Fantasies about the Jews: Cultural Reflections on the Holocaust

Abstract

Fantasies about the Jews:Cultural Reflections on the Holocaust Alon Confino (bio) Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas. Blaise Pascal For the history of civilization the perennial dream of sublime life has the value of a very important reality.... There is not a more dangerous tendency in history than that of representing the past as if it were a rational whole and dictated by clearly defined interests. Johan Huizinga1 A Nazi text, written by two university-educated so-called experts on the Jewish Question, J. Keller and Hanns Andersen, in their 1937 book The Jew as a Criminal, reads as follows: Just like the spirochete bacteria that carries syphilis, so are the Jews the carriers of criminality in its political and apolitical form.… The Jew is the true opposite to a human being, the depraved member of a subracial mixing…. He is the embodiment of evil that rises against God and nature. Wherever his miasma strikes, it causes death. He who contends with the Jews, contends with the devil.2 This passage makes the most difficult demands on fantasy itself, as it combines scientific, moral and religious metaphors. Nothing in this text, [End Page 296] the like of which was common in Nazi Germany, is based on facts, nothing is driven by a desire to provide a truthful account of reality. But it was nonetheless believed by many Germans and therefore was for them real and truthful. It follows, I believe, that we cannot understand why the Nazis persecuted and exterminated the Jews unless we are ready to explore such Nazi fantasies, hallucinations and imagination. The campaign against the Jews was based on and motivated by fantasies about the Jews as the eternal and mortal enemy of humanity, and about the historic need to either exterminate the Jews or perish. In interpreting the Holocaust, I suggest in this essay, we must consider what is essentially a problem of culture: the making of and believing in fantasies. It is fundamental to ask how German society came to believe in these fantasies. What were the reasons for their persuasiveness? How did they arise? How were they diffused and internalized? The Nazi extermination, wrote Primo Levi, "will be remembered as the central event, the scourge, of this century."3 A volume on twentieth-century German history should discuss the topic. The present text is neither a historiographical essay with copious notes nor does it present a comprehensive argument based on exhaustive research. Rather, it presents a hypothesis, a proposal for future research, by evaluating from a bird's-eye perspective several dominant trends in Holocaust historiography. This mode of proceeding has weaknesses but also strengths. What it loses in the complexity and the intricacies of specific important historiographical debates, it gains by identifying broad interpretative directions, problems and possibilities that may get lost in detailed discussions within a rapidly growing historiography. My point of departure for assessing the questions posed above is the current dominant interpretative framework of the extermination of the Jews: the emphasis on Nazi racial ideology that motivated Germans in the brutal circumstances of World War II. Based on this framework, historical work in the last generation has admirably explored the unfolding of the Holocaust, its perpetrators, mechanics, policies, institutions and ideology. Studies that kept close to the experience of Germans and Jews, such as Omer Bartov's on the German army, Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men and Saul Friedländer's Nazi Germany and the Jews, have been particularly insightful.4 This way of looking at the extermination of the Jews has produced much of the most illuminating work on the Third [End Page 297] Reich during the last decades. It was especially important in bringing to the forefront of scholarly research Nazi values and beliefs. In no way does the present essay seek to belittle these achievements. But it does suggest to examine more closely the cultural making of Nazi values and beliefs: that is, to examine a cultural dimension that often remains implied in current historiography and which I would like to consider explicitly. I propose to treat the Holocaust as a problem of culture because the central explanatory problem...