Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust by Götz Aly (review)

There is something almost recklessly ambitious in a Holocaust-related work entitled Why the Germans? Why the Jews? After all, decades of reflection and scholarship have, if anything, rendered the issues and the answers ever more complex. The maverick historian Götz Aly, however, confidently contends that the answer is rather simple: sheer envy at rapid Jewish economic and cultural success and perceived domination (as opposed to Christian immobility) formed the basis of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German antisemitism. That, however, is not all. Although the sub-title refers to “the pre-history of the Holocaust,” Aly in effect extends the thesis to the Shoah itself. Other theories such as fascism, dictatorship, the logic of inclusion and exclusion, quasi-Marxist explanations or those that regard these events as regression into barbarism “do not truly explain why German history culminated in genocide” (p. 2). Aly argues that his mono-causal approach does. Accumulated ressentiment of Jewish achievement and perceived privilege, was gradually rationalized into, and buttressed by, theories of racial superiority. This not only enabled the complicity of a population that profited materially from the expropriation of the Jews but whose “massive feelings of inferiority and envy created a new morality that justified wholesale discrimination, larceny, and murder” (p. 205).

Aly also rejects the (admittedly shop-worn) idea of a special German path through history: the Sonderweg thesis is too fixed and neatly definable, and “transfers too much responsibility from individuals to ideology or a proclivity for totalitarianism” (p. 2). Yet Aly himself resorts to a version of a peculiarly German Sonderweg. Unlike the English, French, and Italians, or the Anglo-Saxon West, Aly argues, the Germans followed their own singular trajectory. Rather than a liberal conception of individual freedom, they consistently pursued a collectivist reliance on the State and a non-individualistic, ethnic sense of self. Aly does not concede that similar claims have long been familiar staples of Sonderweg explanations; his contribution consists in a form of essentialist national psychology, suggesting that the delayed circumstances of national formation—conditioned by territorial fragmentation and the religious split between Protestantism and Catholicism produced an “innate insecurity of German national identity.” Modern Germans, it seems, could be characterized by a self-perceived inferiority, weakness, and timidity, coupled with excessive ambition, pent-up aggression, and xenophobia. This and the constant plaint regarding their disadvantage underlay Germans’ venal and potentially murderous national envy. Unexpected from a historian usually associated with (and sometimes castigated for) his material and economic reductionism, Aly’s new tack comes as a near one-dimensional variant of the fashionable “history of emotions”—one that threatens to smuggle the older, rather discredited, psychohistory in through the back door.

This is not to say that Aly’s new work offers nothing of value or interest. Aly interestingly and rather courageously invokes his own family history to evidence the popularity, nature, and depth of German antisemitism. What other historian would candidly entitle a section of his book: “Social Climbers: My Grandfather and the Gauleiters” In this respect, Aly also has interesting things to say about antisemitism as a dispossessing mechanism enabling the social mobility of previously thwarted members of the lower classes. Both nineteenth- and twentieth-century antisemitism and National Socialism, he argues, were moved by two interrelated central themes: the creation of an ethnically homogenous nation coupled with the ideal of social equality. Antisemites of all stripes demanded both economic and political protectionism. Ridding Germany of dominating, divisive Jews, they held, would finally bring about national solidarity. Aly approvingly quotes contemporaries who viewed National Socialism as “a psychological release valve for feelings of social inferiority and a compensatory mechanism par excellence for a collective sense of self-worth” (p. 139). Race ideology and class interests were thus closely interlinked: there was both psychic and material...