A Merry Club in Dresden

Book reviewed: Dresden Passions by Friedrich Gorenstein

In September 1882, some three hundred visitors from various corners of Europe descended upon the German city of Dresden. They did not come to gawk at Raphael’s Sistine Madonna at the art gallery or take in the city from a river boat cruise, but to come up with a blueprint for solving the “Jewish question.” Known as the First International Anti-Semitic Congress, the event featured Europe’s top anti-Semitic minds and was effectively a dry run for the Wannsee Conference of 1942; and if the agenda lacked the totality of the Nazis’ Endlösung, it was only because the delegates had not acquired the levers of power and the tools needed for industrial-scale butchery — not yet. But the call to action for what followed some sixty years later was drafted in Dresden, amid the knocking of beer steins and cheap cigar smoke. Unlike the top-secret Wannsee, the Congress was well publicized, covered by journalists, and heavily guarded by police. It is all the more surprising that, despite its complete lack of secretiveness, hardly anyone knows anything about the Congress today. The few who do know might be fewer in number still, had one of the Russian delegates not left behind an account of the proceedings. Published in Russian, and subsequently in German with the help of a sympathetic publisher, the pamphlet appears to be the only extant account of the Congress. It is this text that served as the inspiration for Friedrich Gorenstein’s thought-provoking novella Dresden Passions, a trenchant study of the relationship between socialism and modern anti-Semitism.

Gorenstein is a writer who should be in no need of an introduction; sadly, he is in need of one even in the country that speaks the language in which he wrote. Not even his cinematographic work — he was the author of a number of movie scripts, including two for films that went on to attain a cult-like status in the former Soviet Union — could rescue his name from neglect. Although his books are published both in Russia and abroad, Gorenstein seems to be consigned to the margins of the literary world, where his name goes studiously unmentioned even among the literati. There are several explanations for this. Champions of Gorenstein’s work chalk it up to pure envy: Gorenstein is so far out of the competition’s league that a literary omerta surrounding all things Gorenstein is inevitable. Others point to his personality as a more likely culprit. Gorenstein was not an easygoing man. The best that has been said about him is that he was a bit like Mozart as shown in the Miloš Forman movie — brilliant but devoid of any social graces. Other accounts are less charitable. Thin-skinned, prickly, and bilious, Gorenstein carried a chip not on one but on both shoulders, and he used his pen to settle scores with anyone he felt had shortchanged him — the entire Russian literary establishment, more or less. He believed in the existence of a secret anti-Gorenstein pact (some of those who knew the man believed in it too, and perhaps they were right — what do I know?). A man of opinions so strong they made him downright pig-headed at times, he hurled thunderbolts at those who appeared to challenge them, like some jealous god meting out punishment. Intolerant on paper, intolerable in real life, he took no prisoners and recognized no sacred cows, including hallowed names that could never be uttered with irreverence in polite society. His uncompromising attitude was admirable, but it could not have won Gorenstein many friends.

Then there is Gorenstein’s antagonism towards ethnic Russians that supposedly pervades his texts. Gorenstein’s bleak portrayals of life in Russian towns and villages, frank but jaundiced, along with his no-holds-barred treatment of certain topics deemed sensitive in Russia (namely, the Russian people, Russian Orthodoxy, and Russian anti-Semitism), left him on the receiving end of charges of Russophobia from some quarters. The charges are grossly unfair. No one who has read novellas such as The Last Summer on the Volga (Poslednee leto na Volge) or The Street of Red Dawn (Ulitsa krasnyh zor’) will ever suspect Gorenstein of tribal antipathies. If anything, Gorenstein is as hard on his Jewish characters as he is on the Russian ones. He is hard on the entire human race, of which he has a thoroughly dark view. Given humanity’s track record, it is not a view that requires much justification. I suspect that the accusations of Russophobia have less to do with how Russians are portrayed in his prose than with who is doing the portrayals — the accusers may have expected a more genteel treatment of said topics from a non-Gentile author. What’s good for the goose is not necessarily good for the gander if the gander’s last name is Gorenstein. That shouldn’t be Gorenstein’s problem. But unfair accusations are adhesive, and those made against Gorenstein have stuck.

Readers not put off by his ostensible dislike of Slavdom are repelled by the high voltage of his texts. It is not that Gorenstein is difficult to read — a fascinating raconteur who writes with a beguiling simplicity, he is quite accessible. But he never wrote to please. Gorenstein was a biblical writer rooted in the Old Testament; there was something of a prophet about him, an ancient sage whispering from the distant hills of Judea. The rejection of prophets is not only domestic, it is universal. A timeless writer, Gorenstein is not easily placeable in any given context, and many have simply expelled him as a foreign body, leaving it up to history to deliver a final verdict. He could never become a fashionable or popular author, not even with highbrow readers. He has been called the Dostoevsky of the 20th century. I am not a fan of such epithets; Gorenstein is Gorenstein, and his work is sui generis. But it is true that, like Dostoevsky, Gorenstein was concerned with questions of life and death, virtue and sin, good and evil. Like Dostoevsky before him, Gorenstein depicted man at his most beautiful as well as at his ugliest. But the ugliest dominated. Unlike Dostoevsky, whose lack of familiarity with the future horrors of the 20th century made him an innocent, relatively speaking, Gorenstein had a keener sense of the potential for man’s depravity and a more nuanced belief in man’s capacity for redemption.

If Gorenstein had a dim view of humanity, it was because he knew what to expect from it. He was born into a family of Ukrainian Jews in 1932. A few years later, Gorenstein’s father, a professor of economics, was swept up in the Stalinist purges and later executed. His mother died while she and Gorenstein were evacuated during the Second World War; she had fallen sick on a train and was offloaded at a train station before the evacuees had reached their destination. What happened next is obscure. Gorenstein was given to mythopoesis apropos his own life, and there are several versions. According to one version, he was sent to an orphanage. According to another, he was adopted by relatives. Both of these things might have happened. Either way, it was not much of a childhood. Gorenstein was not just an orphan; in the view of the government, he was a politically unreliable orphan. His father’s execution as one of the enemies of the people made Gorenstein suspect by proxy, and he had to keep a low profile until his father’s posthumous rehabilitation in the early 1960s. If a writer’s biography is fate, in Russia at least, Gorenstein had all the material he needed.

Settling in Moscow in the 1960s, Gorenstein managed to have a short story published in a literary journal. While the story was noticed, it was the only serious work that he would ever publish in the Soviet Union — see the reasons already mentioned, and use them in any combination you like. Gorenstein had no interest in becoming a hack churning out party-friendly prose, but to call him a dissident, as some do, is a stretch. Though no admirer of the Soviet regime, he wanted to write high-quality prose, not political statements. His refusal to downplay or otherwise camouflage his Jewish origins further complicated his situation. He was so ensconced in his status as a literary outsider that even samizdat was off limits. Although Gorenstein was able to make ends meet by writing scripts for movies (one of them was for Tarkovsky’s Solaris) and had useful connections, his literary ambitions were DOA. Disillusioned and embittered, he eventually threw in the towel, vowing to write only for himself and a select group of readers — what Russians call “writing for the desk.” His works had to wait until their author’s emigration from the Soviet Union before they left the desk and appeared in print (Gorenstein moved to West Berlin in the early 1980s and died there in 2002, days before his seventieth birthday).

Dresden Passions (Drezdenskie strasti) was one of those works. It is not considered his best one, not even by his admirers. But it is an important book that has lost none of its relevance over the years. While the theme of anti-Semitism, central to Gorenstein’s oeuvre, is present in most of his texts, to one degree or another, it consumes Dresden Passions entirely, the way it consumed Gorenstein’s life. It couldn’t have been otherwise. A Jew of his time and place had to be interested in the Jewish question, and if he didn’t show interest in it, sooner or later the question showed interest in him. Gorenstein didn’t wait for the question to take the initiative. In connection with this, he liked to recount an experience he’d had back in the 1960s. Filling out an application for a Soviet literary journal, he was asked to choose a pseudonym. After a few moments of reflection, he decided to leave the field blank. The woman who accepted his application reacted with a mildly amused confusion: “How so?” This reminds me of a story I’ve heard from another person who had spent half of his life living in the Soviet Union. The man, a youngster at the time, had to fill out a document at a police station. The document required him to state his “nationality” — a Soviet peculiarity that was a coming-out for those not of the ethnic majority. As the man was Jewish on his paternal side and Russian on the maternal one, he had a choice. He opted for his father’s background. “Are you sure, sonny?” asked the helpful policeman. The policeman meant well, and so did the woman who accepted Gorenstein’s application. As Soviet citizens, they knew the lay of the land and what choice was best. But the message, in both cases, was unequivocal. In Gorenstein’s case, it meant one did not set out to conquer the Soviet publishing world with the last name “Gorenstein.” This incident, Gorenstein wrote, marked him for life and informed everything that he would write from that moment on.

I suspect he exaggerated the importance of that episode; people tend to ascribe too much significance to single memorable events to explain the outcomes of experiences that are essentially cumulative. It is out of such experiences that books like Dresden Passions emerge. Like most of Gorenstein’s texts, Dresden Passions has never been translated into English. Were it to be translated, “A Merry Club in Dresden” would work better as a title. But “Dresden Passions” has been used in several literary resources, and I have decided against reinventing the wheel. As for the wheel itself, it was invented sometime in the 1970s, when Gorenstein unearthed The First International Anti-Semitic Congress, the aforementioned pamphlet written by one of the Russian delegates at the Congress. The discovery of the pamphlet in the Soviet Union was something of a feat — even today, fifty years on, the text can only be found in the digital archives of the National Library of Israel. How Gorenstein got his hands on a work so incendiary in a country that restricted or altogether denied access to far more innocuous titles, at a time when there was no Internet, is a mystery.

Just as mysterious is the pamphlet’s authorship. The man who wrote it (that the author was a man is confirmed by, among other things, the use of declensions) chose to remain anonymous and was never identified by historians; we can only surmise that he was decently educated, probably a person of means, and obviously an enthusiastic anti-Semite. He is not a bad writer, but the pamphlet itself is arid, with nothing but a reference to beer steins and the smoke produced by “cheap cigars” to enliven it. It is also, on the surface of it, unremarkable. The substance of most of what was said during the convention is as uninteresting as it is predictable — the usual potpourri of anti-Semitic tropes, sempiternal and re-heatable upon demand. So was the “manifesto” introduced by the Hungarian delegate and politician Gyözö Istóczy (whose forward movements with his right hand, made during his perorations and noted by both the pamphleteer and the shrewd Gorenstein, are reminiscent of another anti-Semitic orator the world would eventually get to know), and enthusiastically adopted by the Congress; it is just the kind of program you can expect from an orchestra of this caliber. Cheered to the echo by the delegates, the manifesto does not envision a physical destruction of Europe’s Jewry, but then it doesn’t need to — the 20th century showed that the distance between the beer hall of the Dresden Congress and the smoking furnaces of Auschwitz requires no great leap.

While Gorenstein faithfully reproduces the palaver in Dresden Passions, he takes full advantage of poetic license to keep the peristalsis of the narrative going. The Russian delegates, who, along with the author, remain under the cloak of anonymity in the pamphlet, acquire identities and opinions; they enjoy meals together and sip Rhenish wine; there are cozy moments filled with nauseatingly soulful conversations. The Congress itself is transformed into an inflamed, often shambolic hotbed of passions that occasionally take on a droll aspect. In one scene, a German baron something or other proposes that Germany close its eastern border to Jews. As the country immediately east of Germany is tsarist Russia, home to a sizeable Jewish population, the proposal would effectively deprive Russia of the ability to expel its Jews westwards, and the Russian delegates hit the roof. Insults are swiftly traded, old enmities come to the fore, and the reader wonders whether the European anti-Semites don’t hate each other even more than they hate the Jews. The scene is fictitious but perfectly believable; somehow one just knows that the syrupy pan-European solidarity at the Congress, vivified by the copious beer, will be forgotten the moment the Jewish question is out of the way.

But the rift is just a sideshow for the real fault line that ran through the Congress. By the time it took place, a schism had emerged among Europe’s anti-Semites. Gorenstein writes: “Anti-Semitism is habitually viewed as a monolithic phenomenon, whereas, as with any contemporary ideological movement, a battle has been raging within it from the time it acquired modern ideological features.” As the pamphlet confirms, the Dresden Congress was split into two factions. One espoused what Gorenstein calls “liberal anti-Semitism,” an “anti-Semitism with a human face”; the other faction took an extreme stance and advocated radical solutions. Gorenstein only hints at it, but the divide reflected broader paradigm shifts in European society. The modern world had been going through a seismic change. Following the Enlightenment and a wave of revolutions, including the industrial one, Western man had turned mostly secular and no longer viewed the world through a religious lens. Faith had been replaced by all sorts of “isms,” nationalism chief among them. At the same time, anti-Semitism had not gone away — as a metaphysical phenomenon, it couldn’t have. But it needed to mutate and adapt itself to the new world to stay current. While anti-Semitism did not entirely discard its religious component (just a few months before the Dresden Congress, the Jews of one Hungarian village were accused of murdering a fourteen-year-old Christian girl who had committed suicide by jumping into a river, while the Beilis Affair, Russia’s own infamous case of the blood libel, took place as late as 1911), it was reformulated along racial lines. The Jews were no longer seen as a religious but an ethnic Other. The implications of the shift from faith to blood were enormous: one can convert to another religion, but one can never shed one’s ethnicity. Faced with religious anti-Semitism, the Jews had at least a chance to survive; in the context of racial anti-Semitism, they were all but doomed.

It is no coincidence that the “anti-Semitism with a human face” at the Congress was represented by a clergyman. As court chaplain to the German Kaiser, Adolf Stoecker was the face of the Lutheran Church at the Congress. That a man like Stoecker could be a dove on the Jewish question might seem like a bad joke. His anti-Semitic credentials were stellar: in the words of one historian, Stoecker put the anti-Semitic movement on the map in Germany. He organized a petition calling for, among other things, the Jews to be banned from teaching Germans and holding public office. Significantly, by “Jews” Stoecker did not mean adherents of Judaism. For all the religiosity implied by his position, Stoecker’s anti-Semitism contained clear racial overtones. Far from a relic of pre-industrial anti-Semitism, he was perfectly in step with the times. With moderates like Stoecker . . . Yet, incredible as it may sound, Stoecker cut a liberal figure at the Congress — by the standards of the Congress, that is. This is noted by the author of the pamphlet, who writes that Stoecker, as the representative of Christian socialists and members of various German conservative parties, opposed the formulation of ultimate objectives, proposing instead goals that were achievable in the short run and that would not provoke countermeasures on the part of the imperial government. This seems no more than tactical considerations. But the author goes on to quote Stoecker as having said, “It is unjust and dangerous to build the movement on a foundation of racial differences; we are not prevented from forming an anti-Jewish union against the Jews’ harmful activities, but we should not forget that the Jews also belong to humanity, like us.” To be sure, this flies in the face of what Stoecker said about the Jews elsewhere. But the fact remains that the Congress was divided, the “Christian socialist” camp attended the Congress reluctantly, and Stoecker left the Congress before it was over.

The “anti-Semitism with a human face” that Stoecker showed in Dresden did not arise out of some latent sympathy for the Jews, but from antipathy towards radicalism. In Stoecker’s analysis, the politics of anti-Semitism had to be conducted within the existing political order of imperial Germany. This put him at loggerheads with the radical camp at the Congress. Represented by men such as Ernst Henrici, Iván Simony, and Gyözö Istóczy, the radicals were unencumbered by loyalty to any royal court and had no interest in giving anti-Semitism a human face. They were prepared to go all the way to solve the Jewish question. We can speculate whether “all the way” would have taken them to the extermination camps of the Third Reich, but the Nazis were without a doubt their direct heirs and descendants. Once violent means become an acceptable political praxis, smoking furnaces are the limit. This was clearly understood by the “liberal anti-Semites,” who saw that a total resolution of the Jewish question required the suspension of legalistic norms and, therefore, the state itself. Contrary to the pamphlet’s assertions that Stoecker’s refusal to operate outside the legal framework was driven by political ambitions, Gorenstein insists that the unwillingness of the “moderates” to embrace radical anti-Semitism was an unwillingness to abrogate the state. This is what made them “liberal anti-Semites” (“conservative,” from the standpoint of the pamphlet’s author). Bearing in mind Carl Schmitt’s conflation of the monarch with God, it might not be an exaggeration to add that Stoecker’s refusal to revolt against the imperial order was a refusal to revolt against the divine order.

Stoecker and his fellow “liberal anti-Semites” had good reason to leave the Congress early. Their position was untenable — the position of moderates always is. This is true of anti-Semitism as much as of any other “ism.” “Sooner or later,” Gorenstein writes, “such ‘moderates’ face a dilemma: either to leave the movement, or to embrace the more radical positions.” The choice is between the Scylla of denouncing the anti-Semitic movement (and its ideology) and the Charybdis of denouncing the legalistic norms that set limits on radicalism. This must have left many “liberal anti-Semites” exasperated. The French writer Georges Bernanos’s infamous line (“Hitler a déshonoré l’antisémitisme”), which does Bernanos very little credit, meant exactly that: thanks to Hitler, one could no longer be a “gentlemanly anti-Semite.” Hitler had deprived “liberal anti-Semites” of the ability to hate and be respectable. Gorenstein would have dismissed Bernanos’s “honorable anti-Semitism.” You can’t have your cake and eat it too: either the anti-Semitism has to go, or the honor. An “anti-Semitism with a human face” is an impossibility; “liberal anti-Semites” will sooner or later have to make a choice. So will those Jews tempted to find a modus vivendi with the “gentlemanly” types. On that point, Gorenstein is clear. An “anti-Semitism with a human face” is a Trojan horse, and Jews foolish or corrupt enough to accept this kind of anti-Semitism will eventually perish. In any ideological movement, it is typically the radicals who win, and history has confirmed that anti-Semitism is no exception. Stoecker went home. Eventually, so did the radicals; half a century later, though, they were in power.

There is not much else to say about the Congress itself, but there is a lot more to Dresden Passions than the theatrical goings-on of the Congress. The Dresden event is one of two parts of the text. The other part is composed of essayistic fragments and reflections that form the “meat” of the book, the real reason Gorenstein bothered to write it and the real reason one should read it. A specter haunted the Dresden Congress; it wasn’t quite the specter of communism, but it was close enough. The German socialist philosopher Eugen Dühring was not present among the delegates in Dresden, but his pungently anti-Semitic spirit hovered over the Congress, mixing with the smoke from cheap cigars. The pamphlet describes him as the “first and most radical theorist of anti-Semitism.” No doubt this is supposed to be a compliment. For Gorenstein, the figure of Dühring is of paramount interest, and in the nonfiction component of the book, Gorenstein examines Dühring’s philosophy with the help of Friedrich Engels’s Anti-Dühring, a polemic aimed at Dühring’s thought. Though both Dühring and Engels were socialists, they disagreed on the methodology required to attain their objectives. In a sense, their ideological conflict mirrored the divide between the Christian socialists and the radicals at the Dresden Congress. Here it will suffice to say that Engels was a moderate and Dühring a radical. Engels (read: Marx) believed that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own self-annihilating dynamics and that the ends did not justify the means. Dühring, a “philosopher of reality,” believed that a reorganization of the means of production required violence, and the ends most certainly justified the means. Dühring was also — not coincidentally, in Gorenstein’s opinion — a modern anti-Semite. He rejected the idea of the Jews as a religious group and conceived of Jewry in racial terms, maintaining that the Jewish question would remain even if all the Jews were to turn their backs on Judaism. Engels did not appreciate Dühring’s anti-Semitism but dismissed it as little more than a personal eccentricity. Gorenstein writes Engels had no choice: an attack on Dühring’s anti-Semitism would have undermined socialism tout court. Like Stoecker at the Dresden Congress, Engels too faced a choice: to reject socialism or accept it wholesale, warts and all. Engels chose the impossible middle ground — a socialism with a human face. He thought he could remain a socialist and keep his hands clean. So he let Dühring keep his quirks. But such quirks spawn monsters. Dühring accused the Jews of exploiting society, and since their main tool of “exploitation” was capitalism, it is easy to see how socialist ideas of redistribution could address the “problem” and solve the “question.” Engels missed this point entirely and, in the long run, lost the battle. Just like the “liberal anti-Semites” at the Dresden Congress, he was defeated by “philosophers of reality,” the Austrian-born degenerate the most realistic of them all.

This is not an abstruse debate of interest to Engels, Gorenstein, and maybe Dühring. The combination of virulent anti-Semitism and radical socialism that Dühring exhibited is at the heart of Gorenstein’s argument: socialism and modern anti-Semitism are two sides of the same coin. “Every modern form of anti-Semitism is inevitably related to socialism,” writes Gorenstein. The Jews are highly individualistic — the Bible is anti-collectivist in its essence, and although this does not always please majorities, who gravitate towards a communal way of life, it is the “only productive mode of existence.” By dint of being a minority group everywhere historically, the Jews represent whatever is individualistic in society. Gorenstein cites Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poem of the End” (“Poema kontsa”): “In this most Christian of worlds / all poets are Jews.” Poets, like Jews, are always pitted against collectivist structures, and Tsvetaeva was not the first one to pick up on that. A hundred years before her, Pushkin underscored the conflict between poet and masses in “The Poet and the Crowd” (“Poet i chern’ ”). During Soviet rule, poets who were too individualistic for the regime’s liking were censored, suppressed, and sometimes done away with. Like Jews, poets are intimately familiar with the sense of helplessness in the face of oppression.

As socialism represents the masses, it is bound to converge with anti-Semitism. Socialism — the kind of anti-biblical, feudal socialism that had come about by the 20th century — seeks to destroy all forms of inequality, even natural ones, by taking things away from those who are deemed to have too much and bestowing them upon those who don’t have enough. The disenfranchised are granted privileges, and new inequalities arise. In the process, the individual is crushed; invariably, so is the Jew. “The Anti-Semites are right to have gathered at their Congress under socialist banners,” Gorenstein writes. According to The First International Anti-Semitic Congress, a pastor present at the Congress, a “liberal anti-Semite,” suggested that the Jewish question could be resolved by helping the Jews fulfill their biblical prophecy and return to Zion (some leading anti-Semites were quite sympathetic to the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine, though naturally not out of any compassion for the Jews). The pastor was naive enough to propose that a dozen reputable Jews be invited in the name of the Twelve Tribes of Israel in order to further discuss the idea. This was too much even for the other “liberal anti-Semites” in the crowd, and Stoecker balked at the proposal. Then a man named Schroeder took the podium. A cobbler by trade but a “radical by temperament,” Schroeder represented an important anti-Semitic association. Screaming and violently waving his right hand (there is that hand again), he lambasted all parties, from right to left, for being too conservative and insufficiently populist; if they wanted to move the dial in the fight against the Jews, they had to abandon their religiosity. Needless to say, this scene is meticulously transcribed in Dresden Passions, down to such minute details as the gesticulations of Schroeder’s right hand. It is doubtlessly with this scene in mind that Gorenstein states, “The pogromizing anti-Semite is part of the makeup of the revolutionary mass, and socialism, whatever its stripe, must lean on it . . . in reality, the growth of anti-Semitism is one of the components of the revolutionary masses, and anti-Semitism always grows along with the revolutionary fervor of a mob.” Gorenstein was not alone in this argument. Here is Ulrike Meinhof, the German 1970s militant of the Red Army Faction fame (and not someone with whom Gorenstein shared any affinities): “Anti-Semitism is really a hatred of capitalism.”

Gorenstein almost always means a great deal more than what he says. Implicit in the conflation of socialism and modern anti-Semitism is the idea that Jews who are attracted to “progressive” ideas would do well to brush up on their history. Gorenstein acknowledges the prominent role that some Jews have played in socialist movements, but believes them to have only been “prodigal sons of their biblical conscience, founded on a capitalistic equality of opportunities and on individualism.” Gorenstein attributes the tendency of some Jews to become such prodigal sons to what he calls, in later texts, the “ghetto complex.” Roughly corresponding to the English “self-hating Jew,” the complex is specific to the Jews and is a byproduct of the abnormal nature of their history. After centuries of living in ghettos, some Jews have developed a fear of the “outside world” and contempt for the world of their own — if you hate yourself, you will naturally hate those who resemble you. Israeli pacifists and peace activists, in Gorenstein’s analysis, are victims of the ghetto complex: they would sooner truckle to their enemies than look out for the welfare of their own people. As Jews with a ghetto complex want to be seen as likeable and attractive, they are natural suckers for utopias and often gravitate towards progressive ideologies — “isms” that promise a world in which the wolf will lie down next to the lamb. This is how Gorenstein explains the prominence of some Jews in left-wing movements and in crusades on behalf of the marginalized; it is a pathological desire to shed their individualism and join the collective body. Gorenstein is scathing of such Jews, whom he believes to be as dangerous as active anti-Semites. Outside of Israel, the Jews will always be the lamb, and the wolf will never change his dietary habits. The collective body will always be hostile and seek to regurgitate foreign elements. Jews who think otherwise will share the fate of those of their brethren who seek to coexist with “liberal anti-Semites” — the wolf will devour them and those gullible souls that follow them.

Gorenstein was a formidable writer of prose, and his ability to draw the reader into text is nothing short of sorcery. But Gorenstein’s ideas should be clearly labeled “fragile” and handled accordingly. To give you a flavor of their fragility, consider Gorenstein’s historicity of the Christian faith as advanced in The Psalm, his masterly novel of magic realism. According to Gorenstein, Jesus was betrayed not by Judas, who was merely a pawn, but by his other disciples. The Apostles had plotted against Jesus and went on to distort and repackage his teachings. Drawing on the Gospel of Matthew for proof, Gorenstein points out that, despite many false testimonies, the Sanhedrin had nothing on Jesus; he was only convicted when two witnesses testified that Jesus had said he could destroy the temple and raise it in three days. Since Jesus had only said it to his disciples and no one else, Gorenstein concludes the two false witnesses must have been his disciples. In point of fact, the only thing this “evidence” proves is that Gorenstein either did not venture beyond the Gospel of Matthew or, more likely, simply ignored what the other Evangelists had to say. In the Gospel of John, we read: “So the Jews answered and said to Him, ‘What sign do You show to us, since You do these things?’ Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ ” (John 2:18–19). Perhaps Gorenstein searched for clues in his own life to explain the life of Christ: if there was a secret plot against Gorenstein, then why not against Jesus? Still, a writer who inserts theories loaded with far-flung implications into his texts ought to be more responsible.

Dresden Passions is lighter on outlandish ideas, but it still invites qualifications and objections. This reader was not entirely persuaded by the relationship between capitalism and the Bible — individualism, yes, but capitalism? The term “socialism” could also use some nuance: a socialism with a human face has dominated much of Scandinavia for decades now, and things seem to have been working rather well for northern Europeans, at least until recently. Perhaps “revolutionary socialism” would be more appropriate. Moreover, the founders of the Israeli state had a lot more in common with socialists than with capitalists — an elephant in the room that Gorenstein either doesn’t see or pretends not to. As regards the horrors of the 20th century, a discussion without some mention of biopolitics seems incomplete. Biopolitics is a mode of government that manages the physical life of the population, reducing people to biological units. It is not an “ism” but the application of a politics well suited to the development of the modern state and the technological progress of modern civilization. The genocide perpetrated by the Nazis, with all the dehumanization that it involved, could have only happened in the industrial age, the age of biopolitics. I doubt Gorenstein had ever heard of the term.

In the main, though, Gorenstein’s analysis is strikingly persuasive. Linking anti-Semitism with socialism might be paradoxical at first glance — weren’t the Nazis, the most rabid anti-Semites historically, far-right on the political spectrum? Not really. The German historian Sebastian Haffner debunks the myth that the Nazis were reactionaries in The Meaning of Hitler, a book whose insightfulness is directly disproportionate to its slim size. Haffner defines the extreme right wing — fascism — as “upper-class rule, buttressed by artificially manufactured mass enthusiasm.” Hitler was never moved by class-based concerns and certainly did not seek to restore any kind of ancien régime. In its policies and goals, the Nazi movement was revolutionary and not reactionary. The Nazis were National Socialists, and the party was initially called “Nazi-Sozi.” The “Nazi” part did not negate the “Sozi” part so much as it subsumed it. The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany’s ideological opposite, was just “Sozi,” yet had Stalin not died when he did, taking the so-called Doctors’ Plot with him, the history of Soviet Jews might have been very different. Actually, there was plenty of institutional anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, even after Stalin was gone. Western Europe has also seen considerable anti-Semitism on the Left. It is telling that Marine Le Pen, leader of a French party considered to be far-right (and the daughter of the sulfurously unrepentant Jean-Marie Le Pen), joined other major political leaders at a march against anti-Semitism in Paris last month; the one politician conspicuously absent was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the poster boy for France’s archaic gauchisme. And while it is silly to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, the hostility of the Western Left towards Israel very often is anti-Semitic — an atavistic reflex that seeks to rescue Bernanos’s “honorable anti-Semitism” from the memory of the Shoah and create an “anti-Semitism with a human face.”

Haffner would have been very receptive to Gorenstein’s critique of socialism. Elsewhere in his book he introduces the dichotomy of socialism and individualism: “It would probably be more correct, and certainly more important, to see not capitalism but individualism as the opposite of socialism. After all, in the industrial age, socialism is also quite inevitably a kind of capitalism.” And so it is: for the average factory worker, it doesn’t much matter whether the factory belongs to a businessman or the state; the question is how well (or not) he is remunerated, and what he can do with his remuneration once his shift is over. The failed artist of Vienna whose Munich beer hall rants propelled him to Germany’s highest office was a reincarnation of the cobbler Schroeder screaming at the delegates in Dresden as he waved his right hand. For all its vaunted ideals, the ultimate tendency of socialism is the rule of the lowest common denominator. While reducing the gap between the haves and have-nots is both noble and desirable, perfect equality also means a loss of individualism and freedom. Presumably there is very little social inequality in North Korea; before its dictator, everyone is indeed very equal. North Korea is an extreme example, but even in the well-functioning, highly civilized Scandinavian countries, there is a cost to the “janteloven” mentality; Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle and Robert Östlund’s movie The Square offer glimpses of what it is. The reasonableness of that cost is a different story.

In other texts, Gorenstein wrote about his belief in the continued existence of the Jews as a prerequisite for the existence of Western civilization. The level of anti-Semitism in a given society is a bellwether of the society’s overall health; a high level of anti-Semitism is a sure sign of malaise. The peculiar nature of anti-Semitism, its durability and malleability, sets it apart from other forms of bigotry; it is, I have always maintained, a metaphysical phenomenon. When Frederick the Great asked a clergyman for proof of God’s existence, the latter replied, “The Jews, your majesty.” Without the Jews, there is no God — and what would Western civilization be without God? The Hebrews are God’s chosen people; the prophets were Jews; Christ came from the womb of a Jewish woman; the Twelve Apostles were Jews. As a rejection of everything biblical, anti-Semitism is a rejection of God and godliness. The author of the pamphlet wrote that Dühring wanted to purge the religious life of Aryans of Semitic influence; I am not sure what that would have done for their Aryanism, but I think I know what it would have done for their spiritual fabric. Gorenstein understood this better than anyone. In The Psalm he writes that since man by his very nature is God’s enemy, the existence of the Jews — God’s chosen people — is a constant reminder that God exists and man must measure up. But most people do not want to measure up; hating God and those who remind us of His existence is easier: “The further this or that nation is from God at a given stage of its historical development, the stronger the hatred, the more natural its anti-Semitism as a national manifestation.” The German thinker and writer Ernst Jünger, Gorenstein’s antipode in every respect, sensed this too. Hearing reports of Nazi atrocities against the Jews while stationed in Paris, Jünger, then an officer in the Wehrmacht, wrote, “We enrage the cosmos against us” (see A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941–1945). The enraged cosmos did not take long to respond. The Reich that was supposed to last a thousand years had expired in less than fifteen, and its Wotan-worshiping leader lay dead in his bunker, his capital having been reduced to rubble. Berlin was eventually rebuilt; the spiritual, metaphysical ruins are much less easy to clear.

Gorenstein ends Dresden Passions with a brief note about Lermontov, one of the greatest poets of Russia’s Golden Age. While still a callow youth, Lermontov was not averse to the kind of casual anti-Semitism typical of his literary milieu. But as he matured into an individual who stood out from the crowd, he found himself a victim of mob mentality, the kind of mentality that tramples on those who stand out and uses violence and ideological lies to maintain its power and dominance. It was as a besieged individual pitted against a bloodthirsty, pogromizing mob that Lermontov wrote “The Jewish Melody.” A self-analytical, deeply introspective poem, it not only expresses Lermontov’s spiritual agony but also conveys the “psycho-emotional characteristics of the Jewish soul.” Like Tsvetaeva a century later, Lermontov understood that, in the final analysis, to be an individual in this most Christian of worlds is, in a way, to be a Jew. That is Gorenstein’s timely message for Jews and non-Jews alike.