Within this array of occult forces, the Jews were the plotters par excellence, the manipulators hidden behind all other secret groups that were merely their instruments. In the notorious two-pronged secret threat of “Jews and Freemasons,” the latter were perceived as instruments of the former.59 Jewish conspiracies, in other words, were at the very top of the conspiratorial hierarchy, and their aim was nothing less than total domination of the world. The centrality of the Jews in this phantasmic universe can be explained only by its roots in the Christian tradition.
Like any other national anti-Semitism at the end of the nineteenth century and during the years preceding World War I, anti-Semitism in imperial Germany was determined, as I have already indicated, both by dominant Christian and modern European trends and by the impact of specific historical circumstances, among which several further aspects should be stressed:
In general terms a structural dimension needs to be emphasized in distinguishing, for example, between French and German modes of national integration, with the relevance of such a distinction in terms of anti-Jewish attitudes becoming clearly apparent. Since the French Revolution, the French model of national integration had been that of a process fostered and implemented by the state on the basis of universal principles, those of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Since the romantic revolution, the German model of national integration had been derived from and predicated upon the idea of the nation as a closed ethnocultural community independent of and sometimes opposed to the state. Whereas the French model implied the construction of national identity by way of a centralized educational system and all other means of socialization at the disposal of the state, the German model often posited the existence of inherited characteristics belonging to a preexisting organic community.60
By way of state-directed socialization and in the name of the secular republic’s universal values, a Jew could become French, and not merely on a purely formal level. (This despite intensely hostile reactions from that substantial part of French society that rejected the Revolution, the republican state, and thus the Jews, identified as foreigners allied with the state and as carriers of the secular, subversive values of social upheaval and modernity.) Regardless of formal emancipation and equality of civic rights, the Jew was often kept at a distance by a German national community fundamentally closed to a group whose recognizable difference seemed to society in general to be rooted in alien ethnocultural—and, increasingly, racial—soil. A somewhat different (but not incompatible) interpretation has pointed to the fact that in France legal emancipation carried a prime expectation of gradual Jewish assimilation (also by way of the French educational system and its universalist values), whereas in Germany a widely shared position was that the process of assimilation should be imposed and monitored by bureacratic means, and that full emancipation should be granted only at the end of the process. As time went by, in Germany the success of Jewish assimilation was increasingly questioned. Therefore, even after the Jews of Germany were granted full emancipation, anti-Semites of all hues—and even liberals—could argue that total assimilation had not really been achieved and that the results of emancipation were problematic.61
The situation in Germany was further exacerbated by developments specific to the second half of the nineteenth century, mainly the various aspects of an extremely rapid process of modernization. By entirely transforming the country’s social structures and by threatening its existing hierarchies, the onrush of German modernization seemed to endanger hallowed cultural values and the organic links of the community;62 at the same time it seemed to allow the otherwise incomprehensible social ascent of the Jews, who were thus perceived as the promoters, carriers, and exploiters of that modernization. The Jewish threat now appeared to be both penetration by a foreign element into the innermost texture of the national community and furthering, by way of that penetration, not of modernity as such (enthusiastically embraced by the majority of German society) but of the evils of modernity.
It is within this context that other developments peculiar to Germany acquire their full significance. First, after the rise and fall of the German anti-Semitic parties between the mid-1870s and the late 1890s, anti-Jewish hostility continued to spread in German society at large through a variety of other channels—economic and professional associations, nationalistic political organizations, widely influential cultural groups. The rapid increase of such institutionalized infusions of anti-Jewish attitudes into the very heart of society did not take place—or at least not on such a scale—in other major Western or Central European countries. Second, in Germany a full-blown anti-Semitic ideology was systematically elaborated; it allowed more or less diffuse anti-Jewish resentment to adopt ready-made intellectual frameworks and formulas that in turn were to foster more extreme ideological constructs during the coming years of crisis. Such specific ideologization of German anti-Semitism was particularly visible, in two different ways, with regard to racial anti-Semitism. In its mainly biological form, racial anti-Semitism used eugenics and racial anthropology to launch a “scientific” inquiry into the racial characteristics of the Jew. The other strand of racial anti-Semitism, in its particularly German, mystical form, emphasized the mythic dimensions of the race and the sacredness of Aryan blood. This second strand fused with a decidedly religious vision, that of a German (or Aryan) Christianity, and led to what can be called “redemptive anti-Semitism.”
III
Whereas ordinary racial anti-Semitism is one element within a wider racist worldview, in redemptive anti-Semitism the struggle against the Jews is the dominant aspect of a worldview in which other racist themes are but secondary appendages.
Redemptive anti-Semitism was born from the fear of racial degeneration and the religious belief in redemption. The main cause of degeneration was the penetration of the Jews into the German body politic, into German society, and into the German bloodstream. Germanhood and the Aryan world were on the path to perdition if the struggle against the Jews was not joined; this was to be a struggle to the death. Redemption would come as liberation from the Jews—as their expulsion, possibly their annihilation.
This new anti-Semitism has been depicted as part and parcel of the revolutionary fervor of the early nineteenth century, particularly of the revolutionary spirit of 1848. But it should be pointed out that the main bearers of the new anti-Jewish mystique had all turned against their revolutionary pasts; when Judaism was mentioned in their revolutionary writings, it was in a purely metaphorical sense (mainly as representing Mammon or “the Law”), and whatever revolutionary terminology remained in their new anti-Semitism was meant as “radical change,” as “redemption” in a strongly religious sense, or, more precisely, in a racial-religious sense.63
Various themes of redemptive anti-Semitism can be found in völkisch ideology in general, but the run-of-the-mill völkisch obsessions were usually too down-to-earth in their goals to belong to the redemptive sphere. Among the völkisch ideologues, only the philosopher Eugen Dühring and the biblical scholar Paul de Lagarde came close to this sort of anti-Semitic eschatological worldview. The source of the new trend has to be sought elsewhere, in that meeting point of German Christianity, neoromanticism, the mystical cult of sacred Aryan blood, and ultraconservative nationalism: the Bayreuth circle.
I intentionally single out the Bayreuth circle rather than Richard Wagner himself. Although redemptive anti-Semitism derived its impact from the spirit of Bayreuth, and the spirit of Bayreuth would have been nonexistent without Richard Wagner, the depth of his personal commitment to this brand of apocalyptic anti-Semitism remains somewhat contradictory. That Wagner’s anti-Semitism was a constant and growing obsession after the 1851 publication of his Das Judentum in der Musik (Judaism in Music) is unquestionable. That the maestro saw Jewish machinations hidden in every nook and cranny of the new German Reich is notorious. That the redemption theme became the leitmotiv of Wagner’s ideology and work during the last years of his life is no less generally acc
epted. Finally, that the disappearance of the Jews was one of the central elements of his vision of redemption seems also well established. But what, in Wagner’s message, was the concrete meaning of such a disappearance? Did it mean the abolition of the Jewish spirit, the vanishing of the Jews as a separate and identifiable cultural and ethnic group, or did redemption imply the actual physical elimination of the Jews? This last interpretation has been argued by, among others, historians such as Robert W. Gutman, Hartmut Zelinsky, and Paul Lawrence Rose.64 The last in particular identifies Wagner’s “revolutionary anti-Semitism” and its supposedly exterminatory streak with the composer’s revolutionary ardor of 1848.
In Judaism in Music, the annihilation of the Jew (and the pamphlet’s notorious final words: “the redemption of Ahasuerus—going under!”) most probably means the annihilation of the Jewish spirit. In this finale the maestro heaps dithyrambic praise upon the political writer Ludwig Börne, a Jew who in his eyes exemplified the redemption from Jewishness into “genuine manhood” by “ceasing to be a Jew.”65 Börne’s example is manifestly the path to be collectively followed. But Wagner’s writings of the late 1870s and the 1880s and the redemptive symbolism of the Ring and especially of Parsifal, are indeed extraordinarily ambiguous whenever the Jewish theme directly or indirectly appears. Whether redemption from erotic lust, from worldly cravings, from the struggles for power is achieved, as in the Ring, by way of self-annihilation or, as in Parsifal, by mystical purification and the rebirth of a sanctified Germanic Christendom, the Jew remains the symbol of the worldly lures that keep humanity in shackles. Thus the redemptive struggle had to be a total struggle, and the Jew, like the evil and unredeemable Klingsor in Parsifal, had to disappear. In Siegfried the allusion is even more direct: The Germanic hero Siegfried kills the repulsive Nibelung dwarf Mime, whom Wagner himself identifies, according to Cosima Wagner’s diaries, as a “Jüdling.”66 All in all the relation between Siegfried and Mime, overloaded with the most telling symbolism, was probably meant as a fierce anti-Semitic allegory of the relation between German and Jew—and of the ultimate fate of the Jew.67Even the Master’s jokes, like his “wish” that all Jews be burned at a performance of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise,68 expressed the underlying intensity of his exterminatory fantasies. And yet, Wagner’s ideas about the Jews remained inconsistent, and the number of Jews in his entourage, from the pianists Carl Tausig and Josef Rubinstein to the conductor Hermann Levi and the impresario Angelo Neumann, is well known. Indeed, Wagner’s behavior toward Levi was often overtly sadistic, and Rubinstein was a notoriously self-hating Jew. Yet these Jews belonged to the maestro’s close entourage, and, more significant, Wagner gave Neumann considerable leeway regarding the handling of contracts and performances of his works: No consistently fanatical anti-Semite would have allowed such a massive compromise.
Although Wagner himself embraced the theoretical racism of the French essayist Arthur de Gobineau, the intellectual foundations of redemptive anti-Semitism were mainly fostered and elaborated by the other Bayreuthians, especially after the composer’s death, during the reign of his widow, Cosima: Hans von Wolzogen, Ludwig Scheemann, and, first and foremost, the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain. In a classic study of the Bayreuth Circle, Winfried Schüler defined Bayreuth’s special significance within the anti-Semitic movement and Chamberlain’s own decisive contribution: “It is in the nature of anti-Semitic ideologies to use a more or less prominent friend-foe model. What nonetheless gives Bayreuth’s anti-Semitism an unmistakably particular aspect is the resoluteness with which the opposition between Germandom and Jewry is raised to the position of the central theme of world history. In Chamberlain’s Foundations [his 1899 magnum opus, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century] this dualistic image of history finds its tersest formulation.”69
In line with Bayreuth’s oft-repeated leitmotiv, Chamberlain called for the birth of a German-Christian religion, a Christianity cleansed of its Jewish spirit, as the sole basis for regeneration. In other words, the redemption of Aryan Christianity would be achieved only through the elimination of the Jew. But even here it is not entirely clear whether or not the redemptive struggle against the Jews was to be waged against the Jewish spirit only. In the closing lines of volume 1, after stating that in the nineteenth century, amid a chaos of mixed breeds, the two “pure” races that stood facing each other were the Jews and the Germans, Chamberlain writes: “No arguing about ‘humanity’ can alter the fact that this means a struggle. Where the struggle is not waged with cannon-balls, it goes on silently in the heart of society…. But this struggle, silent though it be, is above all others a struggle for life and death.”70 Chamberlain probably did not know himself what he meant by this in terms of concrete action, but he undoubtedly offered the most systematic formulation of what he considered the fundamental struggle shaping the course of world history.
Three years after the publication of Chamberlain’s Foundations, the Frankfurter Zeitung had to admit that it “has caused more of a ferment than any other appearance on the book market in recent years.”71 By 1915 the book had sold more than one hundred thousand copies and was being widely referred to. As the years went by, Chamberlain, who in 1908 had married Richard and Cosima Wagner’s daughter, Eva, became ever more obsessed with the “Jewish question.” In nightmares, he reported, he saw himself kidnapped by Jews and sentenced to death.72 “My lawyer friend in Munich,” he informed an old acquaintance, “tells me that there is no living being whom the Jews hate more than me.”73 The war, and even more so the early years of the Weimar Republic, drove his obsession to its utmost limits. Hitler visited him in Bayreuth in 1923: The by now paralyzed prophet of redemptive anti-Semitism was granted the supreme happiness of meeting—and recognizing as such—Germany’s savior from the Jews.74
IV
The impact of the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution on the European imagination was stronger than that of any other event since the French Revolution. Mass death, shattering political upheavals, and visions of catastrophes to come fueled the pervasive apocalyptic mood that settled over Europe.75 Beyond nationalist exacerbation in several countries, the hopes, fears, and hatreds of millions crystallized along the main political divide that would run through the history of the following decades: fear of revolution on one side, demand for it on the other. Those who feared the revolution frequently identified its leaders with the Jews. Now the proof for the Jewish world conspiracy was incontrovertible: Jewry was about to destroy all established order, annihilate Christianity, and impose its dominion. In her 1921 book, World Revolution, the English historian Nesta Webster asked, “who are…the authors of the Plot?…. What is their ultimate object in wishing to destroy civilization? What do they hope to gain by it? It is this apparent absence of motive, this seemingly aimless campaign of destruction carried on by the Bolsheviks of Russia, that has led many people to believe in the theory of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity.”76 Webster was among these believers, and so, in his own way, at the time, was Thomas Mann. “We also spoke of the type of Russian Jew, the leader of the world revolutionary movement,” Mann wrote in his diary on May 2, 1918, recording a conversation with Ernst Bertram, “that explosive mixture of Jewish intellectual radicalism and Slavic Christian enthusiasm.” He added: “A world that still retains an instinct of self-preservation must act against such people with all the energy that can be mobilized and with the swiftness of martial law.”77
The most explosive ideological mixture present in postwar Germany was a fusion of constant fear of the Red menace with nationalist resentment born of defeat. The two elements seemed to be related, and the chaotic occurrences that marked the early months of the postimperial regime seemed to confirm the worst suspicions and fuel the fires of hatred.
Two months after Germany’s defeat, the extreme left-wing revolutionary Spartacists attempted to seize power in Berlin. The uprising failed, and on the evening of January 15, 1919, its main leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, pr
obably having been betrayed, were arrested at their hiding place in Berlin-Wilmersdorf.78 They were brought to the Eden Hotel, the headquarters of the Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division, where they were interrogated by a Captain Pabst. Liebknecht was led out first, taken by car to the Tiergarten, and “shot while trying to escape.” Luxemburg, already brutally beaten at the Eden, was dragged out half dead, moved from one car to another, and then shot. Her body was thrown into the Landwehrkanal, where it remained until March. A military tribunal acquitted most of the officers directly involved in the murders (sentencing only two of them to minimal imprisonment), and Defense Minister Gustav Noske, a Social Democrat, duly signed these unlikely verdicts. Rosa Luxemburg and her closest companions among the Berlin Spartacists, Leo Jogiches and Paul Levi, were Jews.
The prominence of Jews among the leaders of the revolution in Bavaria added fuel to the already passionate anti-Semitic hatred of the Right as did their role among the Berlin Spartacists. It was Kurt Eisner, the Jewish leader of the Independent Socialist Party (USPD) in Bavaria, who toppled the Wittelsbach dynasty, which for centuries had given Bavaria its kings. During his short term as prime minister, Eisner added enemies by publishing incriminating archives regarding Germany’s responsibility for the outbreak of the war and appealing to the German people to help in rebuilding devastated areas of enemy territory, which was simply interpreted as a call for the enslavement of Germans “from children to old people, [who would] be obliged to carry stones for the war-torn areas.”79
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