Nazi Antisemitism Research Articles

Bonifica umana. La clinica dell'uomo nuovo

- The author studies the anti-Semitism of the 1930s, and highlights the continuity between past anti-Jewish discrimination and modern anti-Semitism. He points out how biomedical disciplines and psychiatry include secularized anti-Jewish attitudes. Moreover, he underlines that Nazi and fascist anti-Semitism draws on a century of research on differential assessment of individuals (based on moral and attitudinal features) and on racial degeneration. Bio-medical knowledge has recoded modern racism, developing a scientific device for social prophylaxis that differentiates good races from bad races, and condemns the latter to death. The goal of the reclamation of man becomes therefore a therapeutic act , the disinfection of society. Keywords: anti-Jewish discrimination, anti-Semitism, Nazism, fascism, psychiatry.

"Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population": The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941-45

When Nazi Germany invaded expanded Soviet Union in June 1941, how likely was it that Soviet media would report in a substantial way mass murder of of Europe, known today as Holocaust or Shoah? There was a precedent in a Soviet public record about Nazi antisemitism. On 30 November 1936, Pravda reported Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov's speech of five days earlier on occasion of new Soviet constitution. Condemning fascism for its hostility toward Jews, Molotov cited a previously unpublicized comment by Iosif Stalin that antisemitism, like any form of racial chauvinism, is most dangerous vestige of cannibalism, and added that brotherly feelings for Jewish would define our attitudes toward antisemites and antisemitic atrocities wherever they occur. The Soviet press also covered pogroms in Germany in November 1938, referring to a massacre of a defenseless Jewish population. That same year, two Jewish filmmakers could release Professor Mamlock, first Soviet film depicting persecution of in Germany. (1) But Stalin, himself a killer of millions, was not interested in people killed by Nazi Germany and its allies. During war with Germany, what mattered to him were Soviet citizens who offered armed resistance and prevented exploitation of occupied regions. (2) Despite an awareness of their difficult if not desperate situation, he suspected all others no longer living under his control of treason, for reasons that likely must remain unclear. Many Soviet officials and journalists shared or adopted this suspicion. Even some who were themselves of Jewish descent did so: David Iosifovich Zaslavskii, a prominent commentator who specialized in public denunciation of intellectuals, was able to visit sites of murder of of Kharkiv in December 1943. Those killed were less stable and worthy part of Soviet Jewry, part that more and more lost both personal and national dignity, he wrote in his private diary. Many even seemingly had deserved to die: Any Jew who, for whatever reason, remained with Germans and did not kill himself, condemned himself to death. When, in addition, he, for private gain, his children with him and thus exposed them to death, he is a traitor. (3) When to suspicion one adds Stalin's personal, if usually hidden antipathy to Jews, (4) likelihood that readers of main Russian-language Soviet newspapers such as Pravda, Izvestiia, Trud, and Krasnaia zvezda and those listening to Soviet central radio could find out that Nazis were targeting in particular seems slim indeed. Nevertheless, as I argue here, they could. Such explicit reports did exist and were more numerous than has been assumed. Although Soviet media items often attempted to conceal that Nazis were deliberately killing all Jews, this never became a policy. It was nothing but a tendency that never became entirely consistent. Reports about three meetings in Moscow of representatives of Jewish and various articles by II'ia Grigor'evich Ehrenburg mentioned as victims. Other articles that appeared on various occasions also did so. Even as late as November 1944, as present study reveals, Pravda wrote that 1.7 million had been gassed to death at Birkenau. All investigations of presentation of Nazi mass murder by Soviet media during war with Nazi Germany focus on campaign known today as Jewish Holocaust. The first studies, written at a time when intense antisemitism pervaded Soviet lift, emphasized a total or near-total about mass murder of Jews. Thus Solomon M. Schwarz wrote in 1951 that the very fact of wholesale extermination of Jews was shrouded in silence and kept out of Soviet newspapers. (5) Gennadii Vasil'evich Kostyrchenko wrote in his Tainaia politika Stalina (Stalin's Secret Policy, 2003) of a Soviet wartime cover-up (zamalchivanie, umolchanie) about Hitlerite genocide of [Soviet] Jews. …

The Architecture of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Nazi Fantasy

In this article I examine the aesthetic properties of rural German architecture, Nazi ideology, and their manifestation at the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Architecture sutures together the gap between the ideological demands made on a people and the reality of those demands in their execution and spatial expression. Jacques Lacan’s theory of the Real and Slavoj Žižek’s theory of fantasy as the support for reality provide the theoretical framework from which I examine the architecture used at the camps. I posit a theory connecting the horror of the death camps, Nazi architecture, Volkish thought, and the Nazi utopian city of Auschwitz. I conclude that the convergence of these historical, architectural, and ideological aspects are evident in the buildings at Auschwitz I and Birkenau, and reveal how the practices of daily Nazi life and antisemitism work together to become a fantasy that sustains the consistency and meaning of Nazism.

Blood and belief: the circulation of a symbol between Jews and Christians

Preface Introduction: Writing with Blood 1. Pollution and Power: Blood in the Hebrew Bible 2. Blood and the Covenant: The Jewish and Christian Careers of a Biblical Verse 3. God's Blood: Medieval Jews and Christians Debate the Body 4. Power in the Blood: The Medieval and the Modern in Nazi Anti-Semitism 5. From Blood Libel to Blood Community: Self-Defense and Self-Assertion in Modern Jewish Culture Epilogue: Blood and Belief Notes Selected Bibliography Index

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (review)

Reviewed by: Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays Aaron Gross Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, by Abraham Joshua Heschel, edited by Susannah Heschel. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996. Susannah Heschel’s edited collection of forty short essays and two interviews spanning the full range of A. J. Heschel’s career does much more than bring together previously difficult-to-find material with a fine biographically oriented and detail-rich introduction; Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity has itself become a major work. No other volume conveys the breadth of A. J. Heschel’s work so fully—both his writings and his activism—or provides so many powerful and pithy summaries of concepts elaborated elsewhere in his corpus. The volume’s main demerit is technical: the lack of an index. Here we find Heschel standing on one foot speaking to German Jews in 1936 as Hitler hosted the first televised Olympics (pp. 68–70) and to the American people in a nationally televised interview more than 35 years later as the country reflected and reeled in response to the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement (pp. 395–412). Heschel speaks to seekers—Jewish, Christian, and secular—as well as scholars and to the leaders of Reform, Reconstructionist, Orthodox, and, especially, Conservative Judaism. One of the volumes great merits is its presentation of some of Heschel’s most recurrent themes—God is in search of the human being (pp. 16, 158–63, 185–90, 260, 293, and especially 396) and the need to be more than human to avoid being less than human (pp. 7, 60, 92)—from multiple vantages as Heschel speaks in different contexts. Susannah Heschel, A. J. Heschel’s daughter and one of his foremost expositors, has admirably organized these essays under five headings: I. Existence and Celebration; II. No Time for Neutrality; III. Toward a Just Society; IV. No Religion is an Island; and V. The Holy Dimension. The bookend sections, one and five, contain especially wide-ranging material marked by Heschel’s sustained effort to reformulate the basic questions and assumptions that propel inquiry about and into religion. Encapsulating the broad arc of Heschel’s work, the first section emphasizes the Jewish context, while the fifth and final section emphasizes the religious situation more generally. In the first section, the essays speak to such issues as what it means to be a Jew (pp. 3–11, 47); the theological primacy of events over ideas (pp. 12–17); the Hasidic message of “hope and exultation” (pp. 39; 33–9); “Israel as memory” (pp. 40–43); a critique of Reform, secular, and Orthodox Judaism (pp. 48–52); the meaning of tshuvah (pp. 68–70); and a poetic meditation on Nazi anti-Semitism (pp. 71–2). Ranging over wide terrain, Heschel argues [End Page 221] that “[t]he very existence of a Jew is a spiritual act” (p. 55); blasts Jewish demographers with his insistence that “[t]here are two words I should like to strike from our vocabulary: ‘surveys’ and ‘survival’” (p. 29); and offers a phenomenology of Talmud study, suggesting that pilpul “represented a desire to sublimate feelings into thoughts, to transpose dreams into syllogisms” (p. 36). The final section is of special interest to the historian and philosopher of religion, for here themes such as piety (pp. 305–17), holiness (pp. 318–27), faith (pp. 328–39), prayer (pp. 340–53), and death (pp. 366–79) are approached as basic human phenomena. In “An Analysis of Piety,” Heschel summarizes a fundamental aspect of his analysis of religion: “man’s affinity with God is his persistent aspiration to go beyond himself . . . to live for an ideal” (p. 316). Religion is imagined here as a vehicle to actualize this aspiration that may manifest in devotion to “the family, a friend, a group, the nation . . . art, science, or social service. . .” (p. 316). The second essay in the final section, The Holy Dimension, contains the volume’s most pointed critique of religious studies, which is also touched on elsewhere in the volume through Heschel’s critique of symbolism “as the supreme category in understanding religious truth” (pp. 88, 128; see also 92). Heschel laments, Modern man seldom faces things...

From the Sacrifice of the Letter to the Voice of Testimony: Giorgio Agamben’s Fulfillment of Metaphysics

From the Sacrifice of the Letter to the Voice of TestimonyGiorgio Agamben’s Fulfillment of Metaphysics Jeffrey S. Librett (bio) By denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being, and consequently to an experience which is interior and sovereign. But such an experience, for which the death of God is an explosive reality, discloses as its own secret and clarification, its intrinsic finitude, the limitless reign of the Limit, and the emptiness of those excesses in which it spends itself and where it is found wanting. —Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression” Can there be a discourse that, without being a metalanguage or sinking into the unsayable, says language itself and exposes its limits? —Giorgio Agamben, “The Idea of Language” I shall not rest until every German sees that it is a shameful thing to be a lawyer. —Adolf Hitler, speech before theReichstag, April 26, 1942 From his early works on, Giorgio Agamben has opposed the thought of no contemporary philosopher more consistently and programmatically than that of Jacques Derrida, whose questioning of phonocentric metaphysics Agamben has tried to replace by a characterization of metaphysics as (what I am calling here) graphocentric. To go back behind the replacement of the voice by the letter is for Agamben to recover the event of language itself, the taking-place of language as Being.1 In his conceptualization of the project for such a recovery, as we shall see, Agamben’s commitment to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is overdetermined by his investment in the Christian God as logos. This philosophical program in Agamben’s early essays guides his later work on the homo sacer-sovereign relation but also distorts and disturbs the later work in three principal ways. First, it prompts him to propose an exclusively juridicopolitical understanding of the sacredness of the homo sacer, effectively scapegoating the juridical sphere for a more broadly theopolitical problem, while placing the specifically Christian background [End Page 11] of his antinomianism in a misleadingly secular, rational, and universalist light. Symptomatically, in order to accomplish this juridicopolitical reduction Agamben must reject Bataille’s analysis of sacrifice—along with the entire modern anthropological reading of the sacred—out of hand. For this rejection protects his discourse against any sustained confrontation with the importance of the sacrificial dimension for both what he calls the homo sacer and his own approach to law in his theorization of the homo sacer.. Second, Agamben’s philosophical program impoverishes the account he provides of the Nazi death camps as an extreme example of the sovereign-homo sacer relation by making it impossible for him to appreciate the importance of Christian antinomianism in the formation of National Socialist ideology. For Agamben’s philosophical orientation requires or presupposes that he ignore or underestimate, first of all, the sacrificially anti-Semitic dimension of Christian antinomianism—the tendency of such antinomianism to make Judaism responsible for the ontological desert into which representation exiles us all. Further, as a consequence of his continuing commitment to this tradition, Agamben cannot see how important the tradition remains, even if in a displaced form, for Nazi anti-Semitism. I argue that Agamben’s animus against the letter blinds him to the Christian and sacrificial dimensions of the Holocaust—he ignores the former and explicitly, emphatically denies the latter dimension—because this animus represents his own commitment to the Christian antinomianism that, in its racialized National Socialist form, attempts to rid itself of the letter by sacrificing not only Judaism but the (biologically, racially construed) Jews. Because his radically antinomian program would become unsettled by his recognition of its important overlap with the ideological bases of National Socialism, Agamben cannot ultimately acknowledge the Christian and sacrificial aspects of the Holocaust. Finally, in Remnants of Auschwitz—his main reading (outside of Homo Sacer) of the significance of the Nazi death camps—Agamben positions “testimony” as the exemplary instance of the speaking of speech, the taking-place of language. The result of the destruction of European Jewry becomes here the revelation of poetic speech as a manifestation of the absolute. Unwittingly, Agamben ends up participating in...

Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 (review)

Reviewed by: Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 Anthony Clayton Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945. Edited by Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006. ISBN 1-56663-713-9. Maps. Tables. Figures. Notes. Index. Pp. x, 260. $16.95. This work, perhaps the most rewarding of the many books written about the Dresden bombing, is based on papers given at a colloquium held at Edinburgh University. The different contributions offer a variety of perspectives, but common to all is new and meticulous research. Some chapters are of general interest, while others will be of particular interest to military historians. The general interest chapters include Jeremy Crang on famous philologist Victor Klemperer's Dresden with its horrific detail of Nazi antisemitism as well as his experience in the raid; Nicola Lambourne's argument (with which not all will agree) that the GDR's reconstruction of the city demonstrated a consciousness of Dresden's cultural history; and Alan Russell's account of how Dresden's destruction stands as a defining moment in the history of urban terror bombing and, later, the importance of the Dresden Trust as a symbol of this significance and of reconciliation. The absence of a chapter on the impact of the raids on the city's Christian communities is to be regretted, particularly in the light of the events of 1989 in which churches in Saxony played so important a part. Chapters by Tami Davis Biddle on wartime reactions to the bombing and by Richard Overy on the postwar debates on the subject, will be of interest to military historians, especially Biddle's account of how many American consciences troubled over city bombing were soothed by the claim that the [End Page 579] attacks were directed at communication targets and served a double purpose by subtracting resources from the other areas of the German war effort, a self-delusion that lasted even after the terrifying B-29 Tokyo firestorm raids of March 1945. The two chapters provide useful summaries of the arguments, mostly now well known, of the two periods but also offer some interesting new perspectives, some protagonist and some more scholarly, from the former GDR, whose leading historian Olaf Groehler finally disposed of the myth that the Soviets had specifically asked that Dresden be bombed and also confirmed the very limited military value of the raids. But most important for military historians are the chapters by Hew Strachan on strategic bombing and civilian casualties, Sebastian Cox on the rationale of the raids, Sönke Neitzel on the city under attack and David Bloxham on Dresden as a war crime. Strachan's stimulating chapter suggests three main reasons leading to Britain's urban mass destruction bombing. First was technology, a preference for the advanced technology of the four-engined bomber rather than the bloodshed of mass mobilisation ground warfare. Second was the British colonial "pacification" experience, from the machine-gun to the DH9A bomber and onwards, of ferocious action upon colonial peoples seen as uncivilised and with no need for any consideration of proportionality, all leading to increasing breaches of international conventions concerning noncombatant immunity. Third was Britain's past use of a not dissimilar strategy striking at civilians and civilian morale, the naval blockades of Germany in the First World War. These factors, set against the general war-weariness and the particular frustrations of early 1945, led British and American air officers to see firestorms as a war-winning military strategy without regard to laws of war or morality. Sebastian Cox enters further into the early 1945 arguments and preparations for the raid, noting Churchill's personal involvement. He provides a chilling account of the "command and control" of the raid—we learn of the "Master Bomber," "Blind Illuminators and Markers," and "Visual Centres" aircraft dropping "Skymarker" flares. He further records the damage inflicted on Dresden's industry and (short-lived) on the railway system. But, the firestorm centred on the baroque city centre. Sönke Neitzel's chapter recounts how the German antiaircraft defences had been run down and how inadequate the fire service was, offers caution against inflated casualty estimates, and concludes that one major cause of the devastation...

Convergence: The Classic Case Nazi Germany, Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism during World War II

Despite granting permission for limited Jewish emigration to Palestine in the 1930s, the ideology and policy of the Nazi regime never supported establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. During World War II, Hitler's ideologically consistent view that such a state would be a branch of an international Jewish conspiracy converged with shorter-term efforts to gain Arab and Islamic support for the Third Reich's military goals in the Middle East. The ideological convergence of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism found expression in the works of Nazi propagandists as well as in the speeches and radio addresses of Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, broadcast from wartime Berlin to the Middle East. Examination of the lineages, similarities and differences between Europe's totalitarian past and its aftereffects in the Arab and Islamic world remains an important task for comparative historical scholarship.

German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour by Stephen Brockmann

MLR, IOI.4, 2oo6 II83 Der kleine Sieg uiber den Antisemitismus: Darstellung und Deutung der nationalsozia listischen_tudenverfolgung imdeutschsprachigen Zeitstick des Exils I933-I945. By CARSTEN JAKOBI. (Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur, io6) Tiibingen:Niemeyer. 2005. viii+283pp. E56. ISBN3-484-35i06-3. This book is not an easy read, but it is a rewarding read. After a section reviewing the critical literature on exile and Nazi anti-Semitism, it focuses on anti-Semitism in the exile 'Zeitstiick'. What is especially valuable is that the texts chosen for analysis include not only plays which have been examined many times before, but also some which are not so readily available. Brecht does not often deal with anti-Semitism di rectly, but he does so in his early parable play Die Rundkopfeund die Spitzkopfe (I932), included here. There is also a treatment of 'Die jiidische Frau' from Furcht und Elend des III. Reiches (1937-38). Ferdinand Bruckner's Die Rassen (1933) enjoyed many productions, and Friedrich Wolf's Professor Mamlock (I933) was not only the earli est of the 'Zeitstiicke' to deal with Nazi anti-Semitism but also the most successful. Carsten Jakobi is as up to date with critical appraisals of these famous plays aswith plays which have remained unread and inmany cases unperformed for a long time. As his starting-point, Jakobi focuses on 'Zeitstiicke' which highlight 'das fa tale Interesse, das der Nationalsozialismus Liebesbeziehungen zwischen Juden und Nichtjuden entgegenbrachte' (p. ioi). His first such play with a 'bedrohtes Paar' (p. ioi) isKraft durch-Feuer: Die Nacht vom 9. November I938 (I938-39) by Rudolf Frank. 'Feuer', not 'Freude', iswhat National Socialism brings on Kristall nacht. Another married couple forms the core of Die Masken fallen (I 940) by Hans Schubert and Mark Spiegelberg. Abschied von Wien (I938) has never been performed or published, but deserves critical attention as part of the ceuvre of Bernhard Blume, who became a leading Germanist in exile inNorth America. Jakobi rounds off this section on problematic Liebesbeziehungen inNazi Germany with the analysis of three plays by dramatists from theWeimar Republic, Paul Zech, Gustav Wangenheim, andWalter Hasenclever. Zech's play Nur einm udenweib had its premiere inYiddish in Buenos Aires in I935. Wangenheim's family-based 'Zeitstiick' Die Friedensstorer (1938) was written and performed in the Soviet Union. Hasenclever's Konflikt in Assyrien, making a comedy out of a possible massacre of the Jews, had its premiere in English in London inApril I939. For his last section Jakobi turns from Nazi ideas of Rassenschande to that of the supremely competent Jew, forwhom the medical consultant Professor Mamlock had provided the model. In Oskar Singer's Herren der Welt (I935) and Meier Faerber's Auf der Flucht erschossen (I93 3-34?) the exceptional Jew is now an inventor. Neither of these plays in any way matches Professor Mamlock, nor does the last play studied, Max Brusto's Die letzten Vier (I940). In the end Jakobi concedes that the victory was a small one, yet these exile 'Zeitstiicke' did expose the horrific impact of Nazi anti-Semitism. The Jewish victims had right on their side. INSTITUTE OFGERMANIC& ROMANCESTUDIES,LONDON J.M. RITCHIE German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour. By STEPHEN BROCKMANN. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics and Culture) Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2004. Xi+295 pp. /50; $75. ISBN 1-573I I3-298-8. As Stephen Brockmann points out in his introduction to this thoroughly researched book, the term 'Stunde Null', and indeed the whole concept of a 'Zero Hour' in I945 Germany, has come in for much criticism since the I960s. As far as literature is concerned, critics have tended to argue thatWest German literature really began with B6ll and Grass in the late I950S and I96os. At the very most, it is acknowledged II84 Reviews that Richter and Andersch, through the Gruppe 47, had tried to launch a new, more politically engaged and less linguistically ornate form of literature; equally, literary critical opinion since the I960s would seem to agree that this attempt, noble as itwas, largely failed. Brockmann, with a refreshing zeal, revisits the 1945-49 period, seeking to establish whether literature and literary culture in the aftermath of the war really were...

Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust (review)

As its title indicates, Imaginary Witness traces how Hollywood has depicted the Holocaust in feature films. Daniel Anker, who won an Oscar for his documentary Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, interweaves clips from Holocaust movies, narration by Gene Hackman, and interviews with survivors who work in the film industry like Branko Lustig and Robert Clary, directors of major Holocaust pictures like Steven Spielberg and Sidney Lumet, and scholars like Michael Berenbaum and Annette Insdorf to illustrate how the portrayal of the Shoah has evolved in Hollywood productions over the past 60 years. Anker devotes much of the documentary to the formative years of Holocaust cinema. He locates the causes of Hollywood's timidity to make films critical of Hitler and Nazi anti-Semitism in the assimilationist aspirations of the Jewish movie moguls, their fear of American anti-Semitism, the financial dependence of Hollywood on the German distribution market, isolationist opposition to US intervention in European affairs, and the Production Code Administration's system of self-censorship. Anker gets this story essentially right, but assigns too much blame to the Jewish movie moguls because he relies so heavily on Neil Gabler's characterization of the Jewish studio owners as obsessed with proving their American identity by minimizing their Jewish one. Other film historians like Michael Birdwell and Steven Carr emphasize the external pressures the Jewish producers had to contend with: the threat that Congress would regulate the film industry if it did not censor itself, the State Department which cautioned against antagonizing Germany for diplomatic and economic reasons, the Third Reich's ban on movies deemed anti-German, and the PCA whose clout stemmed from grassroots backing by Catholic and Protestant organizations. Independent anti-Nazi films like Hitler's Reign of Terror and Are We Civilized? were made as early as 1934, but were never released due to Germany's pressure on the Loews and MGM theatre chains. Similarly, PCA chief Joseph Breen squelched MGM's plans to adapt Sinclair Lewis's antifascist novel It Can't Happen Here into a movie in 1935. While Imaginary Witness acknowledges that Harry Warner was one of the few producers who spoke out against Hitler, it does not explore his activities in any depth. Warner Bros. discontinued its operations in Germany in 1934 to protest the order to dismiss its Jewish employees in Germany. Since shorts and cartoons fell outside the purview of the PCA, the studio made an animated cartoon Bosko's Picture Show in 1933 that parodied Hitler. The 1936 Warner Bros. production Black Legion dramatized how an anti-immigrant hate group recruited a disgruntled worker who lost a promotion to a Polish co-worker. Based on a series of ethnically, racially, and religiously motivated murders by the real Black Legion, the movie's script originally featured a Jew as the target of the worker's wrath, but changed his identity because the PCA threatened to withhold its seal of approval if this "inflammatory" plot detail remained in the final cut of the film. Breen worried that the portrayal of anti-Semitism in Warner Bros.' The Life of Emile Zola (1937) might provide Germany with a pretext to ban all American films from distribution in the country. In response the studio limited its reference to Alfred Dreyfus' Jewish heritage to a single visual allusion. The busting of an American Nazi spy ring in 1938 provided the opportunity for Warner Bros.' to produce Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Highlighting the dangers Nazi authoritarianism and racism posed to American democracy, the movie never mentioned anti-Semitism. Anyone cognizant of current events, however, would have recognized that these movies implicitly denounced Hitler and Nazi ideology. Although Hollywood remained hesitant about tackling the issue of Nazi anti-Semitism until the United States entered the war in late 1941, Charlie Chaplin's independent production of The Great...

Radio Vatican’s Opposition to Nazi Ideology, 1940-1942

Much has been published on the issue of Pius XII’s «silence» on the murder of European Jewry and its perpetrators. Critics claim that Pius XII never explicitly condemned the murder of the Jews nor named the perpetrators, whereas Pius XII’s supporters maintain that his words, though measured, were nevertheless clearly understood as a condemnation of Nazi ideology and antisemitism. Notwithstanding the interpretations which may be given to the Pope’s pronouncements, or the merits of his diplomatic activities, a defence of the papacy can however be advanced on the basis of an examination of some of Vatican Radio’s programs during 1940-1942. They show that Vatican Radio broadcasts not only consistently opposed any form of collaboration with Nazi ideology but also stood for the sanctity of human life regardless of descent by informing its listeners about the persecution and murder of the Jews.

Legitimating Nazism: Harvard University and the Hitler Regime, 1933-1937

The Harvard University administration during the 1930s, led by President James Bryant Conant, ignored numerous opportunities to take principled stand against the Hitler regime and its antisemitic outrages, and contributed to Nazi Germany's efforts to improve its image in the West. Its lack of concern about Nazi antisemitism was shared by many influential Harvard alumni and student leaders. In warmly welcoming Nazi leaders to the Harvard campus, inviting them to prestigious, high profile social events, and striving to build friendly relations with thoroughly Nazified universities in Germany, while denouncing those who protested against these actions, Harvard's administration and many of its student leaders offered important encouragement to the Hitler regime as it intensified its persecution of Jews and expanded its military strength. The few scholars who previously addressed this subject devoted insufficient attention to antisemitism in the Harvard administration and student body, and underestimate the university's complicity in the Nazis' persecution of the Jews. William M. Tuttle Jr., to be sure, criticizes Conant's unwillingness to help place German scholars exiled by the Nazis at Harvard, calling this a failure of compassion. Morton and Phyllis Keller, in their recent history of Harvard, similarly describe its administration as slow to appoint refugees from Nazism to the faculty, particularly Jews. They describe Conant as shar[ing] the mild antisemitism common to his social group and time, but then go on to state that an alleged commitment to meritocracy made him more ready to accept able Jews as students and faculty. The Kellers acknowledge that under Conant Harvard restricted the number of Jewish students admitted and hired few Jewish professors, so the trend toward meritocracy was limited. Tuttle, while conceding that Conant publicly criticized the Hitler regime only for suppressing academic freedom, and ignor[ed] other and related Nazi crimes, nonetheless praises him as one of the more outspoken anti-Nazis in the United States from 1933 until World War II. This, however, was hardly the case.1

Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. s> Gross (review)

REVIEWS 58I Gross, Jan T. Neighbors.TheDestruction of theJewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 200I. XX + 26I pp. Map. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $19.95: 712.95. A QUICK visitto the internetwill reveal that thousandsof articles,printed and electronic, have been generated by this smallbook, which was publishedin a Polish edition in 2000. To be sure, its revelations are shocking: on i0 July 1941, part of the Catholic Polish population of Jedwabne, a small town of approximately3,000 personsin Lomza county in the Podlasieregion of northeastern Poland, attacked, tortured and murdered most of the town's Polish Jewish population, perhaps i,6oo in all. The culmination of the day-long killingspreecame when all the survivingJews were driveninto a barn, locked in, and burned to death. There is a lingering dispute about German involvement in the instigation of the atrocity, but there can be no question that the murdererswere Poles. The book has strucka nerve among Poles andJews because Grossdoes not shy away fromthe implicationsof thisevent. His researchaddsto the growing literature about the 'ordinary men,' to use Christopher Browning's phrase, who servedas the foot-soldierswho enabled the ideological fanaticsof Nazism to carryout the massmurderof EuropeanJewry. In thiscase, thevictimswere neighbours who had lived for decades side by side with their murderers in apparentpeace and amity. Even more unsettling although Grossdoes not dwell on this point the Jedwabne massacrewas not an isolated event, but partof a seriesof massmurdersin the region. Some of thevictimsinJedwabne wereJewish refugeesfleeingsimilarattacksin nearbytownslikeRadzilow and W,sosz. Although he does not comment in detail on this phenomenon, Gross includes a map of the '"Bermuda Triangle" of July I94I massacresof Jews by theirneighbors'(p. 203). Self-justifyingeffortshave been made in the past to explain both occasional acts of Polish collaboration with Nazi anti-Semitism, and the more common phenomenon of popular apathy toward the Final Solution. In particular, alleged Jewish collaboration with the Soviet occupation and sovietization of eastern Poland in the period I939-4I iS often used to explain, if not excuse, such actions and attitudes. Gross demonstrates that, despite retrospective claims, Jedwabne Jews could not in any way be linked to the stereotypical 'zydokommuna'.Grosslocated the impetusin the basestof human motives:it was 'thedesireand unexpected opportunityto robtheJews once and for all ratherthan, or alongsidewith, atavisticAntisemitism'(p. I Io). The heated response to Gross'sbook in Poland has served to demonstrate another point made by the author, the extreme difficultyfor Poles to cede the role of 'victim' to others. As Gross provocatively asks in one chapter, 'Is it Possible to Be Simultaneously a Victim and a Victimizer'. The answer is, of course, 'yes'. This has made the realities of Polish-Jewishrelations before, during and after the Second World War so difficult even for conscientious scholarsto address,to saynothing of the broaderpublic. Grossarguesthat the construction of a usable past that can serve as a foundation for a modern Polish identity must include a recognition of the 'dark past' as well as the episodes of martyrdom and glory. At least some segments of contemporary Polishsociety have ralliedto Gross'scall. 582 SEER, 8i, 3, 2003 Lost in the heat of theJedwabne controversyis a hypothesisthat arisesout of Gross' research, dealing not with the Holocaust, but with the subsequent Communist takeover in post-war Poland. Besides the dedicated ideologues who moved this process forward,he notes, was manpower of a differentsort. 'Amongtheir most valuable operativesand confidantsthere were also people devoid of all principles'. These were precisely the types of people who had been compromised during the German occupation. In other words, those willing to kill their neighbours for their cows or clothing, were also willing to benefit from serving the Stalinist system. His contention that 'communities whereJews had been murderedbylocal inhabitantswereespeciallyvulnerable to sovietization'(p. i66) is a hypothesisworthtestingby scholars. Gross's book is significantnot just for the light it sheds on Poland's 'dark past',but forthe many unansweredquestionsthat it raises. Department ofHebrew andJewishStudies J.D. KLIER University College London Jones, Derek (ed.). Censorship. A WorldEncyclopedia. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers , London and Chicago, IL, 200I. lXii + 289 I pp. (in four volumes). Illustrations.Bibliographicalreferences.Index. ?265.oo. THEfirstand most importantpoint to make about thisencyclopaedia is that it is a magnificentachievement. Covering...

The native speaker, identity, and the authenticity hierarchy

Many sociolinguistic writings (e.g. Fishman, J. A., 1972. Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays. Newbury House, Rowley, MA; Fishman, J. A. 1991. Reversing Language Shift. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon; Phillipson, R. and Skutnabb-Kangas, T. 1986. English: The Language of Wider Colonisation. Paper presented at the 11th World Congress, New Delhi) assume native language is inherently central to individual identity, so that those members of an ethnic group who natively speak a language particularly associated with that group are more ‘authentic’ than those who do not. Though such an ideology is true of many groups and many individuals, it is not true of all groups: some, such as Jews, Greeks, Armenians, overseas Indians, Chinese, etc., define their identity in other ways, according to religion, tradition, and/or ancestry, but not native language. An ideology defining identity in terms of native language will inevitably view groups rejecting this ideology as being deficient, low on the ‘authenticity hierarchy’ established by this ideology, deceptively speaking ‘other peoples' ’ languages, and perversely and insistently claiming distinctive identities and interests. It is just such an understanding of the alleged ‘natural’ connection between language and identity which was at the heart of the development of Nazi antisemitism, the view that Jews were impure, deceptive, and not normal human beings.

The Rise of National Socialism in Germany

Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 269 pp., $24.95, ISBN 0-674-35091-X.Dan P. Silverman, Hitler's Economy: Nazi Work Creation Programs, 1933–1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 384 pp., $45.00, ISBN 0-674-74071-8.Roderick Stackelberg, Hitler's Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 432 pp., hb, £50.00, ISBN 0-415-2011414-4.Conan Fischer, ed., The Rise of National Socialism and the Working Classes in Weimar Germany (Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996), 256 pp., hb, $55.00, £37.00, ISBN 1-571-81915-0.Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. I: The Era of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 448 pp., hb, $30.00 ISBN 0-060-19042-6.These works address, among other issues, the following: how widespread was support for Nazism before and after 1933 and how can this support be explained? What was the core of Nazi antisemitism, how important was it to the history of the regime, and how was it translated into policy? Several also demonstrate that, amidst the vast forest of specialist studies, it is also possible to write valuable synthetic works.

Literature at War, 1914-1940: Representing the 'Time of Greatness' in Germany by Wolfgang G. Natter (review)

MLR,96.3,200I 897 Sachlichkeit are givenmorecursory treatment. Ironically, thereal research contribution ofthe bookcomes inthediscussion ofHasenclever's articles andfilms, yet even with these, the reader whohopes for more focus onthe artistic relationship between KurtPinthus and Hasenclever willbe disappointed. Furthermore, the repeated claim-that MunchAausen wasHasenclever's best play, basedonenthusiastic claims byKurtTucholsky (seep. I6I), iSnotcritically justified. Konfikt inAstyr7en, Hasenclever's barelyveiledattackon Nazi anti-Semitism, receives farmore attention, as doesIrrtum und Leridenschaft, 'part novel, part exileautobiography, and partviciousgossipcolumn ofGerman cultural society before and during the Weimaryears'(p. I74). In short, this bookisfarfrom being a definitive study ofHasenclever's works. Researchers willfind almost nothing newhere, most oftheevidence nowbeing available inthefive-volume edition Walter Hasenclever. Samtliche Werke, edited by Dieter Breuer andBernd Witte (Mainz:Hase& Koehler, I990-97).Despite this, wenowhaveaninsight into Hasenclever's works that explains why Kurt Pinthus's description ofhiminhisedition Walter Hasenclever. Gedichte, Dramen, Prosa (Reinbek beiHamburg: Rowohlt, I963)as oneofthe'Unbekanntesten undderVerkanntesten ' (p. 7) among German writers whobetween I9IO and I930achieved fame andfortune, still lingers on. MELLEN UNIVERSITY, IOWA BRIAN KEITH-SMITH Literature at War,I9I4-I940.- Representing the'rimeofGreatness'in Germany. By WOLFGANG G. NATTER. NewHavenand London:Yale University Press. I999.Vi+ 280PP. £25. Study ofthe German literature ofthe First World Warhaspassed through a number ofstages. Attention wasinitially given totexts, suchasArnold Zweig's DerStreit um den Sergeanten Grzscha, which endorsed humanitarian valuesin opposition to the nationalism that hadactivated allthose engaged inpropaganda. Theperspectives ofthecommon soldier orthedisillusioned junior officer inRemarque's ImWesten nichts Aeues andRenn'sKrteg, apartfrom thequestion ofthesenovels'intrinsic literary merit, were presented asnecessary correctives toa consensus with itsroots inthe'ideasofI9I4'. Atthesametime Ernst Junger's early writings, especially In Stahlgewittern, wereanalysed as texts that combined maximum authenticity with a refusal tosupply ideological justification, byfocusing ontheexistential experience ofcombat. Lyric poetry, especially initsExpressionist form, wasviewed inrelation tothepattern that emerged aswriters passed from affirming thenational causeto advocating revolution. The prose of the right(forexample,Beumelburg, Schauwecker, Wehner, and Zoberlein) has recently received attention in Ann Linder, Princes ofthe frenches. Aarrating the German Experience ofthe First World War (Columbia, SC: CamdenHouse, I996),butdrama,whatever theideological complexion ofits authors, remains neglected, although itoffiers material opentothe approaches which haveproved sofruitful instudies ofprose andpoetry. Thepresent study complements Linder andbreaks newground inoffering a New Historicist perspective on theestablishment ofthenationalist paradigm, notby examining the works oftheearly Junger ortheright-wing Frontromane oftheclosing years oftheWeimar Republic, butbygoing backtotheorigins ofdiscourse onthe war.Thisis achieved byreconstructing theprocess ofcontrol, direction, and manipulation ofopinion bymeans ofcensorship, press communiques (produced by theFeldpressestelle under thedirection ofthenovelist Walter Bloem), propaganda campaigns (suchas theactivities under therubric 'vaterlandischer Unterricht', of Reviews 898 which thepublisher Anton Kippenberg wasa regional director), thecreation of portable field libraries, front libraries andfront bookshops, theofficial encouragement ofpopular series issued bysuchpublishers as Perthes, Ullstein, Diederichs, Insel, Reclam, andCotta, and,perhaps most interesting for the light itsheds onthe changing attitudes tothe warexperience andits meaning, the numerous anthologies ofFeldpostbriefe, themostimportant ofwhich, compiled byPhilipp Witkop and initially titled Kriegsbriefe deutscher Studenten (I9I6), wentthrough foureditions (including a Volksausgabe). Theproduct ofpainstaking work innumerous archives, thebookpresents a widerange ofstatistical anddocumentary information onall thesetopics.It also discusses, especially in ChapterI, thetheoretical issues underpinning itsapproach. Thereishowever a pricetobe paidfor this positive achievement: thestyle becomes onoccasion unnecessarily ponderous andabstract, andanalysis often takes second placetothelisting orcursory examination oftexts oflittle ornoliterary merit. It isperhaps significant thatcloseanalyses ofindividual texts areconfined to works from thesmallgroupofwriters whohad remained immune from the institutional conditioning process thatis theauthor's mainsubject; remarks on Koppen's Heeresbertcht (I930)andanextensive examination ofthehitherto ignored (butrecently reprinted byK. Guhl)Es lebe der Krteg! EinBrief (I925,three years before Remarque's bestseller) byBruno Vogel areparticularly valuable. However, inbringing tolight a massofofficially sponsored orendorsed work produced and published before the warwasover, Natter hasdemonstrated that thereceived view (that a timelag ofalmost tenyears wasnecessary before thewarnovelcould establish itself) isnolonger tenable without some modification. Works ofwarliterature arealsolinked toallthepost-war debates andactions which sought to invest theexperience ofthewar(especially at thefront) with meaning, by commemoration, memorialization and, above all, mythification through resonant slogans andtopoi(for example, Langemarck, Verdun, Kameradschaft , Heimat, Kultur). Thestudy aimstoshowfurther that'thegeneral failure of (anti)war novels ofthedemocratic left inWeimar towinthebattle ofsignification [. . .] arguably bespeaks thecontinued power ofanearlier narrational scheme, one that National Socialism appropriated andprovided with a convincing telos', uniting theFrontgemeinschaft with theVolksgemeinschaft, for 'what isatstake [. . .] isnotthe accuracy ofthefacts recorded butthe...

From Expressionism to Exile: The Works of Walter Hasenclever (1890-1940) by Walter Hasenclever , Christa Spreizer (review)

896 Reviews into English. There isenough inthese two pages tosuggest that Dowden could have penneda riveting chapter on theworkings, andfailings, ofliterary translation. Instead, hisis oneofa group offour essays which tendtorepeat themselves in making points ofa broadly ethical or narrowly comparative nature ('Madame Chauchat hasa lotincommon with Leniof771e Erial'). DavidBlumberg (onmusic) andStephen Meredith (onillness) arebetter attuned tothegeneral reader's needs andyieldvaluableinsights concerning, forexample, thenature and extent of Castorp'sfondness forhis cousin,Joachim Ziemssen. Karla Schultzwrites entertainingly aboutthediscovery andfascination ofX-rays, andrelates this early example of'virtual reality' toCastorp's career as a loverandan engineer. The firework display is savedfortheend:Kenneth Weisinger's inspired foray into 'Asiatic' references to'Distant oilrigs andother erections'. Hisetymological tour de force is,admittedly, marred in placesbyan over-zealous attention to detail, as exemplified bya questionable attribution ofBehrens's casual'Siehda, siehda, Timotheus' toStPaul'sEpistles toTimothy. The editor, assuming heknows his Schiller, might haveintervened at thispointto spareembarrassment, butthe conjectures that Weisinger hascleverly teased outofseveral other proper names should ensure a placefor thecurrent volume inthe reference libraries ofcommitted MagicMountaineers. UNIVERSITY OFKENT OSMAN DURRANI From Expressionism toExile. Whe Works ofWalter Hasenclever (I890-I940). BYCHRISTA SPREIZER. (Studies inGerman Literature, Linguistics andCulture) RochestHr, NY:Camden House. I999.Xii + 202PP. £35. Whereas BertKastiesin hisbookWalter Hasenclever. EineBiographie der deutschen Moderne (Tubingen: Niemeyer, I994)set outtopresent Hasenclever's life asa typical example ofmodernism, Christa Spreizer concentrates onhisworks andfits them intotheir historical and socialcontext. Her introduction on Hasenclever's life justifies this approach andisprobably themost useful section ofthebook.Inthe chapter on lyric poetry hisclinging to 'tried andtruestrategies oftheliterary tradition' (p.30) is seenas surprising, butalso as 'an obligatory stagein his development asa writer' (p.30),setting him offrom the experimental poetry ofthe Sturm andAktion circles. Reference toFranz Werfel, hisfellow poetinLeipzig, is aptly made, butonelooks invainfor a broader contrast with the works ofJohannes Becher orErnst Stadler. Theauthor produces critical synopses ofeachplay orprose work and supports thesewithliberaluse ofgeneral secondary literature and background detail onperformances andtheir critical reception. Yetoften the reader isleft wondering what her ownreactions are. A signoflip-service donetolegend comes inthesection ontheproduction in I9I8 inMannheim ofDerSohn, where thenewlighting techniques ofthedirector Richard Weichert arementioned, whereas the actual artistic achievement should be credited tohisstage-designer Ludwig Sievert, a common error nothelped bythe difficulty ofaccesstorelevant research material. Bycontrast, themany references to the influence onHasenclever ofthe historian KarlLamprecht, his Doktorvater, and emphasis on thecontinuities with literary traditions ofDerSohn (especially with Schiller's DonCarlos) are convincing. However, theconclusion, 'It is doubtful whether theplaydemonstrates a transcendence ofthetraditions, attitudes and preconceptions ofWilhelmine society' (p.7I), iS disappointingly lame.Hasenclever 's other Expressionist plays areanalysed with support from WolEgang Paulsen and Walter Sokel, whereas theso-called 'mystic' dramas andthecomedies ofNeue MLR,96.3,200I 897 Sachlichkeit are givenmorecursory treatment. Ironically, thereal research contribution ofthe bookcomes inthediscussion ofHasenclever's articles andfilms, yet even with these, the reader whohopes for more focus onthe artistic relationship between KurtPinthus and Hasenclever willbe disappointed. Furthermore, the repeated claim-that MunchAausen wasHasenclever's best play, basedonenthusiastic claims byKurtTucholsky (seep. I6I), iSnotcritically justified. Konfikt inAstyr7en, Hasenclever's barelyveiledattackon Nazi anti-Semitism, receives farmore attention, as doesIrrtum und Leridenschaft, 'part novel, part exileautobiography, and partviciousgossipcolumn ofGerman cultural society before and during the Weimaryears'(p. I74). In short, this bookisfarfrom being a definitive study ofHasenclever's works. Researchers willfind almost nothing newhere, most oftheevidence nowbeing available inthefive-volume edition Walter Hasenclever. Samtliche Werke, edited by Dieter Breuer andBernd Witte (Mainz:Hase& Koehler, I990-97).Despite this, wenowhaveaninsight into Hasenclever's works that explains why Kurt Pinthus's description ofhiminhisedition Walter Hasenclever. Gedichte, Dramen, Prosa (Reinbek beiHamburg: Rowohlt, I963)as oneofthe'Unbekanntesten undderVerkanntesten ' (p. 7) among German writers whobetween I9IO and I930achieved fame andfortune, still lingers on. MELLEN UNIVERSITY, IOWA BRIAN KEITH-SMITH Literature at War,I9I4-I940.- Representing the'rimeofGreatness'in Germany. By WOLFGANG G. NATTER. NewHavenand London:Yale University Press. I999.Vi+ 280PP. £25. Study ofthe German literature ofthe First World Warhaspassed through a number ofstages. Attention wasinitially given totexts, suchasArnold Zweig's DerStreit um den Sergeanten Grzscha, which endorsed humanitarian valuesin opposition to the nationalism that hadactivated allthose engaged inpropaganda. Theperspectives ofthecommon soldier orthedisillusioned junior officer inRemarque's ImWesten nichts Aeues andRenn'sKrteg, apartfrom thequestion ofthesenovels'intrinsic literary merit, were presented asnecessary correctives toa consensus with itsroots inthe'ideasofI9I4'. Atthesametime Ernst Junger...

NAZISM AND POLARIZATION: THE LEFT AND THE THIRD REICH

This review provides an overview and critique of recent scholarship on German National Socialism. It focuses on four problems through which historians have recently challenged the Marxist scholarship that played a significant role in shaping debates on Nazism in the sixties and seventies : the composition of the Nazi electorate, the Nazi ‘racial state’, Nazi social policy, and the Holocaust. Although acknowledging the importance of such themes in recent work as the Nazi regime's racism, anti-Semitism, and modernity, the review maintains that the key issue in Marxist scholarship, the polarization between left and right during the interwar period in Europe, provides the essential context for understanding the Nazi regime's ideological extremes and racial practices. To make its case, it explores four examples of the left's influence, the German left's relative cohesion as political and social movements, its place in the discourse of ‘racial hygiene’, its role in debates on the ‘standard of living’, and finally, its relevance to Nazi expansionism and the ‘Final Solution’.

"A Calamity Almost Beyond Comprehension": Nazi Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in the Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois

African-Americans have reacted to Jews not only as neighbors in the American communal polity but as a fellow diaspora people. This has been true at least since the late nineteenth century, when Caribbean-born Edward Wilmot Blyden embraced Herzl's Zionism as a template for Africa's redemption, and black newspapers in the United States expressed measured sympathy for Jewish victims of Russian pogroms. 1 The focus here is on the career of W. E. B. Du Bois, the preeminent African-American intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century, as a prism [End Page 53] through which to view the global impact on African-American attitudes toward Jews during the period marked by the rise of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. 2 Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868 of a family lineage he described as "a flood of Negro blood, a strain of French, a bit of Dutch, but, thank God! No 'Anglo-Saxon,'" William Edward Burghardt Du Bois became not only African America's leading thinker but an American master whose talents as a scholar, journalist, novelist, poet, activist and visionary were mostly ignored by the white Americans of his time. The recipient in 1895 of the first doctorate awarded to an African-American by Harvard for his history The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade (1896), he followed with The Philadelphia Negro (1899), the first serious study of the urban sociology of race relations, and The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the prophetic literary and political manifesto announcing that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." Du Bois was the moving force behind the creation of the interracial alliance which in 1909 formed the militantly integrationist National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) [End Page 54] whose journal, The Crisis, edited by him from 1910 to 1934, successfully challenged Booker T. Washington's philosophy of racial accommodationism. 3 Though Joel E. Spingarn, Arthur Spingarn, Henry Moskowitz, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Lillian Wald, and other Jews were prominent in the formation of the NAACP, Du Bois began his career tinged with fin de siècle anti-Semitism. Studying at the University of Berlin in the 1890s, he returned to the United States imbued not only with the latest in German scholarly methods but with his own version of the volkisch nationalism associated with historian Heinrich von Treitschke. Described by Du Bois as "the fire-eating pan-German" and "by far the most interesting" of his professors, Treitschke modernized Luther's lament that "the Jews are our misfortune." 4 Du Bois rejected Treitschke's disparagement of Africans as a race without a history and mulattoes as an inferior breed but absorbed to some degree Treitschke's view of Jews as degenerate cosmopolitans incapable of assimilating into the organic nation state. 5 Though Du Bois recollected that he "followed the Dreyfus case" and was aware of "Jewish pogroms and segregation in Russia," his interest did not then translate into fellow feeling. When visiting Poland during a summer recess, he was light complexioned enough to have a question whispered in his ear by the driver of a rickety cab in a town north of Slovenia. The driver asked whether Du Bois wanted to rent a room in the part of town "unter die Juden?" He "stared and then said yes. I stayed at a little Jewish inn." Yet despite being mistaken for one, Du Bois found Jews to be "a half-veiled mystery" lacking a "strong middle class" and, as he complained about the Jewish passengers on the ship that carried him back to America, typified by "the low mean cheating Pobel [rabble]." 6 [End Page 55] The same sentiments pervaded the unsettling passages in The Souls of Black Folk disparaging as "heir[s] to the slave baron&quot...

Remembering and Forgetting: The Vatican, the German Catholic Hierarchy, and the Holocaust

Abstract This study critically reviews We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, a statement the Vatican issued on March 16, 1998. Following a summary of the many positive developments in Catholic-Jewish relations since the Second Vatican Council's landmark Nostra Aetate of 1965, the article analyzes the 1998 pronouncement, focusing on a perceived attempt by the Vatican to absolve the Church of responsibility in the Holocaust. The study addresses the distinction the Vatican makes between Christian anti-Judaism and Nazi antisemitism, as well as its positive interpretation of the role Pope Plus XII and the German Catholic Church played during the Nazi era. Finally, it summarizes other statements by several national Catholic episcopates since the mid-1960s that address the anti-Jewish stance of their followers during the Nazi era. All of these contributed to a historic reconciliation between Catholics and Jews, but points of disagreement remain to be addressed.