The Gary Null Blog

Digging into the rubble of bombed-out Frankfurt-am-Main after the second world war, I stumbled on two human skeletons who were among the last living survivors of the Hitler regime's anti-Nazi political parties. They were old, semi-starving men, working deliberately apart from each other in the corpse-smelling basement of a ruined apartment house, each of them kept alive by a fierce will to revive what had been, respectively, the Weimar Republic's mass socialist (SPD) and communist (KPD) movements. Catastrophically, their parties had refused to unite against Hitler, and both men had spent the Nazi years in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. .

I had to speak separately to each man, in my broken "Blitz German", because despite all they had suffered, they still would not speak to each other, blaming the other's organisation for pre-war errors and betrayals. It was amazing to me, as a fresh-faced young GI, how old quarrels could be kept venomous for so long, at such a human cost.

Afterwards, as a spectator at the Nuremberg war crimes trial, locking eyes with Hitler's henchman Herman Göring in a staring contest (he won), I wondered: if you don't want the worst, maybe you had better learn to work with the least worst.

That's "coalition politics", the vehicle I was raised in during the era of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. What remains today of the New Deal's welfare state – a total good, for me and my family – was rammed through by a Democratic party (with plenty of Republican sympathisers) composed of crooked big-city bosses, southern racists, small-town bigots, rightwing Catholics, blacks, Jews, progressives of all types, enlightened (or scared) capitalists and so on.