even dryly, in his house in Frankfurt’s Schumannstr., #65. He, whose father and many relatives were murdered in Treblinka or other concentration camps, registers these letters with seemingly neutral objectivity. But behind the demonstrative calm with which he pulls out one letter after another and studies them again and again, a glimmer of his credulity, which he claimed to have a year ago, still shines through.

“Mr. Bubis! Our nation still remembers very clearly, in many respects, the sins of the Jews from 1920 to 1933, and is afraid that 1933 might soon repeat itself in a similar form, with similar pogroms and consequences for everyone, but for the Jews in particular. And you should resolve to openly apologize to the Right for openly discriminating against them.” But Ignatz Bubis, born in 1927 in Breslau, the seventh child of a civil servant, who fled the Nazis to the West, will be damned if he’ll take back, qualify, or play down the Right’s bone of contention–his statement after Rostock: “The Right is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” The year following Rostock, with stops in Mölln, Sachsenhausen, Solingen, and Fulda, gives him no leave to do so. And Erich S., author from Duisburg, will wait in vain for a response. “What good is that?” he asks. “You know,” he only seems to deviate, “yesterday evening the prime minister of Hessen apologized on TV to the Jews for what happened in Fulda. And I asked him, ‘Why don’t you apologize to the other Germans too?’ “

Here [Bubis] admits that the question contains a healthy amount of barely imperceptible skepticism. Hasn’t he learned again and again in the past months that it’s always only the “affected ones” themselves who are outraged? “What does it mean when the General Secretary of the Chrisitain Democratic Union (currently ruling conservative party in Germany), Hintze, asks me on a talk show, ‘What are the Jews doing about anti-Semitism themselves?’ ” Or when the secretary of state and party comrade Kinkel tells Stefan Troller on TV that he is too pessimistic “because he’s on the receiving end?” This is an exclusion that worries him. In the Frankfurt telephone directory Bubis’s address is easy to find, along with that of the Jewish congregation in Westendstr., only a couple of streetcars away from his apartment. Green-and-white VW-buses make it clear from afar that the State is protecting someone there. Bubis doesn’t like it. “I neither need nor want this personal protection. But the State wants it. What would the rest of the world think if–God forbid!–something should happen to me? Incidentally, that ‘God forbid! is for my fear that the rest of the world, not because I’m afraid anything will happen to me.” Ignatz Bubis, who has led the Jewish community in Frankfurt for ten years and has chaired the Hessische Rundfunk Radio Council since 1987, realizes very well that abhorrence of right-wing attacks, like after Sachsenhausen, is only half as bad without the added fear that it will reflect badly on the Germans to the rest of the world.

Ever since Bubis took over for Heinz Galinski, many people at home consider him to be a stroke of luck, for the Jews as well as for Germany. Many of the friendly letter-writers, and there are some of these, and the politicians, too, are pleased with the “credible principal witness for stable German democracy” who appeared so unexpectedly. And here Bubis leaves no room for doubt–the democracy is stable, and the Weimar Republic is just as far away as1933. “But,” and this But, this obligatory objection thrown in with his mild Frankfurt accent, certainly belongs here–“But I’m not at all suited to the role of principle witness. Unfortunately, I’m only being used as such.” No, he doesn’t want to run around as an advertisement. Instead, in many speeches in the US and Israel, he didn’t fulfill local expectations, and, “in the interest of truth,” as he says, he denies that Germany is already burning again and vehemently rejects boycotts “and other jokes,” as he calls them.

His appearances in public, open and resolute, though not loud, persistent yet not embittered, have generated a great deal of sympathy and respect for him. Even a Republikaner (member of a right-wing extremist party), and this pleases him and brings a boyish smile to his face, wrote of his high esteem for him. His ever precise, fact-based objection to laissez-faire German policies in matters of right-wing extremism has made the local politician, real-estate agent, and jewelry dealer from Frankfurt a popular speaker, talk-show guest, and panelist. “My wife always says, ‘You’s crazy.’ ” His appointment book leaves room for only 16 to 18 hours. But even he, who keeps better track of his appointments in his head than his secretaries do on paper, is beginning to wonder whether he’ll be able to keep it up for long. “But ever since I started, I’ve wanted to change, to move things. I don’t actually believe I’ll succeed. Yet my speeches and interviews generate discussion, which makes me think I might have an enlightening effect after all.” To him, enlightening means creating and accommodating openness, paving the way for normalization. And he wants Jews to be involved in German politics.

When he gets involved himself, he does so with caution. His criticism and warnings are always tempered by politeness; when he points to a swelling wound, he is careful not to make sweeping diagnoses. He sticks to the concrete. Because he’s aware, as representative of Germany’s 40,000 Jews, that his every word triggers the bad conscience of Germans, which thereby most automatically generates instinctual rejection. For this reason, many find him agreeable in comparison to his predecessor Galinski, whose relentlessly dour nature is entirely foreign to his own. In this regard his manner suggests a little more of Frankfurt than Berlin. But, when it comes to the matter itself, there’s no difference–something [Bubis] didn’t realize at first. “Heinz Galinski never got Auschwitz out of his heart. I’ve repressed my history. Is that better?”

His answer is no. Ever since he involuntarily became Galinski’s successor , he sees his predecessor in a different light. Not only because he would be the last to ever take from “after Auschwitz” its irrefutability. Anyone who has been in Auschwitz will never really feel at home in the world, especially not in Germany. “This year, though, took me by surprise. I must apologize to Galinski. I always thought his warnings, his pessimism, were exaggerated. But I’ve learned. There’s no other way–one has to express one’s opinion on everything. ‘The Central Council has no comment’ just won’t work in our time.”

It won’t even work for purely technical reasons. During our three-hour conversation, the telephone rings close to 50 times. An editor-in-chief wants to arrange a television panel; one journalist wants a statement on Fulda, and the next one a statement on the report from the office of constitutional defense. A local politician wants to speak his mind, and a business partner in Israel wants his “O.K.” Whether as politician, businessman, or chairman, Bubis responds in German, English, or Hebrew, ever calmly, coolly, and usually with a final “okay.” “They’ll never learn,” he moans softly. “My secretaries [don’t know] how to have four conversations at once. Look, all you have to do is press this button.” But it doesn’t seem to work. Always one after the other, the receptionists think. They react to my reading of the abusive letters with a complete lack of understanding. “Why put yourself through it?” they ask and categorically refuse to even look at the stupid correspondence.

The piles of friendly letters he received a few months ago have dwindled with time, and the nasty ones have increased in number. Rumor has it that the principal witness doesn’t only testify pro domo. The year following Rostock blessed him with increased contact with politicians in Bonn. The man who usually thinks pretty darned fast on his feet and who doesn’t beat around the bush much suddenly falters. He leans back in his silver-gray upholstered chair and pauses a moment. “Politicians. I don’t know how much sincerity there is to it, but they all make me feel as if they respect my opinion. But as I said, I don’t know how much sincerity there is to it.” Moments like this make one wish one weren’t a journalist.

Thoughtless statements do disturb him, like the one from Rostock CDU-representative Schmidt, who called [Bubis] an Israeli who is only tolerated in Germany as a tourist whose visa should be revoked as soon as possible. Bubis knows all too well that political stupidity goes hand in hand with every-day subliminal anti-Semitism. After all, he reads it every day. Even today–“You, big-shot realtor and cutthroat, rake in your millions without working, from the Sheraton in Israel to the red-light district in Frankfurt, at the expense of (dumb) little Germans. If you’re really suffering so much among the Germans, why don’t you have enough pride to turn your back on Germany FOREVER, as many Jews of character did long ago. When it comes to raking in money, Germany’s tops, not Israel. When will you finally figure out that you and your big mouth do your people more harm than you realize?” Mr. Steglitz from Sobernheim, won’t be receiving a response, either. He sits with several hundred others in the file cabinet and reminds the chairman of the Central Council that normalcy is still a long way off. As bad as these letters are, Bubis and his family receive far more threatening ones. He shows me these, too, but he doesn’t want to see them published. His wife and daughter probably aren’t even aware of what they contain.

“There is a rather strange constant. Since the 50s, polls have revealed that those from 18 to 30 years old always respond that they don’t have anything to do with [anti-Semitism]. That they are only half as anti-Semitic as their parents. But when they get older, they catch up with their parents. Do people in Germany automatically become anti-Semitic as they get older?” He doesn’t even want to try to comprehend this. He cannot understand. He shows me the next letter. An old man from the Ruhrgebiet (industrial area in western Germany) in his mid-seventies writes that the last time he met his friends in a bar the conversation turned to the Jewish question. All of them [were] the same age. “Have any of you ever seen a decent Jew?”–“No.”–“Have any of you ever seen a Jew at all?”–“No.” Therefore, Bubis interprets, “there aren’t any decent Jews. That remains the conclusion.”

Will[i] H., contractor from Tempelhof, Berlin, comes to a different conclusion. “You’re currently in Israel in order to establish the conditions by which all Jews in Germany can move to Israel immediately, or at least as soon as possible. Despite your statement, ‘Israel is a difficult country,’ you’ll soon succeed in making Germany ‘free of Jews.’ We Germans are crossing our fingers for you. Galinski, to be sure, went too far with his denunciations of Germany and the German nation. Even he couldn’t cope with it, and he bit the dust.”

Reading such hate-letters has become a part of his daily routine. But these letters don’t frighten Bubis the Optimist one bit. He is afraid, though, that such letters will continue to grow in number, especially when he reads again and again what one writer assures him, “that the bulk of the population, the rank and file are applauding, and not just in Rostock.” But he is and remains convinced that it is not the majority, but “only a third” of all Germans that secretly harbors anti-Semitic feelings.

However, doubts continually creep in which suggest [Germany] might be laboring under careless illusions, even when he openly denies them. Just a few hours ago, Hans Mayer sat here in the meeting room, in which coffee-table books on Chagall and the Musee d’Orsay lie next to “Die Angst vor den Deutschen (fear of the Germans).” Such doubts were on both their minds, Bubis says, especially the question of whether what is happening now is the revelation or the obfuscation of the Germans. “We had no answer to that.” Is he just too friendly, or does he refuse to accept that this is an answer in itself? After all, the doubt alone does not categorically rule out the “revelation.”

Not too long ago, well-wishers got Bubis into the headlines. Journalists wanted to declare him President of Germany. He refused immediately and said, “not qualified.” Others think the same and corroborate his reservation–indirectly. “You seek the highest office in the Federal Republic of Germany. There are hair-brained CDU-politicians who would love to see you in that position. I say, no Jew will ever be ready to be President of Germany, not today, tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. If you were ever allowed to take over the highest state office in the Federal Republic of Germany, then Germany would be finished.”

When he rejects the notion that he is suited for the office himself, people must believe it, even if they would like to disagree. But Ignatz Bubis knows exactly what he’s doing. When he calls himself not “German Jew,” but almost denies it, saying, “I am a German citizen of the Jewish faith,” he, too, says, though he likes to live in Frankfurt, that he, like so many of his friends, can no longer really feel at home here. “German Jewishness has been killed.” And it isn’t just the letters that signal rejection on a daily basis. “Let’s not deceive ourselves. Jews in Germany are a kind of better class of foreigner.” And, “an anti-Semite does not always hate foreigners. But anyone who hates foreigners is always an anti-Semite, too.” Around here there are too many of those, and not just for Bubis.

The Road to Fascism: Communication and Cultural Production

by Hanno Hardt

In the last 60 years, fascism has moved from the definition of a political party organization with concrete social and economic goals to an ideological concern, adapting rapidly to a conservative state of mind which permeates society through communication and cultural practice.

An understanding of contemporary fascism, however, must be based on a knowledge of Marxism and capitalism which accompanied social and political developments throughout most of this century together with a threat to traditional values by social and technological change. Fascism is the by-product of a collapsing liberal democracy with a rising mistrust of society and a loss of hope; socialism and capitalism are its historical antecedents. Fascist intervention through adaptation to conservative values and goals is aided by the rise of nationalism and the introduction of neo-colonialism which reinforce racism, confirm economic discrimination on a global scale, and shape the invention of reality by the media. Since fascism is also an extreme expression of populism and, therefore, a potentially formidable voice of middle-class interests, it becomes a politically attractive and ideologically powerful ally of conservative political and commercial interests.

Fascism has appeared directly in the practice of right-wing organizations, celebrating white supremacy, nationalism or separatism in the United States, but it is the institutional context of industry and politics that serves fascist intervention most effectively in redirecting society, redefining democracy, and celebrating authority. Among the goals of fascism is the organization of despair into a total identification with authority, that is, with the state or with commercial organizations rather than with the diverse interests of class, gender, or ethnicity. The resulting internalization of power overcomes economic inequality by psychological means. In the process of advocating and disseminating its conservative ideology, fascism challenges the weakness of the working class and the inability of a fading middle class to confront economic authority, like industrial interests, which control cultural productions of media organizations.

Encouraged and manipulated by the politics of conservatism, the culture industry also caters to fascist interests and contributes to an increasing alienation of society with a growing litany of nationalism that promotes racism and homophobia and benefits from the social, economic, and moral decay of society. Since communication and culture are significant mechanisms of manipulation in a class struggle from above, the cultural perspective as a reflection of a way of life in the United States serves specific economic and political goals; media culture is defined as an extension of the politics of domination and becomes one-dimensional and one-directional, even in its most popular, liberal/pluralist claims of diversity and multiculturalism.

Current political reactions against film and television, and the arts, in general, as suspicious if not undesirable sources of creative visions and interpretations of the world, are the concrete manifestations of an ideological system that seeks confirmation rather than confrontation of its values over the role and function of culture and communication in American society. The threat of censorship or the withdrawal of political support from public broadcasting, for instance, are forms of intimidation that will effect cultural production, particularly after recent revisions of broadcasting regulations, which will enable corporations to seize large market shares at the expense of diversity and with the goal of controlling access to consumers.

It is consensus rather than conflict that is sought to advance ideas at the expense of radical thought and unconventional, creative enterprise that characterize revolutionary changes. Consequently, the strength and vitality of the cultural resources of the working class or of a struggling, economically dependent intelligentsia, for that matter, conflict with the authority of industrial power which desires control of a predictable, homogeneous creation of a middle class.

The result is a marginalization of cultural practices that violate the rules of the powerful, ranging from restrictions on media content under the guise of good taste or family values, to a redistribution of financial support to eliminate cultural production that escapes state or industrial control. Fascism is also a revolt against modernism, contemporary fascism adapts to the itinerary of conservative thought and provides a provocative voice for militant chauvinism and the glorification of (racial) authority.

Read a review of The Nazi-Loop by Christiane Paul

“From Terminal to Terminator,” Intelligent Agent, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1998.