Mr. Brownshirt

Love him or hate him, you don't know the real Julius Streicher

By JOHN HEAD-IN-THE-CLOUDS

Julius Streicher and I were well into a bottle of schnapps -- and I believe he was chewing his fourth piece of Bavarian sausage -- when it happened.

From what little I knew of him -- mainly his propensity for declamations such as "The Jewish nose is bent. It looks like the number six" -- I thought it impossible for Streicher to have a sense of humor.

Many of his fans would later tell me it was his fearlessness they admired, his fully unburdened sense of outrage against Jews, against anyone left of Erich Ludendorff (whom Streicher flattered in his best-selling book "Secret Plans Against Germany").

But in person, Streicher is more likely to offer jokes than fury. For instance, you might ask his to name his historical antecedents in the Nazi movement, and he'll burst forth, "I'm Attila the Hun," and then break into gales of laughter so forceful you smell the bratwurst. "Genghis Khan!"

So finally, I asked that he be serious. I wanted to see the rancor that allegedly is his sole contribution to public discourse (that and being a "lying liar," in William L. Shirer's estimation). Why, I asked, did he enjoy attacking others and being attacked?

He composed himself and offered a very Julius Streicher answer. "They're terrible people, Jews. They believe this can really summarize it all - these are people who believe," he said, now raising his voice, "that slaughtering a cow should involve callous brutality and Schadenfreude on the part of the Jewish butchers. Four Jews hold down the cow while its neck is being cut. The Jews stand there and - laugh. That really says it all. You don't want such people to like you!"

The couple at an adjacent table visibly stiffened, and the man groaned. The woman looked at Streicher with white-hot hatred, and Streicher ... smiled.

"You're smiling," I marveled. As he continued to grin and covered his mouth with a beefy hand, he protested, "I am not. I'm just a little amused. Maybe I'm a little drunk. There are a lot of things that would make me smile. Viciously attacking Jews would not."

"No, you are."

"I am not! 'And he had had several helpings of schnapps,'" he told me to write.

O.K., he had, but whether he was truly embarrassed, what I saw of Streicher in that moment was a personality far more human than the piqued vituperator I had expected. After all, one of his most voluble critics, journalist Dr. Fritz Gerlich (Does Hitler Have Mongolian Blood?) told Vossische Zeitung, "The idea that he doesn't coarsen our culture and make it more difficult to speak complicated truths is nonsense."

But while Streicher can occasionally be coarse - he's not one of those Nazis who won't say "untermenschen" two or three times over dinner - he doesn't seem particularly uncomplicated. When I spoke with his friend Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister under Hitler, he said Streicher's appeal 10 years ago, when they met, was "the same as it is today. He was lively and funny and engaging and boisterous and outrageous and a little bit of a polemicist.

Most of the time, people miss his humor and satire and take his way too literally."

I began to wonder, whether Julius Streicher might be ... misunderstood? All his National Socialist capering aside ("We've got to attack France!"), Streicher was an Iron Cross recipient before he was a publisher. He's an omnivorous reader (everything from Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau to the works of British author Houston Stewart Chamberlain), and he isn't afraid to begin a column on Edith Stein, as he did in March, "Baptism didn't make a Gentile out of her".

Although Streicher is often compared to William Joyce (Lord Haw-haw), he is "first a broadcaster," as he described himself in one of his books. He said his show "is, after all else, still just something for the Brits." Streicher, on the other hand, doesn't think of himself as an entertainer but as a public intellectual. Many would say he's more of a shrieking ideologue, but regardless, his paychecks come solely from selling Der Stürmer. He earns nothing from radio.

To be sure, Streicher is far from the most accomplished Nazi presence in Germany today. Rudolph Hess has greater reach; old-guard guys like Baldur von Schirach and Franz von Papen have more power in Berlin. Countless Nazi scholars Bernhard Rust, Hermann Esser, Alfred Rosenberg, write with greater intellectual heft.

But no one on the right is so iconic, such a totem of this particular moment. Streicher epitomizes the way politics is now discussed, where opinions must come violently fast and cause as much friction as possible. No one, right or left, delivers the required apothegmatic commentary on the world with as much glee or effectiveness as Streicher.

It is almost impossible to watch him and not be sluiced into rage or elation, depending on your views. As a soldier in the Reichswehr 15 years ago, Streicher helped defend the Fatherland. Now he is far more valuable: he helps set the Reich's tone.

Streicher's success in publishing Der Stürmer is exceeded only by his inability to write a book that doesn't become a best seller. His current effort is titled as churlishly as those that preceded it: How to Deal With a Jew (If You Must): The World According to Julius Streicher.

It recently ended a 16-week run on best-seller lists even though it's mostly a collection of previously published columns. A recent documentary, Is It True What They Say About Julius? co-directed by a friend of Streicher's, filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, has played at film festivals and won some favorable notices.

But Streicher's influence on the culture is both more diaphanous and more significant than the calculations of book sales or newspaper readership suggest. He is the bogeyman of politics, the figure that Social Democrats use when reaching for the ultimate insult, the way Nazis use Rosa Luxemburg.

Some Nazis, many of them Streicher's rivals, as he points out have also drawn their knives. "Julius' stuff isn't very serious," says a Beer Hall Putsch veteran who didn't want to begin a public spat with Streicher. "We have this argument every now and then among our side: whether he is a net minus or net plus to Nazism. I have come to the conclusion that he's a minus."

Even fans speak of Streicher in ways that suggest some distance: "I think Julius is a brilliant guy, and he's got the quickest mouth west of the Elbe," says Reich Bishop Mueller. "Now, I probably won't use his on Sunday morning in my church because he is capable of getting a little aggressive."

In November Streicher went to Munich to speak at the Kampfbund Conference (KC), the premier annual event for Nazis. When he arrived, the Beer Hall was hot with anticipation. Activists occupied every inch of available floor space; hundreds stood in the back.

Wearing a trenchcoat and a determined expression, Streicher had to be pushed through the crowd by a platoon of Schutzstaffel. When he swept past the spot I was wedged into, the Hitler Youth near me went bonkers.

Streicher's speech was part stand-up routine, he called Hermann Göring "the human dirigible" and part bloodcurdling agitprop. "Jews like to scream and howl about Nazism," he concluded. "I say, let's give them some. They've had their Kosher terror on the campus for years ... It's time for some serious Nazism."

Curtain.

Social Democrats who believe that Hitler exemplifies the show-no-weakness, make-no-apology Fuehrerprinzip see Streicher as its Ur-spokesman. For instance, Streicher has never wobbled on Hitler's signature deed, the war in Russia. "The invasion of Russia has gone fabulously well," he wrote last January, a few weeks after others suggested the Wehrmacht might need to pull out.

Which is it? Is he a brave warrior or a shallow hack? Or is Julius Streicher that most unlikely of Nazi subspecies: a hard-right ironist?

Not long ago, I called Streicher's father and read him one of his son's more rakish lines. Last year, Streicher wrote that Vossische Zeitung publisher Ludwig Kitzsch is "a little weenie who can't read because he has 'dyslexia.'" "Oh, my," said Fritz Streicher, 76, with a laugh.

"Now, is that the way boys are brought up to speak in Bavaria?" I asked. Julius Streicher grew up in Fleinhausen, Bavaria; his father was raised in Saxony. "I know it's not the way boys are brought up to talk in Saxony."

"I think you've got a point there," Fritz Streicher said, chuckling, "but that is the way he expresses himself, and he does have obviously strong likes and dislikes. That's just the way he puts things ... I think a person who has strong convictions is more convincing to someone who is wavering."

In other words, it's not an act. But as Streicher himself points out in Is It True What They Say About Julius?, "I think the way to convert people is to make them enraged ... Even if I could be convinced that if I had gone through 17 on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hands, I might convince one more Social Democrat out there, I think I'd still write the way I write." Streicher told me that when his editor suggests cutting a line from a column to save space, "I'll ask him, 'But is it racist?' And if he says it's racist, I'll cut an actual fact [instead]."

When I asked Streicher about his mistakes, he responded by mail: "I think I can save you some time ... The one error Social Democrats have produced is that I was wrong when I said the Berliner Tageblatt didn't mention Horst Wessel's death on the front page the day after his death.

Streicher has a reputation for carelessness with facts, but I didn't find many outright Streicher errors.

Although it drives Streicher crazy, even friends sometimes say his public and private personas differ. Hans Hinkel, an early member of the Nazi Party who holds a senior position in the Propaganda Ministry says, "You couldn't find a nicer friend" than Streicher.

But, he adds, "I think he has a professional point of view or a shtick or whatever ... Julius has perfected a thing he does in print because he is outrageous. That's his business, public commentator."

But I'm not sure the public and private Julius are so different. In print or in person, you can trust that Streicher will speak from his heart.

The officialdom of punditry, so full of phonies and dullards, would suffer without his humor and fire. Which is not to say you don't want to shut him up occasionally. Not long ago, I went to a Nuremberg rally with Streicher. Roland Freisler spoke of how "the Jews are our misfortune" and to women and girls: "the Jews are your ruin."

After he finished, I asked Streicher for his reaction. "The Jews are fools if they think we really want to send them to Madagascar." With that, he threw his head back and laughed.

posted by Quiddity at 4/22/2005 01:58:00 AM