a “Edward Fagan is one of the loudest among the American lawyers. He threatened Degussa, for example, saying that it could lose all its assets if his lawsuits are successful.”
“The American lawyers, furthermore, understand the business of publicity. Again and again during the past months, threats to boycott German products were raised in the USA. Large firms fear for their public image.”
“But it is not a question of moral obligation alone. Many managers obviously have not grasped that the compensation campaign is in their very own interest. If it fails, the world will point a finger at Germany, calls for boycotts will abound, and lawsuits against German firms in American courts will heap up. Ultimately this damage would be more expensive than the contribution to the fund.”
“SZ [Süddeutsche Zeitung]: In case of failure, it’s not the lawyers who would be blamed, but the Germans in general, not only the business sector but also the government and the people in this country. Aren’t you afraid our standing will suffer damage?”
(“Ein ziemlich fetter Spatz in der Hand.” Interview with Otto Graf Lambsdorff. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, December 10, 1999, p. 11. (Transl. KL))
b “The Business of Morality—The Fund for Forced Laborers and the Lawyers’ Fee”
(Headline, Frankfurter Allgeneine Zeitung, July 29, 1999, p. 43. (Transl. KL))
“The American lawyers’ offices are being assigned an important role, which explains the polemics against their ‘greed for money.’”
(Christian Semler: “Entschädigung für NS-Zwangsarbeiter: Der steinige Weg zur Rechtssicherheit.” In: taz, July 31, 1999, p. 7. (Transl. KL))
“Even the victims’ lawyers, as the question of fees indicates, have thought not only of their clients but doubtless of their business as well.”
(Jürgen Jeske: “Der Preis der Vergangenheit.” In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 16, 1999, p. 1. (Transl. KL))
The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote that “among some U.S. lawyers, a real gold-digger mood prevailed. There are even said to be lawyers who went to see their German colleagues in order to buy clients from them. Allegedly, 10,000 DM per client was offered. Presumably these legal freeloaders were gambling on the high percentages that are yielded in many American lawsuits—sometimes 30 to 40 percent of the compensation amounts.”
(“Anwälte mit zweifelhaftem Verdienst.” In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, December 16, 1999, p. 2. (Transl. KL))
“The suspicion that Fagan is also thinking about his fee when he speaks of tormented human beings is obvious. U.S. lawyers collect success fees, and in case of a settlement, that can be up to 10 percent of the settlement amount.”
c “American lawyers, who know how to hide their shrewdness behind the façade of crime and punishment, are putting pressure on German firms by making exorbitant demands. Jewish organizations are battling primarily for the victims of the Holocaust. The victims’ associations and governments in Eastern Europe demand justice and by that really mean German marks.”
d “Lambsdorff: It fills me with horror and misery that to an increasing extent, money is all that’s being talked about, and obviously the interests of the victims recede into the background, and people increasingly forget that most of these victims are more than 70 years old. But what matters here is that we concern ourselves with these people. One must be able to reach some outcome and must not render such an outcome impossible with extravagant and unreasonably high expectations.”
(“Ein ziemlich fetter Spatz in der Hand.” Interview with Otto Graf Lambsdorff. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, December 10, 1999, p. 11. (Transl. KL))
“[The] idea is depressing: A few thousand marks for years of forced labor. But has it ever been possible to make just compensation for injustice, for inmates, prisoners, deportees, expellees, bomb victims? For Nazi crimes, there can be no redress anyway.”
(“Das Angebot.” In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 9, 1999, p. 1. (Transl. KL))
e “Edward Fagan (46) is one of those tough guys we know from lawyer films: He is fond of laconic syntax and fast answers and is ready at any moment to crush a squirrel with his bare hands. The Jewish lawyer from New York has a couple of nice days behind him and presumably before him as well [...] Yes, Ed Fagan is saving the world. And the world is saving him. Because he earns a high sum from every settlement. Always searching for Nazi victims who are willing to litigate, the lawyer flits about through world history and searches for class actions, [...] Witti is what one might call Fagan’s Nazi victim compensation subcontractor. [...] The clients praise his fighting spirit. [...] It’s like intoxication. Fagan can’t stop. He can’t forget the fees. Even if he wanted to: 5 to 10 percent of the settlement amount is what he gets every time. Witti and Carey D’Avino can’t forget the fees either. Nobody can. But does that mean that they’re greedy? Carey D’Avino has the stature and the economy with words typical of a bouncer. [...] he interprets his role as attorney for the plaintiff with a certain theatrical display. Sometimes he takes up a position with a Holocaust survivor in front of the Deutsche Bank, or he sings, kippah on his head, a Psalm of David, as in Zürich on Holocaust Remembrance Day; […] ‘Mafia,’ ‘blackmail,’ and ‘gangster’ are what the captains of industry cry, curse, whisper, [...] if they remain incognito. [...] The approach of this legal Rambo is reminiscent of the Morgenthau Plan. The ‘devil’s advocate’ would like to sue German firms back into an agraraian economy. [...] Being feared is something the man enjoys. He sees himself as a representative of the force that creates morality and millions all in one go. [...] a feeling for bizarre actions [...] a graduate of the hard school of ambulance chasers, [...] who listen to the police radio, hang around emergency rooms, or go jetting off to airplane crash sites. With [...] great promises in his suitcases. [...] Weiss [...] can allow himself an irony that tiptoes. [...] It is a question of billions. No wonder the plaintiffs are rarely well-disposed toward each other. The World Jewish Congress, fearing for its influence and prestige, for example, aims at an agreement with the German firms, without the lawyers. [...] And now he has to get going. To Tel Aviv. D’Avino is silent. But D’Avino smiles.”
f “What upsets Chancellor Schröder far more: While Lambsdorff is negotiating tenaciously for the German Federal Government, most German firms are refusing to participate in the fund—unmindful of the damage Germany, an exporting nation, is suffering to its reputation.”
“Only once does Melvyn Weiss lose his composure. ‘Does it breed anti-Semitism when victims fight for their rights? Be that as it may, I’d rather see it out in the open than hidden.’ Weiss is a lawyer. A Jewish lawyer representing Jewish victims. And right there you’re in the thick of the problem.”[1]
In the late 1990s, the German-language press reported on the compensation negotiations between former forced laborers of the Nazi era and their lawyers on the one hand and German business and the German government on the other. These negotiations ultimately led to the establishment of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future.” Despite the fact that only a fractional part of the former Nazi forced laborers were of Jewish origin, the plaintiffs were widely perceived by the German public as either Jewish survivors or their (also Jewish) lawyers. This perception colored the media’s reactions to the demands of the former Nazi forced laborers. The “compensation debate” was in large part anti-Semitic in its structure.[2] The conduct of the negotiators representing German industry and the German government contributed substantially to the creation of that situation.[3] The filing of charges by the former Nazi forced laborers—something that was possible only in America but not in Germany, as was emphasized repeatedly[4]—met with disapproval and aroused indignation in wide segments of Germany’s population, as the victims were not only insisting on compensation for the crimes committed against them but also implicitly demanding recognition as equals within a constitutional system. In this expression of outrage, anti-Semitic resentment came to the fore, in some cases concealed, in others quite overt.
The history of compensation had been defined by the efforts of German industry to deprive the victims, as far as possible, of the status of a subject with (human and civil) rights, because admitting that rights had been violated would have meant acknowledging a duty of compensation. By applying the term “voluntary payments” to the compensation, they denied the forced laborers this legal status.[5] While imagining themselves in the role of benefactors who give out of charity, for “humanitarian reasons,” they demanded, on the other hand, legal certainty of the survivors and also with regard to the survivors, and that meant—at least with respect to U.S. law—that they wanted to be kept safe from the law, not by the law. In the compensation debate, opponents went so far in some instances as to interpret the former forced laborers’ wholesale demand for justice in the 1990s as insolence. The former forced laborers’ use of the opportunity to file joint actions in the United States as a way to influence German firms that were concerned about their exports was interpreted as an expression of the victims’ irreconcilability, and as a sign of “exploitative thinking” and “vindictiveness” at the same time. Thus, in significant areas of the public debate, there emerged an image of the former Nazi forced laborers that was completely detached from what had been done to them and that ultimately evoked the familiar and at the same time self-contradictory visions of the “vengeful” and simultaneously “purely exploitative” Jew.
Against the backdrop of such stereotyping, the “Jewish-American lawyers” in particular, who played a prominent role in the German press portrayals, could scarcely be perceived any longer as what they were: legal representatives of plaintiffs with justified concerns. Therefore, their alleged “greed for money” recurred as a kind of mythical image in many articles that dealt with the compensation debate. Like the thirst for revenge that was imputed to the survivors, it became a remarkably “natural,” seemingly innate property; something fundamentally different from the “pursuit of profit” by German business, for example. Both “vengefulness” and “greed” appeared as everyday elements of an anti-Semitic myth that speaks not of historical events but of the “essence,” the “nature,” of its object: the “Jews,” entering the stage here in the form of the survivors and their attorneys. In doing so, the myth does not exhibit its themes unambiguously but does not conceal them either; rather, it deforms what it pretends to relate, flickers and wavers between latency and manifestation, and thus appeals for associative and intuitive acceptance of the proffered observations by readers who are receptive to them, and for activation of “anti-Semitic knowledge” stored in the social memory.
The demand of Jews for recognition and treatment as equals before the law in the Western, mostly Christian societies in the nineteenth century had reinforced anti-Semitic resentment and allowed it to come to light in new forms. In the process, the themes of both “vindictiveness” and “greed” from the canon of Christian anti-Judaism were refreshed in the mythology of modern anti-Semitism. Both themes also permeated the compensation debate of the 1990s. Instead of looking into the legitimate legal claims of the former Nazi forced laborers and thereby grappling with the magnitude of the German crimes, people imagined their demands to be a threat of destruction for the German economy and hence for all of Germany. a The myth of “vindictiveness” made it possible to predestine any conciliation to failure and simultaneously to shift the blame for the possible failure to the former forced laborers. Without seriously asking themselves just which demands would be “proportionate” in such a case, people repeatedly depicted the demands of the former forced laborers as “disproportionate,” as a claim that in this form was utterly baseless and forced on the German economy from outside,[6] represented by incredibly powerful and correspondingly threatening “sharks in lawyers’ clothing.”[7] It was no longer the Nazis’ crimes but the compensation demands of the surviving victims of these crimes that appeared excessive. Not only was it possible to threaten in the German public arena that the negotiations would fail,[8] but it was possible at the same time to effect a reversal of the historical perpetrator-victim relationship and imagine the German economy as the victim of the survivors of Nazism or of their lawyers. Historian Götz Aly, for example, wrote in the Berliner Zeitung, “In the concentration camps, the SS simply had the watery soup placed among the prisoners and thus provoked regular scuffles, which inevitably ended in the victory of the strongest. This same system is what the representatives of the victims now are forcing on the representatives of the federal government.”[9] Aly explains in his article that the objective of the federal government’s representatives was fair compensation for each individual survivor, while the big representatives of the victims, especially the “Jewish organizations in the West,”[10] were organizing a fight over the spoils, in which the East European forced laborers would (again) be victimized by these very organizations when all was said and done. The writer failed to make clear how the representatives of the former Nazi forced laborers could ever force the German negotiators to submit an offer so inadequate that there would not be enough money to compensate everyone satisfactorily. According to Aly, the goodwill of the German side fell victim to the “Jewish organizations in the West,” which allegedly were acting in immoral ways, and which he associated with the SS. Thus the simple dichotomizing of “victims” and “perpetrators”—to be interpreted as “good” and “evil”—creates a “post-Auschwitz morality,” in which the German side, disregarding historical circumstances and actual deeds and perpetrators, has learned to judge whose behavior lacks moral integrity: for example, “money-hungry Jewish organizations.”
The chief target of the anti-Semitic resentment expressed in German newspapers, however, was the lawyers—especially those of American Jewish origin—who filed the class actions and, along with large Jewish organizations such as the Claims Conference, represented the former Nazi forced laborers in the negotiations. They most of all were accused of “greed for money,” and the wildest rumors about their fees were repeatedly floated in German newspapers. b Thus an effort was made to convey the impression that the lawyers were not representing the interests of the Nazis’ victims, but exploiting their story to satisfy their own “greed.”[11] This, of course, implies an exploitation of the Holocaust for immoral purposes, which was the accusation leveled sometimes openly, sometimes covertly, at both the lawyers—“the force that copes with morals and millions all in one go”[12]—and the former Nazi forced laborers: “The plaintiffs are misusing the Holocaust to play a courtroom game with high stakes. The lawsuit is a priceless gift for the anti-Semites in Poland.”[13] The theme of “greed for money,” therefore, also was used to reverse the historical perpetrator-victim relationship: If the victims, by exploiting the Holocaust out of “vindictiveness” and “greed for money,” showed that they had learned nothing from the Holocaust c , then the German side appeared to lack all material interest and to be motivated solely by moral concerns:[14] And the suggestion that the Holocaust was such an unparalleled crime that reparations were incapable of producing the desired effect here was used to emphasize the dignity of the German side in dealing with the crime, in contrast to the supposed ignobility and moral inferiority of its victims.[15] d This peculiar reversal of victim and perpetrator, linked with the expectation that the victims ought to have enough moral discernment to agree here, is an anti-Semitic topos—as is the notion that the victims themselves promote anti-Semitism by not bowing to its judgments.
The bias of the German press against the victims’ representatives was evident most clearly in the portraits devoted to individual attorneys in various newspapers and magazines. e These portraits, like all the comments in the compensation debate that stem from resentment, lack cohesion; they do not rely on deductive reasoning but call up, by association, impressions whose logic is determined solely by antipathy. The appearance of coherence results from their invocation of an unconscious store of anti-Semitic images: The lawyers are always on the move, unscrupulous, use the Holocaust and Jewish religion and rituals in an exploitative way to give “us” a bad conscience, are, of course, avaricious, cosmopolitan, and rootless, and present a serious threat to German business and thus to “our” survival on account of their great power in the United States. This power was repeatedly an issue in the press[16]—and here the old anti-Semitic image of the “worldwide Jewish conspiracy” with its headquarters in the United States appears, without any need for the articles to make it explicit. As in many nationalistic discourses, in the compensation debate, too, the projected image of a mythical superiority of the “enemy” was used to call forth national solidarity in the homeland. Firms that even after unification were still in default on their payments to the German Economy Foundation Initiative were requested in a Foundation Initiative announcement on May 20, 2000, to make their contribution to “Germany’s reputation in the world” and thus avoid betrayal of the image of Germany’s moral decency. f
The Holocaust has found its way into Germany’s national self-concept, and its position is reinforced by the establishment of the Foundation “Remembrance and Future” fund for educational projects as a long-term outcome of the conflict. In the perpetrator-victim distortions of the compensation debate, however, the Holocaust served to strengthen the concept of a German “we” in opposition to the “Jewish aggressors,” although it was precisely National Socialism that could have taught us that that the notion of“we” is the greatest danger of all. As long ago as the 1950s, Max Horkheimer described the function of Germans’ confessions of guilt: “It bears repeating time and again that the confession of guilt on the part of the Germans after the defeat of National Socialism in 1945 was really an attempt to keep the sense of national solidarity alive in the postwar period. The main thing was to preserve the ‘we’ [...] The ‘we’ is the bridge, the evil which made Nazism possible.”[17]
(MN; transl. KL)
