Antisemitism

Antisemitism is the moral fact that overturns Paul von Hartmann’s earlier attempt to separate Hitler’s political achievements from the regime’s persecution of Jews. In the account of a former lover’s arrests, lasting impairment, and precarious care, anti-Jewish violence appears not as a regrettable exception but as evidence of what the regime is capable of; Hugh Legat recognizes the force of Hartmann’s conclusion as they travel together toward a city waking to news of an agreement.

A history of persecution

Hartmann recounts that he and the woman separated after Munich, after which he lost touch with her. She returned to Berlin and became more deeply involved with the communists, working for the underground continuation of their newspaper, Die Rote Fahn, after the authorities banned it when the Nazis came to power. Her political activity placed her in danger, but the account makes clear that her Jewish identity would shape the severity of what followed.

She was arrested in a raid in 1935 and sent to Moringen, a women’s camp. By then she was married to a fellow communist, who was later killed fighting in Spain. After his death she was released and returned to communist work. The authorities arrested her again; this time, Hartmann says, they discovered she was Jewish and treated her more harshly. The sequence matters: political opposition brought her within reach of the authorities, while antisemitism intensified the persecution and its consequences.

Hartmann reports that officials said she had fallen from a third-floor window, and he says he believes that she did. He also tells Legat that she had been marked with a Star of David before the fall. The account offers no independent investigation of the circumstances, but Hartmann’s certainty that she fell does not lessen his conviction that she had already been subjected to abuse. Her brain was so badly damaged that, in his assessment, treatment could not restore her former condition.

Care, influence, and complicity

The woman’s mother, a widowed former teacher with little money, contacted Hartmann and asked whether his influence could secure better treatment for her daughter. Hartmann says he tried, but believed the damage was too severe for his efforts to succeed. He could provide for her nursing-home care, and his position persuaded the institution to overlook her Jewish identity. His help offers a measure of protection, yet its terms expose the reach of the persecution: even access to care depends on an exception granted because of a politically useful man’s standing.

Legat responds that Hartmann’s actions were decent. Hartmann rejects that description with a laugh and a shake of his head. The exchange prevents his payment for the nursing home from becoming a simple redemption. He has helped an individual, but cannot undo what was done to her or make the wider system safe. His intervention is constrained by the same political order whose party he had joined and within which he holds a position.

Hartmann’s changed understanding

Hartmann presents the woman’s history as the lesson he and Legat could not grasp in Oxford. He recalls the earlier judgment of people like himself: Hitler might be a terrible figure, they had thought, but not wholly bad; his achievements could be acknowledged while anti-Jewish policy was dismissed as an archaic prejudice that would eventually pass. Hartmann now rejects that division. Antisemitism cannot be isolated from the regime’s other actions, he argues, because a system capable of such persecution is capable of anything.

The change is more than a revised estimate of Hitler. Hartmann identifies a failure in the reasoning that made political achievements seem separable from persecution: it treated antisemitism as a detachable excess rather than part of the same political reality. The woman’s fate supplies the concrete counterexample. Her communist work explains why she was targeted, but it does not explain away the intensified treatment that followed the discovery that she was Jewish. The progression forces Hartmann to see the violence as integral rather than incidental.

As he speaks, Hartmann keeps his eyes on the road, gestures with his cigarette, and briefly looks toward Legat; his eyes are wet. Legat says that he now understands. His reply marks a change in their conversation: Hartmann’s account has made a previously abstract argument legible through the fate of someone they knew. Their understanding does not repair her condition, but it ends the earlier intellectual refuge in the idea that antisemitism might simply disappear while the rest of the regime remained acceptable.

The scene’s public and private aftermath

After Legat’s acknowledgment, the two men remain silent for half an hour. The pause gives the exchange an ending without suggesting that either man has resolved what it means politically. Their conversation concerns a woman whose life has been broken by persecution; outside the car, ordinary movement resumes as morning arrives, with a bus, a flatbed truck carrying scrap metal, and a train approaching the city.

Legat sees passengers reading newspapers that announce the agreement. This image places the intimate account of antisemitism beside a public report of political settlement, without making the two equivalent or claiming that the passengers know what Hartmann has just told him. The contrast is instead carried by the scene’s timing: while the agreement circulates in print, the men have confronted evidence that no diplomatic optimism can render harmless. Antisemitism has become, for Hartmann and now Legat, a test of whether the regime can be judged by its apparent achievements while its persecution is set aside.