Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust (review)

This study explores the place of animals and nature, metaphorically and, at times, materially, in the development of National Socialism. In a persuasive introduction, Sax makes a compelling case for the benefits of studying the play of emotion and metaphor across the human-animal divide, and he deals sensitively and effectively with the potential charge that such an approach might trivialize the horrifying historical events that he is attempting to understand. Offering his book as a contribution to "anthrozoology," an emerging field that studies the shifting cultural boundaries between humans and other animals, Sax touches on numerous aspects of the Nazi regime. The work's first section examines "Animals and the Intellectual Origins of National Socialism"; the second looks at the role of specific animals as cultural symbols. The next chapters deal with the rise of biologistic ideology, the study of animal psychology, and the Nazi laws for animal protection. The final section considers the Holocaust in light of Nazi (and broader German) attitudes toward death, slaughter, and sacrifice.

Though interesting as a meditation on the moral ambiguities of human-animal relations in the modern era, this work is unfortunately less effective as a contribution to the historical understanding of the Third Reich. Sax raises interesting questions, but his relatively thin base of primary sources and spotty engagement with recent secondary literature make his book a less valuable contribution than it might have been. Unfortunately, he did not consult German archives, and his survey of published primary material is also relatively narrow. Although the book centers around the Nazi era, most chapters cover considerably more chronological ground, often beginning with antiquity, before bringing the reader up through the centuries to the 1930s and 1940s. Given the brief historical period at the center of his analysis, the usefulness of this "deep time" approach is questionable. Sax sometimes offers arguments about centuries-long pathological divergences in German cultural development, presenting an extreme version of a narrative that (even in less severe forms) has largely lost its persuasiveness for German historians since David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford, 1984).

Methodologically, Sax presents his work as a "paradigm shift" in Holocaust studies, offering the study of myth as an escape from the explanatory impasse that he believes inevitably to confront specialized historical research. His call for attention to metaphor, meaning, and ritual is admirable, but his broad-brush approach to the study of cultural symbols sometimes falls into unhelpful overgeneralizations. In his final chapters, for example, Sax speculates about the causes of the Holocaust and the sources of Germans' support for Adolf Hitler, attributing both, in large part, to a "cult of death" that permeated all of German culture. This picture differs significantly from the one offered in other recent work on public support for Hitler (much of which has also been sensitive to myth and meaning). In The Hitler Myth (Oxford, 1987), for example, Ian Kershaw found that many of Hitler's most abhorrent ideological obsessions did not figure prominently in the fabricated public image that secured him such widespread popularity in the 1930s. Rudy Koshar's study of civic life in Marburg, Social Life, Local Politics and Nazism (Chapel Hill, 1986), found that the Nazis attracted large portions of the middle classes by using an already widespread rhetoric of apoliticalism.

Meanings and symbols are historically specific things, and Sax's book suffers from its lack of attention to the different communicative spaces and constituencies that existed in the Third Reich.