Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany ed. by Devin O. Pendas, Mark Roseman, Richard F. Wetzell (review)

One of the signs of a great work of revisionism is that a reader takes its arguments personally. This splendid book compels historians of Nazi Germany to recognize how little many of us have interrogated our own assumptions about the Third Reich. To be sure, we have recognized that Nazi ideology was more porous and multifaceted than a mere focus on “blood and soil.” We have argued that antisemitism was as much about Jews’ supposed political, economic, and cultural power as it was about physiology and heredity. Yet the nineteen essays in Beyond the Racial State reveal how much recent research has taken aspects of the “racial state” framework for granted.

What, then, are the broad assumptions that attend the paradigm first introduced by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann’s The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945, and against which this volume pushes? They are, among others, that biological notions of race and racism permeated state and society in the Third Reich; that Nazi Germany was sui generis in its violent encoding of racism into law; that a coherent ideology drove the Nazis to methodically legislate against “degenerates” in the pursuit of Aryan purity; and that a spirit of science drove Nazi racial policy. Some of these views are the stuff of longstanding discussions about the nature of the Third Reich and by now have been vigorously challenged. But variations on these themes are still to be found in even the best work on Nazi Germany.

In contrast, the essays in Beyond the Racial State reveal a regime in fact confused about, and even uninterested in, biological sciences and race theory when it came to policymaking. Nazi racial policy and the regime’s vision of Nordic purity were, the present volume argues, inconsistent and at times irrelevant when it came to enacting discrimination and murder. Nazi policy was—according to these contributions—multifaceted, ambiguous, incoherent, and ever-shifting. “Entrepreneurial bureaucrats” could kill the mentally and physically disabled more for economic reasons than the pursuit of biological purity. Occupied peoples in Eastern Europe could be coded as racially Aryan at one moment and stripped of their Aryan-ness the next. Concentration camps before World War II were populated more by political prisoners and the “work-shy” than by those of “Jewish” lineage. Politicians had little use for the findings of racial scientists, whose theories of geographical origin left barely a stamp on Nazi programs. The word “Volk,” we learn, was employed more as a marker for culture, language, and history than for a discrete Germanic race sanitized of Jews and other undesirables. And we discover that nationalism arguably proved more central to political mobilization in the Third Reich than racism. In short, despite—or perhaps because of—the Nazis’ malformed views of race, discrimination and murder proceeded for reasons often far removed from biology.

These are compelling findings. And yet one might be tempted to maintain some elements of the racial state paradigm. As an important part of comparative history, the paradigm allows us to delineate the role governments play in fomenting prejudice, segregating citizens, or committing genocide. It also allows us to explore the symbolic power of biology. Advertisements taught citizens which household products were better for volkish health. Germans learned which vices—e.g., tobacco or caffeine—threatened the national body. Depictions of rape and kosher slaughter, as well as disgusting representations of Jews adorned broadsheets and movie screens. Tours of the Warsaw ghetto presented “proof” of the Jews’ biological degeneracy. Racial scientists measured noses, and math problems required pupils to weigh the opportunity costs of feeding the physically and intellectually challenged. The language of sex, bodies, and existential danger saturated the Nazi public sphere. In short, Nazi racial policy rested, precariously but brutally, on notions of biological purity.

This all prompts a second and related question. How does jettisoning the racial state paradigm...