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The Nazi Worldview exchange, part 1: ‘A world without Jews’

[additional-authors]
July 1, 2015

Alon Confino is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and at Ben Gurion University, Israel. Professor Confino received his PhD from Berkley University. He has written extensively and influentially on historical memory, historical method and German history. He has received grants from the Fulbright, Humboldt, DAAD, and Lady Davis foundations, the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University, the Social Science Research Council, the Israel Academy of Sciences, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Professor Confino is the author of four books, and this exchange will focus on his latest (critically acclaimed) book, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014).

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Dear Professor Confino,

Your new book re-examines the widely held belief that the Nazi party's racial ideology and scientific-biological worldview was the single most dominant catalyst behind Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews. In the introduction you write that while racial ideology was certainly a big part of the story, “this view has now become so prevalent that it obscures a set of identities, beliefs, and memories that made Nazi Germany”.

Our introductory question: what kind of alternative explanations can your readers expect to find in the book, and what are the main misperceptions you would like it to clarify?

Yours,

Shmuel.

 

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Dear Shmuel,

The central innovation of Holocaust scholarship in the last generation has perhaps been the emphasis on racial ideology. Whereas Nazi anti-Jewish motivations were once seen as emanating from long-term anti-Semitic beliefs or were excluded altogether by emphasizing impersonal dynamics inherent in the Nazi system of government, the Holocaust is now squarely placed within the context of the regime’s overall racial ideology. Scholars have shown that those who organized and carried out the extermination were committed ideologues who wanted to build a better world through genocide. Vast scholarship has explored how, well beyond this circle of true believers, the regime’s racial ideology–which stands in current historiography in self-conscious contrast to older understanding of Nazi ideas as a mixture of fuzzy beliefs, vague intentions, or sheer passion and madness– penetrated all levels of society, be it institutions (the army or the churches), social spheres (cinema, architecture, or sport), and cultural artifacts (ranging from children’s board games to the Nuremberg party rallies). There is no doubt about the interpretative importance of racial ideology to understanding the Third Reich and the Holocaust.

But this view has now turned into a catechism, depreciated by surplus use and acquiring a metaphysical explanatory status. To ask new questions about the Holocaust, it is imperative to center differently the power of racial ideas in the Third Reich, for the interpretative hegemony of race obfuscates ways of life and death in the Third Reich. It often sets race in opposition to other identities (religious identity, for example), while the issue is how identities existed in relations of commingling and reciprocal influence. It often severs the racial regime from pre-1933 and post-1945 German history, instead of locating the period within long-term German traditions and forms of beliefs. It often suggests a cohesion and uniformity to racial thought and practice and to Nazi culture and aims, while a much better explanatory metaphor is Nazism as a work in progress.

Let me give an example from the opening scenes of my book on the burning of the Torah in the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) on November 9, 1938.  By fire and other means, the destruction of the Book of Books was at the center of Kristallnacht, when 1400 synagogues were set on fire. Not one copy, but thousands, not in one place but in hundreds of communities across the Reich, and not only in metropolis such as Berlin, Stettin, Vienna, Dresden, Stuttgart, and Cologne, but in small communities such as Sulzburg, a Protestant village in Baden with 1070 inhabitants, 120 among them Jewish, where the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments were thrown from the roof and the Nazis marched mockingly up and down the main street with Torah scrolls before destroying them.

Holocaust historiography has been silent about the burning of the Bible although the sources I used to reconstruct the event, based on local and eyewitness accounts, have been accessible to scholars. One reason historians could not “see” these sources is the hegemony of racial ideology as the ultimate source of motivations, beliefs, and values in the Third Reich. There is nothing in racial ideology itself that can explain the destruction of synagogues and the Bible. The insight that the Nazis set out to build a racial civilization should be the beginning of our interpretative work to understand the Holocaust, not its final destination. From here, I ask a simple question: why did the Nazis, set on constructing a racial civilization, burn the Bible and synagogues, which are holy, religious symbols? This is a good question to think with about Nazi anti-Semitism because it is an obvious question, and answers to obvious questions are at times most revealing.

Searching for the meaning of the Nazi burning of the Bible, A World Without Jews proposes a different approach to the Holocaust. It explores what was the Nazi imagination that made the persecution and extermination of the Jews conceivable and possible. How did Nazis and other Germans imagine a world without Jews? This is a subversive question because one tenet of Holocaust historiography has been that the extermination was unimaginable and unpresentable. The book tells the story of how the Nazis imagined the Jews as symbols of historical time—of modernity, of a certain morality embedded in the Hebrew Bible, and ultimately, in the years of extermination, of history and humanity—and how this imagination led to the belief that for the new Nazi civilization to arise, the Jews had to be extirpated. This civilization would owe nothing to the Jews, from psychoanalysis (allegedly invented by Jews) down to the shared Biblical text.

Differently put, I trace the story the Nazis told themselves about who they were, where they came from, how they had arrived there, and where they were headed, and this is a story that commingled not only racial ideas but also, and fundamentally, religious and national sentiments.

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