S. Friedlaender Redemptive Anti-Semitism Source: S. Friedlaender, Chapter 3 in: Nazi Germany and the Jews , Vol. I - The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, (New York 1997), p. 73-112. Part A, B, C, D, E, F I On the afternoon of November 9, 1918, Albert Ballin, the Jewish owner of the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line, took his life. Germany had lost the war, and the Kaiser, who had befriended him and valued his advice, had been compelled to abdicate and flee to Holland, while in Berlin a republic was proclaimed. On the thirteenth, two days after the Armistice, Ballin was buried at Ohlsdorf, a suburb of Hamburg. In the midst of revolution,' writes Ballin's biographer, the city paused to pay tribute to its most distinguished citizen, and from Amerongen the ex-Kaiser telegraphed his condolences to Frau Ballin.' 1 Ballin's life and death were but one last illustration of the paradoxical existence of the Jews of Germany during the Second Reich. Some had achieved remarkable success but were held at arm's length; many felt “at home in Germany”, but were perceived as strangers; almost all were loyal citizens but engendered suspicion. Thus two years before the collapse, on October 11, 1916, by which time the military situation had reached a complete stalemate, the Prussian war minister signed a decree ordering a census of all Jews in the armed forces to determine... how many Jews subject to military duty were serving in every unit of the German armies.' 2 The War Ministry explained that it was continually receiving complaints from the population that large numbers of men of the Israelite faith who are fit for military service are either exempt from military duties or are evading their obligation to serve under every conceivable pretext.' 3 The census was held on November 1, 1916. From the beginning of the war, the Jews of Germany had, like all other Germans, joined the army; very soon a number of them became officers. For the caste like Prussian officer corps in particular, this was a bitter pill to swallow, and officer organisations turned to anti-Semitic groups to find ways of putting an end to these promotions 4 . A wave of rumors, originating both within and outside the army, described Jewish soldiers as lacking in ability and courage, and accused Jews in great numbers of shirking frontline duty, settling into rear-echelon office jobs or flocking into the “war economy corporations” established for the acquisition of raw materials and food supplies 5 . The industrialist Walther Rathenau, who was Jewish, had in fact become the head of the new War Resources Department in the War Ministry; and on the initiative of Ballin, the bankers Max Warburg and Carl Melchior (also Jewish), the Central Purchasing Company was established for acquiring foreign food products through a network of war corporations. According to extreme nationalist Germans, these corporations were becoming instruments of Jewish speculation and exploitation of the nation in its time of peril: The war profiteers were first of all essentially Jews,' wrote Gen. Erich Ludendorff in his memoirs. They acquired a dominant influence in the “war operations”... which gave them the occasion to enrich themselves at the expense of the German people and to take possession of the German economy, in order to achieve one of the power goals of the Jewish people.' 6 Hitler, in Mein Kampf , wrapped it all up in his own typical style: The general mood [in the army] was miserable. ...The offices were filled with Jews. Nearly every clerk was a Jews and nearly every Jew was a clerk...As regards economic life, things were even worse. Here the Jewish people had become really “indispensable.” The spider was slowly beginning to such the blood out of the people's pores. Through the war corporations, they had found an instrument with which, little by little, to finish off the nation's free economy.' 7 Due to the professional structure of the Jewish population, approximately 10 percent of the directors of the war corporations were Jews 8 . Continuous anti-Jewish attacks induced a Catholic Center deputy, Matthias Erzberger, to demand a Reichstag inquiry 9 . He was supported by a coalition of liberals and conservatives. Even some Social Democrats joined in 10 . It was in this atmosphere that the Prussian War Ministry announced its decision to conduct its census of Jews ( Judenzaehlung ). The Jews reacted, but only meekly. Warburg, then already one of the most influential Jews in imperial Germany, met with War Minister Stein in March 1917 to ask for the release of a statement that Jews were fighting as bravely as other Germans. Stein refused, and in order to underline the Jewish traits he most disliked, lectured Warburg about Heinrich Heine 11 . The results of the census were not published during the war, ostensibly out of consideration for the Jews, as they were termed “devastating” by officials of the War Ministry 12 . Immediately after the Armistice, pseudo results were leaked to the radical anti-Semitic Voelkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund by the Jew-hating General Wrisberg and used as anti-Jewish propaganda on a massive scale 13 . Only at the beginning of the 1920s did a systematic study of the material show it to be the greatest statistical monstrosity of which an administration had ever been responsible.' 14 Detailed analysis indicated that Jewish participation in frontline service was equivalent to that of the general population, with a minimal deviation due to age and occupational structure. The damage had nonetheless been done. Ernst Simon, who had volunteered for the army to find a sense of community with the German nation, perceived that the Judenzaehlung was more than the initiative of some malevolent officials. It was the real expression of a real mood: that we were strangers, that we did not belong, that we had to be specially tagged, counted, registered and dealt with.' 15 Walther Rathenau wrote to a friend in the summer of 1916: The more Jews are killed [in action] in this war, the more obstinately their enemies will prove that they all sat behind the front in order to deal in war speculation. The hatred will grow twice and threefold.' 16 After almost two decade of relative latency, the Jewish issue had resurfaced in full force in German political life during the 1912 Reichstag elections, which were soon dubbed the “Jewish elections” ( Judenwahlen ) 17 . The real political issue was the growth of the Left. However, as the Jews - opposed to (and by) the Conservatives and disappointed by the stand taken toward them by the National Liberals - turned to the Progressives and, in particular, to the Social Democrats, they became identified with the left-wing peril 18 . The elections marked the disappearance of the anti-Semitic splinter parties and represented a significant setback for the Conservative right. The Social Democrats emerged as the strongest single party on the German scene, more than doubling their number of seats in the Reichstag from 53 to 110. Of the 300 candidates favored by organisations in which Jews were prominent, 88 were elected 19 . These results proved that the majority of the voters did not manifestly harbour intense anti-Jewish feelings, but the reaction of the Right was different and immediate. It had become obvious to the right-wing press that Jewish money and the Jewish spirit were in control of the “gold” and the “red” internationals, those two most dangerous enemies of the German nation. Even for a publication as close to the Lutheran Church as the Christlichsoziale Reichsbote , the workers who voted for the Social Democrats were “driven by the Jewish whip” held by “the manipulators of international Jewish capitalism.” 20 Frantic activity now spread throughout the extreme right, with approximately twenty new ultra-nationalist and racist organisations springing up on the political scene. Some of them, such as the Reichshammerbund and the Germanenorden, were coalitions of previously existing groups 21 . Among larger groups, the evolution of the Pan-German League is particularly telling. In his previously mentioned 1912 pamphlet, If I Were the Kaiser , league press Heinrich Class fully spelledout a program for the complete expulsion of the Jews from German public life - that is, from public office, from the liberal professions, and from banks and newspapers. Jews would lose the right to own land. Jewish immigration would be banned, and all Jewish non-citizens deported. Those who were citizens would be subject to “alien Status” ( Fremdenrecht ). A Jew would be defined as a person belonging to the Jewish religious community on January 18, 1871, the day the German Empire was proclaimed, as would all the descendants of such persons, even if only one grandparent was Jewish 22 . A few months later a memorandum was submitted to the crown prince, Wilhelm II's eldest son, by another member of the league, Konstantin von Gebsattel; it proposed the same measures against the Jews as well as a “coup d'etat” to put an end to parliamentarianism in Germany. The crown prince - who later would become a member of the SS - was “captivated” by Gebsattel's memorandum and transmitted it to his father and to Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. Himself a strange mix of traditional conservatism and radical right-wing opinions 23 , the Kaiser was dismissive. He considered Gebsattel an “oddball,” the Pan-Germans who supported such plans “dangerous people,” and the idea of excluding the Jews from public life “downright childish”; Germany would be cutting itself off from civilized nations. The chancellor was more deferential to the crown prince, but no less negative 24 . The Association Against Jewish Arrogance (Verband gegen die Ueberhebung des Judentums) was established on February 11, 1912, by the remnants of the old anti-Semitic parties and various other anti-Semitic organisations. Its aim was the creation, under nationalist auspices, of a mass movement to achieve political change. One of their top priorities was to exclude the Jewish “race” from the nation's public life. The founding of the association, clearly linked to the 1912 elections, was but one more manifestation of the new right's determined “defence” against Juda .' 25 II Jews never represented more than approximately 1 percent of Germany's overall population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between the beginning of the century and 1933, that percentage slightly declined. The Jewish community, however, gained in visibility by gradually concentrating in the large cities, keeping to certain professions, and absorbing an increasing number of easily identifiable East European Jews 26 . The general visibility of the Jews in Germany was enhanced by their relative importance in the “sensitive” areas of business and finance, journalism and cultural activities, medicine and the law, and, finally, by their involvement in liberal and left-wing politics. The social discrimination to which the Jews were subjected, and their own striving for advancement and acceptance, easily explain their patterns of activity. Interpreted as Jewish subversion and domination, these patterns in turn led, at least in parts of German society, to further hostility and rejection. Of the fifty-two private banks in Berlin at the beginning of the nineteenth century, thirty were Jewish-owned. Later on Bismarck asked the Rothschilds to recommend a private banker (it was to be Gerson Bleichroeder), and Kaiser Wilhelm I chose for himself the banker Moritz Cohn. When, at the turn of the century, many private banks became shareholding companies Jews frequently held a controlling percentage of the shares or served as directors of the new enterprises. Add the banking aristocracy of the Warburgs, the Arnholds, the Friedlaender-Fulds, the Simons, the Weinbergs, and so on, to such financial potentates as chain-store owners Abraham Wertheim and Leonhard and Oskar Tietz, founding electrical industrialist Emil Rathenau, publisher Rudolf Mosse, and shipping magnate Albert Ballin, and it becomes obvious that Jews held an eminent and visible place in the financial world of imperial Germany 27 . The Jewish economic elite's particular function during the nineteenth century had been its decisive role in capital mobilisation and concentration through development of the Berlin stock market 28 , and linkage of the still relatively parochial German economy with world markets 29 . The centrality of “Jewish” banking during the Weimar period did not decrease 30 , contrary to what has sometimes been argued. But there was no correlation between Jewish economic activity and any kind of lasting political influence in German society. Culture was possibly the most sensitive domain. In March 1912 a telling exchange was triggered by an article written by a young Jewish intellectual, Moritz Goldstein, and published in the arts journal Kunstwart under the title “Deutsch-juedischer Parnass” (German-Jewish Parnassus). As Goldstein put it, We Jews administer the spiritual possessions of a people that denies us the right and the capability of doing so.' 31 After admitting to Jewish influence on the press and in the literary world, Goldstein re-emphasised the insuperable rift between the Jewish “adminstrators” of German culture, who believed they were speaking for and to the Germans, and the Germans themselves, who considered such presumption insufferable. What, then, was the way out? Zionism, Goldstein thought, was not option for people of his background and generation. In an emotional and most emphatic fashion, he called instead for an act of courage on the part of the Jews of Germany: that, in spite of their deep feelings for Germany and all things German, in spite of their centuries-long presence in the land, they must turn their backs on the host society and stop vowing ever-renewed and ever-unrequited love 32 . On the cultural level Jews should now turn to Jewish issues, not only for their own sake but to create a new type of Jew, new not in life but in literature.' 33 Goldstein's closing was on an emotional par with the rest: We demand recognition of a tragedy that, with a heavy heart, we have exposed to all.' 34 Goldstein's sharp diagnosis/tearful lament induced the editor of Kunstwart , Ferdinand Avenarius, to produce in the August issue a long comment entitled “Aussprachen mit Juden” (Debates with Jews). We are not anti-Semites,' he wrote. We know that there are domains in which the Jews are more able than we are, and that we have greater ability in others; we hope that with good will on both sides, peaceful co-operation will be possible, but we are convinced that relations cannot continue much longer in their present form.' Avenarius called for some sort of “negotiation” between “leaders” of both sides in order to avoid bitter cultural battles [ Kulturkaempfe ]...Given the growing excitement [Avenarius did not specify whose],' he did not believe that success could easily be achieved 35 . The argument was clear, the “we” and “they” even clearer. But as to the basic facts (though obviously not their interpretation), both Goldstein and (implicitly) Avenarius were not entirely wrong. As for the press ¯ excluding the great number of conservative and specifically Christian newspapers and periodicals, as well as most of the regional papers - there was, on the national level, a strong Jewish presence in ownership, editorial responsibility, and major cultural or political commentary. Rudolf Mosse's publishing empire included the Berliner Tageblatt , the Morgenzeitung , the Volkszeitung , and the Boersenblatt . The Ullstein family owned the Neues Berliner Tageblatt , the Abendpost , the Illustrierte Zeitung , and B.Z. am Mittag , “the first German paper based completely on street sales.” 36 The paper with the largest circulation, the Morgenpost , also belonged to Ullstein, as eventually did the Vossische Zeitung , “Berlin's oldest newspaper.” 37 Among the three most prominent publishers who took the largest share of the pre-1914 daily press - Mosse, Ullstein, and Scherl - the first two were Jews 38 . The relative importance of these three publishers would be altered somewhat in the twenties by the acquisition of Scherl by the ultra-right-wing Alfred Hugenberg and by the consequent rapid expansion of press holdings. The editors in chiand main editorial writers of many of the most influential newspapers (such as Theodor Wolff, editor of the Berliner Tageblatt ; Georg Bernhard, editor of the Vossische Zeitung ; and Bernhard Guttmann, the influential Berlin correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung ), were Jews, as were dozens of other political commentators, cultural critics, and satirists in a wide array of dailies and periodicals 39 . In book publishing Mosse and Ullstein were major figures, as was Samuel Fischer, who founded his publishing house in Berlin in 1886. Fischer, as important in the history of modern German literature as, for example, Random House or Scribner's in the United States, published Thomas Mann, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Hermann Hesse, among others 40 . Along with the Jewish publishers and editors in chief, there was a solid group of Jewish readers and theater- and concertgoers. A striving for Bildung (culture/education) had turned the Jewish bourgeoisie into the self-appointed (and ecstatic) carrier of German culture. Writing in December 1896 about the first performance of Gerhart Hauptmann's play Die versunkene Glocke (The Sunken Bell), Baroness Hildegard von Spitzemberg noted in her diary: The house was packed with Jews and Jew-companions and with the representatives of press and literature: Maximilian Harden, Hermann Sudermann, Erich Schmidt, Theodor Fontane, Ludwig Pietsch, the last [two] of whom, however, shook their heads disapprovingly and did not join in the frenetic applause of the poet's [playwright's] supporters.' 41 Fontane and Pietsch were non-Jews. References: 1. Lamar Cecil, Albert Ballin: Business and Politics in Imperial Germany 1888¯1918 (Princeton, N.J., 1967), p. 347. Cecil does not decide whether the overdose of sleeping pills was intentional or not. At the end of his novel A Princess in Berlin . Arthur R. G. Solmssen appends the (untitled) afterword: On August 31, 1935, the Board of Directors of the Hamburg-Amerika Line announced that henceforth the SS Albert Ballin would carry the name SS Hansa .' Arthur R. G. Solmssen, A Princess in Berlin (Hamondsworth, England, 1980). I am grateful to Sue Llewellyn for this information. 2. Werner T. Angress, “The German Army's Judenzaehlung' of 1916: Genesis¯Consequences¯Significance.” LBIY 23 ([London] 1978): 117ff. See also Egmont Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg (Goettingen, 1969), pp. 528ff. 3. Werner T. Angress, “The German Army's Judenzaehlung,” p. 117. 4. Werner Jochmann, “Die Ausbreitung des Antisemtismus,” in Werner E. Mosse, ed., Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution 1916¯1923 (Tuebingen, 1971), p. 421. 5. Ibid., p. 423. 6. Saul Friedlaender, “Political Transformation During the War and their Effect on the Jewish Question,” Herbert A. Strauss, ed., Hostages of Modernisation: Studies on Modern Anti-Semitism 1870¯1933/39: Germany¯Great Britain¯France (Berlin, 1993), p. 152. 7. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (London, 1974), p. 193. 8. Friedlaender, “Political Transformations,” p. 152. 9. Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik , p. 525. 10.Ibid., in particular note 42. 11.Chernow, The Warburgs , p. 172. 12.Jochmann, “Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus,” p. 427. 13.Ibid. 14.Ibid., p. 426. Jochmann quotes the classic study by the Jewish statistician and demographer Franz Oppenheimer, Die Judenstatistik des Preussischen Kriegsministeriums (Munich, 1922). 15.Ernst Simon, Unser Kriegserlebnis (1919) , quoted in Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik , p. 533. 16.Rathenau to Schwaner, August 4, 1916, quoted in Jochmann, “Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus,” p. 427. 17.See especially Werner T. Angress, “The Impact of the Judenwahlen of 1912 on the Jewish Question: A Synthesis,” LBIY 28 (1983): 367ff. 18.For the shift of the Jewish vote, its dynamics and political significance, see ibid., p. 373ff., as well as Marjorie Lamberti, Jewish Activism in Imperial Germany: The Struggle for Civil Equality (New Haven, Conn., 1978), and Jacob Toury's classic study, Die politischen Orientierungen der Juden in Deutschland: Von Jena bis Weimar (Tuebingen, 1966). 19.Angress, “Impact of the Judenwahlen of 1912,” p. 381. 20.Ibid., p. 390. 21.Uwe Lohalm, Voelkischer Radikalismus: Die Geschichte des deutsch-voelkischen Schutz-und-Trutz-Bundes 1919¯1923 (Hamburg, 1970), p. 30. 22.Daniel Frymann, Das Kaiserbuch: Politische Wahrheiten und Notwendigkeiten , 7th ed. (Leipzig, 1925), pp. 69ff. 23.For the distinction between the traditional and the new trends in German nationalism after 1912, see Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866¯1918 , vol. 2, Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (Munich, 1992), pp. 606ff. For the Kaiser's sometimes rabid anti-Jewish outbursts, see John C. G. Roehl's “Das beste waere Gas!” Die Zeit , Nov. 25, 1994. 24.Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886¯1914 (Boston, 1984), p. 287. 25.Angress, “Impact of the Judenwahlen of 1912,” p. 396. 26.In 1925 66.8 percent of all German Jews lived in the major cities, with Frankfurt and Berlin first and second in Jewish population. In 1871 36,326 Jews lived in the Greater Berlin area, accounting for 3.9 percent of a population of 931,984. In 1925 the official census for the same area indicated 172,672 Jews, or 4.3 percent of a general population of 4,024,165 (in Frankfurt that year, the Jewish population represented 6.3 percent). The number of Jews in Berlin was, in fact, probably higher than indicated by the official census, since many Jews did not register with Jewish communal organisations (the basis for the census), and a number of East European Jews were not registered anywhere at all. According to some estimates, as many as 20,000 Jews, or approximately 5 percent of the general population, were living in Greater Berlin in the immediate post war period. Gabriel Alexander, “Die Entwicklung der juedischen Bevoelkerung in Berlin zwischen 1871 und 1945,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch fuer Deutsche Geschichte , vol. 20 (Tel Aviv, 1991), pp. 287ff., an particularly pp. 292ff. Such urban concentration was enhanced by the high visibility of East European Jews in the major German cities. Jews from the East had long been in Germany and Austria, arriving in particular after the late-eighteenth-century partitions of Poland and the annexation of Polish territory by both Prussia and Austria. A hundred years later, from 1881 on, a decisive change took place, with the beginning of a series of major pogroms against Jewish communities in the western provinces of czarist Russia. A mass exodus of Jews¯most of them heading to the United States¯from Russian-Polish territory began. Of the 2,750,000 Jews who left Easter Europe for overseas between 1881 and 1914, a large proportion passed through Germany, mostly in the direction of the northern seaports Bremen and Hamburg, with a small number remaining in the country. For a detailed account see Shalom Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1880¯1940 (Tuebingen, 1959). At the same time a more substantial number of Galician and Romanian Jews settled in Austria, especially in Vienna. In 1900 7 percent of the Jews in Germany were Ostjuden , the percentage of East European Jews growing to 19.1 by 1925 and 19.8 by 1933. Ibid., p. 165. Moreover, their concentration in the large cities progressed at a rate faster than that of German Jewry's overall urbanization. In 1925 Eastern Jews represented 25.4 percent of Berlin's Jewish population, 27 percent of Munich's, 60 percent of Dresden's, and 80.7 percent of Leipzig's. Ibid. 27.See mainly Werner E. Mosse, “Die Juden in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft,” in Werner E. Mosse, ed., Juden im Wilhelminischen Deutschland 1890¯1914 (Tuebingen, 1976), pp. 69ff, 75ff. 28.Werner E. Mosse, Jews in the German Economy: The German-Jewish Economic Elite 1820¯1935 (Oxford, 1987), p. 396. 29.Ibid., pp. 398, 400. 30.Ibid., pp. 323ff (particularly p. 329). 31.Moritz Goldstein, “Deutsch-juedischer Parnass,” Kunstwart 25, no. 11 (Mar. 1912): 283. 32.Ibid., pp. 291¯92. 33.Ibid., p. 293. 34.Ibid., p. 294. 35.Ferdinand Avenarius, “Aussprachen mit Juden,” Kunstwart 25, no. 22 (Aug. 1912): 225. 36.These details and the quotations are taken from Ralph Max Engelman's Ph. D. dissertation, “Dietrich Eckart and the Genesis of Nazism” (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1971) pp. 31¯32. 37.Ibid. 38.Ibid., p. 32. 39.Maximilian Harden's Die Zukunft was “Jewish,” and so was Siegfried Jacobsohn's Schaubuehne (later Weltbuehne ). Otto Brahm's Freie Buehne fuer modernes Leben , succeeded by the Neue Rundschau , was “Jewish,” as were the leading cultural critics of the major daily papers, Fritz Engel, Alfred Kehr, Max Osborn, and Oskar Bies. Engelman, ibid. Soon Kurt Tucholsky would become the most visible¯and the most hated¯journalist-author of Jewish origin of the Weimar years. Siegried Breslauer would be associate editor of the Berliner Lokalanzeiger , Emil Faktor editor in chief of the Berliner Boersen-Courier , Norbert Falk, cultural affairs editor of the B.Z. am Mittag , Joseph Wiener-Braunsberg editor of Ulk , the satirical supplement of the Berliner Tagblatt , and many more. Bernd Soesemann, “Liberaler Journalismus in der Kultur der Weimarer Republik,” in Julius H. Schoeps, ed., Juden als Traeger buergerlicher Kultur in Deutschland (Bonn, 1989), p. 245. 40.Engelman, “Dietrich Eckart,” p. 33. 41.Ibid. Part B The situation was possibly even more extreme in Austria-Hungary. At the end of the nineteenth century, Jews owned more than 90 percent of the major banks in the Austrian part of the empire, and occupied nearly 80 percent of the key positions in the banking world 42 . In the Hungarian part, the Jewish economic presence, which benefited from the full support of the Hungarian aristocracy, was even more widespread. Above all, Jews were prominent among the great tycoons. They owned, edited, and very extensively contributed to most of the leading newspapers of Vienna. Though his words were somewhat exaggerated, it was nonetheless telling that Harry Wickham Steed, the London Times correspondent in the Austrian capital, could write that economically, politically and in point of general influence they [the Jews] are...the most significant element in the Monarchy.' 43 During the early decades of the nineteenth century, the harmonious assimilation of the Jews into German society, as in other countries of Western and Central Europe - later made formally possible by the full emancipation of 1869 and 1871 - could appear to many as a reasonable prospect 44 . More than anything else, the Jews themselves wanted to join the ranks of the German bourgeoisie; this collective “project” was undoubtedly their overriding goal 45 . Lay leaders and enlightened rabbis never tired of stressing the importance of Bildung und Sittlichkeit (manners and morals) 46 . Although the great majority of Jews did not abandon Judaism entirely, the collective effort of adaptation led to deep reshapings of Jewish identity in the religious domain as well as in a variety of secular pursuits and attitudes 47 . The modern German Jew, however, did create - consciously or not - a specific subculture that, although aiming at integration, resulted in a new form of separation 48 . Religious-cultural distinctiveness was reinforced by the increasingly negative reactions of society in general to the very rapidity of the Jews' social and economic ascent. Economic success and growing visibility without political power produced, in part at least, their own nemesis. In his biography of Bismarck's banker, Gerson Bleichroeder, Fritz Stern alluded to the shift in attitudes from the 1870s on: [Bleichroeder's] middle years described the moment of the least troubled amalgamation of German and Jewish society; his declining years [he died in 1893] marked the first organised repudiation of that amalgamation, and his very success was taken as a warrant for repudiation.' 49 One may readily agree with German historian Thomas Nipperdey that in comparison to that of France, Austria, or Russia, German anti-Semitism on the eve of World War I was certainly not the most extreme. One may also agree with his statement that pre-1914 anti-Semitism should be evaluated both within its own historical context and from the perspective of later events (“under the sign of Auschwitz”) 50 . However, his related statement that the Jews of Germany themselves considered the anti-Semitism of those years a marginal issue, a remnant of prior discrimination that would disappear in due time is less convincing 51 . Any perusal of contemporary testimonies indicates that Jews held diverse views regarding the attitudes of society in general toward them. It needs only Moritz Goldstein's lament to show that some German Jews were quite aware of the fact that the chasm between them and the surrounding society was growing. This was true not only in Germany. Two equally remarkable literary representations of Austria before the Great War, Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday and Arthur Schnitzler's The Road into the Open , provide contrary assessments of how the Jews perceived their own situation. For Zweig anti-Semitism was practically nonexistent, for Schnitzler it was at the centre of his characters' consciousness and existence. In any event, whatever the relative strength of pre-war anti-Semitism may have been, its presence was a necessary condition for the massive anti-Jewish hostility that spread throughout Germany during the war years and increasingly after the defeat of 1918. Moreover, the pre-war scene also provided some of the ideological tenets, political demands, and institutional frameworks that endowed post war anti-Semitism with its early structures and immediate goals. When one considers the wider European scene, the achievements, political attitudes, and cultural options of Jews at the end of the nineteenth century appear as those of members of an identifiable minority, stemming in part from the peculiar historical development of this minority. But these achievements and options were first and foremost those of individuals whose goal was the kind of success that led to integration into society in general. For the anti-Semite, however, the situation looked entirely different: Jewish striving and Jewish success, real or imaginary, were perceived as the behaviour of a foreign and hostile minority group acting collectively to exploit and dominate the majority. As long as merely a few Jews, under the patronage of kings and princes, managed to climb the social ladder, their limited number, the function they fulfiled, and the protection they were granted checked the spread of hostility. When, as Hannah Arendt pointed out in somewhat different terms 52 , emancipation allowed for the social advancement of a large number of Jews within a context in which their social function was losing its specificity and in which political power no longer backed them, they increasingly became the targets of various forms of social resentment. Modern anti-Semitism was fueled by this conjunction of increasing visibility and increasing weakness. A common trigger of various forms of non-racial anti-Jewish resentment was undoubtedly the very existence of a Jewish difference. Liberals demanded that, in the name of universalist ideals, the Jews should accept the complete disappearance of their particular group identity; nationalists, on the other hand, demanded such disappearance for the sake of a higher particularist identity, that of the modern nation-state. Although the majority of Jews were more than eager to travel a long way down the road to cultural and social assimilation, most of them rejected total collective disappearance. Thus, as moderate as Jewish particularism may have been, it antagonised its liberal supporters and incensed its nationalist opponents. Jewish visibility in highly sensitive domains exacerbated the irritant in difference. Racial anti-Semites also claimed that their anti-Semitic campaign was based on the Jews' difference. However, whereas for the non-racial anti-Semite such difference could and should have been totally effaced by the complete assimilation and disappearance of the Jews as such, the racial anti-Semite argued that the difference was indelible, that it was inscribed in the blood. For the non-racial anti-Semite, a solution to the “Jewish question” was possible within society in general; for the racial anti-Semite, because of the dangerous racial impact of Jewish presence and equality, the only solution was exclusion (legal and possibly physical) from society in general. This well-known basic picture should be completed by two aspect of the modern anti-Jewish scene that are either barely mentioned by many historians or considered all-encompassing by others: the survival of traditional religious anti-Semitism and the related proliferation of conspiracy theories in which the Jews always played a central role. Whether or not Christian hostility toward the Jews was intermittent, whether or not the Jews themselves contributed to the exacerbation of this hostility 53 does not alter the fact that, in dogma, ritual, and practice, Christianity branded the Jews with what appeared to be an indelible stigma. That stigma had been effaced neither by time nor by events, and throughout the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries, Christian religious anti-Semitism remained of central importance in Europe and in the Western world in general. In Germany, apart from the general motives of Christian anti-Semitism, Christian anti-Jewish attitudes also stemmed from the particular situation of the Churches throughout the Imperial era. German Catholics were antagonised by Jewish support for the National Liberals, who were Bismarck's allies during his anti-Catholic campaign of the 1870s, the Kulturkampf 54 ; conservative Protestants were firmly committed to the Christian nature of the Second Reich, and even liberal Protestants, in their attempt to rationalise Christianity, entered into confrontations with liberal Jews keen on demonstrating the pagan core of the Christian religion 55 . Finally, in Germany, France, and Austria, political use of Christian anti-Jewish themes proved successful, at least for a time, in appealing to lower-middle-class voters. For some historians the rootedness and the very permanence of Christian anti-Judaism has been the only basis of all forms of modern anti-Semitism. Jacob Katz, for example, sees modern anti-Semitism as but a continuation of the pre-modern rejection of Judaism by Christianity, even when it [modern anti-Semitism] renounced any claim to be legitimized it or even professed to be antagonistic to Christianity.' In Katz's view any claims for an anti-Semitism that would be beyond “the Jewish Christian division” were but a mere declaration of intent. No anti-Semite, even if he himself was anti-Christian, ever forwent the use of those anti-Jewish arguments rooted in the denigration of Jews and Judaism in earlier Christian times.' 56 This interpretation is excessive, but the impact of religious anti-Judaism on other modern forms of anti-Semitism is apparent in several ways. First, a vast reservoir of almost automatic anti-Jewish reactions continued to accumulate as a result of early exposure to Christian religious education and liturgy, and to everyday expressions drawn from the pervasive and ongoing presence of the various denominations of the Christian creed. Second, the very notion of “outsider” applied by modern anti-Semitism to the Jew owed its tenacity not only to Jewish difference as such but also to the depth of its religious roots. Whatever else could be said about the Jew, he was first and foremost the “other,” who had rejected Christ and revelation. Finally, perhaps the most powerful effect of religious anti-Judaism was the dual structure of the anti-Jewish image inherited from Christianity. On the one hand, the Jew was a pariah, the despised witness of the triumphal onward march of the true faith; on the other, from the Late Middle Ages onward, an opposite image appeared in popular Christianity and in millenarian movements, that of the demonic Jew, the perpetrator of ritual murder, the plotter against Christianity, the herald of the Antichrist, the potent and occult emissary of the forces of evil. It is this dual image that reappears in some major aspects of modern anti-Semitism. And, its threatening and occult dimension became the recurrent theme of the main conspiracy theories of the Western world. The of Christian phantasm a Jewish plot against the Christian community may itself have been a revival of the pagan notion that the Jews were enemies of humanity acting in secret against the rest of the world. According to a popular medieval Christian legend, a secret rabbinical synod convened periodically from all over Europe to determine which community was in turn to commit ritual murder.' 57 From the eighteenth century on new conspiracy theories also pointed to threats from a number of non-Jewish occult groups, Freemasons, Illuminati, Jesuits. In the landscape of modernity, paranoid political thought was acquiring a permanence of sorts. What is the distinguishing thing about the paranoid style,' wrote Richard Hofstadter, is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a vast' or gigantic' conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade.' 58 Within this array of occult forces, the Jews were the plotters par excellence, the manipulators hidden behind all other secret groups that were merely their instruments. In the notorious two-pronged secret threat of “Jews and Freemasons,” the latter were perceived as instruments of the former 59 . Jewish conspiracies, in other words, were at the very top of the conspiratorial hierarchy, and their aim was nothing less than the total domination of the world. The centrality of the Jews in this phantasmic universe can be explained only by its roots in the Christian tradition. Like any other national anti-Semitism at the end of the nineteenth century and during the years preceding World War I, anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany was determined, as I have already indicated, both by dominant Christian and modern European trends and by the impact of specific historical circumstances, among which several further aspects should be stressed. In general terms a structural dimension needs to be emphasised in distinguishing, for example, between French and German modes of national integration, with the relevance of such a distinction in terms of anti-Jewish attitudes becoming clearly apparent. Since the French Revolution, the French model of national integration had been that of a process fostered and implemented by the state on the basis of universal principles, those of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Since the romantic revolution, the German model of national integration had been derived from and predicated upon the idea of the nation as a closed ethno-cultural community independent of and sometimes opposed to the state. Whereas the French model implied the construction of national identity by way of a centralised educational system and all other means of socialisation at the disposal of the state, the German model often posited the existence of inherited characteristics belonging to a pre-existing organic community 60 . By way of state-directed socialisation and in the name of the secular republic's universal values, a Jew could become French, and not merely on a purely formal level. (This despite intensely hostile reactions from that substantial part of French society that rejected the Revolution, the republican state, and thus the Jews, identified as foreigners allied with the state and as carriers of the secular, subversive values of social upheaval and as carriers othe secular, subversive values of social upheaval and modernity.) Regardless of formal emancipation and equality of civic rights, the Jew was often kept at a distance by a German national community fundamentally closed to a group whose recognisable difference seemed to society in general to be rooted in alien ethno-cultural - and, increasingly, racial - soil. A somewhat different (but not incompatible) interpretation has pointed to the fact that in France legal emancipation carried a prime expectation of gradual Jewish assimilation (also by way of the French educational system and its universalist values), whereas in Germany a widely shared position was that the process of assimilation should be imposed and monitored by bureaucratic means, and that full emancipation should be granted only at the end of the process. As time went by, in Germany the success of Jewish assimilation was increasingly questioned. Therefore, even after the Jews of Germany were granted full emancipation, anti-Semites of all hues - and even liberals - could argue that total assimilation had not really been achieved and that the results of emancipation were problematic 61 . The situation in Germany was further exacerbated by developments specific to the second half of the nineteenth century, mainly the various aspects of an extremely rapid process of modernisation. By entirely transforming the country's social structures and by threatening its existing hierarchies, the onof German modernisation seemed to endanger hallowed cultural values and the organic links of the community 62 ; at the same time it seemed to allow the otherwise incomprehensible social ascent of the Jews, who were thus perceived as the promoters, carriers, and exploiters of that modernisation. The Jewish threat now appeared to be both penetration by a foreign element into the innermost texture of the national community and furthering, by way of that penetration, not of modernity as such (enthusiastically embraced by the majority of German society) but of the evils of modernity. It is within this context that other developments peculiar to Germany acquire their full significance. First, after the rise and fall of the German anti-Semites parties between the mid-1870s and the late 1890s, anti-Jewish hostility continued to spread in Germany society at large through a variety of other channels - economic and professional associations, nationalistic political organisations, widely influential cultural groups. The rapid increase of such institutionalised infusions of anti-Jewish attitudes into the very heart of society did not take place - or at least not on such a scale - in other major Western or Central European countries. Second, in Germany a full-blown anti-Semitic ideology was systematically elaborated; it allowed more or less diffuse anti-Jewish resentment to adopt ready-made intellectual frameworks and formulas that in turn were to foster more extreme ideological constructs during the coming years of crisis. Such specific ideologisation of German anti-Semitism was particularly visible, in two different ways, with regard to racial anti-Semitism. In its mainly biological form, racial anti-Semitism used eugenics and racial anthropology to launch a “scientific” inquiry into the racial characteristics of the Jew. The other strand of racial anti-Semitism, in its particularly German, mystical form, emphasised the mythic dimensions of the race and the sacredness of Aryan blood. This second strand fused with a decidedly religious vision, that of a German (or Aryan) Christianity, and let to what can be called “redemptive anti-Semitism.” References: 42 Bernard Michel, Banques et banquiers en Autriche au début du XXe Siècle (Paris, 1976), p. 312. 43 Robert S. Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Josef (Oxford, 1989), p. 170. The extraordinary role of the Jews in Viennese culture at the turn of the century has been systematically documented in Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867¯1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge, England, 1989). 44 For the historical background of emancipation, see Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation 1770¯1870 (New York, 1978). 45 Shulamit Volkov, “Die Verbuergerlichung der Juden in Deutschland als Paradigma,” in Juedisches Leben und Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1990), pp. 112ff. 46 See in particular George L. Mosse, “Jewish Emancipation: Between Bildung and Respectability,” in Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg, eds., The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover, N.H., 1985), pp. 1ff. 47 Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany 1749¯1824 (Detroit, 1967). 48 David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry 1780¯1840 (New York, 1987). 49 Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichraeder and the Building of the German Empire (New York, 1977), p. 461. 50 Nipperdey, Machtstaat vor der Demokratie , p. 289. 51 Ibid., p. 290. 52 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; reprint, New York, 1973), pp. 11ff. 53 For debates on these issues see in particular Israel Y. Yuval, “Vengeance and Damnation, Blood and Defamation: From Jewish Martyrdom to Blood Libel Accusations,” Zion 58, no. 1 (1993): 33ff.; and Zion 59, no. 2¯3 (1994) (Hebrew). 54 Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870¯1914 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975) pp. 96¯98. 55 Ibid., pp. 209¯10. 56 Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism 1700¯1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 319. 57 Amos Funkenstein, “Anti-Jewish Propaganda: Pagan, Christian and Modern,” Jerusalem Quarterly 19 (1981): 67. 58 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Chicago, 1979), p. 29. 59 Jacob Katz, Jews and Freemasons in Europe 1723¯1939 , (Cambridge, England, 1970), particularly pp. 148ff. 60 Such distinctions have been implicit in some of the historical work published in the 1960s on the special course of German history during the nineteenth century; these theses have been recently reformulated and systematised by political sociologists. See in particular Pierre Birnbaum, “Nationalismes: Comparaison France-Allemagne,” in La France aux Français: Histoire des haines nationalistes (Paris, 1993), pp. 300ff. 61 For the comparative part of the argument, see mainly Reinhard Ruerup, Emanzipation und Antisemtismus: Studien zur “Judenfrageî der buergerlichen Gesellschaft (Goettingen, 1975), pp. 17¯18. 62 For a clear summary of German modernisation and its impact, see Volker R. Berghahn, Modern Germany: Society, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1987). For the voelkisch reactions to this evolution, see George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964); and Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley, Calif., 1961) Part C III Whereas ordinary racial anti-Semitism is one element within a wider racist world view, in redemptive anti-Semitism the struggle against the Jews is the dominant aspect of a world view in which other racist themes are but secondary appendages. Redemptive anti-Semitism was born from the fear of racial degeneration and the religious belief in redemption. The main cause of degeneration and the religious belief in redemption. The main cause of degeneration was the penetration of the Jews into the German body politic, into German society, and into the German bloodstream. Germanhood and the Aryan world were on the path to perdition if the struggle against the Jews was not joined; this was to be a struggle to the death. Redemption would come as liberation from the Jews - as their expulsion, possibly their annihilation. This new anti-Semitism has been depicted as part and parcel of the revolutionary fervour of the early nineteenth century, particularly of the revolutionary spirit of 1848. But it should be pointed out that the main bearers of the new anti-Jewish mystique had all turned against their revolutionary pasts; when Judaism was mentioned in their revolutionary writings, it was in a purely metaphorical sense (mainly as representing Mammon or “the Law”), and whatever revolutionary terminology remained in their new anti-Semitism was meant as “radical change,” as “redemption” in a strongly religious sense, or, more precisely, in a racial-religious sense 63 . Various themes of redemptive anti-Semitism can be found in voelkisch ideology in general, but the run-of-the-mill voelkisch obsessions were usually too down-to-earth in their goals to belong to the redemptive sphere. Among the voelkisch ideologues, only the philosopher Eugen Duehring and the biblical scholar Paul de Lagarde came close to this sort of anti-Semitic eschatological worldview. The source of the new trend has to be sought elsewhere, in that meeting point of German Christianity, neromanticism, the mystical cult of sacred Aryan blood, and ultraconservative nationalism: the Bayreuth circle. I intentionally single out the Bayreuth circle rather than Richard Wagner himself. Although redemptive anti-Semitism derived its impact from the spirit of Bayreuth, and the spirit of Bayreuth would have been non-existent without Richard Wagner, the depth of his personal commitment to this brand of apocalyptic anti-Semitism remains somewhat contradictory. That Wagner's anti-Semitism was a constant and growing obsession after the 1851 publication of his Das Judentum in der Musik ( Judaism in Music ) is unquestionable. That the maestro saw Jewish machinations hidden in every nook and cranny of the new German Reich is notorious. That the redemption theme became the leitmotiv of Wagner's ideology and work during the last years of his life is no less generally accepted. Finally, that the disappearance of the Jews was one of the central elements of his vision of redemption seems also well established. But what, in Wagner's message, was the concrete meaning of such a disappearance? Did it mean the abolition of the Jewish spirit, the vanishing of the Jews as a separate and identifiable cultural and ethnic group, or did redemption imply the actual physical elimination of the Jews? This last interpretation has been argued by, among others, historians such as Robert W. Gutman, Hartmut Zelinsky, and Paul Lawrence Rose 64 . The last in particular identifies Wagner's “revolutionary anti-Semitism” and its supposedly exterminatory streak with the composer's revolutionary ardor of 1848. In Judaism in Music , the annihilation of the Jew (and the pamphlet's notorious final words: “the redemption of Ahasuerus - going under!”) most probably means the annihilation of the Jewish spirit. In this finale the maestro heaps dithyrambic praise upon the political writer Ludwig Boerne, a Jew who in his eyes exemplified the redemption from Jewishness into “genuine manhood” by “ceasing to be a Jew.” 65 Boerne's example is manifestly the path to be collectively followed. But Wagner's writings of the late 1870s and the 1880s and the redemptive symbolism of the Ring and especially of Parsifal , are indeed extraordinarily ambiguous whenever the Jewish theme directly or indirectly appears. Whether redemption from erotic lust, from worldly carvings, from the struggles for power is achieved, as in the Ring , by way of self-annihilation or, as in Parsifal , by mystical purification and the rebirth of a sanctified Germanic Christendom, the Jew rthe symbol of the worldly lures that keep humanity in shackles. Thus the redemptive struggle had to be a total struggle, and the Jew, like the evil and unredeemable Klingsor in Parsifal , had to disappear. In Siegfried the allusion is even more direct: The Germanic hero Siegfried kills the repulsive Nibelung dwarf Mime, whom Wagner himself identifies, according to Cosima Wagner's diaries, as a “ Juedling. ” 66 All in all the relation between Siegfried and Mime, overloaded with the most telling symbolism, was probably meant as a fierce anti-Semitic allegory of the relation between German and Jew - and of the ultimate fate of the Jew 67 . Even the Master's jokes, like his “wish” that all Jews be burned at a performance of Lessing's Nathan the Wise 68 , expressed the underlying intensity of his exterminatory fantasies. And yet, Wagner's ideas about the Jews remained inconsistent, and the number of Jews in his entourage, from the pianists Carl Tausig and Josef Rubinstein to the conductor Hermann Levi and the impresario Angelo Neuman, is well known. Indeed, Wagner's behavior toward Levi was often overtly sadistic, and Rubinstein was a notoriously self-hating Jew. Yet these Jews belonged to the maestro's close entourage, and, more significant, Wagner gave Neumann considerable leeway regarding the handling of contracts and performances of his works: No consistently fanatical anti-Semite would have allowed such a massive compromise. Although Wagner himself embraced the theoretical racism of the French essayist Arthur de Gobineau, the intellectual foundation of redemptive anti-Semitism were mainly fostered and elaborated by the other Bayreuthians, especially after the composer's death, during the reign of his widow, Cosima: Hans von Wolzogen, Ludwig Scheemann, and, first and foremost, the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain. In a classic study of the Bayreuth Circle, Winfried Schueler defined Bayreuth's special significance within the anti-Semitic movement and Chamberlain's own decisive contribution: It is in the nature of anti-Semitic ideologies to use a more or less prominent friend-foe model. What nonetheless gives Bayreuth's anti-Semitism an unmistakably particular aspect is the resoluteness with which the opposition between Germandom and Jewry is raised to the position of the central theme of world history. In Chamberlain's Foundations [his 1899 magnum opus, The Foundation of the Nineteenth Century ] this dualistic image of history finds its tersest formulation.' 69 In line with Bayreuth's oft-repeated leitmotiv, Chamberlain called for the birth of a German-Christian religion, a Christianity cleansed of its Jewish spirit, as the sole basis for regeneration. In other words, the redemption of Aryan Christianity would be achieved only through the elimination of the Jew. But even here it is not entirely clear whether or not the redemptive struggle against the Jews was to be waged against the Jewish spirit only. In the closing lines of volume 1, after stating that in the nineteenth century, amid a chaos of mixed breeds, the two “pure” races that stood facing each other were the Jews and the German, Chamberlain writes: No arguing about “humanity” can alter the fact that this means a struggle. Where the struggle is not waged with cannon-balls, it goes on silently in the heart of society.... But this struggle, silent though it be, is above all others a struggle for life and death.' 70 Chamberlain probably did not knowwhat he meant by this in terms of concrete action, but he undoubtedly offered the most systematic formulation of what he considered the fundamental struggle shaping the course of world history. Three years after the publication of Chamberlain's Foundations , the Frankfurter Zeitung had to admit that it has caused more of a ferment than any other appearance on the book market in recent years.' 71 By 1915 the book had sold more than one hundred thousand copies and was being widely referred to. As the years went by, Chamberlain, who in 1908 had married Richard and Cosima Wagner's daughter, Eva, became ever more obsessed with the “Jewish question.” In nightmares, he reported, he saw himself kidnapped by Jews and sentenced to death 72 . My lawyer friend in Munich,' he informed an old acquaintance, tells me that there is no living being whom the Jews hate more than me.' 73 The war, and even more so the early years of the Weimar Republic, drove his obsession to its utmost limits. Hitler visited him in Bayreuth in 1923: The by now paralysed prophet of redemptive anti-Semitism was granted the supreme happiness of meeting - and recognising as such - Germany's saviour from the Jews 74 . IV The impact of the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution on the European imagination was stronger than that of any other event since the French Revolution. Mass death, shattering political upheavals and visions of catastrophes to come fueled the pervasive apocalyptic mood that settled over Europe 75 . Beyond nationalist exacerbation in several countries, the hopes, fears, and hatreds of millions crystallised along the main political divide that would run through the history of the following decades: fear of revolution on one side, demand for it on the other. Those who feared the revolution frequently identified its leaders with the Jews. Now the proof for the Jewish world conspiracy was incontrovertible: Jewry was about to destroy all established order, annihilate Christianity, and impose its dominion. In her 1921 book, World Revolution , the English historian Nesta Webster asked, who are... the authors of the Plot?....What is their ultimate object in wishing to destroy civilization? What do they hope to gain by it? It is this apparent absence of motive, this seemingly aimless campaign of destruction carried on by the Bolsheviks of Russia, that has led many people to believe in the theory of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity.' 76 Webster was among these believers, and so, in his own way, at the time, was Thomas Mann. We also spoke of the type of Russian Jew, the leader of the world revolutionary movement,' Mann wrote in his diary on May 2, 1918, recording a conversation with Ernst Bertram, that explosive mixture of Jewish intellectual radicalism and Slavic Christian enthusiasm.' He added: A world that still retains an instinct of self-preservation must act against such people with all the energy that can be mobilised and with the swiftness of martial law.' 77 The most explosive ideological mixture present in post war Germany was a fusion of constant fear of the Red menace with nationalist resentment born of defeat. The two elements seemed to be related, and the chaotic occurrences that marked the early months of the post-Imperial regime seemed to confirm the worst suspicions and fuel the fires of hatred. Two months after Germany's defeat, the extreme left-wing revolutionary Spartacists attempted to seize power in Berlin. The uprising failed, and on the evening of January 15, 1919, its main leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, probably having been betrayed, were arrested at their hiding place in Berlin-Wilmersdorf 78 . They were brought to the Eden Hotel, the headquarters of the Garde-Kavallerie-Schuetzen-Division, where they were interrogated by a Captain Pabst. Liebknecht was led out first, taken by car to the Tiergarten, and “shot while trying to escape.” Luxemburg, already brutally beaten at the Eden, was dragged out half dead, moved from one car to another, and then shot. Her body was thrown into the Landwehrkanal, where it remained until March. A military tribunal acquitted most of the officers directly involved in the murders (sentencing only two of them to minimal imprisonment), and Defense Minister Gustav Noske, a Social Democrat, duly signed these unlikely verdicts. Rosa Luxemburg and her closest companions among the Berlin Spartacists, Leo Jogisches and Paul Levi, were Jews. The prominence of Jews among the leaders of the revolution in Bavaria added fuel to the already passionate anti-Semitic hatred of the Right as did their role among the Berlin Spartacists. It was Kurt Eisner, the Jewish leaderof the Independent Socialist Party (USPD) in Bavaria, who toppled the Wittelsbach dynasty, which for centuries had given Bavaria its kings. During his short term as prime minister, Eisner added enemies by publishing incriminating archives regarding Germany's responsibility for the outbreak of the war and appealing to the German people to help in rebuilding devastated areas of enemy territory, which was simply interpreted as a call for the enslavement of Germans from children to old people, [who would] be obliged to carry stones for the war-torn areas.' 79 On February 21, 1919, Eisner was assassinated by Count Anton Arco-Valley, a right-wing law student. After a brief interim government of majority Socialists, the first of two Republics of the Councils was established. In fact only a minority among the leaders of the Bavarian republics were of Jewish origin, but some of their most visible personalities could identified as such 80 . Exacerbated right-wing opinion accused these Jewish leaders of being responsible for the main atrocity committed by the Reds: the shooting of hostages in the cellar of the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich. To this day the exact sequence of events is unclear. Apparently, on April 26, 1919, seven activists of the radical anti-Semitic Thule Society, among them its secretary, Countess Heila von Westarp, were detained at the organisation's office. Two officers of the Bavarian Army and a Jewish artist named Ernst Berger were added to the seven Thule members. On April 30, after news reached Munich, that the counter-revolutionary volunteer units, the Free Corps of Franz Freiherr Ritter von Epp, had killed Red prisoners in the town of Starnberg, the commander of the Red forces, a former navy man named Rudold Egelhofer, ordered the shooting of the hostages. These executions, an isolated atrocity, became the quintessential illustration of Jewish Bolshevik terror in Germany; in the words of British historian Reginald Phelps, this murder of hostages goes far to explain... the passionate wave of anti-Semitism that spread because the deed was alleged to represent the vengeance of “Jewish Soviet leaders” ...on anti-Semitic foes.' Needless to say, the fact that Egelhofer and “all those directly connected with the shooting” were not Jews, and that one of the victims was Jewish, did not change these perceptions in the least 81 . The impact of the situation in Berlin and Bavaria was amplified by revolutionary agitation in other parts of Germany. According to the pro-Nazi French historian Jacques Benoist-Mechin, revolutionaries of Jewish background were no less active in various other regional upheavals: In Magdeburg, it is Brandes; in Dresden, Lipinsky, Geyer, and Fleissner; in the Ruhr, Markus and Levinsohn; in Bremerhaven and Kiel, Gruenewalde and Kohn; in the Palatinate, Lilienthal and Heine.' 82 What is important here is not the accuracy of every detail but the widespread attitude it expressed. These events in Germany were perceived in relation to simultaneous upheavals in Hungary: the establishment of Bela Kun's Soviet Republic and the fact that the “Jewish” presence was even more massive there than in Berlin and Munich. The British historian of Central Europe R. W. Seton-Watson noted in May 1919: Anti-Semitic feeling is growing steadily in Budapest (which is not surprising, considering that not only the whole Government, save 2, and 28 out of the 36 ministerial commissioners are Jews, but also a laproportof the Red officers).' 83 Some of these revolutionaries, such as the notorious Tibor Szamuely, were indeed downright sinister figures 84 . Finally, the massive disproportion of leaders of Jewish origin among the Bolsheviks themselves seemed to give cogency to what had become a pervasive myth that spread and resonated throughout the Western world 85 . There was no mystery in the fact that Jews joined the revolutionary left in large numbers. These men and women belonged to the generation of newly emancipated Jews who had abandoned the framework of religious tradition for the ideas and ideals of rationalism and, more often than not, or socialism (or Zionism). Their political choices derived both from the discrimination to which they had been subjected, mainly in Russia but also in Central Europe, and from the appeal of the socialist message of equality. In the new socialist world, all of suffering humanity would be redeemed, and with that, the Jewish stigma would disappear. It was, for at least some of these “non-Jewish Jews,” 86 a vision of a secularised messianism, which may have sounded like a distant echo of the massage of the Prophets they no longer recognised. In fact, almost all of them were actually hostile, in the name of revolutionary universalism, to anything Jewish. In no way did they represent the political tendencies of the great majority of the Central and Western European Jewish populations, which were politically liberal or close to the Social Democrats, only a fraction was decidedly conservative. For example, the German Democratic Party, favoured by most German Jews, was the very epitome of the liberal centre of the political scene 87 . Much of this was ignored by the non-Jewish public. Particularly in Germany the nationalist camp's accumulated hatred needed a pretext and a target for its outpourings. And so it pounced on the revolutionary Jews. Rosa Luxemburg and the Jewish leaders in Bavaria represented the threat of Jewish revolution. For the nationalists the appointment of a number of Jewish cabinet ministers and other high officials proved that the hated republic was indeed in Jewish hands; the Right could point to Hugo Haase, Otto Landsberg, Hugo Preuss, Eugen Schiffer, Emanuel Wurm, Oskar Cohn, and to the most visible Jewish minister of all, Walther Rathenau 88 . Rosa Luxemburg had been murdered on January 15, 1919; Walther Rathenau, appointed foreign minister barely six months before, was assassinated on June 25, 1922. Rathenau's murderers - Erwin Kern (aged twenty-four) and Hermann Fischer (twenty-six), both members of a Free Corps unit called Naval Brigade Ehrhardt, and their accomplices Ernst Werner Techow (twenty-one), his brother Gerd (sixteen), and Ernst von Salomon, also a former Free Corps member - were, in Salomon's words, “young men from good families.” 89 At their trial Techow declared that Rathenau was one of the Elders of Zion 90 . The canonical text of the Jewish-conspiracy theorists, Protocols of the Elders of Zion , was secretly fabricated in the mid-1890s by order of Piotr Rachkovsky, chief of the Paris office of the Okhrana, the czarist secret police 91 . The Protocols comprised elements of two works from the 1860s, a French anti-Napoleon III pamphlet and a German anti-Semitic novel, Biarritz , by one Hermann Goedsche 92 . the entire concoction was meant to fight the spread of liberalism inside the Russian Empire. Rachkovsky was merely following the rich tradition of attributing worldwide conspiracies to Jews. References: 63 The argument for the definition of this new anti-Semitic current as “revolutionary anti-Semitism” has been made in Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, N.J., 1990). See in particular Rose's argument about Wagner, pp. 358ff., as well as in idem, Wagner: Race and Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 1992). 64 See Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind and His Music (New York, 1968), mainly pp. 389¯441; Hartmut Zelinsky, Richard Wagner: Ein deutsches Thema 1876¯1976 , 3rd ed. (Vienna, 1983); Rose, Wagner , mainly pp. 135¯70. 65 Richard Wagner's Prose Works , vol. 3 (London, 1894; reprint, New York, 1966), p. 100. 66 Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebuecher , vol. 4 [1881¯83], (Munich, 1982), p. 734. 67 Gustav Mahler remarked that Mime's music parodied bodily characteristics that were supposedly Jewish. For a study of the anti-Jewish imagery in Wagner's musical oeuvre, see Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, Neb., 1995. For the Mahler remark, see ibid., p. 28. 68 Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebuecher , p. 852. 69 Winfried Schueler, Der Bayreuther Kreis von seiner Entstehung bis zum Ausgang der Wilhelminischen Ära (Muenster, 1971), p. 256. 70 Houston Stewart C, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century , vol. 1 (1st English ed., 1910; reprint, New York, 1968) p. 578. 71 Geoffrey Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Cahmberlain (NYork, 1981), p. 225. 72 Ibid., p. 326. 73 Ibid. 74 On Hitler's visit to Chamberlain, see ibid., p. 436. 75 Some historians have emphasised the similarities of the reactions to the war all over Europe. See mainly Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, England, 1995), others have pointed to the differences: the rise of an anti-war sentiment in France, that of a genocidal mood in Germany. See Bartov, Murder in Our Midst , mainly chap. 2. But an immense literature recognises the apocalyptic post war mood as such. 76 Nesta H. Webster, World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization (London, 1921), p. 293. 77 Thomas Mann, Tagebuecher 1918¯1921 , ed. Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), p. 223. 78 The details that follow are taken from Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg , vol. 2 (Oxford, 1966), pp. 772ff. 79 Friedlaender, “Political Transformations,” p. 159. 80 Among the twenty-seven members of the government of the Bavarian Republic of the Councils, eight of the most influential were of Jewish origin: Eugen Levine-Nissen, Towia Axelrod, Frida Rubiner (alias Friedjung), Ernst Toller, Erich Muehsam, Gustav Landauer, Ernst Niekisch, Arnold Wadler. Hans-Helmuth Knuetter, Die Juden und die Deutsche Linke in der Weimarer Republik, 1918¯1933 (Duesseldorf, 1971), p. 118. 81 Reginald H. Phelps, “'Before Hitler Came': Thule Society and Germanenorden,” Journal of Modern History 35 (1963), pp. 253¯54. 82 Jacques Benoist-Méchin, Histoire de l'armée allemande , vol. 2 (Paris, 1964), p. 216. Other Jewish left-wing politicians provoked no less negative reactions. On November 8, 1918, for instance, just after the break of relations between Germany and Russia, the Jewish Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Adolf Yoffe, about to leave Germany, transferred large sums of money to the Jewish Independent depury Oskar Cohn, who had become undersecretary in the Ministry of Justice. The money was meant to further revolutionary propaganda and for the acquisition of weapons. The facts soon became known and were widely discussed in the press. For the details of this transaction and of the debate in the press see Knuetter, Die Juden und die Deutsche Linke , p. 70. Possibly even more violent was the reaction of the nationalist camp to the fact that a Jewish member of the National Assembly, Georg Gothein, became chairman of the Investigation Committee on the causes of the war and, together with Oskar Cohn and Hugo Sinzheimer, was in charge of the investigation of Hindenburg and of Ludendorff. See Friedlaender, “Political Transformations,” pp. 158¯61, and mainly Barbara Suchy, “The Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (II): From the First World War to Its Dissolution in 1933,” LBIY 30 (1985): 78¯79. 83 Quoted in Nathaniel Katzburg, Hungary and the Jews: Policy and Legislation 1920¯1943 (Ramat-Gan, 1981), p. 35. 84 On the revolutionary events and on the leaders of the Hungarian revolution, see in particular Rudolf L. Toekés, Béla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic (New York, 1967). 85 Two French novelists, the brothers Jérôme and Jean Tharaud, chronicled the Béla Kun regime in Hungary. Their historical fantasy appeared in 1921 and translated into English in 1934, from the 64th French edition. Almost all of Béla Kun's revolutionary companions were Jews. Cf. Jérôme and Jean Tharaud, When Israel Is King (New York, 1924). 86 Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (London, 1968). 87 Hamburger and Pulzer quote two sets of statistics about the Jewish vote in Weimar Germany: According to a contemporary observer, in 1924, 42 percent of the Jews cast their ballots for the SPD, 40 percent for the DDP, 8 percent for the KDP, 5 percent for the DVP, and 2 percent for the Wirtschaftspartei; according to Arnold Paucker's inquiry of 1972, the division was the following: 64 percent DDP, 28 percent SPD, 4 percent DVP, 4 percent KPD. See Hamburger and Pulzer, “Jews as Voters in the Weimar Republic,” p. 48. The main point is that in both counts more than 80 percent of Jewish voters opted for progressive liberals or for the moderate left. 88 On Jewish participation in the political life of the German Republic in its early phase, see in particular Werner T. Angress, “Juden im politischen Leben der Revolutionszeit,” in Mosse, Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution ; idem, “Revolution und Demokratie: Juedische Politiker in Berlin 1918/19,” in Reinhard Ruerup, ed., Juedische Geschichte in Berlin: Essays und Studien (Berlin, 1995). On Rathenau und Ernst Schulin, Walter Rathenau: Repraesentant, Kritiker und Opfer seiner Zeit (Goettingen, 1979). 89 Ibid., p. 137. 90 Rathenau's assassins claimed further that by sponsoring the fulfilment policy demanded by the Allies Jewish minister was intent on the perdition of Germany, that he aimed at the Bolshevization of the country, that he was married to the sister of the Jewish Bolshevik leader Karl Radek, and so on. The anti-Jewish motivation of Rathenau's murderers is unquestionable. What remains unclear, though, is whether - beyond their hatred for the Jew Rathenau - his killers were instruments in the hands of ultra-right-wing groups that aimed to exploit his murder to destabilise the entire republican system. On this issue see Martin Sabrow, Der Rathenaumord: Rekonstruktion einer Verschwoerung gegen die Republik von Weimar (Munich, 1994), mainly pp. 114ff. 91 For a detailed reconstruction of the origins and spreading of the Protocols see Norman Cohn , Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London, 1967). 92 The anti-Napoleon III pamphlet was entitled “Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel,” and composed in Brussels in 1864 by a French liberal, Maurice Joly; the novel Biarritz , written in 1868 by the German Hermann Goedsche, alias John Ratcliff, described the secret meeting of the heads of the Tribes of Israel in a Prague cemetery to plot Jewish domination of the world. Back to the top