Council fora Democratic Germany
The Council for a Democratic Germany (CDG) was founded in New York City in May 1944 by German emigres with different political affiliations in order to add an organized voice of “the other Germany” to the American public wartime debate and in the hope of influencing the official U.S.
planning for postwar Germany. Its purpose was not to prefigure a kind of governmentin-exile, but rather to advocate a constructive European-wide peace settlement based on continued Allied cooperation. The groups’ organizing committee comprised nineteen left-liberal political and cultural representatives (among them Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Budzislawski, and Paul Hagen) under the chairmanship of the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. The sixty cosigners of the council’s original declaration included a wide range of German artists, academics, religious representatives, and political—especially labor—activists. Party affiliations ranged from the Catholic Center Party through various liberal parties to Socialists and Communists (e.g., Friedrich Baerwald, Ernst Bloch, Lion Feuchtwanger, Paul Hertz, Fritz Kortner, Peter Lorre, Heinrich Mann, Erwin Pisca- tor, Wolfgang Stresemann, and Carl Zuck- mayer). Although primarily an organization of emigrants and refugees, the council was publicly supported by a group of American intellectuals long active in public campaigns against the Third Reich and favoring a constructive peace with defeated Germany (John Dewey, Horace M. Kallen, Reinhold Niebuhr, Dorothy Thompson, Rabbi Jonah B. Wise, and others).The council had a significant precursor in an earlier German American advocacy group with which it shared both personnel and political aims: the American Friends for German Freedom (AFGF), with its indefatigable research director Karl Frank, alias Paul Hagen (who represented the Socialist Neu-Beginnen, or “New Beginning” group), as well as Max Lerner, Dorothy Thompson, Thomas Mann, and Paul Tillich as prominent executive members and Reinhold Niebuhr as chairman.
Preceding the CDG by almost a decade, the AFGF had its origins in left-liberal intellectual and Jewish European—dominated trade union circles. The AFGF made significant contributions to both public and official debates on the Third Reich through its substantive research output, based on extensive contacts in the German underground, and its regular publications. Many of its members never quite gave up hope for a popular revolt within Germany against the Nazi terror and in general insisted on that nation’s own ability for democratic renewal.Like the AFGF, the council continued to fight in the public debate of 1944—1945 on two fronts: against both the Moscow-inspired German Communists and the American hard-liners on the German question, the “Vansittartists.” Responding directly to the enunciations of the Nationalkommitee Freies Deutschland (NKFD, or National Committee for a Free Germany), established in Moscow in 1943, the Socialist and liberal exiles in the United States rejected the Moscow group’s direct appeal to the German army as falling far short of the necessary democratization. In its public declarations the council accepted a collective German responsibility for the Nazi crimes, including the need for restitution. It was in similar agreement with Allied war plans in its indictment of Prussian German militarism. The council insisted, however, on a distinction between the Nazis and their supporters and the German people themselves, clinging to the hope that the latter would, at least in the final phase of the war, join in the defeat of Nazism. The reconstruction of a democratic Germany should be left to Germans themselves. The council strongly argued against any plans for dismemberment and partitioning, as first discussed in Tehran, as well as the kind of deindustrialization that the Morgenthau Plan envisioned. Instead it held out the vision of a supranational European unity as a prerequisite for postwar peace, anticipating continued cooperation within the international anti-Hitler coalition and expecting that Anglo-American liberal democracy would be supplemented by farther-reaching social welfare measures.
For a few intense months, committees and subcommittees of the council drafted memoranda for the political, economic, and cultural reorganization of Germany’s postwar democracy. By 1945, however, the council, which had never attained sufficient public or official attention, faltered under the combined pressure of a general realization of the extent of German war crimes and the first signs of inter-Allied tension. In contrast to its Soviet counterpart, the NKFD, the council did not become an instrument of U.S. policy toward Germany; indeed, the Roosevelt administration for the most part ignored it, just as it rejected all substantive contacts with any German opposition to the Nazi regime. The late arrival and feeble voice of the council on the American scene illustrates that German exiles were hardly a politically relevant force.Michaela Hoenicke Moore
See also Aufbau; Brecht, Bertolt; Fromm, Erich; Intellectual Exile; Lorre, Peter; Mann, Thomas; Morgenthau Plan; Neumann, Franz L.; Tehran Conference; Thompson, Dorothy; U.S. Plans for Postwar Germany; Vansittartism; Zuckmayer, Carl
References and Further Reading
Koebner, Thomas, Gert Sautermeister, and Sigrid Schneider, eds. Deutschland nach Hitler: Zukunftsplane im Exil und aus der Besatzungszeit, 1939—1949. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987.
Langkau-Alex, Ursula, and Thomas M.
Ruprecht, eds. Was Soil Aus Deutschland Werden? Der Council for a Democratic Germany in New York, 1944—1945.
Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1995.
Radkau, Joachim. Die deutsche Emigration in den USA: Ihr Einfluss auf die amerikanische Europapolitik, 1933—1945. Dusseldorf: Bertelsmann, 1971.