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CHAPTER 1
Paul Sethe
RESISTANCE AND ITS POST-HITLER MORAL AND JOURNALISTIC CONSEQUENCES
IT IS AGAINST the background of the larger issues of modern German history and journalism outlined in the introduction that I now turn to the first major figure of the Generation of '32: Paul Sethe. Because of his death in 1967, he is now largely forgotten, although he was one of the best-known journalists during the founding years of the Federal Republic. In the eyes of Gerd Bucerius, he was even the "grand old man" of West German journalism in his time. At the same time, Sethe poses a considerable challenge to the historian who tries to evaluate his professional record because of his work as an editor of the Ohligser Anzeiger und Tageblatt (OA) until December 1933 and of Frankfurter Zeitung (FZ) between 1934 and 1943. After all, whereas in the OA he expressed views that were critical of Hitler before 1933, the FZ's journalism occupied a rather more ambiguous position in the Third Reich. There is also the question of whether deep down in his heart he was more of a scholar of serious history than a journalist writing in the daily hustle and bustle of the newspaper business. As we will see, he wrote several big books on historical themes after 1945 and, judging from his output, putting pen to paper certainly seems to have come to him with ease. What he produced was generally thoughtful and aimed at a nonexpert educated readership.
Family and Academic Training
Paul Sethe was born on 12 December 1901 in Bochum, a major industrial city in the heart of the Ruhr coal and steel region, and grew up in a Protestant middle-class family. His father was a publican and restaurant owner (Gastwirt) but also took up other business activities. There is little information on the son's youth. He went to primary school in Bochum between 1908 and 1911 and seems to have hoped to finish his secondary education with the Abitur certificate. However, writing to his sister Herta after 1945, he remarked in a slightly bitter tone: "Too bad that the Old Sethe did not send me to a gymnasium; [it is] a double pity that I did not study ancient history and embark upon an academic career." But that happened at the end of World War I with its revolutionary turmoil, and his parents may have wanted him to get a more applied education rather than a classical one with ancient Greek and Latin. So Paul was sent to an Oberrealschule at which he excelled sufficiently to be admitted to Bonn University in the spring of 1920. He moved on to the University of Münster in the autumn of 1921.
However, he had to take a leave of absence until the autumn of 1922, when he resumed his studies at Bonn, which continued until Easter 1923. It was a time of rampant inflation and economic hardship, and he probably had to interrupt his studies again for financial reasons. Both before and after his leave he pursued a broad curriculum, majoring in history, German literature, and art history, but also taking courses in philosophy, law, and economics. As inflation began to spin out of control, Sethe had to leave, apparently without an academic qualification. He was fortunate enough to find a job on the editorial staff of the OA, a small local paper published in one of the suburbs of Solingen, the city of world-famous steel cutlery. He held this job until the end of 1933 and, starting as a political editor, eventually rose to the position of editor in chief. Yet he never abandoned his plan to complete his studies, perhaps in the hope of realizing his earlier dream of a university career. Reregistering at Bonn University in the spring of 1930, he was accepted for a doctorate in history and passed his oral exams at the end of January 1932. While his official sponsor was Fritz Kern, a conservative full professor and medievalist, it was in fact Dr. Hans Hallmann, a Privatdozent at Bonn, who "trained and shaped" his scholarship.
In 1927 Hallmann had written a book on the naval ambitions of Wilhelm II and the crisis in Anglo-German relations during 1895, after the Kaiser had sent a telegram of support to Ohm Krueger, the leader of the Boers, the Dutch settlers in South Africa who had rebelled against the British. Subsequently, Hallmann had begun another book on the origins of the German naval buildup in the late 1890s. Sethe was assigned a topic that had become a bone of contention among naval historians after 1918, that of why the Royal Navy had adopted the strategy of a wide blockade in the northern North Sea during World War I rather than confronting the Imperial Navy in a decisive battle further south in the German Bight. His doctoral dissertation was published in late 1932. In it Sethe emerges as a perceptive analyst of a complex problem of naval history. He clearly also had a knack for telling quite an intriguing story — a skill that is also reflected in his later books on larger themes of German and European history.
The book is an illuminating study of perception and misperception in international diplomatic and military relations as well as of bureaucratic rivalries among generals and admirals, based on a careful evaluation of three multivolume editions of official documents from Britain, Germany, and the United States that appeared between 1919 and 1931. Starting with a discussion of the conflicts inside the Wilhelmine navy both before and during the war, the issue was whether to deploy the German battle fleet against the Royal Navy in the North Sea strait in 1914 in an all-out confrontation, as advocated by Alfred von Tirpitz, the builder of the battleship fleet. By contrast, Hugo von Pohl, the chief of the admiralty staff, in rightly judging the fleet to be inferior to the Royal Navy, refused to take a risk that he believed would lead to a disaster. Pohl's passivity ironically derived from Tirpitz's earlier "risk theory," which Tirpitz had proclaimed in 1900 and was sharply criticized by Wolfgang Wegener, another naval officer, in the 1920s. Sethe believed that the Wegener debate would rumble on for years, as indeed it did even beyond 1945 because Tirpitz's aims had been so far-reaching. Ultimately, he was thwarted because the Royal Navy responded to the German threat by engaging Germany in a naval arms race that the Imperial Navy lost. Thus the German plan to shift the international balance of power was never realized. Worse, the admirals began to live in the fear of a British pre-emptive strike such as the Danish fleet had experienced when it was "Copenhagened" in 1807.
But this strike never came after the British Admiralty moved the fleet to the far North at Scapa Flow. Critical of this particular strategy, some British planners wanted to lure Pohl out of the safety of Wilhelmshaven to do battle; they were stopped each time by Winston Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty, and Admiral John Jellicoe. The conflict within the Royal Navy was finally settled after the Gallipoli adventure, when Britain failed to occupy the Turkish Dardanelles. As Sethe put it succinctly: "The Dardanelles became the grave of the big British offensive in the North Sea." Accordingly, Britain practiced its wide blockade while the war of attrition in the trenches of the Western Front continued. It was the appearance of fresh American troops in the spring of 1918 that finally brought Germany to its knees, leading to the fall of the Hohenzollern monarchy and to the German revolution of November 1918.
Sethe's doctoral dissertation has been summarized here in some detail because it proved him to be a perceptive analyst of a major issue of the history of World War I. His conclusions said even more about the quality of a mind that had learned to differentiate, as would also been seen repeatedly in his later career as a journalist. For him the war was catastrophic not only for Germany, but also for Britain and her empire in that it prolonged the conflict beyond the time frame that might have made a British victory possible. Worse, the passions of total war pushed the country after 1918 into a "quite un-English peace of Versailles whose consequences today belong to the most onerous worries of the Empire." Thinking of Britain's troubles in Ireland, Asia, and Africa, Sethe concluded that, while the wide blockade had helped defeat the German enemy, it had also inflicted life-threatening wounds on the victor "that were becoming fully visible only today," in 1932, while the prolongation of the war by three years had covered the rest of "Europe with a sea of blood and tears."
Writing for the Ohligser Anzeiger and the Crisis of the Weimar Republic
Sethe's pessimistic conclusion must be linked to his journalism and politics at the end of the Weimar Republic. What were his perceptions at this time both of the fallout from the war and of the contemporary situation that he was facing at the OA? His papers contain at least a few leads, thanks to a letter that Hallmann wrote to Elfriede Sethe, Paul's widow, in 1967, shortly after her husband's death. In it his former mentor quoted from two letters that Sethe had written to him in 1932. In the first he had expressed his deep gratitude that Hallmann had encouraged him to research his dissertation topic. He had, he said, received many insights in the seminars that he had taken with him. To him these hours had been important beyond his doctoral degree and had enabled him to transfer much of what he had learned to his work at his newspaper. What had also been instilled in him was the urge to look for what lay beneath the surface of historical events. His eyes had been sharpened to discern what was genuine and essential in this world, and the insights he had gained had also become a constant reminder of the responsibility he had before the country's history. What he had gleaned from these seminars would thenceforth guide his actions, even in a position as modest as the one he held in Solingen-Oligs. And last, but by no means least, there was his "longing for a new harmony between Geist und Macht" that Hallmann had spoken about in the concluding session of his seminar on Machiavelli and Fichte.
The other remark by Sethe in Hallmann's letter to his widow dates from June 1932 and was composed in rather a different key. Sethe confessed that he no longer felt much joy in being a journalist. He was depressed about the overall situation in Germany. Even worse was his sense that the onslaught of the "masses in politics" since around 1930 had undermined the philosophical foundations of his journalism. While the major papers in the big cities might still be able to deal with pressures from all sides, pessimism was particularly widespread in the provinces. In fact, the freedom of the press seemed to him to be a worthless constitutional guarantee. A "revolution of the primitive" had set in and it subverted Solingen's politics and its newspapers. People, Sethe concluded, merely wanted to be confirmed in their beliefs. Whoever took a different point of view was deemed a traitor. What he wanted to see highlighted in the current intellectual crisis was the "destruction of the freedom of the press from below." Therefore, he had attended a public meeting of the Nazi Party at which he was threatened with three years of hard labor in a quarry. After that, so the warning continued, he would receive a more humane treatment than he in fact deserved. Those were the things that were being said in Solingen about him as a man "who is certainly not suspect of being an adherent of Marxist ideology." Some of his colleagues, he wrote, had already made their peace with Nazi politics in the hope of gaining recognition and job security. But then there was "the rest of us who do not dispose of so much Jewish[!] flexibility" and for whom "new conflicts of interest arise every day." Being no more than a journalistic auxiliary and a "servant of business," Sethe was evidently becoming more and more resigned. The alternative was to move to another career, which — he informed Hallmann — he was now pondering.
At the end of Sethe's letter, he advised his former mentor in Bonn not to encourage young people to go into journalism. It was not a career for "parsivals," as it was impossible to work in this machinery, even as a small cog, except with a strong dose of skepticism. Worse, in a future Third Reich, moral humiliations would be demanded of journalists; no one would be able to resist this for long and without damage to one's soul. How long, Sethe asked Hallmann, would it be before, living in a "total state," they would be writing the opposite of what was on their minds? Thinking of the academic position of his mentor, he asked how long it would take the universities to fall into line. If Sethe still harbored any of his earlier dreams of becoming a professional historian, it seems that he had given them up by force of circumstance. He remained a thoughtful journalist instead.
Assuming that Hallmann had correctly excerpted the passages from those two letters and that they accurately reflect their author's state of mind at this crucial juncture of German history, these words are significant in terms of both Sethe's attitudes toward the Nazi period and his post-1945 journalism. They will help us assess his subsequent work and actions during the Third Reich and the lessons he drew from those twelve years for his writing in West Germany. While the significance of Sethe's letter of 1932 for an understanding of his postwar career can therefore hardly be overestimated, we must first ask where he stood at the end of the Weimar Republic and then during the early Nazi period.
Sethe's Politics and Journalism during 1932–1933
As far as Sethe's attitudes toward domestic politics in 1932–33 are concerned, his papers contain a letter from Curt Georgi, the former publisher of the OA and hence Sethe's boss in Solingen during a crucial period, until the latter left for Berlin and the FZ in 1934. Although the letter was written on 13 November 1945 and might hence be regarded as a Persilschein ("laundering certificate") to facilitate Sethe's smooth passage through the de-Nazification process, both its scrappiness and the many details mentioned in it indicate that it represented more than a document for submission to a tribunal. These details had once led Georgi to conclude that during his years at the paper Sethe had been "pressured here in Solingen and Ohligs like no other editor."
He added that Sethe had raised his voice even before the Nazis' rise and that this had not been without consequences for him once Hitler had seized power. According to Georgi, it had been soon after January 1933 that he received a warning from the Nazi police president of nearby Wuppertal relating to an article that had appeared in the OA. In fact, Georgi as the publisher had also been sent a complaint from the regional bureau of the Reich Propaganda Office in Düsseldorf that criticized Sethe's negative attitude toward the Nazi Party. Finally, Georgi mentioned that two local Nazi leaders, Messrs. Keller and Potthoff, had visited him in order to voice their dissatisfaction with Sethe's editorial policies. When Georgi replied that Sethe, as the editor in chief, was responsible for what was published in the OA, the two asked for another meeting with both him and Sethe. This second meeting was held at Georgi's home on a Sunday morning, and at it Sethe did not cave in. Instead he admitted that he did not agree with the Party's aspirations. More specifically, he had objected to some Nazi speakers who, in line with the Party's quest for autarky, had called Solingen's export of goods "crazy," although it was well known how dependent the city was on exports.
Experiencing these pressures as the publisher, Georgi had come to realize that it had become impossible for Sethe to stay in his position. He quoted a passage from Sethe's farewell article of 30 December 1933, in which he had expressed his belief in a strong state that was rooted in the people and founded on the ideology of National Liberalism(!). Sethe added that Weimar's foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, the "liberator of the Rhineland," had envisioned this kind of Germany. In a letter of recommendation that Georgi wrote on 31 December 1934 and quoted in his message of November 1945, Georgi remarked that "Dr. Sethe was the creator and guardian of the best liberal ideas" — noble in his attitudes as well as patriotic and social "in the best sense of the word." This is therefore the point at which we must consider Georgi's postwar statements by evaluating the OA, at least for the crucial months before and after the Nazi seizure of power
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer"
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