Heterologias

"Hitler Chancellor. What, up to election Sunday on March 5, I called terror, was a mild prelude. Now the business of 1918 is being exactly repeated, only under a different sign, under the swastika. Again, it's astounding how easily everything collapses. What has happened to Bavaria, what has happened to the Reichsbanner, etc. etc.?

Eight days before the election the clumsy business of the Reichstag fire -- I cannot imagine that anyone really believes in Communist perpetrators instead of paid [swastika sign] work. Then the wild prohibitions and acts of violence. And on top of that the neverending propaganda in the street, on the radio, etc. On Saturday the fourth, I heard a part of Hitler's speech from Konigsberg. The front of a hotel at the railway station, illuminated, a torchlight procession in front of it, torchbearers and swastika flag bearers on the balconies and loudspeakers. I understood only words. But the tone! The unctuous bawling, truly bawling, of a priest. ---

Yesterday the dramaturge Karl Wolf dismissed "by order of the Nazi party" -- not even in the name of the government -- today the whole Saxon cabinet, etc., etc. A complete revolution and party dictatorship. And all opposing forces as if vanished from the face of the earth. It is this utter collapse of a power only recently present, no, it's complete disappearance (just as in 1918) that I find so staggering. Que sais-je?"

March 10, 1933

Diários de Viktor Klemperer, entrada de 10 de Março de 1933

'There he is, up to his neck, Jabotinsky, up with the leaders of the intellectual west? You didn't ever even get to where the Greeks were with their ethical & political debate, when yeer crowd were barely straggling back from Babylon, all misery & grudges, weren't they well shut of ye. Where's your Legal Title? What's this it says? Deuteronomy ch.20? Joshua ch.10 vv.28-42. You despise & slander the writings of the New Testament, yet you cite as your title to other people's land a rabid fairytale written down 700 years after the events it purports to describe? And you say your values are western? Your last two civilised rabbi emissaries, despatched to inspect the locale after the 1897 Zionist Congress in Basel reported back: "the bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man." Viktor Klemperer the Dresden Diarist wrote in 1934: the Nazis got their stupid Blut und Boden romanticism from ye.'

As in the scriptural story itself, the precise location of the promised land remained vague, and for a time the desert lands of Arab Palestine seemed too far a stretch for the imagination. Alberto Gerchunoff was one of the pioneering Zionists who fled the steppes of Russia for the pampas of Argentina, to help found there, with earnest Argentine government encouragement, the Jewish settlement of "Moisesville." "Argentina is the Promised Land reached after a New Exodus," he declared in his book Los Gauchos Judios (The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas). "Here, in Argentina," he exulted, "we will work hard, we will eat the bread made with our own wheat, and will be farmers like the old time Jews, the ones in tne Bible."
If Palestine seemed too alien for these Europeans, it also brought with it another problem: it was already inhabited, by an Arab population of hundreds of thousands of people whose families had lived there for centuries. The small community of Jews who already resided in Jerusalem, like the more sizable Jewish enclave in Baghdad, had long ago made its accommodations with Arab culture and strongly opposed Zionist pretensions that might, in arousing Arab antipathies, threaten their relatively stable existence.
In the early years of the Zionist movement, two rabbis from Vienna were sent on a scouting mission to Palestine to estimate the possibilities of creating a Jewish state there. The rabbis wired back, "The bride is beautiful but she is married to another man." But for the more zealous, and focused, Zionists, this was no fatal obstacle. After all, in the very same chapter of Genesis in which the Lord first calls Abraham to the promised land, there is the explicit acknowledgement that "the Canaanite was then in the land."
Nevertheless, the Lord immediately thereafter appears to Abraham and declares to him, "Unto thy seed will I give this land." In the next chapter the sequence is repeated, and elaborated. "And the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelled then in the land." And the Lord said to Abraham, "Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward: for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed forever." The biblical message could not be any clearer: the imagined land took precedence over the inhabited land.

David F. Noble, Beyond the Promised Land: The Movement and the Myth, Toronto, Between The Lines, 2005, pp. 41-42