Book Review: A World Without Jews
/A World Without Jews:
The Holocaust should be placed within a history of Nazi war and occupation, empire building, and comparative genocide. The Holocaust was not unique. But it was perceived during the war as unique by German Jews, and other Europeans, and if we want to understand why the Holocaust happened, we ought to explain this.
He has the usual questions that have so painfully baffled inquirers for seventy years: "Why did the Nazis view extermination of the Jews as so urgent and vital to their survival? Why did Germans, Jews, and Europeans perceive during the war the extermination of the Jews as unlike any other genocide perpetrated by the Nazis?" With a bitter acerbity that fills the pages of this book and makes them at once so disturbing and so hypnotic to read, Confino summarizes the hysterical case for the prosecution:
The Jews, it was said time and gain in Germany after 1933 were responsible for - and let us register one more time the long list of their crimes - bolshevism, communism, Marxism , socialism, liberalism, conservatism, pacifism, cosmopolitanism, materialism, atheism, democracy, sexual freedom, psychoanalysis, feminism, homosexuality abortions, modernist art, and Germany's general misfortune, on top of being a dangerous virus, a microbe, a carrier of syphilis and criminality, the opposite of a human being, the destroyer of God and nature, and the devil incarnate. Only flying was missing.
The outcome of such a list of fears was of course obsessional. A downtrodden and impoverished Volk were encouraged to imagine a parasite in their midst, draining their resources and vitality while attempting to remain inconspicuous. And they encouraged each other. And they required little encouragement. Any handy other could be pressed into service as a scapegoat, and in this respect one other has always been more accessible than all the others:
Ultimately, storytelling was more important than science. Nazis continued to believe in their fantasies about the Jews because these required no hard facts. They used racial science not as a vehicle to find truth but as a modern seal of approval to predetermined anti-Jewish views. This is why they had no problem, in enacting the Nuremberg Race Laws, in defining Jews using a historical argument of genealogical decent. The main issue with respect to race was not that it was based on science but that it represented German national origins.
In clear, unsparing prose - accompanied by dozens of thoroughly damning photos (young men out for a jaunt in an automobile bearing the painted slogan "The Jews Are Our Misfortune," children laughing at a Jew-effigy hanging from a lamp-post, signs proudly proclaiming their towns "Jew-free" - and so on, until you can hardly stand to look anymore) - Confino details the progressive deformation (or revelation) of normal people into smiling, spitting bigots so thoroughly lost in frantic hatred that they seem almost exhausted by it. Or consumed by it, as Confino makes clear the German State was:
But the Nazis did imagine a clear narrative arch of the relations between Germans and Jews from the dawn of history to the present. Right from the beginning they were certain about one thing, which did not change until the last day of the Reich: the Jews and their historical roots, real or invented, from the Bible down to the modern period, must be eliminated at all costs and whatever the consequences. The Nazis did not leave standing one cultural edifice that implied a cultural debt to the Jews: this amounted to making a new civilization by uprooting a key element of their own roots.
If the fact was ever avoidable before A World Without Jews, it certainly isn't after it: the German people of the 1920s and '30s needed no bullying from the Nazis to hate the Jews. Whatever else was happening during the Nazi rise to power, wide-scale ideological coercion most certainly wasn't. The book's sub-title should be "The German Imagination from Persecution to Genocide" - and however it's called, it deserves the widest possible audience.