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New discussions of the history of black-Jewish relations could grow out of Du Bois's remarkable analysis of the impending Holocaust.
POKING AROUND THE LIBRARY last year, I came across a startling article, written in 1937 and published in New York's Germanlanguage Staatszeitung und Herold. The article reported comments by W. E. B. Du Bois on his recent half-year trip to Germany. Du Bois in Nazi Germany?
I knew that Du Bois had studied in Berlin from 1892 to 1894. 1 knew that he had been a lifelong Germanophile. I had also read about his visit to East Germany in 1958, when he received an honorary degree from Humboldt University. But I had never read anything about a trip in 1936, the year that Adolf Hitler was forced to watch Jesse Owens's triumph at the Berlin Olympics. What could have prompted a noted African-American intellectual to spend several months in a fascist state? How did this American specialist in race relations, this champion of racial equality, regard the anti-Semitic universe that the Nazis were creating?
Then, why had I never heard about the trip? I have long studied African-American relations with Europe. And, certainly, there has been a wealth of scholarship on W. E. B. Du Bois in recent years.
The story in the Staatszeitung seemed incredible. According to the anonymous journalist who wrote it, Du Bois had found the attitude of the German press toward colored athletes at the 1936 Olympics "quite fair, even friendly." He had spoken positively of Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess, who had made a good impression on him, although he had suggested that Hess's influence was waning. Du Bois had praised the Nazis for constructing apartments and highways, noting that, despite food shortages and a generally depressed national mood, most Germans unconditionally trusted and were grateful to Hitler and his National Socialism.
On a more skeptical note, Du Bois had found that Germany now lacked gemutlichkeit, that untranslatable sense of ease, but he was not quoted as having any more-fundamental worries about the popularity of the Nazis. He had commented that the saber-rattling rhetoric about "party honor" at the 1936 National Socialist rally in Nuremberg might precipitate a war.
Apparently responding to the Staatszeitung journalist's questions about race, Du Bois...