Laboratory for World Destruction: Germans and Jews in Central Europe (review)

The origins of Adolf Hitler's genocidal antisemitism have intrigued historians ever since the Führer's rise to power. Robert Wistrich has traced Hitler's obsession with the Jews back to his youth in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, in particular his experiences in Vienna between 1907 and 1912. Wistrich's thesis is that Hitler's "völkisch paranoia reflected the identity crises of those German Austrians who felt increasingly on the defensive in the wake of Slav encroachment and Jewish emancipation" (p. 7). In his words, "this Jewish rise in social status, economic weight and cultural influence was typically seen as undermining long-established traditions, Christian values, and ethnic-national solidarity" (p. 9).

In chapter 1, Wistrich shows how ethnic competition for jobs and political influence heightened nationalism. This was particularly true in Bohemia, where Czech workers moved into previously overwhelmingly German areas and competed for jobs in new or expanding industries. Antisemitism was merely part of the larger ethnic struggle. Jews were increasingly identified with the Empire's dominant nationalities, the Germans in the western half of the dual state, and the Magyars in Hungary. Czechs identified the Jews with Germans in Bohemia, while Slovaks and Rumanians equated highly assimilated Jews with the Magyars in Hungary. Only the Magyars remained, for the moment, relatively immune from antisemitism. However only the Jews, Wistrich asserts, "would pay such a terrible price for being trapped in the ethnic conflict of Central Europe" (p. 49). The author concedes that the Habsburg Empire "acted as a counterweight to the explosive nationalism which would tear Europe apart in the twentieth century" (p. 49). But Wistrich fails to mention that after 1918 the Habsburgs were no longer around to play this role; they were replaced by dominant nationalities in new nation-states that viewed all minorities—whether ethnic or religious—as actual or potential traitors.

In most of the book's remaining chapters Wistrich uses biographical sketches to explain the Jewish, and especially the Zionist, reaction to antisemitism, devoting less space to its causes and development. Without explicitly saying so, Wistrich shows that the Jewish response to antisemitism was varied and sometimes contradictory. Adolf Fischof, for example, was a liberal Jewish politician who during the Revolutions of 1848 fought for freedom of the press, popular sovereignty, and political equality for Jews. In 1867, he proposed federalism to solve the Czech-German and other ethnic conflicts, although at the time most Viennese Jews favored centralism and German hegemony within the monarchy. Austro-Marxists such as Victor Adler tried to eradicate Judaism from their identity and strove for full Jewish assimilation, largely ignoring antisemitism or at least refusing to be labeled "philosemitic." Rosa Luxemburg, another socialist of Polish-Jewish origins, also "considered any form of Jewish ethnic solidarity as inimical to international proletarian brotherhood" (p. 104). One of the few non-Jews who spoke out in the Jews' defense prior to the First World War was Friedrich Nietzsche, who described antisemites as the "socially lowest people, losers, the misfits, the bungled, botched, and so-called underprivileged" (p. 182). However, as Wistrich points out, Nietzsche's philosophy was a double-edged sword because he also denounced the idea of equality along with democracy—denunciations fully compatible with Nazism.

Some Viennese Jews such as Sigmund Freud and Stefan Zweig were devoted to the Habsburg monarchy and mourned its passing. Neither felt that his career had been seriously harmed by antisemitism prior to the Great War; Freud never spoke out against antisemitism, believing his Jewish background allowed him to think independently and objectively. Zweig feared that Zionism would cover up the universalist, supranationalist, and humane elements in Judaism with Hebraic nationalism. Still other Jews, such as the satirist Karl Kraus, converted to Christianity and actually joined the antisemitic attack on the "Jewish press" and the alleged "disintegrating power of the Jews" (p. 320).

In contrast to those Jews who were relatively indifferent to prewar antisemitism, early Zionists such...