unguided tour

In an unusually biased article in yesterday’s New York Times Michael Kimmelman praises Countess Elisabeth (Tisa) von der Schulenburg, sister of Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg who was a member of the fervently nationalistic and anti-Semitic military conspiracy group which tried to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, as a model for German families’ efforts of ‘coming to terms’ with the Nazi past as well as “a cautionary tale about judging history or a people, any people, in black and white.” Kimmelman clearly prefers white, leaving out black and brown entirely. Even shades of gray are hard to find in this portrait of the daughter of a wealthy aristocratic & anti-Semitic Prussian family, who became a socialist, married a Jew, emigrated to England in 1933, returned to Germany in 1938, converted to catholicism in the 1950s and spent the rest of her life as a nun in an Ursuline convent in West-Germany where, apparently, she learned to forgive.

Although we don’t know what it was Tisa learned to forgive — death camps, mass murder, the Holocaust are never mentioned in this article — Kimmelman offers forgiveness (a notoriously vague and elusive concept bordering on forgetting) as an answer to the “complexities of families, not least German ones, aristocratic or otherwise.” To give an example of those “complexities” Kimmelman writes,

“In later years she would recall that her father, despite his anti-Semitism, always treated [her Jewish husband] with respect. The love of a father for a daughter could transcend prejudice, Tisa realized. Forgiveness must be reciprocated.”

In passing Kimmelman also whitewashes one of Germany’s most influential aristocratic families, the von Weizsäcker’s. In a quote from an interview with Kimmelman, former German President Richard von Weizsäcker, during the war a loyal Nazi and officer in the Wehrmacht, who knew von Schulenberg, comes across as a resistance fighter. Who needs guilt by association? Let’s make heroes by association! What Kimmelman neglects to mention is that right after the war Weizsäcker, a lawyer by training, defended his father Ernst von Weizsäcker who was charged with crimes against humanity at one of the Nuremberg War Crime Trials. Among other atrocities Ernst von Weizsäcker, secretary of State under foreign minister Ribbentrop, was responsible for the deportation of thousands of French Jews to Auschwitz. Richard defended his father’s phoney claim that as secretary of state he did not know that Auschwitz was a death camp. In Richard’s view Ernst von Weizsäcker who believed deportations would make life easier for Jews, was a resistance fighter. This, Mr. Kimmelman, is another interesting story about “the complexities of families, not least German ones, aristocratic or otherwise.”

As every catholic knows, forgiveness doesn’t require much. It’s easy, says Tisa’s grand-niece Elisabeth Ruge who is a friend of Kimmelman’s.

“Tisa knew that to criticize the weaknesses of others you’ve got to understand your own weaknesses.”

The Holcaust as weakness?
There’s a German word for articles like Kimmelman’s: Freundschaftsdienst.

Tags: anti-semitism, elisabeth von der schulenburg, germany, holocaust

Posted: July 16th, 2009