Against the Tide

XVIII

F. A. Kramer: In Memoriam*

If one individual among the many who mourn the untimely death of this unique man may be permitted a personal testimony, I would condense everything into this one sentence: I have lost a friend to whom I was tied by years of common work in hard times, by an intimate mutual understanding in everything we had at heart, and by the deepest affection, and whose life and work I respectfully acknowledge as those of a truly wise and God-fearing man. Would that thousands knew what example he set by his firm and unswerving faith in the highest, by his steadfast courage in defending what he had recognized as right, by the judicious application of his exceptional mental faculties, and by a spirit of sacrifice that gave him, long marked out for an early death as he was, the strength to make his life’s work, the Rheinischer Merkur, the rallying point of the Christian and humanist freedom forces in Germany. Thousands should know that here was a man of unusual gifts of mind and character, who sacrified his health, comfort, peace, and finally his life to his work and, with it, to a cause that numberless Germans knew as their own. In thanking him for it here, I wish that we may be joined in this expression of gratitude by all those who, even though only from afar, can appreciate what it meant in the despondency of our time to see this man’s fight against the deadly forces of disintegration, of world ruin, the simultaneous destruction of the divine and the human, excess, perversity and unfreedom. They cannot express their gratitude better than by associating with their memory of our dead friend respect for his example and loyalty to his aims and standards.

It was during the war that we met on Swiss soil, brought together by a common concern for the fate of our Western culture and for a European solution to the German question. At our very first meeting I was impressed with the political acumen of my friend, with the clarity and precision of his thinking, with his unusual power of expression and his intellectual integrity. Immediately there was created between us the sort of concord that roots in the deepest layers of the soul and hardly needs to be stated and confirmed in detail. And so it came that despite the distance between Geneva and Berne, where he lived, we developed an increasingly close collaboration, of which the direct results unfortunately were scant, although the indirect effects have proved all the more significant and lasting.

One of our main tasks, as we saw it, was to avail ourselves of all the ways and means offered by the diplomatic life of a neutral capital in order to counteract the pernicious tendencies that threatened early to push the Allies’ policy onto the track that ultimately led to Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam. It was a desperate struggle against an extent of delusion and misjudgment that even then filled us with ominous forebodings for the future. It was my friend who, because he lived in Berne and devoted himself wholeheartedly to this struggle, had to shoulder the main burden of this wearing and discouraging activity. An account of our experiences, which naturally would have to include the intrigues of the German socialists and communists, then still linked by a common “left” ideology, would mean taking a living example to describe the historical and psychological background of an Allied policy that was not only bound to fail in solving the German question but ended up by surrendering the bulk of Europe and Asia to Russian communist imperialism. Not all Germans were Nazis; it was needful to look out at once for the forces on which to rely for the sound reconstruction of Germany—these forces were not only on the Left, for communism was nothing but a variant of totalitarianism—and it was only at one’s peril that one could try to drive out Satan by Beelzebub. We would say all this only to realize in the end that we were talking into the blue and, to boot, were becoming suspect as “reactionaries.” It was my friend who suffered most from this psychologically, and I am sure that it was then that the ground was prepared for his illness. The logical outcome of all this was that discussions with the American representative were broken off when we talked of the incurable naiveness of a policy that placed blind faith in the communists and of the necessity of combating the red totalitarianism just like the brown.

The highest marks must be given, in this context, to the intelligence and loyalty of Allan W. Dulles, the author of a just book on the German opposition, whom President Roosevelt had sent to Berne on a special mission during the war. But it was through his mediation that one of our greatest disillusionments was to come to us.

It was on the day when the foundation of the “Free Moscow Committee” was announced, in 1943, that I made Dulles’s acquaintance. When he asked what this meant, I replied: “It means that Moscow has a German program, but the West has none.” He went on to ask what I advised should be done, and I said the West should make haste to catch up with the East’s political and propaganda lead by making up its mind about a Western solution to the German question in opposition to the Moscow-inspired one, and by promoting the creation of an appropriate Western committee of Germans. I was asked what sort of thing I had in mind and explained that I thought the purpose would be best served by a committee made up of representatives of the Christian churches. Such a committee should be formed without further delay, and its first duty should be to issue a carefully prepared manifesto by which to lead the Germans back to the firm ground of Western values and traditions. But something else needed doing as well. The Allies should imagine in what an appalling state of spiritual bewilderment the Germans would be. At their entry, the Allies would find a nation of human beings upon whose heads the world was collapsing after terrible suffering. Only a few would understand why this had to come, what Hitler and national socialism signified, why there had been a war, what inhuman and hateful things had come to pass, and why it all ended as it did; and greater still than their physical hunger would be the spiritual hunger of these people, who in their stupor would want to know what had really happened to them and why, and once they had grasped that, would come to see a new goal of life and community. The Allies should engage the good services of an honest German at one with his people, an intelligent man with powers of expression, to write a pamphlet in this sense, and this should right away be printed in millions of copies to be distributed at the Allies’ arrival, together with the soup kitchen rations, in the name of our Christian, German committee. I knew of only one man who would fill the bill, my friend Dr. F. A. Kramer.

All these ideas and proposals were accepted with the utmost readiness, and all the rest again fell to the lot of my friend, who set about carrying out the project untiringly and with admirable skill. The committee was founded after we had succeeded in interesting excellent representatives both on the Catholic and the Protestant side, including a well-known socialist. We agreed upon an action program, and, most important of all, my late friend, who, upon my proposal, was also entrusted with this literary task, delivered his manuscript for the pamphlet. It had cost him weeks of the most painstaking work and, as was to be expected, was eminently suitable for the purpose. The rest was now up to the Americans. And then the crushing blow fell. Obviously in response to a hint from Washington, Mr. Dulles, who so far had impatiently urged us on, called the whole thing off. The work of months was merely destined to disappear in the files of the State Department, and instead of the millions of copies that Mr. Dulles had led us to believe would be printed, we got the kind offer that if Dr. Kramer cared to have the pamphlet printed, the Americans would Take the beggarly total of five hundred copies. The pamphlet was later published under the title “Vor den Ruinen Deutschlands” in Germany (Historisch-Politischer Verlag, Koblenz) and in Switzerland (Europa-Verlag, Zürich).

We had had our lesson. If it was in any case undesirable for the Western powers to have a German policy, because and insofar as this was against communist plans, it was altogether out of the question to encourage any sort of political and spiritual activity by Germans who had gained a reputation for being reactionaries on account of their appeal to tradition, Western civilization, homeland, family, property, and Christianity, and of their warning against any and every form of totalitarianism. In the name of the policy of “unconditional surrender,” such hopelessly “unprogressive” Germans had to be cast off at once.

This is the story, told here for the first time, of what was probably the only attempt, and one that failed miserably, to oppose Moscow’s declared German and European policy during the war by a joint German-American initiative based on those ideals by which the West stands or falls. I break my silence not in order to open old wounds, but in order to honor the memory of my friend, who played the main part in this attempt and, with the support throughout of his courageous wife, sacrificed his strength and his last financial reserves.

When history took the course that we had tried to stem with our weak forces, he regarded it as his natural duty to be among the first to return to his country and to devote himself to his last breath to the same task, even amid the ruins. He was irreplaceable, and the more grievously we shall miss him.

* Undated manuscript, first published in Gegen die Brandung, 1959, believed to have been written at the time of Kramer’s death in 1950.