27/07/12 Why the Germans? Why the Jews?1/70majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/why_the_germans_why_the_jews

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Why the Germans? Why the Jews?

Warum die Deutschen? Warum die Juden? Gleichheit, Neid und Rasenhass 1800-1933

is the titleof the new book by German historian Götz Aly, the author of another controversial recent work,one which focused on the economic aspects of the Third Reich:

Hitler’s beneficiaries: Plunder,Racial War and the Nazi Welfare State

.The subtitle translates as “Equality, Envy and Racial Hatred from 1800 to 1933” and quite neatlyencapsulates both Götz’s thesis as well as the particular historical period under examination,which ends with the assumption of power by the Nazis in 1933. The publisher’s webpage, whichcan be accessedhere, includes a press release with outline summary as well as a downloadableversion of most of the first chapter.Neither seem to be available in English, so I provide a quick and dirty translation below the fold(usual disclaimers apply). I would expect that a book dealing with this particular subject matter,and especially one by an author as internationally controversial and as faithful to the canonicalaccount as Aly, will have little trouble finding an English-language outlet in due course.At first sight, Aly’s proposition might appear to simply be aGoldhagenesqueretread. However,in focusing on the time period that he has chosen, Aly effectively discounts the

religious

anti-Semitism which had been a salient feature of “German” society since medieval times, and placesthe emphasis instead on the

racial

anti-Semitism which did not take form until the mid-to-late19th century. If we are to take his thesis as set out, then 20th century German animus towardsJews arose not from their status as a ‘People Apart’ or as an Antichrist, or from what Goldhagendescribed as an “eliminationist antisemitism” which was “the cornerstone of German nationalidentity” but rather out of a new and completely modern sense of jealousy and envy at thealacrity with which Jews were able to negotiate the challenges, and profit from theopportunities, presented by Modernity.It’s an interesting perspective which bears some serious consideration.

Press Information (12 August 2011) (extract)

Why did Germans murder six million Jews? That’s the question that contemporaryGermans need to answer if they wish to reach an understanding of their ownhistory.

Existential Issues

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Guessedworker

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In the 19th century it was a fear of the future that animated most ChristianGermans. With Jews it was different. They came to an understanding thateconomic freedom, political liberalisation and the industrial revolutionrepresented for them a unique opportunity. They charged ahead. They sent theirchildren to the best schools. By 1900 Jewish pupils were achieving success in theAbitur at a rate eight times higher than gentiles. Jews streamed into theprofessions, into white collar occupations and into entrepreneurial pursuits. Thereaction of the less upwardly mobile Germans was one of envy and jealousy. Theydemanded ‘more equality’ and ‘protection for Christians not Jews’, not out of animaginary sense of superiority but rather from a lack of education andentrepreneurial drive. Christian Germans sought refuge in the Collective andsought to restore their self-esteem through the deprecation of others. Thus arosethe populist anti-Semitic hatred.Envy flourished in concealment. With envy came as well an unacknowledgedrecognition of and shame in their own failure. From 1933 the elevation of anti-Semitism as an instrument of state policy began to relieve individual Germans of their personal shame and sense of responsibility. That helps to explain whyalthough most Germans did not participate directly in the later violence againstJews, they did consider their disenfranchisement as appropriate. They delegatedtheir aggression to the State. This afforded the Hitler regime the opportunity totransform the malice felt by individuals into the impersonal project known as “theFinal Solution to the Jewish Question”.Aly has also produced a lengthyarticle for Der Spiegelwhich elaborates upon his thesis. I havebeen unable to track down an existing English version so I have produced a translation. Firstthough, a short scene-setting extract from the opening chapter of the book itself (available inthe original at the publisher’s link above):

The Question of All Questions

Why the Germans? Why the Jews?Why did the Germans murder six million men, women and children simply becausethey were Jews? How was that possible? How could such a civilised, cultured andproductive people summon up the necessary criminal energy? That remains theQuestion of All Questions, the one that Germans must answer if they are tounderstand their own history, or when they attempt to explain the thereinembedded stories to themselves and to their children.Jew who emigrated to Germany from the neighbouring states to the east weredelighted once having crossed the German border. They treasured the security of being within the Reich, the economic freedom and the educational opportunitiesfor their children, which after 1812 were offered by Prussia and later the Kaiser’sReich. Pogroms which were still a regular occurrence in both eastern and south-eastern Europe as late as the early 20th century were but a distant memory inGermany. Despite all their encumbrances Jews, especially in Prussia, had excellentopportunities to press forward with their own self emancipation. However, andparadoxically, the additional freedoms that Jews came to be granted simplyfomented more anti-Semitism, and in a novel form. ...I wrestled for a while with the title of Aly’s Spiegel essay,

 Auf dem Boden des Neids

whichliterally translates as “In the soil of envy” but I suspect that it is more likely a play on wordswhich may be lost on a non-native speaker. Eventually, and after consultation with a nativespeaker, I chose to render the title as follows in the hope that this may be closer to author’soriginal meaning:

 

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On the Basis of Envy

by Götz Aly

The more the Germans talk about the Holocaust, the more they come to believethat it must have been the work of extra-terrestrials.

The question of how the Holocaust came about continues to occupy historiansand commemoration specialists. But instead of providing straightforwardexplanations, they indulge themselves in verbal contortions. They talk of rapturous enthusiasm for a ‘redemptive’ anti-Semitism, or of a coldly impersonal‘objective’ anti-Semitism or of the paranoid worldview of ‘racial’ anti-Semitism.I’ve no idea what they’re on about; I for one know of nobody in Germany whowould own up to having such a crazed adherent to any of these for a father orgrandfather. The journalist Inge Jens reports that although her father was in theSS he was not a national socialist. My doctor’s father told me that as a child hehad played as a soldier-farmer in the black earth region [refers to Southern Russia,presumably. Ed.] and his father had been in the SD ‘thankfully though in a totallyunimportant department’. Recently I asked two respectable colleagues around myage “What did your father do back then? Was he involved in the war?”. Bothhesitated and then mumbled “Um, haven’t actually asked him. No, I’ve neverreally looked into it.”The more that Germans speak of the Holocaust, the more it becomes a kind of alien presence within their collective history. They refer to ‘the culprits’, or to‘the Nazis’ or to ‘the Nazi State’ as if they were speaking about extra-terrestrials.Little insight can be gleaned from that. The same with all the theories aboutfascism, which trivialise the genocide as a throwback to a prehistoric barbarism,or put up systemic models as a smokescreen, and attempt to shift the historicalburden onto a distinctly German form of development or onto an ostensiblydefinable group of ideologues. Such naked abstractions enable the adherents of such theories to distance themselves from events and to enjoy the warm feelingthat they would have stood on the better side of history. Goethe mocked theself-deception of the theoreticians who would rather that “actual phenomenathemselves disappeared, and their place taken by illustrations, concepts and yes,even just words.”These days the occasional public personality may still be subject to publicmoralising if it should be disclosed that he joined the Nazi party as an 18-year-oldin 1944. However when my neighbour discovered a carefully-packed bust of Hitlerbeneath a tree-stump he was removing, nobody seemed to care. But just whowas living there in 1945? It turns out to have been an elderly Protestant clergymanand his wife. “Charming folks” they were depicted as being, charming would alsoseem to have been how they regarded their Führer. The other day after a lecturea student showed me her diamond-studded gold ring. “Thanks to your book

Hitler’s Beneficiaries

I’ve found out where it came from,” she said and thencontinued: “Such a ring would never have come from our family. My grandmother,a very ordinary woman, acquired in 1943 at an auction of Jewish property.”Shortly before she died my mother came to speak about her friend Annemarie.Under pressure from her husband, she had given her handicapped baby over to aEuthanasia Clinic and had suffered for it ever since. My bookcases were built by avery pleasant, elderly carpenter from East Berlin. About a year ago he asked quiteout of the blue: “What are you actually up to here?” - “I’m writing a book aboutGerman anti-Semitism.” - “Yes, my uncle was involved in all that. First with theGestapo in Dessau, then in Russia. In 1942 he told my mother that he had shotchildren there. He later settled in West Germany and drank himself to death.”