Imagined Enemies, Real Victims: Bartov's Transcendent Holocaust

Abstract

OMER BARTOV'S sweeping and erudite essay, Defining Enemies, Making Victims, attempts to explain genocide through the evolution of the hatreds that lead up to it. Specifically, he explores the ways in which a certain, psychological sense of victimization finds its outlet in the creation of imagined enemies. Under the right set of political, economic, and ideological conditions, these projections can become explosive, and there is no better example of this syndrome than under the Weimar Republic and the subsequent Third Reich. For Bartov, perceptions common among Germans of themselves as victims (as with the stab-in-the-back legend after World War I, and of Jewish infiltration generally) helped to justify ana promote ever more radical forms of persecution. tragic end result, of course, was the Holocaust. As he writes: The ubiquity of perpetrators and victims, and the frequent confusion between them, is at the core of the destructive energy characteristic of modern genocide, taking place as it does within an imaginary universe that encompasses every single individual in a cycle of devastation and murder.' Here Bartov comes close to creating an abstract, ideal type of genocide that explains at once too much and too little. Bartov's thesis that a continual process of victimization and blame is at the heart of the animosities that lead to genocide may help us to understand why certain groups are targeted in certain contexts. Yet scapegoating is an old historical phenomenon, not a twentieth-century innovation, and it did not always produce genocide by any means. Where Bartov's thesis ultimately falls short is in explaining, to put it concretely, how it was possible for some 100,000 Germans to participate in a continent-wide murderous rampage that left 6 million Jews (among millions of others) dead, the vast majority of whom were not German to begin with. While I certainly do not intend to turn this forum into a rehashing of the Goldhagen debate, the author of Hitler's Willing Executioners does present a simple, if exaggerated, picture of the perpetrators and their motives-ordinary Germans for whom virulent, eliminationist anti-Semitism could easily be turned into lethal action.2 While few scholars have gone that far, Bartov seems to have veered so much in the other direction that it is not clear who,