German Pollster Still on Pedestal Despite Past

She would seem to have everything a professional woman could want at age 80, especially in Germany: an elegant personal style; the admiration of her peers; the satisfaction of having built a successful firm from the ashes of World War II; and, even in retirement, a continuing involvement in her nation’s public life at the highest level.

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, doyenne of German public-opinion polling, “stands for a spirit of citizenship . . . without which our democracy could not long survive,” Chancellor Helmut Kohl said last week in remarks commemorating the 50th anniversary of Noelle-Neumann’s polling firm, the Allensbach Institute.

The chancellor confided to the standing-room-only crowd how much he had learned from Noelle-Neumann’s frequent “tutoring” as a young politician. And in an age when heads of government normally make fleeting cameo appearances at such testimonials, Kohl showed his gratitude by taking the afternoon off for her bash and sitting at her side through several hours of speeches and performances by classical string quartets.

“She has always been the most important pollster for him,” said a senior official of Kohl’s party, the Christian Democratic Union.

But now, clouds are inconveniently gathering over the shining career of Germany’s most influential pollster. New research by an American scholar shows that Noelle-Neumann--Germany’s counterpart to George Gallup--wrote Nazi propaganda articles as a young woman. And it claims that her apparent early anti-Semitism and hostility to democracy have tainted her path-breaking work throughout the postwar era.

“She was an opportunist,” charges Christopher Simpson, a professor of communication studies at American University, who published his findings in the Journal of Communication, the leading periodical in that field. “She was somebody who made the types of compromises necessary to be a big success in a Nazi regime.”

Simpson’s allegations have drawn an enraged response from Noelle-Neumann and her admirers here. One protege, Hans Mathias Kepplinger, a professor at the University of Mainz, wrote a denunciation of what he called Simpson’s “far-fetched speculation”; mysteriously, it appeared earlier this year in the mailbox of every person at American University who might be involved in deciding whether Simpson would get tenure.

“Tenure decisions are always more politicized than the academy likes to admit, but this was way off the scale,” Simpson says. “It was done in secret so that I would have no opportunity to respond. This was behavior characteristic of a police-state-type approach to a debate.”

Simpson got tenure despite the uproar.

The affair raises the ever-pressing question: Can a young person’s early attitudes and political activities influence his or her thinking over the course of an important career in public life?

“In my view, this isn’t a particularly radical idea, that a person’s later ideas can be found in an embryonic form in their dissertation,” says Simpson, whose article describes the pollster’s doctoral thesis, written in 1940 when Noelle-Neumann was 24, and draws parallels between it and her most famous work of public-opinion theory, “The Spiral of Silence,” published in English by the University of Chicago Press in 1984.

Simpson’s allegations have yet to knock Noelle-Neumann off her pedestal. Although she has been criticized for various things in Germany--usually for bias toward Kohl’s Christian Democrats--she is still not widely accused here of lingering totalitarian tendencies.

According to the Journal of Communication article, Noelle-Neumann was born into a Berlin family that “flourished” in the 1930s, in part through the acquisition of businesses stolen from Jews under Hitler’s Aryanization program. Her father eventually became a member of the Nazi Party.

At 19, Simpson writes, Noelle-Neumann joined the pro-Hitler German National Socialist student organization and contributed to its newspaper, the Movement. In 1937, she won a scholarship at the University of Missouri’s journalism school, where she wrote an apologia for Hitler’s policies for the Columbia Missourian.

“National Socialism is opposed to the mixing of races,” she wrote, “because it sees herein a danger to the maintenance of national character, since history shows sufficient examples that the downfall of great nations has set in with the mixing of the races.”

Upon her return to Germany, Simpson continues, Noelle-Neumann worked for more than one Nazi student group. And as her career in journalism began to take off, he says, she wrote various newspaper articles, sometimes innocuous features, other times anti-Semitic blasts.

“To reach into the darkness to find the Jew who is hiding behind the Chicago Daily News is like sticking your hand into a wasp’s nest,” she wrote in the Ministry of Propaganda’s newspaper, Das Reich, alleging widespread Jewish manipulation of the U.S. media and public opinion.

The article was illustrated with a still from “The Day of the Dictator,” a U.S. movie about a well-known incident in which Nazi guards forced Jewish intellectuals to scrub Vienna streets. Noelle-Neumann’s article stated that the picture was staged, leaving it for readers to conclude that Jewish producers in Hollywood were ramming anti-German propaganda down unsuspecting American throats.

In an interview last week, Noelle-Neumann pointed out that none of the charges are new. Simpson’s article, she said, marked the eighth time someone has made such allegations about her past. She added that friends have always advised her to ignore the attacks but said she had decided to meet her critics head-on.

She said it was true she had written the articles Simpson cited but argued that it was impossible to do otherwise in the Nazi era.

“If you try to publish something which is unwanted in a dictatorship, you have to put something acceptable in the first sentences and the last sentences,” she said, adding that if one reads her wartime oeuvre as a whole, one sees not an ardent Nazi but a struggling young journalist, inserting anti-Semitic passages here and there to please the censors.

She said she was eventually fired by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels himself because she didn’t insert enough of this pro-Hitler boilerplate.

“One should try to speak to a population, even after a dictatorship has been established,” she said. “But this is almost impossible to explain to an American. An American cannot imagine what it’s like to live in a dictatorship. It’s like the dark side of a faraway star.”

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The last person who tried to “out” Noelle-Neumann was Leo Bogart, who in 1991 as an adjunct professor at New York University published an article in Commentary magazine detailing Noelle-Neumann’s Third Reich roots. The article prompted the University of Chicago to terminate Noelle-Neumann’s position at the time as a visiting professor.

What makes Simpson’s attack different--and what has exercised Noelle-Neumann’s supporters--is that Simpson has tried to link her embarrassing youthful writings and her modern academic theories, which culminated in the respected “Spiral of Silence.”

The core theory of this book is that ordinary people have sensitive antennae to public opinion and tend to clam up when they know they’re in the minority. The work has powerful implications for the way pollsters go about their business--and for the way democracy itself functions.

As Simpson reads Noelle-Neumann’s theory, he is troubled by her belief that, as he puts it, “the public is incompetent, emotional, irrational and usually easily deceived”--unfit, in other words, to run a successful, self-governing Jeffersonian democracy.

He is also bothered by her position that this powerful but incompetent public needs strong leadership from above “if the community is to be capable of making decisions and taking action.”

“These embryonic ideas were received with great acclaim at the height of the Third Reich, and now they’re coming back in a modern, consumer democracy,” Simpson said in an interview. “What you see in her contemporary writing is not praise for Adolf Hitler, but fear of the inability to make an informed decision through the democratic processes, and therefore the elites must lead the way.”

Noelle-Neumann’s advocates disagree. One of Simpson’s many sins, in their eyes, is a tendency to confuse mainstream, modern conservatism with 1930s-style, rule-from-above ideology.

Noelle-Neumann said she will republish some of her youthful writings herself, specifically her wartime dissertation, with an explanatory essay.

“From a personal side, this is unpleasant,” she said. “But from a professional side, it’s very interesting and a very lucky case. Dictatorships have not really been carefully studied. That’s why I hope I succeed in writing this essay.”

“Great,” responds Simpson. “Will her collected writings for the Movement be included?”