By Joel Lobenthal
My father wanted to perform due diligence on Nazism. Seventy years ago, he was studying law at the University of Chicago when he took a year abroad in an exchange program with the University of Frankfurt.
He died exactly one year ago, and I’m now reading a particularly relevant essay that he wrote twenty years ago. Not So Long Ago or So Far Away, describes his stay in Germany and the supposition that he wanted to test. “I believed that ordinary Germans knew or suspected what was on the horizon and should have been able to do something to foil the ensuing obscenities. I blamed them for not having done so.” Yet he was writing this as the Bush-Cheney regime was shredding civil liberties here in America. He watched a feckless American resistance that could not stop Bush’s march to a war of choice in Iraq launched on lies. Dad—Joseph Spiro Lobenthal, Jr.—realized he could no longer pass judgment as easily as he had in his twenties.
In Not So Long Ago or So Far Away, Dad recalls that Frankfurt in 1953 was fast being rebuilt, but entire blocks remained in bombed-out ruins. On some lots, fenced-in community vegetable gardens grew. Prostitutes stood every few yards on one main thoroughfare leading to the train station. Many were war widows; their customers were mostly Americans who occupied the city. They were headquartered in the former office complex of the IG Farben company. It had been tried at Nuremberg for manufacturing chemicals for genocide.
Germans had been forced to submit to a Truth and Reconciliation process. It attempted to ensure that the population understood exactly what had happened, took some responsibility for it, and was primed to ensure that it never happened again. Obviously it worked, or at least it has so far. But paradoxically, and anecdotally what Dad found was a resolute silence on the part of students and faculty to discuss or even acknowledge the recent past.
Occasionally, he was even subject to recriminations: “We had Goebbels and burned books. You have McCarthy and Roy Cohn.” He found this doubly troubling because Frankfurt’s University, named for Goethe, had a long tradition of humanism—that same lineage in Germany’s culture that bred denial in the minds of so many Jews who elected to remain. Post-war, the University was “now distinctly politically Left,” he writes.
What appeared to motivate the Germans Dad talked to was above all a determination to “look forward not back,” to reference the hollow phraseology Democrats have been far too eager to apply when confronting the wreckage of first the Bush and now the Trump administrations.
Dad looked at the law from every angle—as witness on the ground, as attorney in the U.S. Navy, as a private practitioner, as a pro-bono resource for friends and family, as an author, as a professor. My gorge rises in anxiety and anger as I read the twelve bullet points of comparison Dad drew up between the Nazis and Bush and his Neocons. In the final years of his life, Dad and I talked innumerable times about the even greater threat posed by Trump.
Dad—mostly—believed that Americans had enough common sense to ultimately reject submission to a crazed dictator. He lived to see Biden elected. A few days before January 6, 2021, he didn’t want to believe it when I told him that I’d read something disruptive was being planned for that day. Despite that cataclysm, he was reassured as he watched Biden’s inauguration, only a few days before he fell and was admitted to the hospital.
He loved Lady Gaga’s rendition of the National Anthem. But as always, his optimism—and sometimes wishful thinking—were informed by his experience of the cycles of history and the lessons of the past. He and I agreed: for democracy to survive, those lessons must be taught perpetually.
