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132 SHOFAR Winter 2000 Vol. 18, No.2 concept (and the question Weinzierl asked in the media to gather information) of "helping" Jews relegates the persecuted Jews to an object status while assigning the non-Jews a position ofagency. Whether they harm or help, the Jews are acted upon. To be sure, mention is made in passing ofJews helping other Jews, but Weinzierl's overall perspective prevents Jews from being perceivedas autonomous agents, as human beings who had reasons oftheir own for reacting the way they did react under duress, and who did develop strategies for facing the unprecedented catastrophe. The focus on gentile agency is characteristic ofthe entire study, including the historical sections. Zu wenig Gerechte implicitly sets gentile society in its positive and its negative aspects as the cultural norm and overlooks the inner dynamics ofthe Jewish communities that inform Jewish responses to the historical events under discussion, whether in the period ofthe Toleration Edict, or at the time ofthe deportations. Today's reader may wonder about the reasons for Jewish remigrations aftermassacres andexpulsions, abouttheir apparent (and only apparent) defeatism in the face ofpogroms and anti-Jewish legislation. With regard to the topic ofassistance by non-Jews, today's reader might want to know more about the reaction of those persons being helped-and those who were not. In short, there are blind spots in Weinzierl's s~dy that could have been largely avoided in the 1997 edition, considering the wealth of recent literature that explores Jewish identity and Jewish history from a Jewish point of view, not to forget the extensive memoir, video, and recording archives. Nonetheless, to readers interested specifically in what non-Jews did and did not do to help, Weinzierl's book offers important facts in a readable, concise, and engaging form. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz University of Illinois-Chicago The History of an Obsession: German Judeophobia and the Holocaust, by Klaus P. Fischer. New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1998. 532 pp. $39.50 (c). The books, articles, conferences, and museums devoted to Nazism and the Holocaust have been rapidly growing in number, with no end in sight; the testimonies, reflections, and attempts to offer interpretive insights similarly have become so numerous that even specialists despair ofkeeping up with them. The need for clear and reliable syntheses becomes correspondingly great, all the more so since, alas, the divisions among scholars and between scholars and the general public remain in many regards more vituperative than was the case two generations ago. Some commendable overviews do now exist, most recently Saul Friedllinder's Nazi Germany and the Jews. How much does Klaus Fischer's volume deserve to join their ranks? Book Reviews 133 There is good news and bad news. Fischer is an ambitious scholar. He grapples with a wide range of difficult issues and intrepidly negotiates many emotional minefields. He stakes out his interpretive positions and argues them unflinchingly. He has read widely. Most important, he gives evidence ofbeing a scrupulously honest and morally sensitive person, a man who has struggled to prevent his own passionate convictions, his dismay over his subject matter, from skewing his presentation. To an important degree, the bad news has to do with style and a lack of careful editing. Fischer can be wooden; his efforts to brighten his prose with slangy or journalistic expressions often hit a false note: Goebbels was a "spin doctor," book burning was an example of"political correctness," and Hitler was "a kind of armchair sociobiologist." There are a fair number of factual errors (charitably many can be attributed to inadequate proofreading): 1789 is given as the date ofthe emancipation of the Jews in France (it was 1791) and Tsar Alexander III is confused with Alexander II. Most of these have to do with the history of other countries, but a few glaring errors also mar Fischer's treatment of German history: Rathenau's assassination is given as occurring in 1920 (it was 1922) and H. S. Chamberlain is described as supporting Nazis "into the thirties" (he died in 1927). The interpretive framework must be described as conventional rather than imaginative or original. Scholars familiar with the field-not ostensibly the main audience that...

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