Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution
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The general visibility of the Jews in Germany was enhanced by their relative importance in the “sensitive” areas of business and finance, journalism and cultural activities, medicine and the law, and, finally, by their involvement in liberal and left-wing politics. The social discrimination to which the Jews were subjected, and their own striving for advancement and acceptance, easily explain their patterns of activity. Interpreted as Jewish subversion and domination, these patterns in turn led, at least in parts of German society, to further hostility and rejection.
Of the fifty-two private banks in Berlin at the beginning of the nineteenth century, thirty were Jewish-owned. Later on Bismarck asked the Rothschilds to recommend a private banker (it was to be Gerson Bleichröder), and Kaiser Wilhelm I chose for himself the banker Moritz Cohn. When, at the turn of the century, many private banks became shareholding companies, Jews frequently held a controlling percentage of the shares or served as directors of the new enterprises. Add the banking aristocracy of the Warburgs, the Arnholds, the Friedländer-Fulds, the Simons, the Weinbergs, and so on, to such financial potentates as chain-store owners Abraham Wertheim and Leonhard and Oskar Tietz, founding electrical industrialist Emil Rathenau, publisher Rudolf Mosse, and shipping magnate Albert Ballin, and it becomes obvious that Jews held an eminent and visible place in the financial world of imperial Germany.27
The Jewish economic elite’s particular function during the nineteenth century had been its decisive role in capital mobilization and concentration through development of the Berlin stock market,28 and linkage of the still relatively parochial German economy with world markets.29 The centrality of “Jewish” banking during the Weimar period did not decrease,30 contrary to what has sometimes been argued. But there was no correlation between Jewish economic activity and any kind of lasting political influence in German society.
Culture was possibly the most sensitive domain. In March 1912 a telling exchange was triggered by an article written by a young Jewish intellectual, Moritz Goldstein, and published in the arts journal Kunstwart under the title “Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass” (German-Jewish Parnassus). As Goldstein put it, “We Jews administer the spiritual possessions of a people that denies us the right and the capability of doing so.”31 After admitting to Jewish influence on the press and in the literary world, Goldstein reemphasized the insuperable rift between the Jewish “administrators” of German culture, who believed they were speaking for and to the Germans, and the Germans themselves, who considered such presumption insufferable. What, then, was the way out? Zionism, Goldstein thought, was no option for people of his background and generation. In an emotional and most emphatic fashion, he called instead for an act of courage on the part of the Jews of Germany: that, in spite of their deep feelings for Germany and all things German, in spite of their centuries-long presence in the land, they must turn their backs on the host society and stop vowing ever-renewed and ever-unrequited love.32 On the cultural level Jews should now turn to Jewish issues, not only for their own sake but to create “a new type of Jew, new not in life but in literature.”33 Goldstein’s closing was on an emotional par with the rest: “We demand recognition of a tragedy that, with a heavy heart, we have exposed to all.”34
Goldstein’s sharp diagnosis/tearful lament induced the editor of Kunstwart, Ferdinand Avenarius, to produce in the August issue a long comment entitled “Aussprachen mit Juden” (Debates with Jews). “We are not anti-Semites,” he wrote. “We know that there are domains in which the Jews are more able than we are, and that we have greater ability in others; we hope that with good will on both sides, peaceful co-operation will be possible, but we are convinced that relations cannot continue much longer in their present form.” Avenarius called for some sort of “negotiation” between “leaders” of “both sides in order to avoid bitter cultural battles [Kulturkämpfe]…. Given the growing excitement [Avenarius did not specify whose],” he did not believe that success could easily be achieved.35 The argument was clear, the “we” and “they” even clearer. But as to the basic facts (though obviously not their interpretation), both Goldstein and (implicitly) Avenarius were not entirely wrong.
As for the press—excluding the great number of conservative and specifically Christian newspapers and periodicals, as well as most of the regional papers—there was, on the national level, a strong Jewish presence in ownership, editorial responsibility, and major cultural or political commentary. Rudolf Mosse’s publishing empire included the Berliner Tageblatt, the Morgenzeitung, the Volkszeitung, and the Börsenblatt. The Ullstein family owned the Neues Berliner Tageblatt, the Abendpost, the Illustrierte Zeitung, and B.Z. am Mittag, “the first German paper based completely on street sales.”36 The paper with the largest circulation, the Morgenpost, also belonged to Ullstein, as eventually did the Vossische Zeitung, “Berlin’s oldest newspaper.”37 Among the three most prominent publishers who took the largest share of the pre-1914 daily press—Mosse, Ullstein, and Scherl—the first two were Jews.38 The relative importance of these three publishers would be altered somewhat in the twenties by the acquisition of Scherl by the ultra-right-wing Alfred Hugenberg and by the consequent rapid expansion of his press holdings.
The editors in chief and main editorial writers of many of the most influential newspapers (such as Theodor Wolff, editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, Georg Bernhard, editor of the Vossische Zeitung; and Bernhard Guttmann, the influential Berlin correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung), were Jews, as were dozens of other political commentators, cultural critics, and satirists in a wide array of dailies and periodicals.39
In book publishing Mosse and Ullstein were major figures, as was Samuel Fischer, who founded his publishing house in Berlin in 1886. Fischer, as important in the history of modern German literature as, for example, Random House or Scribner’s in the United States, published Thomas Mann, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Hermann Hesse, among others.40
Along with Jewish publishers and editors in chief, there was a solid group of Jewish readers and theater- and concertgoers. A striving for Bildung (culture/education) had turned the Jewish bourgeoisie into the self-appointed (and ecstatic) carrier of German culture. Writing in December 1896 about the first performance of Gerhart Hauptmann’s play Die versunkene Glocke (The Sunken Bell), Baroness Hildegard von Spitzemberg noted in her diary: “The house was packed with Jews and Jew-companions and with the representatives of press and literature: Maximilian Harden, Hermann Sudermann, Erich Schmidt, Theodor Fontane, Ludwig Pietsch, the last [two] of whom, however, shook their heads disapprovingly and did not join in the frenetic applause of the poet’s [playwright’s] supporters.”41 Fontane and Pietsch were non-Jews.
The situation was possibly even more extreme in Austria-Hungary. At the end of the nineteenth century, Jews owned more than 50 percent of the major banks in the Austrian part of the empire, and occupied nearly 80 percent of the key positions in the banking world.42 In the Hungarian part, the Jewish economic presence, which benefited from the full support of the Hungarian aristocracy, was even more widespread. “Above all, Jews were prominent among the great press tycoons. They owned, edited, and very extensively contributed to most of the leading newspapers of Vienna. Though his words were somewhat exaggerated, it was nonetheless telling that Harry Wickham Steed, the London Times correspondent in the Austrian capital, could write that ‘economically, politically and in point of general influence they [the Jews] are…the most significant element in the Monarchy.’”43
During the early decades of the nineteenth century, the harmonious assimilation of the Jews into German society, as in other countries of Western and Central Europe—later made formally possible by the full emancipation of 1869 and 1871—could appear to many as a reasonable prospect.44 More than anything else, the Jews themselves wanted to join the ranks of the German bourgeoisie; this collective “project” was undoubtedly their overriding goal.45 Lay leaders and enlightened rabbis never tired of stressing the importance of Bildung and Sittlichkeit (manners and morals).4
6 Although the great majority of Jews did not abandon Judaism entirely, the collective effort of adaptation led to deep reshapings of Jewish identity in the religious domain as well as in a variety of secular pursuits and attitudes.47 The modern German Jew, however, did create—consciously or not—a specific subculture that, although aiming at integration, resulted in a new form of separation.48 Religious-cultural distinctiveness was reinforced by the increasingly negative reactions of society in general to the very rapidity of the Jews’ social and economic ascent. Economic success and growing visibility without political power produced, in part at least, their own nemesis. In his biography of Bismarck’s banker, Gerson Bleichröder, Fritz Stern alluded to the shift in attitudes from the 1870s on: “[Bleichröder’s] middle years described the moment of the least troubled amalgamation of German and Jewish society; his declining years [he died in 1893] marked the first organized repudiation of that amalgamation, and his very success was taken as a warrant for repudiation.”49
One may readily agree with German historian Thomas Nipperdey that in comparison to that of France, Austria, or Russia, German anti-Semitism on the eve of World War I was certainly not the most extreme. One may also agree with his statement that pre-1914 anti-Semitism should be evaluated both within its own historical context and from the perspective of later events (“under the sign of Auschwitz”).50 However, his related statement that the Jews of Germany themselves considered the anti-Semitism of those years a marginal issue, a remnant of prior discrimination that would disappear in due time is less convincing.51 Any perusal of contemporary testimonies indicates that Jews held diverse views regarding the attitudes of society in general toward them. It needs only Moritz Goldstein’s lament to show that some German Jews were quite aware of the fact that the chasm between them and the surrounding society was growing.
This was true not only in Germany. Two equally remarkable literary representations of Austria before the Great War, Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday and Arthur Schnitzler’s The Road into the Open, provide contrary assessments of how the Jews perceived their own situation. For Zweig anti-Semitism was practically nonexistent; for Schnitzler it was at the center of his characters’ consciousness and existence. In any event, whatever the relative strength of prewar anti-Semitism may have been, its presence was a necessary condition for the massive anti-Jewish hostility that spread throughout Germany during the war years and increasingly after the defeat of 1918. Moreover, the prewar scene also provided some of the ideological tenets, political demands, and institutional frameworks that endowed postwar anti-Semitism with its early structures and immediate goals.
When one considers the wider European scene, the achievements, political attitudes, and cultural options of Jews at the end of the nineteenth century appear as those of members of an identifiable minority, stemming in part from the peculiar historical development of this minority. But these achievements and options were first and foremost those of individuals whose goal was the kind of success that led to integration into society in general. For the anti-Semite, however, the situation looked entirely different: Jewish striving and Jewish success, real or imaginary, were perceived as the behavior of a foreign and hostile minority group acting collectively to exploit and dominate the majority.
As long as merely a few Jews, under the patronage of kings and princes, managed to climb the social ladder, their limited number, the function they fulfilled, and the protection they were granted checked the spread of hostility. When, as Hannah Arendt pointed out in somewhat different terms,52 emancipation allowed for the social advancement of a large number of Jews within a context in which their social function was losing its specificity and in which political power no longer backed them, they increasingly became the targets of various forms of social resentment. Modern anti-Semitism was fueled by this conjunction of increasing visibility and increasing weakness.
A common trigger of various forms of nonracial anti-Jewish resentment was undoubtedly the very existence of a Jewish difference. Liberals demanded that, in the name of universalist ideals, the Jews should accept the complete disappearance of their particular group identity; nationalists, on the other hand, demanded such disappearance for the sake of a higher particularist identity, that of the modern nation-state. Although the majority of Jews were more than eager to travel a long way down the road to cultural and social assimilation, most of them rejected total collective disappearance. Thus, as moderate as Jewish particularism may have been, it antagonized its liberal supporters and incensed its nationalist opponents. Jewish visibility in highly sensitive domains exacerbated the irritant inherent in difference.
Racial anti-Semites also claimed that their anti-Semitic campaign was based on the Jews’ difference. However, whereas for the nonracial anti-Semite such difference could and should have been totally effaced by the complete assimilation and disappearance of the Jews as such, the racial anti-Semite argued that the difference was indelible, that it was inscribed in the blood. For the nonracial anti-Semite, a solution to the “Jewish question” was possible within society in general; for the racial anti-Semite, because of the dangerous racial impact of Jewish presence and equality, the only solution was exclusion (legal and possibly physical) from society in general. This well-known basic picture should be completed by two aspects of the modern anti-Jewish scene that are either barely mentioned by many historians or considered all-encompassing by others: the survival of traditional religious anti-Semitism and the related proliferation of conspiracy theories in which the Jews always played a central role.
Whether or not Christian hostility toward the Jews was intermittent, whether or not the Jews themselves contributed to the exacerbation of this hostility,53 does not alter the fact that, in dogma, ritual, and practice, Christianity branded the Jews with what appeared to be an indelible stigma. That stigma had been effaced neither by time nor by events, and throughout the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries, Christian religious anti-Semitism remained of central importance in Europe and in the Western world in general.
In Germany, apart from the general motives of Christian anti-Semitism, Christian anti-Jewish attitudes also stemmed from the particular situation of the churches throughout the imperial era. German Catholics were antagonized by Jewish support for the National Liberals, who were Bismarck’s allies during his anti-Catholic campaign of the 1870s, the Kulturkampf;54 conservative Protestants were firmly committed to the Christian nature of the Second Reich, and even liberal Protestants, in their attempt to rationalize Christianity, entered into confrontations with liberal Jews keen on demonstrating the pagan core of the Christian religion.55 Finally, in Germany, France, and Austria, political use of Christian anti-Jewish themes proved successful, at least for a time, in appealing to lower-middle-class voters.
For some historians the rootedness and the very permanence of Christian anti-Judaism has been the only basis of all forms of modern anti-Semitism. Jacob Katz, for example, sees modern anti-Semitism as but “a continuation of the premodern rejection of Judaism by Christianity, even when it [modern anti-Semitism] renounced any claim to be legitimized by it or even professed to be antagonistic to Christianity.” In Katz’s view any claims for an anti-Semitism that would be beyond “the Jewish Christian division” were but “a mere declaration of intent. No anti-Semite, even if he himself was anti-Christian, ever forwent the use of those anti-Jewish arguments rooted in the denigration of Jews and Judaism in earlier Christian times.”56 This interpretation is excessive, but the impact of religious anti-Judaism on other modern forms of anti-Semitism is apparent in several ways. First, a vast reservoir of almost automatic anti-Jewish reactions continued to accumulate as a result of early exposure to Christian religious education and liturgy, and to everyday expressions drawn from the pervasive and ongoing presence of the various denominations of the Christian creed. Second, the very notion of “outsider” applied by modern anti-Semitism to the Jew owed its tenacity not only to Jewish difference as such but al
so to the depth of its religious roots. Whatever else could be said about the Jew, he was first and foremost the “other,” who had rejected Christ and revelation. Finally, perhaps the most powerful effect of religious anti-Judaism was the dual structure of the anti-Jewish image inherited from Christianity. On the one hand, the Jew was a pariah, the despised witness of the triumphal onward march of the true faith; on the other, from the Late Middle Ages onward, an opposite image appeared in popular Christianity and in millennarian movements, that of the demonic Jew, the perpetrator of ritual murder, the plotter against Christianity, the herald of the Antichrist, the potent and occult emissary of the forces of evil. It is this dual image that reappears in some major aspects of modern anti-Semitism. And, its threatening and occult dimension became the recurrent theme of the main conspiracy theories of the Western world.
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.”57 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