Hitler’s Antisemitism and the Horizons of the Racial State

Abstract

Eve Rosenhaft Hitler’s Antisemitism and the Horizons of the Racial State Roman Töppel’s prodigious literary detective work has provided the most definitive account of the sources behind the ideas that feature in Hitler’s chapter “Volk und Rasse” from Mein Kampf. Regarded by both scholars and contemporaries as the key section, “Volk und Rasse” is the eleventh chapter of the book’s first volume in which Hitler laid out, in Töppel’s words, “the real essence of the National Socialist world view.”1 Hitler not only identifies the central conflict in world history as that between Aryan and Jew, Töppel notes, but he also elaborates on the threat posed by the Jewish presence in terms of blood and “race.” Töppel adduces detailed evidence for Hitler’s long-observed intellectual “dilettantism” in questions of race and racial theory, marked by his tendency to pick and choose arguments while simply ignoring aspects of theories that might run counter to his own argument. Examples of this include his selective use of the work of Hans F. K. Günther, who expressly rejected the term “Aryan” as well as stereotypes about the physical appearance of Jews, and his dismissal of the idea put forth by Günther and other völkisch race theorists that the Jews were to be understood as a Volk but not a race. Likewise, Hitler continued to insist on the degenerative effects of miscegenation in spite of arguments to the contrary in (among other works) the Grundriß der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (1921) by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz, which is otherwise an important source for “Volk und Rasse.” Additionally, Töppel finds evidence to explain the unsystematic character of Hitler’s thinking in his reading habits, which are documented in eyewitness testimonies and his surviving private library. Hitler’s thinking on “race” was inconsistent, derivative, and intellectually vacuous, even by the standards of a pseudoscience devoted to the study of a wholly constructed category. Although all this will come as no surprise to most readers, Töppel nonetheless provides some valuable food for thought in exposing the genealogy of “Volk und Rasse.” By investigating not only the sources for the chapter, but also the circumstances of its composition, he confirms its originary character. The scholarly consensus has been that Hitler’s antisemitism was a product of his wartime and postwar experiences, yet the fact that “Volk und Rasse” was first drafted in 1922–23, before his imprisonment in Landsberg that 1 Roman Töppel, “Volk und Rasse.” In Search of Hitler’s Sources, in this yearbook, pp. 71–110, here p. 77. 112 Eve Rosenhaft provided the impetus and time to write the rest of the first volume, bespeaks how urgent a business it was for Hitler’s own politics to think through his antisemitism that was still inchoate at that stage. Töppel thus exposes the way in which Hitler’s reflections on blood and race in this part of Mein Kampf serve as a retrospective structure for rationalizing and giving articulate voice to his hatred and fear of Jews. As Töppel puts it, given that Hitler’s antisemitic statements were significantly more radical than those of any of the thinkers on whose work he drew, what Hitler was doing in “Volk und Rasse” was to use their ideas to cobble together “his own, murderous ideology, whose central theme was a relentless hatred of Jews.”2 Hitler was giving his visceral antisemitism the argumentative bones and muscle that could make it the basis for an entire political program. As valuable as it is to see Hitler’s Weltanschauung thus anatomized, Töppel’s analysis is particularly useful in provoking some wider questions about the character and operation of National Socialism. Among these are questions about the functions of reading, ideas and “ideas” in fascist movements, but what I would like to focus on here are questions raised by the indications that in this chapter Hitler is using pseudoscientific principles of “race” to rationalize a pre-existing antisemitism. These questions interrogate the place of this chapter – and Hitler’s ideas more broadly – in the construction of a “racial state.” Where...