Forum Essay Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust OMER BARTO V THE DISCOURSE ON ENEMIES AND VICTIMS, its effects on our conduct in and perceptions of war and genocide, and the extent to which such perceptions have in turn redefined our views of victimhood and identity can be viewed as among the most crucial issues of this century. This is a vast topic, and in the present context I do not presume to cover it all. Rather, though at the end of this essay I will suggest some of the broader implications of my argument for understanding genocide, I will focus on two related issues: German self-perceptions and attitudes toward Jews, especially in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic; and Jewish self-perceptions and attitudes toward real and perceived enemies in the past and the present, in Europe, the United States, and Israel. That there are numerous connections between the German discourse on nationalism, identity, and Nazism, and the Jewish discourse on identity, Zionism, and the Holocaust, indeed, that the two have a complex reciprocal relationship, is both obvious and in need of further elabora-tion. Moreover, while this relationship has been crucial in defining national and individual identities, it has retained a persistently pernicious potential that has often led to obfuscation, repression, and violence, rather than understanding and reconciliation. Even this narrower focus is obviously too large to allow a comprehensive analysis. Hence the following article merely presents some ideas and conceptualizations that I hope will provoke further discussion. This is a synthetic essay that offers no new documentation, although some of the literature it cites may be new to some readers. My aim is not to provide any definitive answers but to raise questions, reformulate assumptions, and sketch out links that are not commonly recognized. I am well aware of the danger that, while some readers may find my generalizations open to criticism, others will be too familiar with at least some of the material. But I hope they will keep an open mind to the main thrust of this essay, which is to make us I would like to thank the readers and editors of this article for their generous and instructive comments. I also wish to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for a research fellowship during 1996-1997 and Rutgers University for granting me sabbatical leave during 1995-1996. Without these two years of leave, I would not have been able to complete this article. Earlier and much shorter versions of this essay were presented in several forums: the German Historical Institute, Washington D.C., and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, both in November 1996; Yale University, in February 1997; Stanford University, in March 1997; and Rutgers University, in April 1997. I thank all the participants for their comments, criticism, and encouragement. 771 at Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University on November 13, 2014http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/Downloaded from

772 Orner Bartov think whether, at the end of the twentieth century, we have succeeded in breaking out of the vicious circle of defining enemies and making victims, which has characterized much of the last hundred years and has been at the root of so much violence and bloodshed. Since historians have been implicated in much of this discourse in the past, I believe that they would do well to think about its ramifications for their own time as well. THE GREAT WAR OF 1914-1918 came at the end of a long process of domestic consolidation and outward expansion of the great European powers. Indeed, among the most distinct features of the new nation-state were the eradication of inner resistance to its claim to sovereignty and control and the ceaseless striving to expand either its proper borders or its overseas empire. These in turn tended to create a mechanism of self-definition and legitimization based on two mutually dependent conceptual and material requirements, namely, the need to define enemies and the urge to make victims, even if the intensity and severity of its application depended on specific circumstances in each individual state. From the state’s point of view, those seen as belonging to it had to be integrated, either willingly or by coercion, whereas those seen as not belonging to it had to be excluded or eliminated, no matter whether they wished to belong to it or not.I Hence the definition of both foe and friend, compatriot and non-patriot, entailed the making of victims, that is, compelling people to conform to a definition that they might not share, based on categories imposed on them by a larger community or a political regime. In the course of this process, some ethnic, religious, or linguisti-cally distinct minorities within these large entities retained an especially ambiguous status. Paradigmatic of such ambiguity were the Jews.2 1 For some examples, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Rejiections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn. (London, 1991); Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2d edn. (Cambridge, 1992); Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, Calif., 1989); Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, Calif., 1976). 2 In the context of this article, I refer especially to Germany. See, for example, George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich, 2d edn. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991). There are, of course, many other examples, each of which differs according to the different national circumstances. In France, for instance, the status of Jews was questioned at times of crisis, such as the Dreyfus Affair or the 1930s, not to mention Vichy. Some of the recent literature on the latter is reviewed in my article “The Proof of Ignominy: Vichy France’s Past and Present,” Contemporary European History 7, no. 1 (1998): 107-31. In Poland, anti-Jewish policies and an urge to expel Jews from the country increased throughout the interwar period. On the similarities and differences between Polish and German anti-Semitism, see, most recently, William W. Hagen, “Before the ‘Final Solution’: Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland,” Journal of Modern History 68 (June 1996): 351-81, and the literature cited therein. The Polish example has many similarities to other East European countries. See also Deborah Dash Moore, ed., East European Jews in Two Worlds: Studies from the YIVO Annual (Evanston, Ill., 1990). Italy, by contrast, had a very small and well-integrated Jewish community but developed a sense of national identity very late, which may explain the relative absence of anti-Semitism there. The Gypsies, or Sinti and Roma, are another case in point, which cannot be discussed in this article for reasons of space and conceptual clarity. The most important study on the genocide of the Sinti and Roma is Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialistische “Losung der Zigeunerjrage” (Hamburg, 1996). For an interesting discussion of AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1998 at Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University on November 13, 2014http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/Downloaded from

Defining Enemies, Making Victims 773 If the legal emancipation of the Jews coincided with the emergence of the modern nation-state, it was this very same process that brought about a profound transformation in the age-old anti-Jewish prejudices of Christian Europe into modern political and racial anti-Semitism. And if the Jews increasingly welcomed their economic and political integration into gentile society, the efforts of assimi-lated Jewish communities to retain some features of their specific identity and some links to their co-religionists across national borders made them into a symbol of the “insider as outsider.” Thus the Jews served as both proof of and metaphor for the immense integrative powers of the new nation-state; simultaneously, they came to symbolize its exclusionary potential.3 Ambiguous identities produced tremendous social, political, and psychological tensions, which in turn made for that complex relationship between creativity and disintegration, ingenuity and annihilation, so typical of our century. In this sense, the Jews can be seen as the paradigmatic example of the preoccupation with identity and solidarity, exclusion and victimiza-tion, that numerous states or at least some of their agencies have manifested in the modern era. As it consolidated its domestic and international status, the nation-state was simultaneously beset by visions of decadence and degeneration, chaos and anarchy, disintegration and subversion, invasion and destruction. Europe on the eve of World War I was a society haunted by inarticulate fears and anxieties just as much as it was propelled forward by a fervent faith in progress and science. The hard-won domestic unity seemed to symbolize and facilitate the eternal grandeur of the nation; paradoxically, it also appeared to be in imminent danger of social, political, and moral upheaval. A source of confidence and security, the national community also generated anxieties about its potential dissolution, seemingly under attack from all quarters: organized labor “from below,” destabilization of traditional gender roles “from within,” and deterioration of international relations “from without.” Moreover, confidence in European superiority vis-a-vis the rest of the world, rooted in the newly conquered vast colonial empires, was undermined by fears about the West’s vulnerability to infiltration by other races and civilizations and alarm about the biological degeneration of the white race.4 postwar German attitudes toward this group, see Gilad Margalit, “Die deutsche Zigeunerpolitik nach 1945,” Vierteljahrshefte fUr Zeitgeschichte 45, no. 4 (1997): 557-88. 3 For documentation on early French discussions about Jewish citizenship, see Lynn Hunt, ed., The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (Boston, 1996); Scott Glotzer, “Napoleon, the Jews and the Construction of Modern Citizenship in Early Nineteenth Century France” (PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 1997). See further, for instance, in Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modem Anti-Semitism (New York, 1968); Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973); George L. Mosse, Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism (Hanover, N.H., 1993); Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal, Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (Hanover, 1992); Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg, eds., The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover, 1985); Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, Werner J. Dannhauser, ed. (New York, 1976); David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (New York, 1987). 4 See, for example, Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989); Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modem Age (Boston, 1989); Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modem Age (New Haven, Conn., 1993); and Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1998 at Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University on November 13, 2014http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/Downloaded from

774 Orner Bartov With the outbreak of the war, it seemed at first that rumors of approaching internal disintegration had been greatly exaggerated, as all the aggressive potential of fear and anxiety and the dehumanizing and demonizing imagery of pre-war domestic enemies were mobilized against the foreign enemy at the gate. The German Burgfrieden and the French union sa cree were explicit attempts to create solidarity at home by focusing attention on the danger from without. Moreover, in Germany (as in other nations), those sectors of society that had remained to a greater or lesser degree excluded from the nation, such as the socialists, the Jews, and the Catholics, rallied to the flag in a show of patriotism meant to legitimize them as full members of the national community. Similarly, disgruntled intellectu-als, skeptical bohemians, disengaged artists, and detached scholars all seized the opportunity of this uplifting event of cataclysmic military confrontation and took up the national cause. If the enemy was now clearly defined and easily identifiable, so, too, the victims of the war were obviously all those who fought for one’s own nation. For a moment, then, the fog and confusion of war was accompanied by a miraculous clarification of identities. Yet, as the casualties mounted at the front and deprivation and mourning increased in the rear, the classifications of foe and friend, victim and perpetrator, began shifting once more. This was a fundamental transformation, occurring simultaneously with the unprecedented expansion of the state’s powers of mobili-zation and production, control and surveillance, propaganda and coercion. It has had far-reaching consequences for the rest of the twentieth century. While propaganda and the brutalizing effects of the fighting enhanced a view of the world as divided between demonic foreign enemies and one’s own victimized nation, the peculiar conditions in the trenches of the Western Front created a sense of solidarity between the fighting troops on both sides of the line and a growing resentment of the rear. Moreover, the scope and relentlessness of this new type of industrial killing also created a sense of breathless, if often morbid, fascination and, for some, even an overpowering enchantment and intoxication with the horror being perpetrated on the battlefield. The soldiers could thus both hate the war and experience a sinister attraction to its desperate camaraderie and ruthless, indiffer-ent, wholly unambiguous, outright destructiveness; they could both hate the men across no-man’s-land and appreciate that they alone could empathize with their predicament, due to that bond of blood and suffering that had been sealed between them. The “real” enemy was therefore to be found in the rear, among the staff officers, the noncombatants, the politicians and industrialists, even the workers in the factories, all those who were perceived as having shirked the fighting and thus having excluded themselves from that community of battle increasingly celebrated by the fighting troops. This was a grim, probably inevitable glorification of one’s helplessness, of pain and death, just as much as of heroism and sacrifice; it was, that is, a glorification of victimhood. The community of solidarity both crossed over the border and shrank into itself. 1848-c. 1918 (Cambridge, 1989); Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York, 1990). A key and pioneering text for understanding the relationship between anti-Semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism is still Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951). AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1998 at Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University on November 13, 2014http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/Downloaded from

Defining Enemies, Making Victims 775 Precisely by fighting the enemy across the line, combat soldiers shared a front-line solidarity and a sense of alienation from their respective civilian hinterlands. This imaginary battle community continued to exert a tremendous influence on postwar society long after the fighting had ceased. Made of embittered, at times silent, at times rebellious and violent survivors of the front, this community was torn between a desire to be reintegrated into society and a sense of being separated from those who had not been “there” by what appeared to some, and was mythologized by certain extremist organizations, as an insurmountable barrier, more difficult to traverse than even that no-man’s-land into which the soldiers had stared with horror from both sides of the front for four long years.s A sense of victimhood and alienation breeds an urge to look for culprits, for those who had perpetrated the slaughter and in the process both eschewed the suffering and profited from it. Hence the transformation of front-line solidarity into a quest for the “true” enemy, the “real” cause of evil. And because the evil was so keenly felt and of such vast dimensions, so, too, should be the punishment of the guilty. Yet the identity of that “true” enemy remained elusive, making for still greater rage and frustration, expressed in both passivity and listlessness, in violence and brutality. If the foreign enemy had become one’s comrade in suffering, if the glorious war for which one had sacrificed so much had been in vain, and if patriotism had been whipped up by a lying propaganda machine run by gutless intellectuals safely closeted in the rear, then how was one to make sense of it all?6 Disaster can be more easily confronted if traced to a cause, to human culprits, superhuman agency, natural forces. Destruction may not always be rooted in identifiable evil, but it often creates imaginary carriers of perdition. Scapegoats have the advantage of being readily accessible and defenseless, and if slaughtering them does not prevent future catastrophe, it can have a powerful psychological effect. For bewilderment and inaction in the face of catastrophe sap the will to hold out, while identifying a cause and acting against it helps cope with trauma, creating the illusion of fighting back and generating the energy and determination needed to ensure survival. Hence imagination and metaphor are crucial in liberating people 5 See, among others, Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, 1914-1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War, Helen McPhail, trans. (Providence, RI., 1992); Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People, Arnold Pomerans, trans. (Leamington Spa, 1985); Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee, eds.,Authority, Identity, and the Social History of the Great War (Providence, 1995); Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York, 1975); Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, and Irina Renz, eds., Keiner fuhlt sich hier mehr als mensch … Erlebnis und Wirkung des Ersten Weltkriegs (Essen, 1993); Leonard V. Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World War I (Princeton, N.J., 1994); Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984). 6 On instances of frustration, rage, mutiny, and violence during and after the war, see, for example, Douglas Gill, The Unknown Army: Mutinies in the British Army in World War I (London, 1985); Guy Pedroncini, Les mutineries de 1917 (Paris, 1967); Antoine Prost, In the Wake of War: “Les Anciens Combattants” and French Society, 1914-1939, Helen McPhail, trans. (Providence, RI., 1992); Dennis E. Showalter, Little Man, fVhat Now? Der Sturmer in the Weimar Republic (Hamden, Conn., 1982); Klaus Theweleit, Miinnerphantasien, 2 vols., 2d edn. (Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1987); Robert Weldon Whalen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914-1939 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984). Read further on the veterans and the Freikorps of 1920s Germany in James M. Diehl, Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany (Bloomington, Ind., 1977); Robert G. L. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany, 1918-1923, 2d edn. (Cambridge, Mass., 1970); Volker R Berghahn,Der Stahlhelm (Diisseldorf, 1966). AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1998 at Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University on November 13, 2014http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/Downloaded from

776 Orner Bartov Jewish war victims of World War I. Tombstone for a fallen soldier, at the Jewish Cemetery in Breslau (now Wroclaw). Photograph copyright Orner Bartov. from the perceived stranglehold of uncontrollable, invincible forces. In other words, the aftermath of disaster may have fewer devastating psychological and physical consequences for survivors if they can, in turn, victimize their real or imaginary enemies. THE SEARCH FOR THOSE GUILTY OF THE MASSACRE in the trenches, the “real” enemy, began in Germany even before the deteriorating military situation at the front and its ultimate collapse made for open accusations of subversion against those least capable of defending themselves. The legend of the “stab in the back” (Dolch-stof3legende) was preceded by the notorious “Jew count” (Judenziihlung) of 1916, an AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1998 at Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University on November 13, 2014http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/Downloaded from

Defining Enemies, Making Victims 777 official inquiry aimed at gauging the alleged underrepresentation of Jews in the army. If, before the war, many generals had feared that the growing numbers of working-class recruits affiliated with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) would undermine the army’s reliability as a tool against social unrest, during the war the notion of casting doubt on the loyalty of millions of fighting soldiers stemming from the lower classes would have obviously been counter-productive and might have seriously demoralized the troops. But turning against the Jews, a numerically almost irrelevant minority actually striving to demonstrate its loyalty to the regime by dying with frightening zeal at the front, was an almost foolproof way to direct the people’s growing anger and frustration away from the political and military leadership without undermining morale (an old method employed often enough in Russia by the tsarist regime). Moreover, reports by Jewish soldiers indicate that they were encountering anti-Semitism even among their own comrades, an attitude also reflected in the diaries and correspondence of the officer corps, some of whose members eventually became Adolf Hitler’s generals in the next war. 7 In this respect, the legendary battle community (Kampfgemeinschaft) was already in the process of becoming a racial or people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft), from which the Jews were excluded by definition. The rapid and vast growth of the populist, ultra-nationalist, and anti-Semitic Vaterlandspartei (Fatherland Party) during the latter part of the war is also instructive in this context. The domestic enemy, whose presence could explain the military disaster and whose elimination would herald national salvation, was thus becoming an indispensable factor in the national imagery even before the fighting ended.8 The German soldiers and sailors who rebelled against their commanders were primarily motivated by a desire to put an end to the pointless carnage at the front and the navy’s plan of a suicidal attack against the British. The widespread disenchantment among the troops would indicate that, by the last phase of the war, 7 Twelve thousand German Jews were killed in the war. On the “Jew count” and its repercussions, see Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 31-35; Werner T. Angress, “Das deutsche Militar und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg,” Militiirgeschicht-liche Mitteilungen 1 (1976): 77-146; Egmont Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg (Gottingen, 1969),524-37. Colonel-General von Fritsch wrote in a private letter in 1939, that is, after he was dismissed by Hitler as commander in chief of the army on the fabricated accusation of homosexual relations, that soon after the Great War he had concluded that for Germany to be powerful again, it would have to win the battle against the Jews. See John Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918-1945, 2d edn. (London, 1980), 380. Ludwig Beck, who was later the architect of Hitler’s army as its chief of staff, only to become a major figure in the resistance after 1938, wrote in a private letter on November 28, 1918, as a young staff officer: “At the most difficult moment in the war we were attacked in the back by the revolution, which I now do not doubt for an instant had been prepared long before” (my translation). Cited in Klaus-Jurgen Muller, General Ludwig Beck (Boppard am Rhein, 1980), 323. See further in Wilhelm Deist, Militiir, Staat, und Gesellschaft (Munich, 1991),83-233. For a remarkable account by a Jewish officer in the Austro-Hungarian army that illustrates the extent of anti-Semitism in its ranks, see Avigdor Hameiri, The Great Madness (1929; Tel Aviv, 1989 [in Hebrew]). 8 Apart from works cited above, see also V. R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914, 2d edn. (New York, 1993), for background to the war; Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford, 1993), for its aftermath. See also suggestive essays in Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Imperial Germany, 1867-1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State, Richard Deveson, trans. (London, 1995); Geoff Eley, From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (London, 1986). On popular pre-1914 nationalism, see also Marilyn Shevin Coetzee, The German Army League: Popular Nationalism in Wilhelmine Germany (New York, 1990); Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck, 2d edn. (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1991). AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1998 at Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University on November 13, 2014http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/Downloaded from

778 Orner Bartov the myth of the battle community hardly expressed the rank and file’s perception of reality. But revolutionary situations are a highly fertile breeding ground for fantasies and distorted perceptions. The legacy of the immediate postwar years in Germany was one of seething animosities and mutual victimization, violence and terror, all crucial elements in the subsequent rise of the Nazi party. The extremists on both the left and the right, but also to some extent the more moderate liberals and socialists, tended to view their political opponents as sworn enemies; the militants also often perceived themselves as victims. It is true that the Weimar Republic provided more opportunities for German Jews than ever before in the past, as can be seen from the growing prominence of Jews in the arts, academe, the media, and politics. At the same time, however, the 1920s were also a period of growing anti-Semitism, in which the Jews came to be viewed by much of the radical and conservative Right as the main cause and beneficiary of the military debacle and the collapse of the imperial regime and all it had stood for. The impact of this atmosphere on German Jewry was just as significant, although reactions were anything but unified. Some Jews turned to accelerated assimilation, others sought to recover their Jewish identity, still others made efforts to emigrate, but most were aware of the mixed signals given them by gentile society and were beset by a sense of crisis.9 Conversely, if the socialists could be accused of adhering to a pernicious ideology, the working class as such could never take the place of the nation’s foreign enemies, since the future army expected to undo the humiliation of the Versailles Diktat would eventually be raised from its ranks. To be sure, the carriers of “Bolshevism” had to be eliminated, but their followers were to be won over, not destroyed. Those on the lookout for domestic enemies needed a target group that would be both sufficiently visible and more or less universally disliked, perceived as both all-powerful and numerically marginal so that its elimination from society would not have a major detrimental effect on the nation, both an easy target for victimization and generally accepted as the chief instigator of its persecutors’ own victimhood. An enemy, that is, whose very persecution would serve to manifest the power and legitimacy of the victimizer, while simultaneously allowing the persecu-tor to claim the status of the “true” (past, present, and potentially future) victim.10 9 One of the best recent studies of the growth of an anti-Semitic ideology among the young academic elites of the period is Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien uber Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und VernunJt, 1903-1989 (Bonn, 1996), part 1, and the literature cited therein; see also his 1996 unpublished paper, “Den Gegner vernichten, ohne ihn zu hassen: Loathing the Jews in the World View of the Intellectual Leadership of the SS in the 1920s and 1930s.” Older studies on Weimar culture and the role of the Jews in it include Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918-1933 (New York, 1974); and Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York, 1968). A recent study on the revival of tradition in Weimar Jewry is Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture. A recent work on Jewish emigration in Weimar and the Third Reich is Doron Niederland, German Jewry-Emigrants or Refugees? A Study of Emigration Patterns between the Two World Wars (Jerusalem, 1996 [in Hebrew]). See also the works cited above, especially Mosse,Confronting the Nation; Reinharz and Schatzberg, Jewish Response; and Scholem, Jews and Judaism. Interpretations of Weimar as the site of a crisis of modernity or of a new type of reactionary modernism, whatever their merits and problems, do not undermine the point made here, although I think that especially the former underestimates its importance. See Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, Richard Deveson, trans. (New York, 1992); Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984). 10 See further suggestive comments in Michael Hughes, Nationalism and Society: Germany 1800-1945 (London, 1988); Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York, 1986); and AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1998 at Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University on November 13, 2014http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/Downloaded from

Defining Enemies, Making Victims 779 Toward the end of the 1920s, and with much greater vehemence following Hitler’s nomination as chancellor in 1933, increasing numbers of Germans began to identify the Jews as their most pernicious domestic foe. And precisely because the Jews were the elusive enemy par excellence, they served as a metaphor for all other domestic and foreign opponents of the nation (and the regime that claimed to represent it), making it appear possible to wipe out political opposition without casting doubt on the inherent unity of the Volk. Hence the image of “the Jew” as constructed by the regime played an important role in consolidating the Nazi state and preparing it for the existential struggle for which Hitler had always striven.11 While a consensus over the identity of the enemy was being reached, however, his elusive nature, as presented by the regime, meant that he might lurk everywhere, not only in one’s social environment but even as a constant threat to each individual’s alleged Aryan purity. Paradoxically, just as the Reich was declared progressively judenrein (Jew-free) the specter of Jewish presence seemed to haunt people’s imagination all the more. It was as if the Jews had simply gone underground or had merged into the innocent Aryan population so well that they might be discovered even among Hitler’s most obedient followers. At the same time, “the Jew” also came to represent the entirety of Germany’s foreign foes, serving as the incarnation of Bolshevism and plutocracy just as much as the cause of the “stab in the back” and all the misfortunes that followed it. Hence individual psychological anxiety, domestic social threats, and foreign military opponents were merged into the image of that elusive yet all-powerful enemy, “the Jew.”12 The image of “the Jew” as the state’s most insidious enemy by dint of being both distinctly and irreversibly alien and capable of such mental and physical dissimu-lation that made him appear “just like us” was a legacy of late nineteenth-century political and racial anti-Semitism. The rapid transformation of European society in the wake of the industrial revolution, whose immediate outcome for much of the population was often poverty, disorientation, and fear, created the need to isolate and identify the evil forces lurking behind such an unprecedented upheaval. Simultaneously, the emancipation of the Jews, which, along with industrialization, accompanied the creation of the new nation-state, while providing the Jews with new opportunities, created unease and animosity within a gentile population still permeated by anti-Jewish prejudices.B And since the Jews appeared to be the main beneficiaries of the process, they quickly came to be identified as the instigators of the suffering it caused. Thus, especially among the threatened old middle class of small shopkeepers and artisans, the argument could be made that by putting the Steven E. Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York, 1996). 11 For conflicting views on this issue, see Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria, 1933-1945 (Oxford, 1983); David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (Oxford, 1992). 12 On the manner in which this was expressed in German attitudes toward foreign enemies, see Jiirgen Forster, “The German Army and the Ideological War against the Soviet Union,” in The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany, Gerhard Hirschfeld, ed. (London, 1986); Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York, 1991). 13 For an account of the origins of anti-Semitic thinking within German liberalism and its links to the politics of gender, see Dagmar Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton, N.J., 1996). AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1998 at Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University on November 13, 2014http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/Downloaded from

780 Orner Bartov Jews “back in their place” all the confounding and wretched realities of modern-ization would go away and the good old order would return. If the new economic forces were anonymous and faceless, Jewish emancipation and assimilation created a new kind of Jew who could no longer be identified as such with the same ease as in the past. Seemingly indistinguishable from his gentile neighbors, “the Jew” as an identifiable “other” was disappearing, at the same time that his power, according to the anti-Semitic logic, was expanding immeasurably. Modernity and the Jews thus shared the same elusive qualities and could be presented as inextricably linked. To be sure, a rather significant leap of the imagination was needed in order to conclude that an international Jewish conspir-acy was at work, where “real” Jews, stripped of their modern, emancipated garb, were plotting in the dark to take over the world. But in both popular and elite circles, the idea was gaining ground that behind the mask of the new Jew lurked the “Asiatic” features of the proverbial Jew of medieval lore and Christian imagery. And, as in all nightmares, this elusive enemy generated much greater anxiety than the easily identifiable one. The notion that the enemy is among us yet cannot be unmasked has always been the stuff of fear and paranoia and the cause of destructive imaginings and violent eruptions.14 Modernity also brought with it a belief in science and progress, accompanied by fears of physical and mental degeneration. Scientific racism soon asserted that humanity was divided into higher and lower species, thereby positing racial purity as a goal and miscegenation as racial pollution. According to the skewed logic of racial hygiene, the Jews were both the lowest and most insidious race and the most zealous guardians of their own racial purity, even as they threatened to contaminate the higher races with inferior blood. Yet the same scientists who claimed to have identified the different strands of the human race were haunted by the protean nature of “the Jew” and his ability to defeat scientific diagnoses. This implied that every individual was potentially a carrier of precisely those Jewish qualities one was striving to eliminate, that is, that everyone was suspect of belonging to the enemy’s camp without even being aware of it. Indeed, anti-Semitism was imbued with this fear of “the Jew within,” just as the glorification of masculinity was undercut by anxieties regarding one’s feminine predilections. The most nightmarish vision of the elusive enemy was, that is, to discover that he was none other than oneself.15 World War I strengthened the state’s ability to identify, control, and supervise its population to an unprecedented degree; it thereby also greatly contributed to the spread of anxiety about the presence of a seemingly inexhaustible number of elusive 14 See esp. Reinhard Riimp, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus (G6ttingen, 1975); Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destmction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980); Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, rev. edn. (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Shulamit Volkov, liidisches Leben undAntisemitismus im 19. und 20. lahrhundert (Munich, 1990). See also Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the lewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, rev. edn. (Harmondsworth, 1970); Binjamin W. Segel, A Lie and a Libel: The History of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion, ” Richard S. Levy, trans. and ed. (Lincoln, Neb., 1995). 15 See esp. Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge, 1989); Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany c. 1900-1945 (Cambridge, 1994); Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995). See also George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York, 1996). AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1998 at Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University on November 13, 2014http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/Downloaded from