The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (12 page)

The German experience was different. Because they came so much later to overseas empire, Germans adopted ‘scientific’ racism at a relatively late date. There was no German translation of Gobineau’s
Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
(1853–5) until 1898. And,
since so few Germans emigrated to tropical colonies, they were more likely to apply imported theories of Social Darwinism and ‘racial hygiene’ to Jews – the nearest identifiable ‘alien’ race – than to Africans or Asians. The composer Richard Wagner provides a good example of the way the race ‘meme’ spread to Germany. Wagner read Gobineau in the original French in 1880 and immediately adopted the idea of the declining racial purity of the German people, which he somewhat eccentrically dated back to the rape of German women by invading armies during the Thirty Years War of 1618–48. Especially detrimental, in Wagner’s view, was any mingling of German and Jewish blood. As early as 1873 – in other words, even before he had read Gobineau – Wagner had rejected the idea that mixed marriages were a ‘solution to the [Jewish] problem’, arguing that ‘then there would no longer be any Germans, since the blonde German blood is not strong enough to resist this leech. We can see how the Normans and Franks became French, and Jewish blood is much more corrosive than Roman.’ Others followed similar lines of reasoning. In
The Jewish Question as a Question of Races, Customs and Culture
(1881), the Berlin philosopher and economist Eugen Dühring, another follower of Gobineau, lamented the ‘implanting of the character traits of the Jewish race’ and called for a prohibition on mixed marriages to preserve the purity of German blood. Theodor Fritsch’s
Anti-Semitic Catechism
(1887) warned Germans to keep their blood ‘pure’ by avoiding contact of all kinds with Jews. His new version of the Ten Commandments included: ‘Regard it as a crime to contaminate the noble stuff of your people with Jewish matter. Know that Jewish blood is indestructible and forms body and soul in the Jewish way for all future generations.’ ‘Guard against the Jew within you,’ warned another, for no German could be certain that all his ancestors had resisted Jewish contamination. One of the defining works of German racial thought –
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
(1899) – was in fact written by an Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who had emigrated to Germany in his twenties and married one of Wagner’s daughters. Chamberlain too argued that Germany faced a choice between racial homogeneity or ‘chaos’. The leader of the Pan-German League, Hein-rich Class, was another who regarded ‘half-bloods’ as playing a malign role in German society.

Some German anti-Semitic literature was crudely sensationalist. As in England, there were lurid allegations that Jews played a leading part in the organization of prostitution. In a tract entitled
Brothel Jews
, it was alleged that Jews considered ‘the corruption of our virgins, the trade in girls, the seduction of women as no sin, but a sacrifice that they make to their Jehovah; the same applies to the spread of degenerative diseases and plagues that they thereby facilitate’. In vain did German-Jewish feminists like Bertha Pappenheim point out that many of the victims of the ‘white slave trade’ were themselves Jewish girls from Eastern Europe. The stereotype of the lecherous Jew seducing or raping non-Jewish females also made its first appearances in German caricatures at around this time. Sensational in a rather different way were those works that sought to expose the Jewish ancestry of supposedly blue-blooded families. The authors of the volume known as the
Semi-Gotha
, a parody of the aristocratic handbook the
Almanach de Gotha
, alleged that there were more than a thousand old aristocratic and recently ennobled Gentile families now partly or wholly Jewish through marriage. Yet interwoven with such muckraking were more sinister intimations of radical ‘solutions’ to the so-called ‘Jewish question’. In
Jews and Indo-Germans
(1887), the Orientalist Paul de Lagarde characterized Jews as ‘bearers of decay’, comparing them with ‘trichinae and bacilli’. The best remedy in such cases was ‘annihilation’ by means of ‘surgical intervention and medication’. In a Reichstag debate in 1895, the anti-Semitic deputy Hermann Ahlwardt referred to Jews as ‘cholera bacilli’ and called for the authorities to ‘exterminate’ them as the British had exterminated the ‘Thugs’ in India. As early as 1899 the anti-Semitic German Social Reform Party called for a ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’ to take the form of ‘complete separation and (if self-defence requires it) ultimately the annihilation of the Jewish people’. The racial hygienist Alfred Ploetz’s German Society for Racial Hygiene also called for the ‘extermination of less valuable elements from the population’.

From such declarations it is all too tempting to draw a more or less straight line to Hitler’s death camps. It should nevertheless be stressed that there were also strong countervailing tendencies at the turn of the century. As has often been remarked, someone in 1901 trying to predict a future Holocaust would have been unlikely to pick Germany
as the country responsible. Jews accounted for less than 1 per cent of the German population, and that proportion had been declining for two decades. In absolute and relative terms, there were far larger Jewish communities in the Western provinces of Russia (see
Chapter 2
) and the eastern parts of Austria-Hungary – notably Galicia, Bukovina and Hungary itself – to say nothing of Romania and, it should be noted, the United States, which already had the biggest Jewish population in the world. Of the fifty-eight European cities with Jewish populations in excess of 10,000 in around 1900, just three – Berlin, Posen and Breslau – were in Germany, and only in Posen did the Jewish community account for more than 5 per cent of the population. Moreover, the process of assimilation was much further advanced in Germany than in Russia and Austria. Legal obstacles to marriage between Jews and non-Jews were removed in 1875, bringing the Reich into line with Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Holland, Switzerland and the United States. (Hungary followed only in 1895, while in Austria one party or the other was obliged to change religion, or both were obliged to register as ‘confessionless’. In the Russian Empire it remained illegal.) The results were striking. In 1876 around 5 per cent of Prussian Jews who married took non-Jews as their spouses. By 1900 the proportion had risen to 8.5 per cent. For the Reich as a whole, the percentage rose from 7.8 per cent in 1901 to 20.4 per cent in 1914. Such statistics must be used with caution, since the inherent probability of a mixed marriage must be a function of the relative sizes of the two populations concerned; other things being equal, such marriages were and are more likely to occur where Jewish communities are relatively small. However, contemporary researchers were struck by the fact that the intermarriage rates were highest in Germany in those places where the Jewish communities were largest, namely the big cities of Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. By the early 1900s, around one in five Hamburg Jews who married took a non-Jew as his or her spouse; Berlin was not far behind (18 per cent), followed by Munich (15 per cent) and Frankfurt (11 per cent). There was also a discernible rise in intermarriage in Breslau. The figures were markedly lower in Austria-Hungary – even in Vienna, Prague and Budapest – while in Galicia and Bukovina there were virtually no mixed marriages. In the United States, too, there was much less intermarriage
than in Germany at this time, reflecting the large proportion of Jews in the US who had migrated from less assimilationist Eastern Europe; indeed, it was not until the 1950s that American Jews began to marry out the way German Jews had done in the 1900s. Switzerland and the United Kingdom also lagged behind; only the Danish and Italian Jewish communities evinced comparable intermarriage rates. In the eyes of the Posen-born sociologist Arthur Ruppin, this trend ‘constitute[d] a serious menace to the continued existence’ of the Jewish communities of Berlin and Hamburg. On the other hand, he could not resist observing, the spread of intermarriage gave the lie to the claims of anti-Semites ‘that Jewish blood destroys the pure “Aryan” race and that physiological antipathy is such that marriage between the two races is unnatural… The parties who contract the marriage are surely the best judges as to whether there exists any physical antipathy!’

When anti-Semites called for legal discrimination against the Jews, they therefore had to define what they meant by a Jew with considerable care since the progeny of mixed marriages were already quite numerous – even if, contrary to the fears of some anti-Semites, the average number of children produced by mixed marriages was significantly fewer than the number produced by ‘pure’ Jewish or Christian marriages. By 1905 there were already more than 5,000 mixed couples in Prussia alone and by 1930 between 30,000 and 40,000. Estimates for the number of children produced by such mixed marriages in the first three decades of the twentieth century range from 60,000 to 125,000. In fact, only a minority of the children born to such couples were raised as Jews, though that was irrelevant from a racialist viewpoint. The criteria devised by the Pan-German leader Heinrich Class in 1912 were that everyone who had belonged to a Jewish religious community on the date of the Reich’s foundation in 1871 was a Jew and so, too, were all their descendants: ‘Thus for example the grandson of a Jew who had converted to Protestantism in 1875, whose daughter had married a non-Jew, for example an officer, would be treated as a Jew.’ The fact that he felt the need to write such a sentence was in itself significant.

Nor was German political culture especially receptive to anti-Semitism, though anti-Semitic parties enjoyed a brief flurry of success
in the 1880s and 1890s. Nowhere in the world were the egalitarian and secular teachings of Karl Marx (himself an apostate married to a Gentile) more widely accepted than in Germany; by 1912 the German Social Democrats were the biggest party in the country’s far from impotent parliament, the Reichstag. Admittedly, some German socialists were not wholly immune to anti-Semitism, having inherited from the generation of 1848 a tendency to elide the categories of capitalist and Jew. Yet the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party was consistent in its opposition to notions of racial discrimination. While one American state after another introduced legal and even constitutional bans on interracial marriages, the Reichstag rejected a proposal to introduce similar legislation for the German colonies. Indeed, Jews suffered no form of legal discrimination under the
Kaiserreich
. Moreover, their access to higher education and thence to the professions was as good as it was anywhere else in Europe, if not better. Jews were far more likely to be the victims of discrimination and, indeed, violence in Tsarist Russia, as we shall see. That was precisely why so many Jews at the turn of the century left the Russian Empire for Germany, Austria-Hungary and destinations further west. Indeed, it is impossible to understand what befell the Jews in the twentieth century other than in the context of this westward exodus, which was often accompanied by a weakening of traditional Jewish practices, most obviously endogamy.

To some German Jews – not only Arthur Ruppin but also Felix Theilhaber and others – the increase in mixed marriages was just one symptom of a general ‘downfall of the Jewish religion’, which also manifested itself in apostasy, suicide, low fertility and physical or mental degeneracy. Indeed, it was Ruppin’s growing conviction that assimilation spelt the death of Judaism that converted him to Zionism. But in the eyes of others, interracial marriage was in fact the best answer to the Jewish ‘question’. In his 1874 story
Between the Ruins
, the Pressburg-born Jew Leopold Kompert had portrayed the love between a Jewish boy and a Christian girl as a symbol of assimilation and an antidote to superstition and prejudice. As the Austrian Social Democrat Otto Bauer put it, ‘This last of all Jewish problems’ would be resolved by ‘young men’s inclinations and young women’s choice in love’. Other German proponents of intermarriage included the
Zionist Adolf Brüll, who believed that an infusion of soldierly ‘Aryan’ genes would strengthen the character of East European Jews. In the words of Otto Weininger, himself a convert to Christianity, ‘the pairing instinct is the great remover of the limits between individuals, and the Jew,
par excellence
, is the breaker down of such limits’. Even some anti-Semites succumbed to this very instinct. The late nineteenth-century German publicist Wilhelm Marr, author of
The Victory of Jewry over Germandom
(1879), is usually credited with coining the term ‘anti-Semitism’. Echoing Friedrich Nietzsche, Marr feared that ‘The future and life itself belonged to Jewry; to Germandom, the past and death.’ Yet in his revealing autobiographical essay entitled ‘Within Philo-Semitism’, Marr admitted to having had Jewish girlfriends while still at school and later as a young man in Poland. He also recalled flirting with two young Jewish women on a transatlantic steamer. Marr married three times in all: one wife was the daughter of an apostate Jew, one was a ‘half Jewess’ and the third a ‘full Jewess’. As Rudolph Loewenstein once observed, ‘the sexual factor is one of the most powerful unacknowledged motivations underlying anti-Semitism’. In short, between Germans and Jews there was what deserves to be called a ‘love-hate’ relationship. Those who projected trends in inter-marriage, fertility and apostasy were not unreasonable in thinking that the Jewish ‘question’, in Germany at least, was answering itself – through a willing dissolution.

Anti-Semitism in 1901 was, it is almost superfluous to say, about more than just fears of miscegenation. Economic grievances were just as important. It was the extraordinary social and geographical mobility of
Ashkenazim
in the aftermath of their eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century emancipation that created core constituencies for anti-Jewish policies. Those who felt the Rothschilds and their ilk had made illicit profits by manipulating the stock exchange were not especially interested in racial hygiene. Authors like the Frenchman Alphonse Toussenel, writer of
The Jews, Kings of the Epoch
(1847), were radicals – men of the Left, indignant at the leading role played
by Jewish bankers in what Toussenel called a new ‘financial feudalism’. Marx himself wrote a review article ‘On the Jewish Question’, which identified the capitalist, regardless of his religion, as ‘the real Jew’. Similar hostility to the Jews as ‘parasites’ was expressed by both the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. The unscrupulous Jewish financier is a figure who crops up in the literatures of most European countries in the nineteenth century; not only in Gustav Freytag’s
Soll und Haben
but also in Balzac’s
La maison Nucingen
, Zola’s
L’Argent
and Trollope’s
The Way We Live Now
. Zola’s Gundermann, for example, is the quintessential ‘banker king, the master of the bourse and of the world… the man who knew [all] secrets, who made the markets rise and fall at his pleasure as God makes the thunder… the king of gold’. The inspiration behind Edouard Drumont’s
Jewish France
(1886) was the collapse of the Union Générale bank four years before, which Dru-mont and others sought to blame on the Rothschilds. To Auguste Chirac and numerous others, the Third Republic was wholly in the grip of ‘Jewish finance’.