German anti-Semitism played an undeniable role in the creation of the Third Reich, with writers such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain (who, despite being British born, found an intellectual home in Germany) drafting the anti-Semitic ideology on paper, and artists such as Richard Wagner setting it to music, so to speak. However, anti-Semitism was by no means an exclusively German plague, and whereas the Holocaust did carry a uniquely German element, it was not the culmination of a uniquely German loathing of European Jewry, but was the result of a much larger crisis in German identity.
German Unification
The 1871 unification of Germany came at a transitive period in European history in the midst of the Second Industrial Revolution. As both national politics and technology were changing rapidly, Germans were rightfully wondering what path the new Germany was taking. Many who had hoped that political unity would naturally entail cultural cohesion were disappointed when it became apparent that more work was to be done.
People looked to forge a new German identity with a large degree of urgency. Consequently, many Germans began defining the Volk by reaching out to Germanic antiquity while shunning the present state of German culture, which struggled to adapt with the implications of modern technology.
Runology, championed by Austrian occultist Guido von List, took on popularity, and ancient pagan religious practices found a new legitimacy, with sociologist Eugen Dühring claiming that “Nordic gods of antiquity were still sentient, vital forces residing in nature of old,” according to University of Wisconsin professor George Mosse. It was also at this time that the swastika found a new place in German society, for it was considered a symbol of Germanic antiquity despite (or perhaps because of) its Indian origins.
This longing for the old is better understood when one considers German linguistics; whereas in English, explains University of Melbourne Bernard Mees, the adjectives “German” and “Germanic” is almost indistinguishable, the former is translated from the German word deutsch while the latter is translated as germanisch. “Germanic and Germanicness are to German and Germanness what (classical) Roman and Romanness are to Italian and Italianness,” explains Mees.
Thus, when German thinkers said they aspired for a “Germanic” Germany, they were specifically longing for a return to their romanticized antique roots. The result was a volkish ideology that combined old Germanicness with Nineteenth Century romanticism.
Volkish Ideology
Given the emphasis that both ancient Germanic cultures and the romantics placed on natural surroundings, a strong element of Volkish ideology centered around the environment, and it was commonly believed that a certain kindredness existed between the people and these surroundings. As the Germans believed that their inhabitance of this land extended back thousands of years, it was thus thought that the German racial character was a product of this landscape.
The reconciliation between the traditional and the modern technology, which University of Maryland professor Jeffery Herf calls “reactionary modernism”, lay at the heart of Germany’s identity crisis, and although reactionary modernists took on many forms, National Socialism proved to be the ultimate attempt at reconciliation between the new and the old.
Although the Nazi regime had its differences with the Mystic Volkism of the early years of unification, there was nonetheless continuity in ideology, with Volkism sometimes invoked in the context of racial ideology during the Nazi era. Mosse points out that Nazism, unlike other strains of fascism in other countries, was rooted in “the primacy of the ideology of the Volk, nature, and race.”
The Failure of German Liberalism
As Herf points out, Germany was unique amongst industrialized countries due to the “inadequate and partial incorporation into German society” of Enlightenment philosophy. Whereas liberalism was relatively well entrenched within the French and English states (which were the cradles of Enlightenment philosophy), the German Empire had experienced only a limited incorporation of liberalism into its political traditions, but there was certainly a liberal force in Germany that proved consequential in the political upheavals between 1866 and 1871.
Following Prussia’s victory in the 1866 Prussian-Austrian War, the liberals found themselves aligned with Bismarck as a means of advancing the cause of national unification. “Most liberals wanted to work with Bismarck, not simply because they acknowledged his achievements but also because they hoped to use his power for their own purposes,” explained Stanford University professor James J. Sheehan. “Bismarck, in turn, wanted to use the liberals for his own ends: he needed their support not only to ensure the passage of his constitution but also to combat those who challenged his solution to the problem of national identity.”
This sort of Machiavellian maneuvering proved to be a source of contention within the liberal camp between the left, who were the most uneasy with Bismarck, and the liberals further to the right, who were more inclined to accept a partnership with the monarchy. Furthermore, political suffrage proved to be destructive for the liberals as their opponents mobilized against them. “Catholics, national minorities, particularists, and Social Democrats all entered the realm of electoral politics in movements overtly opposed to liberal policies and programs,” said Sheehan.
In a sign that the liberals were losing touch with the Volk, the 1877 Reichstag election saw the National Liberal political party marginalized by the increasingly popular Conservative and Social Democrat parties. The threat of the Social Democrats was reduced after that party was suppressed following the 1878 election, but German liberalism would never again return to the position of prominence it carried in the mid-1860s until the post-1945 era. A major moral restraint was lost when liberalism failed to prevail in the German Empire, thus paving the way for its reckless abuse of deadly modern technology in the Twentieth Century.
Conclusion
The rise of Hitler and the subsequent Holocaust is all too often attributed merely to anti-Semitism, most notably in Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The Third Reich existed, goes the argument, as a popular front to fulfill Germany’s longtime aspiration of “eliminationist anti-Semitism.” While it is true that anti-Semitism was rife in Germany when the Nazis came to power, it was hardly unique amongst European countries in that regard.
The Holocaust was the heinous culmination not just of anti-Semitism, but of deeply-rooted German insecurities (which were unrelated to anti-Semitism and affected non anti-Semitic Germans as well as anti-Semitic ones) that predate the 1871 unification. As the German Volk struggled to find an identity throughout the decades, events spiraled out of control until the country was brought to its knees in 1945. By then, millions had perished in both World Wars and the European Jewish community had been decimated.
Sources:
Herf, Jeffery. Reactionary modernism. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 1984.
Sheehan, James J. German liberalism in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999.
Mosse, George. The crisis of german ideology : Intellectual origins of the third reich. New York, NY: Grosset and Dunlap. 1964.
Bees, Bernard. Hitler and germanentum. Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2): 255--270. 2004.
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s willing executioners : ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York, NY: Knopf. 1996.
Bennett Murray - Bennett Murray wrote for his first publication in 2006, and has been writing ever since. Murray most recently worked for the Phnom Penh ...
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