Visiting professor Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann flew home to Germany last Monday, a few days earlier than she originally intended to. She’s not sure she wants to come back to Chicago. A frequent guest at the University of Chicago since 1978, she had never spent a quarter quite like this last one–which was largely devoted to defending herself against charges that half a century ago she colluded with the Nazis and practiced anti-Semitism in Hitler’s Germany.
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But she writes, “If I had been an anti-Semite, then I probably would have joined the Nazis. Until 1940, I was convinced that there was a strong Jewish influence on the economy and the media; this belief was widespread in Germany and also in America in the 30’s.” Nevertheless, she tells Commentary, a 1941 article on American media that she wrote for the German newspaper Das Reich contained an anti-Semitic passage only because Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda demanded it. “I would certainly have preferred not to have written these sentences at all, since I was not anti-Semitic at the time and am not an anti-Semite today,” she writes. “I am terribly sorry if any hurt was caused by what I wrote fifty years ago. I certainly can say that when I wrote the passage at that time, I had no intention of doing any harm to the Jews.”
At the time she wrote the Das Reich article, great harm was already being done the Jews of Germany and Europe, and far worse was to come. Isn’t it fair to say that any anti-Semitic expression enriched the soil that nourished the Holocaust? Noelle-Neumann might quickly have resolved her predicament this autumn by writing “for the hurt caused,” by stating that in those distant, blighted days she’d meant what she said, and by straightforwardly apologizing. She was told as much by John Mearsheimer, chair of the political science department.
Now he knew better. The article was written by Leo Bogart, an adjunct professor of marketing at New York University and a former president of the American and world associations for public-opinion research. Long critical of Noelle-Neumann on both professional and personal grounds, Bogart assailed the public-opinion theory identified with her–known as “the spiral of silence”–as the age-old bandwagon effect dressed up with a “memorable label.” And though “the most convincing demonstration” of the theory’s validity “would appear to be the reaction of Germans to the events that followed the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in 1933,” Bogart observed that Noelle-Neumann barely mentions the Nazi period in her 1980 textbook The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion–Our Social Skin (a new English-language edition is scheduled to be published by the University of Chicago Press next spring).
Noelle-Neumann’s labors preoccupied the political science department. She discussed her position in the class she taught, “Public Opinion in West and East Germany,” and shared the various drafts of her response with students, colleagues, and reporters. Despite the openness, this remarkable situation was ignored by Chicago’s daily papers. But the campus paper, the Maroon, carried articles and a flurry of letters, and a long piece ran last month in the Chicago Jewish Star. Julia Angwin, editor of the Maroon and a New York Times stringer, filed a piece that the Times carried in late November.
“This has taken place 50 years ago in another continent and under conditions that [Mearsheimer] could not imagine,” she asked us to understand. “You see, American political scientists are not interested in doing research on dictatorships. My students were very surprised, when they went to Regenstein Library to find out about public opinion and dictatorships, they didn’t find anything. Public opinion and dictatorships is a completely unknown subject for students in Chicago.”
