Book Review: Why the Germans? Why the Jews?

Why the Germans? Why the Jews?Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaustby Gotz Alytranslated by Jefferson ChaseMetropolitan Books, 2014 Renowned Holocaust historian Gotz Aly's controversial 2011 book Warum die Deutschen? Warum die Juden? has now been given a crystal-clear translation into English by Jefferson Chase that comes with a rather pause-inducing Translator's Note: "In the interests of making an extraordinarily complex historical investigation more comprehensible to an American audience, Gotz Aly's German original has been revised for this edition," we're told. "All changes have been made in consultation with the author." The nature of the changes - in effect, the nature of the revised edition - isn't specified, but it doesn't really need to be, does it? Whenever "an American audience" is mentioned, can "NASCAR" be very far out of earshot? As galling as it is, Chase's note means this version of Aly's book has been simplified for an American audience.That audience will still find a vigorously thought-provoking book that asks some of the same stark questions we find in all such books: "Why did Germans murder six million men, women, and children who were guilty of nothing other than being Jews? How was this possible? How could a civilized, culturally diverse, and productive people release this sort of massive destructive energy?"In a neat counterweight to Alon Confino's recent (and equally excellent) book A World Without Jews, Aly doesn't waste the reader's time by drawing too many artificial distinctions in this case between "Germans" and "Nazis," except to delineate - more fully and deftly than any previous book on the subject has quite managed to do - the canny ways the Nazi leadership played on the economic and social fears of a populace ravaged by widespread poverty and hunger. A population that knows want is ripe for knowing also envy, and by spotlighting the cultural cohesion of the German Jews (and their slightly greater degree of economic prosperity), the German government was able to raise jealousy to a fever pitch. Dozens of wise and eloquent passages (Jefferson Chase does superb work in capturing the speedy cadence of Aly's prose) testify to the fact that our author has thought long on these primal emotions:

Envy dissolves social cohesion. It destroys trust, creates aggression, promotes suspicion over proof, and leads people to bolster their sense of self-worth by denigrating others. Those who achieve success, especially if they are also outsiders, are invariably subjected to sidelong glances, malicious rumor, and libel. At the same time, as envier know only too well, jealous people gradually poison themselves, becoming ever more dissatisfied and bitter.

This evil abetting was only strengthened by the many ways in which the most powerful Nazis themselves felt the very emotions the were attempting to inflame:

... the Nazi leadership did not come from those segments of the middle classes often described as petite bourgeoisie, who had been radicalized by their fear of losing social status. That may have been the case with some German anti-Semites and ordinary Nazi Party members. Nazi leaders, however, were typically men from the lower classes bidding to move up the social ladder.

This almost unsettlingly fine understanding of the ruling elite's psychology is matched by an extremely persuasive reading of what the new neo-pagan cult of National Socialism came to mean to the ordinary Germans over which it held the power of life and death. Aly does a superb job of stressing to his readers that the Nazi appeal was, ironically, one of hope:

It mattered little which particular social class or trade individuals came from; their common denominator was the ambition to rise up from whatever specific social starting point. The Nazi Party represented the farmhand's son who wanted to become a skilled laborer, the worker's son who wanted to become a technician, the train conductor's daughter who wanted to become a photographer, the artisan's son who wanted to study law, the farmer's daughter whom fate had taken to the big city. The Nazi movement absorbed the ambitions and fears of those whose social status was in flux.

The greater social cohesion of Jewish communities made them natural targets in a climate of social-status fear, and Aly's compendious research allows him to range far earlier than the Nazi era to find the roots of that era. In these earlier accounts we see chilling hints of what's to come:

No matter what experts saw as the root cause of the Jews' education advantage, non-Jews sensed the difference and reacted with displeasure. In 1880, liberal Reichstag deputy Ludwig Bamberger noted Jews' "unusual thirst for learning" and "obvious haste" to catch up on what had long been forbidden to them and concluded: "It is certain that the revival of hateful behavior toward them is closely connected to these things."

Why the Germans? Why the Jews? sparked a good deal of heated debate in Germany when it first appeared, and it's easy to see why: envy may be uncontrollable, after all, but acting on envy is a conscious choice, and as Aly puts it, that choice "dissolves social cohesion." Let's hope the book sparks some soul-searching debates even in complacent 21st-century America. Even simplified, it should.