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

Is it good or bad for the Jews? To be sure, there are other important questions to be asked in the field of Jewish history, but readers may not find them equally developed in this book. Wistrich analyzes how a group of politicians and intellectuals approached this question in the context of the Habsburg Empire and Germany during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In those specific contexts, the answers to this question changed according to perspective, from that of German speaking anti-Semites to that of Jewish intellectuals and Zionist thinkers. But the Jewish prism (and for some, a Jewish-centered view of the world) seemed to have been central to their global reading of events leading to the catastrophe of the Holocaust. Other significant observers of the time did not ask this question at all. Does the author blame them for this omission? Should he?

In this book, Wistrich is once more concerned with modern antisemitism, one of the most significant features of European modernity. The relation between antisemitism and the Holocaust is acknowledged in the title, but, more importantly, this relation is the driving force behind the book’s historical inquiry. With the Holocaust in sight (or shall we say in hindsight?), all actors who ignored antisemitism appear as participants in the “laboratories for world destruction.” Why Adolf Hitler would be included as one of the “researchers” in this destructive laboratory is certainly clear, but why Sigmund Freud should be a member of the destruction lab is not. Wistrich argues that “unlike [Theodor] Herzl, however, Freud could offer no convincing political solution for the human drive to aggression, war violence, and injustice.”

Wistrich maintains that Jews who ignored their fate—that is, the inexorable fact of their own incoming destruction—unwillingly collaborated with it, whereas Zionist thinkers like Max Nordau and Herzl did not. Moreover, Wistrich stresses the links between Jewish ideas of assimilation and the subsequent inability of their Jewish practitioners to see what was coming—a destruction prophesized and then delivered to them by Hitler. Wistrich argues that “the depth of Jewish assimilation did act as catalysts for antisemites, increasingly obsessed with the need to completely eradicate any Jewish presence in German society and culture” (21).

In this context, Germans and German Jews alike participated in a seemingly “symbiotic” environment in which victimization and integration were tied together. As Saul Friedlander reminds us in his sobering recent history of the Holocaust, Jews who were suddenly empowered with political subjectivity became visible objects of hatred and desire. Whereas Friedlander illustrates his Holocaust narrative with an innovative integration of structural process and private experiences that often belong to “ordinary people” as well as to intellectuals, Wistrich’s book reads like a classic collection of informed vignettes about famous men (the only exception to this pattern being an interesting chapter on Rosa Luxemburg).¹

Wistrich is mainly concerned with German-speaking Jews and non-Jewish German intellectuals. The books’s narrative places them in three categories: Jews with a conscience, Jews with an “assimilationist dogma,” and “Germans.” The author’s preference for the first group is apparent, though he does not neglect the others. Freud, Victor Adler, Karl Lueger, Luxemburg, Nordau, Herzl, Stefan Zweig, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hitler are presented as inhabitants of a pre-Holocaust world that awaits its destiny.