Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust

by Götz Aly

Overview

A provocative and insightful analysis that sheds new light on one of the most puzzling and historically unsettling conundrums

Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Countless historians have grappled with these questions, but few have come up with answers as original and insightful as those of maverick German historian Götz Aly. Tracing the prehistory of the Holocaust from the 1800s to the Nazis' assumption of power in 1933, Aly shows that German anti-Semitism was—to a previously overlooked extent—driven in large part by material concerns, not racist ideology or religious animosity. As Germany made its way through the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, the difficulties of the lethargic, economically backward German majority stood in marked contrast to the social and economic success of the agile Jewish minority. This success aroused envy and fear among the Gentile population, creating fertile ground for murderous Nazi politics.

Surprisingly, and controversially, Aly shows that the roots of the Holocaust are deeply intertwined with German efforts to create greater social equality. Redistributing wealth from the well-off to the less fortunate was in many respects a laudable goal, particularly at a time when many lived in poverty. But as the notion of material equality took over the public imagination, the skilled, well-educated Jewish population came to be seen as having more than its fair share. Aly's account of this fatal social dynamic opens up a new vantage point on the greatest crime in history and is sure to prompt heated debate for years to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780805097009
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/15/2014
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Götz Aly is the author of Hitler's Beneficiaries and Into the Tunnel, among other books. One of the most respected historians of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, he has received the National Jewish Book Award, Germany's prestigious Heinrich Mann Prize, and numerous other honors. He is currently the Sir Peter Ustinov guest professor at the University of Vienna.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments and Translator's Note ix
Introduction: The Question of Questions 1
1. Jewish Emancipation 13?
2. The Anxiety of German Nationalism 42?
3. Anti-Semitism as a Political Force 65?
4. The Mainstream's Dangerous Indifference 86?
5. War, Defeat, and Jew Hatred 99?
6. Weak Masses, Strong Race 127?
7. The National Socialist People's Party 181?
Epilogue: A Story with No End 219
Notes 235?
Bibliography 253?
Index 277

Editorial Reviews

Whether or not one agrees with this thesis, the lavish evidence Aly heaps on—from both self-revealing anti-Semites and acutely prescient Jewish writers—is incredible in its own right and makes for gripping reading.

The New York Times Book Review - Dagmar Herzog

04/14/2014
Traditionally, scholars have divided anti-Semitism into religious and racial types, but German historian Aly (Hitler's Beneficiaries) posits a third type in modern Germany, one motivated by "envy, fear of failure, resentment, and greed." He notes that modern German Jews became increasingly urbanized and tended to be better educated and more professionally successful than their largely rural gentile counterparts. In 1913, the anti-Semitic ideologue Theodor Fritsch wrote, "In the big cities... Jews and Jewish sensibilities rule, and a person accustomed to nature feels like an alien, a clueless child." Even when the educational and status gap between German Jews and gentiles narrowed starting around 1910, the Depression crushed many Germans' hopes, leading some into the Nazi Party, which strove to "replace a class-based state with a mass-based one." Aly does not ignore unadulterated racial anti-Semitism, but his focus is on how status issues often fueled it. Though prone to sweeping generalizations, Aly has written a readable, nuanced, and important work on how German Christians' longstanding obsession with German Jews so prepared the ground for Nazism that its emergence seemed almost inevitable. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

A remarkably fresh look at an old problem… Aly is one of the most innovative and resourceful scholars working in the field of Holocaust studies. Time and again he has demonstrated an uncanny ability to find hitherto untapped sources, frame insightful questions, and articulate clear if often challenging and controversial arguments.” —Christopher R. Browning, The New York Review of Books

“The lavish evidence Aly heaps on—from both self-revealing anti-Semites and acutely prescient Jewish writers—is incredible in its own right and makes for gripping reading.” —Dagmar Herzog, The New York Times Book Review

“Consistently absorbing... A penetrating and provocative study [that] offers shrewd insight into the German mindset over the last two centuries.” —The Jewish Daily Forward

“Brilliant, passionate, provocative.” —Micha Brumlik, Die Zeit

“The most important contribution to the massive literature on the subject. Aly's analysis of a deeply rooted social malady has made the incomprehensible comprehensible.” —Michael Blumenthal, director of the Jewish Museum Berlin

From the Publisher

★ 2014-02-05
In a fluid translation, a German historian soundly explores the numerous attractions of the Nazi agenda to a deeply insecure, unsettled people. Aly (Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, 2007, etc.) rehearses many of the standard understandings of why the Germans chose the Jews as the scapegoats for all their economic and political woes of the 1920s and '30s—the "question of questions"—adding some interesting new glimmers of Holocaust research. The author reaches back to the emancipation of the Jews after the Napoleonic Wars, which freed them to join guilds and even the armed forces, helping to unleash an entrepreneurial spirit and encourage competition. While the Jews greatly benefited from these modern currents of individualism and liberalism, German Christians, weighted under static "old certainties," looking toward the government for economic protection rather than liberation, "experienced legal and material progress as personal loss." While Germany was just coalescing into a united nation, the Jews were long committed to education, learning and bettering themselves. The German senses of inferiority, political immaturity and national anxiety, combined with the resentment over the Versailles Treaty, made them receptive to the siren song of Hitler's National Socialist Party, which emphasized entitlements for the "ethnic Germans" at the expense of the interlopers, the Jews. Aly asserts that even if most Germans did not initially agree with the Nazis' virulent anti-Semitic views, they were reassured by the Nazi visions of economic progress, self-sufficiency, and upward mobility and signed up for what increasingly became clear as a "criminal collaboration" between the people and their political leadership. Aly mostly wraps things up at 1933 yet hints chillingly at how the dawning sense of transgression played in the minds of average Germans. An elegant, erudite historical survey employing deep research and excellent examples, even from the author's own family.

Kirkus Reviews