Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYone’s intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude![dare to know] Have the courage to use your own intelligence! istherefore the motto of the enlightenment.”Like Kant, Karl Popper characterized using one’s reason as thecounterpart to docile submission, in deference to authority, as centralfor modern open societies when he explained: 70“the closed society is characterized by the belief in magical taboos,while the open society is one in which men have learned to beto some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authorityof their own intelligence (after discussion).”The question before us is whether the Federal Republic of Germanyis an open or closed, that is an authoritarian society. Are we allowed tocritically discuss taboos and proclaim our opinions based on our owndecisions? And does the German society have taboos, or not? As a matterof fact, the subject of this trial is exactly about this, namely about theGreat Taboo of German society. Dr. Robert Hepp, professor of sociology,has the following to say about this: 71“Occasional experiments that I have conducted in my seminarsconvince me that ‘Auschwitz’ is ethnologically speaking one of thefew taboo topics that our ‘taboo free society’ still preserves. […]While they did not react at all to other stimulants, ‘enlightened’ centralEuropean students who refused to accept any taboos at all, reactedto a confrontation with ‘revisionist’ texts about the gas chambersat Auschwitz in just as ‘elementary’ a way (including the comparablephysiological symptoms) as members of primitive Polynesiantribes reacted to an infringement on one of their taboos. Thestudents were literally beside themselves and were neither preparednor capable of soberly discussing the presented theses. For the sociologistthis is a very important experience, because a society’s taboosreveal what it holds sacred. Taboos also reveal what the communityfears. […] A ‘modern’ society does not in any way react differentlyto breeches of taboos than does a ‘primitive’ society. Thebreaking of taboos is generally perceived as ‘outrageous’ and‘abominations’ and produce spontaneous ‘revulsion’ and ‘disgust.’In the end the perpetrator is isolated, excluded from society, and hisname and memory ‘tabooed.’”7071Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Routledge & Paul, London 1962, vol. 1, p.202.In: Rolf-Josef Eibich (ed.), Hellmut Diwald, Grabert, Tübingen 1995, footnote 46, p. 140.59