Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (14 page)

The Christian phantasm of a Jewish plot against the Christian community may itself have been a revival of the pagan notion that the Jews were enemies of humanity acting in secret against the rest of the world. According to a popular medieval Christian legend, “a secret rabbinical synod convened periodically from all over Europe to determine which community was in turn to commit ritual murder.”
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From the eighteenth century on, new conspiracy theories also pointed to threats from a number of non-Jewish occult groups: Freemasons, Illuminati, Jesuits. In the landscape of modernity, paranoid political thought was acquiring a permanence of sorts. “What is the distinguishing thing about the paranoid style,” wrote Richard Hofstadter, “is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a ‘vast’ or ‘gigantic’ conspiracy as
the motive force
in historical events. History
is
a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade.”
⁵⁸

Within this array of occult forces, the Jews were the plotters par excellence, the manipulators hidden behind all other secret groups that were merely their instruments. In the notorious two-pronged secret threat of “Jews and Freemasons,” the latter were perceived as instruments of the former.
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Jewish conspiracies, in other words, were at the very top of the conspiratorial hierarchy, and their aim was nothing less than total domination of the world. The centrality of the Jews in this phantasmic universe can be explained only by its roots in the Christian tradition.

Like any other national anti-Semitism at the end of the nineteenth century and during the years preceding World War I, anti-Semitism in imperial Germany was determined, as I have already indicated, both by dominant Christian and modern European trends and by the impact of specific historical circumstances, among which several further aspects should be stressed:

In general terms a structural dimension needs to be emphasized in distinguishing, for example, between French and German modes of national integration, with the relevance of such a distinction in terms of anti-Jewish attitudes becoming clearly apparent. Since the French Revolution, the French model of national integration had been that of a process fostered and implemented by the state on the basis of universal principles, those of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Since the romantic revolution, the German model of national integration had been derived from and predicated upon the idea of the nation as a closed ethnocultural community independent of and sometimes opposed to the state. Whereas the French model implied the
construction
of national identity by way of a centralized educational system and all other means of socialization at the disposal of the state, the German model often posited the existence of inherited characteristics belonging to a preexisting organic community.
⁶⁰

By way of state-directed socialization and in the name of the secular republic’s universal values, a Jew could become French, and not merely on a purely formal level. (This despite intensely hostile reactions from that substantial part of French society that rejected the Revolution, the republican state, and thus the Jews, identified as foreigners allied with the state and as carriers of the secular, subversive values of social upheaval and modernity.) Regardless of formal emancipation and equality of civic rights, the Jew was often kept at a distance by a German national community fundamentally closed to a group whose recognizable difference seemed to society in general to be rooted in alien ethnocultural—and, increasingly, racial—soil. A somewhat different (but not incompatible) interpretation has pointed to the fact that in France legal emancipation carried a prime expectation of gradual Jewish assimilation (also by way of the French educational system and its universalist values), whereas in Germany a widely shared position was that the process of assimilation should be imposed and monitored by bureacratic means, and that full emancipation should be granted only at the end of the process. As time went by, in Germany the success of Jewish assimilation was increasingly questioned. Therefore, even after the Jews of Germany were granted full emancipation, anti-Semites of all hues—and even liberals—could argue that total assimilation had not really been achieved and that the results of emancipation were problematic.
⁶¹

The situation in Germany was further exacerbated by developments specific to the second half of the nineteenth century, mainly the various aspects of an extremely rapid process of modernization. By entirely transforming the country’s social structures and by threatening its existing hierarchies, the onrush of German modernization seemed to endanger hallowed cultural values and the organic links of the community;
⁶²
at the same time it seemed to allow the otherwise incomprehensible social ascent of the Jews, who were thus perceived as the promoters, carriers, and exploiters of that modernization. The Jewish threat now appeared to be both penetration by a foreign element into the innermost texture of the national community and furthering, by way of that penetration, not of modernity as such (enthusiastically embraced by the majority of German society) but of the evils of modernity.

It is within this context that other developments peculiar to Germany acquire their full significance. First, after the rise and fall of the German anti-Semitic parties between the mid-1870s and the late 1890s, anti-Jewish hostility continued to spread in German society at large through a variety of other channels—economic and professional associations, nationalistic political organizations, widely influential cultural groups. The rapid increase of such institutionalized infusions of anti-Jewish attitudes into the very heart of society did not take place—or at least not on such a scale—in other major Western or Central European countries. Second, in Germany a full-blown anti-Semitic ideology was systematically elaborated; it allowed more or less diffuse anti-Jewish resentment to adopt ready-made intellectual frameworks and formulas that in turn were to foster more extreme ideological constructs during the coming years of crisis. Such specific ideologization of German anti-Semitism was particularly visible, in two different ways, with regard to racial anti-Semitism. In its mainly biological form, racial anti-Semitism used eugenics and racial anthropology to launch a “scientific” inquiry into the racial characteristics of the Jew. The other strand of racial anti-Semitism, in its particularly German, mystical form, emphasized the mythic dimensions of the race and the sacredness of Aryan blood. This second strand fused with a decidedly religious vision, that of a German (or Aryan) Christianity, and led to what can be called “redemptive anti-Semitism.”

III

Whereas ordinary racial anti-Semitism is one element within a wider racist worldview, in redemptive anti-Semitism the struggle against the Jews is the dominant aspect of a worldview in which other racist themes are but secondary appendages.

Redemptive anti-Semitism was born from the fear of racial degeneration and the religious belief in redemption. The main cause of degeneration was the penetration of the Jews into the German body politic, into German society, and into the German bloodstream. Germanhood and the Aryan world were on the path to perdition if the struggle against the Jews was not joined; this was to be a struggle to the death. Redemption would come as liberation from the Jews—as their expulsion, possibly their annihilation.

This new anti-Semitism has been depicted as part and parcel of the revolutionary fervor of the early nineteenth century, particularly of the revolutionary spirit of 1848. But it should be pointed out that the main bearers of the new anti-Jewish mystique had all turned against their revolutionary pasts; when Judaism was mentioned in their revolutionary writings, it was in a purely metaphorical sense (mainly as representing Mammon or “the Law”), and whatever revolutionary terminology remained in their new anti-Semitism was meant as “radical change,” as “redemption” in a strongly religious sense, or, more precisely, in a racial-religious sense.
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Various themes of redemptive anti-Semitism can be found in
völkisch
ideology in general, but the run-of-the-mill
völkisch
obsessions were usually too down-to-earth in their goals to belong to the redemptive sphere. Among the
völkisch
ideologues, only the philosopher Eugen Dühring and the biblical scholar Paul de Lagarde came close to this sort of anti-Semitic eschatological worldview. The source of the new trend has to be sought elsewhere, in that meeting point of German Christianity, neoromanticism, the mystical cult of sacred Aryan blood, and ultraconservative nationalism: the Bayreuth circle.

I intentionally single out the Bayreuth circle rather than Richard Wagner himself. Although redemptive anti-Semitism derived its impact from the spirit of Bayreuth, and the spirit of Bayreuth would have been nonexistent without Richard Wagner, the depth of his personal commitment to this brand of apocalyptic anti-Semitism remains somewhat contradictory. That Wagner’s anti-Semitism was a constant and growing obsession after the 1851 publication of his
Das Judentum in der Musik
(
Judaism in Music
) is unquestionable. That the maestro saw Jewish machinations hidden in every nook and cranny of the new German Reich is notorious. That the redemption theme became the leitmotiv of Wagner’s ideology and work during the last years of his life is no less generally accepted. Finally, that the disappearance of the Jews was one of the central elements of his vision of redemption seems also well established. But what, in Wagner’s message, was the concrete meaning of such a disappearance? Did it mean the abolition of the Jewish spirit, the vanishing of the Jews as a separate and identifiable cultural and ethnic group, or did redemption imply the actual physical elimination of the Jews? This last interpretation has been argued by, among others, historians such as Robert W. Gutman, Hartmut Zelinsky, and Paul Lawrence Rose.
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The last in particular identifies Wagner’s “revolutionary anti-Semitism” and its supposedly exterminatory streak with the composer’s revolutionary ardor of 1848.

In
Judaism in Music
, the annihilation of the Jew (and the pamphlet’s notorious final words: “the redemption of Ahasuerus—going under!”) most probably means the annihilation of the Jewish spirit. In this finale the maestro heaps dithyrambic praise upon the political writer Ludwig Börne, a Jew who in his eyes exemplified the redemption from Jewishness into “genuine manhood” by “ceasing to be a Jew.”
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Börne’s example is manifestly the path to be collectively followed. But Wagner’s writings of the late 1870s and the 1880s and the redemptive symbolism of the
Ring
and especially of
Parsifal
, are indeed extraordinarily ambiguous whenever the Jewish theme directly or indirectly appears. Whether redemption from erotic lust, from worldly cravings, from the struggles for power is achieved, as in the
Ring
, by way of self-annihilation or, as in
Parsifal
, by mystical purification and the rebirth of a sanctified Germanic Christendom, the Jew remains the symbol of the worldly lures that keep humanity in shackles. Thus the redemptive struggle had to be a total struggle, and the Jew, like the evil and unredeemable Klingsor in
Parsifal
, had to disappear. In
Siegfried
the allusion is even more direct: The Germanic hero Siegfried kills the repulsive Nibelung dwarf Mime, whom Wagner himself identifies, according to Cosima Wagner’s diaries, as a “
Jüdling
.”
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All in all the relation between Siegfried and Mime, overloaded with the most telling symbolism, was probably meant as a fierce anti-Semitic allegory of the relation between German and Jew—and of the ultimate fate of the Jew.
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Even the Master’s jokes, like his “wish” that all Jews be burned at a performance of Lessing’s
Nathan the Wise
,
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expressed the underlying intensity of his exterminatory fantasies. And yet, Wagner’s ideas about the Jews remained inconsistent, and the number of Jews in his entourage, from the pianists Carl Tausig and Josef Rubinstein to the conductor Hermann Levi and the impresario Angelo Neumann, is well known. Indeed, Wagner’s behavior toward Levi was often overtly sadistic, and Rubinstein was a notoriously self-hating Jew. Yet these Jews belonged to the maestro’s close entourage, and, more significant, Wagner gave Neumann considerable leeway regarding the handling of contracts and performances of his works: No consistently fanatical anti-Semite would have allowed such a massive compromise.

Although Wagner himself embraced the theoretical racism of the French essayist Arthur de Gobineau, the intellectual foundations of redemptive anti-Semitism were mainly fostered and elaborated by the other Bayreuthians, especially after the composer’s death, during the reign of his widow, Cosima: Hans von Wolzogen, Ludwig Scheemann, and, first and foremost, the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain. In a classic study of the Bayreuth Circle, Winfried Schüler defined Bayreuth’s special significance within the anti-Semitic movement and Chamberlain’s own decisive contribution: “It is in the nature of anti-Semitic ideologies to use a more or less prominent friend-foe model. What nonetheless gives Bayreuth’s anti-Semitism an unmistakably particular aspect is the resoluteness with which the opposition between Germandom and Jewry is raised to the position of the central theme of world history. In Chamberlain’s
Foundations
[his 1899 magnum opus,
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
] this dualistic image of history finds its tersest formulation.”
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