Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918-1945 (review)

The participation of the German people in the Holocaust remains a subject as controversial as it is uncomfortable. At one extreme stands the hypothesis of a "culture of genocide" traceable to the Lutheran Reformation, the Middle Ages, or even further back. At the other is the construction of a people cowed, deceived, and brutalized—essentially excluded from participation in a genocide inspired by Hitler and implemented by his minions.

Thomas Kühne, Clark University's Strassler Family Professor in the Study of Holocaust History, has a distinguished record of achievement in contextualizing the Holocaust in the social and cultural history of modern Germany. This volume summarizes and epitomizes his approach and conclusions. Slim in length, it is an intellectual heavyweight, with a perspective even informed readers may initially find shocking. Kühne concentrates on the constructive, constitutive side of mass murder. Whether as perpetrators or as bystanders, the Germans of the Third Reich vitalized society and constructed identity by committing genocide. Mass murder was enabled and facilitated by a desire for community, an experience of belonging, and an ethos of collectivity. Carrying his point even further, Kühne focuses not on hatred of Jews, Slavs, or whomever, but on hatred's counterpoint—love. Destroying "Them," he asserts, can also nurture love within "Us."

In Kühne's paradigm, culture—including its guidelines for good and evil—is socially constructed. National Socialism in particular repudiated traditional Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment ethics in favor of an ethic tailored to the Aryan community that Nazi ideology was designed to create. From Ferdinand Tönnies' thought to contemporary works such as Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, sociologists and psychologists have stressed the personal and collective costs of disconnection. National Socialism's limited, focused ethical structure was based on togetherness.

Nazi success in this did not involve a conscious public affirmation of Milton's satanic epigram, "evil, be thou my good." C.S. Lewis provides a more useful model in Perelandra, where Evil is sophisticated only when necessary, and otherwise reverts to banal maliciousness. Germany, a latecomer to unification, suffered from a correspondingly pervasive sense that its industrializing society was atomizing. The coming of war in 1914 offered apparent opportunities for a new synthesis: above all, the myth of an egalitarian "trench community," a brotherhood of warmth and sacrifice among equals. This myth bridged the gap between "conscience and comradeship": civil morality and the realities of war. It provided a matrix for a national rebirth in the aftermath of defeat. Initially one among several narratives, it became increasingly dominant in the Weimar Republic's later years.

Kühne attributes that development to the shift from a guilt culture to a shame culture. After 1918 the question of responsibility for the "perfect storm" of catastrophe that had overtaken Germany could not be reasonably answered in terms of individual guilt or individual responsibility. The idealized trench community offered an alternate model for healing past wounds and sublimating present conflicts: a model institutionalized in the training culture of Nazi Germany.

National Socialism sought Germany's revolutionary recasting as a racial community. The term was a mantra, a trope for transcending class and status barriers without sacrificing the aggressiveness and competitiveness essential for the coming struggle. Those tendencies would be subsumed in the common enterprise. Individual egoism and selfishness on one hand, disappointment and disillusion on the other, would alike be transcended by national harmony.

The new community was sustained by a terror that might take a form as benign as a warning against missing the New Order's train as it left the station, or as direct as a concentration camp. Internally, the terror was psychological: the threat was being excluded from a community that was rapidly absorbing or dissolving the original society. Comradeship correspondingly evolved towards conformity. Any challenges, direct or passive, internal or external, to a racially and ideologically homogeneous society posed a mortal threat. Jews, Roma and Sinti, and Aryans unable or...