Steven E. Aschheim-In Times of Crisis - Essays On European Culture, Germans, and Jews (2000)

In Times of Crisis
In Times of Crisis
essays on european culture,

germans, and jews
Steven E. Aschheim
the university of wisconsin press

The University of Wisconsin Press
2537 Daniels Street
Madison, Wisconsin 53718
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London WC2E 8LU, England
Copyright 䉷 2001
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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Printed in the United States of America
Some of the chapters in this book originally appeared in the following publications: Journal of Contem-
porary History 28 (4): “Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau, and Degeneration,” reprinted by permission
of Sage Publications Ltd.; “Excursus” was originally published under the title “The German-Jewish
Legacy beyond America,” in American Jewish Archives (November 1988); LBI Year Book XLIII
(1998): “German History and German Jewry: Boundaries, Junctions, and Interdependence,” reprinted
by permission of Leo Baeck Institute; German History 15 (2): “Archetypes and the German Jewish Dia-
logue: Reflections Occasioned by the Goldhagen Affair,” reprinted by permission of the German His-
tory Society; New German Critique 70 (Winter 1997), 117⫺41: “Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of
Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil”; Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Gesch-
ichte 26 (1997): “Post-Holocaust Mirrorings of Germany: Hannah Arendt and Daniel Goldhagen”;
Tikkun 11, no. 4 (July/August 1996): “Reconceiving the Holocaust?”; an earlier version of “George
Mosse at 80: A Critical Laudatio” appeared in Journal of Contemporary History 34 (2), reprinted by
permission of Sage Publications Ltd.; History & Memory 4, nos. 1/2 (Fall 1997): “On Saul Fried-
lander.” Unless otherwise noted all articles are reprinted here by the permission of their respective jour-
nals. “Assimilation and Its Impossible Discontents: The Case of Moritz Goldstein” was originally pub-
lished under the title “1912 The Publication of Moritz Goldstein’s ‘The German-Jewish Parnassus’
Sparks a Debate Over Assimilation, German Culture and the ‘Jewish Spirit,’” 䉷 1997 Yale University
Press, in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, edited by Sander L. Gil-
man and Jack Zipes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), reprinted here by permission of
Yale University Press. “Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem,” 䉷 2001 Regents of the University of California,
will be published in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, edited by Steven E. Aschheim (Berkeley & Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), reprinted here by permission of the University of Califor-
nia Press. “Nazism, Normalcy, and the German Sonderweg,” 䉷 1988 Oxford University Press, Inc.,
was published in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Volume IV, The Jews and the European Crisis, ed-
ited by Jonathan Frankel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), reprinted here by permission of
Oxford University Press, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aschheim, Steven E., 1942–

In times of crisis: essays on European culture, Germans, and Jews / Steven E. Aschheim.
pp. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-299-16860-3 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-299-16864-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Jews—Germany—Intellectual life. 2. Jews—Europe—Intellectual life. 3. Jews—Cultural
assimilation—Germany. 4. Jews—Cultural assimilation—Europe. 5. Germany—Ethnic relations.
6. Europe—Ethnic relations. 7. Antisemitism—Germany. 8. Antisemitism—Europe. 9. Germany—
Civilization—Jewish influences. 10. Europe—Civilization—Jewish influences. I. Title.
DS135.G33 I4655 2001
305.892⬘4043⬘09—dc21 00-010301
For Hannah, again . . .
and Ariella, Yoni, and Daniel . . .
and now Yonatan
and to the memory of my Mother Ï⬙Ê
Contents
Preface ix
Part I: The Crisis of Culture— Then and Now
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau, and Degeneration 3

2. Thinking the Nietzsche Legacy Today: A Historian’s
Perspective 13
3. Against Social Science: Jewish Intellectuals, the Critique of
Liberal-Bourgeois Modernity, and the (Ambiguous) Legacy
of Radical Weimar Theory 24
4. Nazism and the Holocaust in Contemporary Culture 44
Part II: (Con)Fusions of Identity —Germans and Jews
5. Excursus: Growing Up German Jewish in South Africa 59

6. Assimilation and Its Impossible Discontents: The Case of
Moritz Goldstein 64
7. Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem 73
8. German History and German Jewry: Junctions, Boundaries,
and Interdependencies 86
9. Archetypes and the German Jewish Dialogue: Reflections
Occasioned by the Goldhagen Affair 93
Part III: Understanding Nazism and the Holocaust:

Competing Models and Radical Paradigms
10. Nazism, Normalcy, and the German Sonderweg 105
vii
viii Contents
11. Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil 122
12. Post-Holocaust Jewish Mirrorings of Germany: Hannah
Arendt and Daniel Goldhagen 137
Part IV: Historians, History, and the Holocaust
13. Reconceiving the Holocaust? Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s

Willing Executioners 147
14. George Mosse at 80: A Critical Laudatio 155
15. On Saul Friedlander 171
Notes 197
Index 265
Preface
This work explores flashpoints of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century

relationship between European culture, German history, and the Jewish
experience. Here was a complex triangular encounter that proved to be
of immense historical import. Out of this confrontation emerged some
of the West’s most powerful and paradigmatic intellectual creations and,
perhaps in subtly paradoxical and interrelated ways, the century’s darkest
genocidal moments.1 Ultimately wrapped up with the rise of Nazism and
the Holocaust—an overwhelming datum that often tends to distort our
portrait of the preceding years—it raises political, ethical, and interpre-
tive issues that still reverberate powerfully in post-Auschwitz culture. This
collection touches upon past dimensions of the meeting and present di-
lemmas of grasping and representing it. It concentrates upon the junc-
tions—those multiple sites of sensitive contact—where its most creative
and lethal dimensions, its achievements and tensions, ambiguities, nobil-
ity and meanness, ironies, and hidden subtexts are best uncovered. In the
essays contained here, I seek to portray the contexts and dynamics of
these interconnections and the ideas and biases of some of the personali-
ties caught up in this taut nexus. I seek also to illuminate the ubiquitous,
charged inscriptions of Nazi genocide within our own culture and the
projects of some later thinkers and historians who—in various and highly
contested ways—have wrestled with its problematics and sought to cap-
ture its animating essence.
These then are the themes that give this collection its rationale and
unity. The essays included here were written for a variety of academic
venues and public occasions. Chapters 3, 4, and 7 have not been pre-
viously published, and Chapter 2 has heretofore appeared only in
Hebrew, in Historia 5 (2000). Although the others have been published
before—the sources and permissions are given at the beginning of each
chapter’s notes—I have been persuaded to put them together not only
because many of them appeared in journals not always easily accessible
but because they are bound by a continuity of method, issues, and con-
ix
x Preface
cerns. At the same time, they also reflect a certain change and develop-
ment and, one hopes, a responsiveness to emerging problems and contro-
versies. Placing these essays together may, therefore, be useful in providing
a perspective over time on such continuity and change. I would hope that
any repetition that may occur—and an attempt has been made to cut this
to a minimum—will be compensated for by the variety of issues raised
and perspectives offered in the course of this work.
Over the years I have benefited immensely from the wisdom and advice
of countless friends and colleagues. I have gratefully acknowledged such
help in the notes and hope that I have not inadvertently omitted anyone.
I must, however, also acknowledge the support of Raphy Kadushin, ac-
quisitions editor of the University of Wisconsin Press, who showed im-
mediate interest in the book, and thank Hannah Nyala for her skillful
and sympathetic editing of the work. Juliet Skuldt has guided In Times of
Crisis to publication with remarkable warmth, good spirit, and compe-
tence. John Landau, acute as always, suggested the title of the book. It is
quite obvious to me that if these essays have any merit at all it is due to
the warmth and boisterous support of my ever-growing family, to whom
this volume is dedicated. It is also dedicated to the loving memory of my
mother who passed away in June 2000. Last, but certainly not least,
I want to thank Saul Friedlander and Anson Rabinbach, both of whom
read In Times of Crisis in manuscript form. They were embarrassingly
generous in their encouragement.
Part I
The Crisis of Culture—Then and Now

One
Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau,

and Degeneration
Max Nordau (1849–1923) was a household name to educated late-

nineteenth-century Europeans. It is a telling fact that most late-twentieth-
century readers will have little or no idea who he was or what he repre-
sented. A famous journalist, physician, dramatist, novelist, polemicist
and, later, Zionist activist, his thought and work appears today to have
achieved widespread popularity among the middle classes precisely be-
cause it was so time-bound and tied to the conventions and postures of a
positivist outlook that ceased to be relevant after World War I. The hun-
dredth anniversary of the publication of his famous, or rather infamous,
work Degeneration (1892)—a veritable diatribe of cultural criticism that
characterized virtually every modernist fin-de-siècle trend as a symptom
of exhaustion and inability to adjust to the realities of the modern indus-
trial age—provides an opportunity for reassessment.1 This can perhaps be
most helpfully done through a comparison of Nordau to a thinker whom
he despised, yet one whose relevance to and imprint upon twentieth-
century intellectual sensibility could not have been greater: Friedrich
Nietzsche.
Judging by contemporary intellectual fashions and the highly anti-
positivist cultural tenor of the times, it appears, of course, that Nietzsche
has defeated, indeed routed, Nordau. With the possible exception of his
later Zionist career, Nordau’s work has been accorded a fate worse than
neglect: he is typically treated as little more than a “symptom,” a textbook
example of hopelessly outmoded and misguided cultural and intellectual
postures built upon thoroughly discredited psycho-physiological prem-
ises.2 A recent historian of degeneration, for instance, has summarily dis-
missed Nordau’s work as “the best-known instance of bizarre ‘social di-
agnosis.’” 3 The story appears dotted with ironies and tables turned: as,
for example, when Nordau predicted that his fin-de-siècle degenerates
would “rave for a season, and then perish,” 4 a prediction that apparently
3
4 The Crisis of Culture—Then and Now
applied more to himself than it did, for instance, to the objects of his
scorn—Ibsen, Wilde, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and so on.
These perceptions notwithstanding, this essay will seek to analyze and
reassess the Nietzsche–Nordau relationship in terms of a contemporary
perspective. On one level, clearly, it is tempting to regard both thinkers as
almost archetypal figures, extreme personifications of an epochal parting
of the ways, the point at which an indignant, rather bewildered and un-
comprehending, yet aggressively self-assertive European positivism con-
fronted the incipient modernist revolution intent on radically questioning,
indeed destroying, all its revered postulates. The clash of the Nordauian
and Nietzschean sensibilities can then be taken as historical evidence of
a particular cultural turning point. Nevertheless, appearances apart, there
were not only differences: there were also certain interesting, if limited,
affinities that need to be identified and analyzed. I shall document both
the clash and the commonalities and then attempt to evaluate the compet-
ing legacies of these two thinkers from our own present historical per-
spective. We may yet uncover some unsuspected relevancies contained in
Nordau’s heritage.
At the very center of what Max Nordau described as a “severe mental
epidemic . . . a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria,” 5 stands
the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche. In Degeneration it is Nietzsche who,
more than anyone else, provided the philosophy behind what Nordau de-
scribed as the prevalent “ego-mania” and who furnished the grounds for
an ongoing “deification of filth, . . . licentiousness, disease and corrup-
tion.” 6 Nietzsche represented nothing less than the quintessence of intel-
lectual and moral degeneration. Indeed, Nordau’s definition of the ethical
climate of the fin-de-siècle is marked by what appears to be its essentially
Nietzschean characteristics:
a contempt for traditional views of custom and morality . . . a practical

emancipation from traditional discipline. . . . unbridled lewdness, the
unchaining of the beast in man . . . disdain of all consideration for his
fellow-men, the trampling under foot of all barriers which enclose brutal
greed of lucre and lust of pleasure . . . to all, it means the end of an estab-
lished order, which for thousands of years has satisfied logic, fettered de-
pravity, and in every art matured something of beauty.7
Nordau’s cultural analysis explicitly extended the Morelian and Lom-

brosian analyses of psycho-physiological degeneration to an area where,
as he stated, it had not yet been applied, “the domain of art and litera-
ture.” 8 “It is not necessary,” he wrote, “to measure the cranium of an
author, or to see the lobe of a painter’s ear, in order to recognize the fact
that he belongs to the class of degenerates.” 9 Authors and artists, Nordau
Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau and Degeneration 5
proclaimed, as much as criminals, prostitutes, and lunatics (those classi-

cal outsiders labeled with the condition), demonstrated all the familiar
mental characteristics and very often the somatic features that symp-
tomized the degenerate condition.10
Critics were, from the beginning, skeptical of and sometimes appalled
by Nordau’s application of quasi-medical categories to artistic and philo-
sophical matters.11 Yet in the case of Nietzsche and his well-known illness
(his insanity dated from January 1889), it was particularly easy and plau-
sible to frame not only the man but also his thought within a medico-
pathological frame, a connection that for many of the others that Nordau
pilloried—such as Wagner or Zola—seemed forced or at best metaphori-
cal. Linking the craziness of Nietzsche’s ideas to his (later) insanity was a
general technique of those who, in the history of Nietzsche-reception,
sought to defame the philosopher and outlaw his arguments. The fact of
Nietzsche’s derangement was regularly incorporated into the philosoph-
ical critique, explanatory of its “perverted” contents.12 Nordau phrased
it thus:
From the first to the last page of Nietzsche’s writings the careful reader
seems to hear a madman, with flashing eyes, wild gestures, and foaming
mouth, spouting forth deafening bombast . . . So far as any meaning at all
can be extracted from the endless stream of phrases, it shows, as its funda-
mental elements, a series of constantly reiterated delirious ideas, having
their source in illusions of sense and diseased organic processes. . . . Here
and there emerges a distinct idea, which, as is always the case with the
insane, assumes the form of an imperious assertion, a sort of despotic
command.13
More than his fellow “degenerates,” Nietzsche was not only considered
as insanely perverted but, as Sander Gilman has persuasively shown, a
thinker uniquely and consistently endowed with almost supernatural po-
tency, a “‘dangerous thinker’—not merely that he espoused dangerous
thoughts, but that he caused dangerous acts. . . .” 14 In this respect, Nor-
dau’s comments fitted into an ongoing tradition, a strategy not only for
dealing with Nietzsche himself but for coping with what many contem-
poraries regarded as even more disturbing phenomena: the remarkable
influence that Nietzsche had begun to exert and the perplexing prolifera-
tion of Nietzsche cults (often quite contradictory in nature and outlook)
that increasingly dotted the cultural landscape of the 1890s.15 Nietzsche,
wrote Nordau, was
obviously insane from birth, and his books bear on every page the imprint
of insanity. It may be cruel to insist on this fact. It is, however, a painful,
yet unavoidable, duty to refer to it anew, because Nietzsche has become
the means of raising a mental pestilence, and the only hope of checking its
propagation lies in placing Nietzsche’s insanity in the clearest light, and in
branding his disciples with the marks most suited to them, viz., as hysteri-
cal and imbecile.16
Nordau, like other nineteenth-century liberals, had no doubts about

what constituted sanity and the nature of moral standards: these were
largely defined through the norms of bourgeois respectability. Moreover,
he did not fret about the imperceptible nature of “reality.” Survival meant
quite simply the adjustment to a clearly accessible reality. That adjust-
ment was attainable through clear observation, rational self-discipline, a
lucid sense of right and wrong, and a balanced integration of the faculties
of will and judgment.17 Those who lacked these qualities were degener-
ates: Nietzsche was perhaps the ultimate incarnation of its egomaniacal
form. “The ego-maniac,” Nordau confidently proclaimed, “is an invalid
who does not see things as they are, does not understand the world, and
cannot take up a right attitude towards it.” 18 Inexorably it was this inca-
pacity to come to terms with reality that destroyed these degenerates.19
There would not be much point to rehearsing Nordau’s refutation of
Nietzsche nor his almost point-by-point analysis of the way madness en-
tered Nietzsche’s writings or his logic, thought, and style. What distin-
guished Nordau’s analysis from other anti-Nietzsche tracts of the day,
however, was the way he integrated it into a systematic, overarching posi-
tivist framework. It is, indeed, as exemplifier of the clash between nine-
teenth-century positivism and an emerging twentieth-century modernist
sensibility that the Nordau–Nietzsche comparison and confrontation re-
tains its historical interest.
Nordau was acutely and anxiously aware of the apparently “modern”
appeal of the artists and writers he attacked. Though they presented
themselves as avant-garde, they were not, he sought to persuade his read-
ers, “heralds of a new era. They do not direct us to the future, but point
backwards to times past.” Their spurious, irrational modernity had to be
distinguished from his own authentic kind:
The “freedom” and “modernity,” the “progress” and “truth,” of these fel-
lows are not ours. We have nothing in common with them. They wish for
self-indulgence; we wish for work. They wish to drown consciousness in
the unconscious; we wish to strengthen and enrich consciousness. They
wish for evasive ideation and babble; we wish for attention, observation
and knowledge. The criterion by which true moderns may be recognised
and distinguished from impostors calling themselves moderns may be this:
Whoever preaches absence of discipline is an enemy of progress; and who-
ever worships his “I” is an enemy to society.20
From his perspective Nordau was quite correct to single out Nietzsche
as a key articulator of this new modernist current with its assault on the
objective foundations of reality, its radical problematization of truth, and
its highly developed expressivist sense of subjective consciousness. Nietz-
sche is today, as we know, almost consensually viewed as foundational to
both the modernist and postmodernist projects.21 Who symbolizes better
than Nietzsche—who once scoffed, “All ordered society puts the passions
to sleep” 22 —the frontal attack on those values that Nordau held to be
most sacred: rationality, discipline, science, and order?
Nietzsche, of course, was instrumental in questioning the basic prem-
ises of a widespread nineteenth-century liberal faith that Nordau had ar-
ticulated: the belief in advancement based upon potentialities of the natu-
ral sciences. He fundamentally disputed the very idea of “progress.” Even
more radically, he railed against the presupposition that there was a prior,
objective reality “out there.” For Nordau and the many others whose
views Nordau mirrored, there could be no doubt about reality’s existence:
the laws of an objective natural and social world could confidently be
revealed through clear thinking and patient observation. “Culture and
command over the powers of nature are solely the result of attention; all
errors, all superstition, the consequence of defective attention. False ideas
of the connection between phenomena arise through defective observa-
tion of them, and will be rectified by a more exact observation.” Only
through their “want of attention” did degenerates produce “false judge-
ments respecting the objective universe.” 23
While Nordau sought to grasp and then adjust to objective reality,
Nietzsche spoke about reality as a construct of the self. It was the will to
power that created reality (a reality which, in some of his moods, Nietz-
sche regarded as wholly fictitious). What could have been further removed
from the Nordauian conception of knowledge than Nietzsche’s definition
of his Dionysus ideal: “the force in all life that wills error; error as the
precondition even of thought. Before there is ‘thought’ there must have
been ‘invention’; the construction of identical cases, of the appearance of
sameness, is more primitive than the knowledge of sameness.” 24
Nothing could have been more alien to Nordau’s way of thinking than
the radical perspectivism of Nietzsche, who denied the validity of any
stable, fixed viewpoint and who had written: “The world with which we
are concerned is false, i.e. is not a fact but a fable and approximation on
the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is in ‘flux’, as something in
a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting
near the truth: for—there is no ‘truth.’” 25 “Truth,” he wrote elsewhere,
was a “mobile army of metaphors . . . illusions about which one has for-
gotten that this is what they are.” 26
In the confrontation between Nordau and Nietzsche, middle-class so-

briety, discipline, and realism encountered its Dionysian opposite. For
Nietzsche the withdrawal from positivist reality became a goal, an ideal:
“To spend one’s life amid delicate and absurd things; a stranger to reality;
half an artist, half a bird and metaphysician; with no care for reality, ex-
cept now and then to acknowledge it in the manner of a good dancer with
the tip of one’s toes.” 27 For Nordau such withdrawal was unequivocal evi-
dence of a clinical condition, what he described as “coenaestheses, or sys-
temic sensations.” 28
In Nietzsche’s Dionysian world, ecstasy was transformed into a funda-
mental fructifying force. Under its charm, he wrote, man
has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into
the air, dancing. His very gestures express enchantment. Just as the ani-
mals now talk, and the earth yields milk and honey, supernatural sounds
emanate from him, too: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks
about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams.
He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.29
But for Nordau ecstasy was regarded quite simply as “a consequence of

the morbid irritability of special brain-centres,” 30 and dance and art
(those most liberative and expressive of Nietzschean activities) were dis-
missed as “pure atavisms” to be practiced in the future only “by the most
emotional portion of humanity—by women, by the young, perhaps even
by children.” 31 Where Nietzschean man sought to transform himself into
a work of art, then, Nordau more or less banished art from his future
order.32 “Observation . . . triumphs ever more and more over imagination
and artistic symbolism—i.e., the introduction of erroneous personal in-
terpretations of the universe is more and more driven back by an under-
standing of the laws of Nature.” 33
The alternative to Nietzsche and his ilk was quite evident to Nordau.
“The normal man,” he wrote, “with his clear mind, logical thought,
sound judgement, and strong will, sees, where the degenerate only gropes
. . . Let us imagine the driveling Zoroaster of Nietzsche, with his card-
board lions, eagles, and serpents, from a toyshop in competition with
men who rise early and are not weary before sunset, who have clear
heads, solid stomachs and hard muscles: the comparison will provoke
our laughter.” 34
Yet we need to pause here for, all the obvious differences between
Nietzsche and Nordau notwithstanding, it is precisely in their common
emphases on “normalcy” and “abnormalcy,” “sickness” and “deca-
dence,” their common advocacy of the manly ideal, and their desire for
healthy, regenerated “men with hard muscles” that certain important
underlying affinities may be discovered. What united these apparently dia-

metrically opposed figures was the fact that they were key participants,
both as makers and beneficiaries, in a wider nineteenth-century discourse
of “degeneration.” Here was a highly flexible, politically adjustable tool
able simultaneously to locate, diagnose, and resolve a prevalent (if incho-
ate) sense of social and cultural crisis through an exercise of eugenic label-
ing and a language of bio-social pathology and potential renewal.35 The
rhetoric of degeneration cut across the ideological spectrum. Linked to
the optimistic language of evolutionary naturalism but marked by a belief
in imminent breakdown and a search for ever more drastic corrective
measures, it was employed by conservatives, liberals (like Nordau), the
incipient radical right, and materialist socialists of all kinds.
Although Nordau and others had marked him as a major symptom
and exhibit of the condition, degeneration was also perhaps the key con-
stitutive ingredient in Nietzsche’s Lebensphilosophie. “Tell me, my broth-
ers,” Zarathustra asked, “what do we consider bad and worst of all? Is it
not degeneration?” 36 In Nietzsche’s world, the reassertion of all that is
natural and healthy is dependent upon the rootless extirpation of those
anti-natural ressentiment sources of degeneration which have thoroughly
weakened and falsified the natural and aristocratic base of life. “The spe-
cies requires,” he declared in various ways, over and over again, “that the
ill-constituted, weak, degenerate, perish.” 37 Both Nordau and Nietzsche,
each in his own way, regarded culture and civilization as under threat;
both were fundamentally concerned with the sources of decadence, a de-
bilitating loss of energy and vitality, and the possibilities of recovery. Both
constructed a world of ideal- and anti-types and looked forward to a
cleansed world purged of the lower, degenerated elements they posited.
Both envisaged new, non-decadent forms of humanity. Both employed
naturalistic, quasi-biological language. There was even something quite
Nietzschean in Nordau’s eugenic suggestions: “Those degenerates,” he
wrote, “whose mental derangement is too deep-seated must be aban-
doned to their inexorable fate. They are past cure or amelioration. They
will rave for a season, and then perish.” 38 Nor did what Nordau proposed
for his degenerate Nietzschean enemies differ significantly from the mea-
sures Nietzsche advocated for his, as can be seen when Nordau writes,
“. . . whoever looks upon civilization as a good, having value and deserv-
ing to be defended, must mercilessly crush under his thumb the anti-social
vermin. . . . To him who, with Nietzsche, is enthusiastic over the ‘freely-
roving, lusting beast of prey,’ we cry, ‘Get you gone from civilization!’ . . .
There is no place among us for the lusting beast of prey; and if you dare
return to us, we will pitilessly beat you to death with clubs.” 39
There were other, at times rather striking, rhetorical resemblances.
Thus Nordau’s evocation of his ideal type, of “exceptional” man—writ-

ten eight years before Degeneration—bears a striking resemblance to the
heroic uebermenschlich Nietzschean counterpart.
The human race rarely produces an individual who, realizing his power,
and upheld by an exalted self-appreciation, is prepared to enter alone
upon life’s battle-field, on which he must wield his sword and shield with
might and skill to come out as victor or even alive. These exceptional
men . . . offer the finest and most perfect types of our race . . . They look
with contempt upon the beaten paths, and open new highways for
themselves.40
These similarities notwithstanding, it should be clear that over the

years it was with Nietzsche, far more than with Nordau, that the notion
of degeneration was most intimately associated and assimilated into Eu-
ropean political culture. This applied to left as well as radical right and
racist circles. Thus, when the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld employed the
term, he did not invoke Nordau but rather, in an almost taken-for-granted
way after writing “entartete,” he added: “to use a Nietzsche-word.” 41 The
crucial point is that in the mediated (and at some points horribly fateful)
political history of “degeneration,” it is the impact of Nietzsche and not
Nordau that has been decisive. To be sure, Nietzsche’s influence, like his
writing, was always multivalent and never reducible to any single political
or cultural current or direction of thought.42 This diversity of reception
should not, however, obscure the fact that in the first half of this century
various European political circles came to regard Nietzsche as perhaps
the philosopher of degeneration.
As was his wont, he employed the concept in multiple, shifting ways:
as metaphor and irony,43 but most often and most crucially as a substan-
tial literal danger whose overcoming through drastic measures was the
precondition for the urgent re-creation of a naturalized, non-decadent hu-
mankind. “Let us look ahead a century,” Nietzsche wrote, “and assume
that my attempt to assassinate two millenia of anti-nature and human
disfiguration has succeeded. That new party of life which would take the
greatest of all tasks into its hands, the higher breeding of humanity, in-
cluding the merciless extermination of everything degenerating and para-
sitic, would make possible again that excess of life on earth from which
the Dionysian state will grow again.” 44
This kind of language—suitably integrated, of course, into National
Socialist ideology—was constantly repeated and hammered home into
every nook and cranny of the Nazi world. There are innumerable sources
demonstrating that in formative ways the Nazi bio-political understand-
ing of and obsession with degeneration was explicitly inspired by Nietz-
sche.45 Of course, given Nordau’s background, regardless of what he had

written about degeneration, the Nazis could never have acknowledged
that their diagnoses and widely advertised exhibitions of degenerate art
and music owed anything to this Jewish author.46 But the matter went
beyond this merely formal consideration. There were obvious building
blocks in Nietzsche’s radically transvalued world that, if suitably inter-
preted and annexed, could be taken as inspirational to the Nazi Weltan-
schauung in a way that Nordau’s most definitively could not.47
Nordau’s views were, in many ways, an articulation of the conven-
tional opinions of his class and time; indeed, their typicality and respect-
ability constituted the source of their attraction.48 Nowhere had Nordau
preached a healthy barbarism “beyond good and evil,” nor was his New
Man to be unfettered by the chains of traditional morality and an anti-
life rationalist intellect. If both men thought in generalized terms of socio-
political hygiene and heavily employed the language of degeneration, they
nevertheless placed such concerns into radically opposed epistemological
and ethical frames.
Nordau, it is true, like Nietzsche, thought in naturalistic terms, and,
like the author of The Antichrist, was an outspoken critic of all estab-
lished religion; he was, in fact, considered so subversive that his Conven-
tional Lies of Mankind (1883) was banned by the Imperial Council of
Vienna.49 Like Nietzsche too, not only did he propose taking exceedingly
tough steps against those he regarded to be the agents of degeneration,
but also he advocated a hierarchical “aristocratic” society consisting “of
the best and most highly qualified human material.” 50 But all these harsh
emphases fitted into a wider philosophy of a positivist evolutionary hu-
manism characteristic of a nineteenth-century European liberalism that
valued order, traditional discipline, progress, respectability, and rational-
ity—all of which Nietzsche openly despised and attacked.51
Above all, Nordau’s toughness was softened by his ultimate aims. As
were so many other liberals of the time, he was indubitably an elitist yet,
quite unlike Nietzsche, the avowed purpose of his elitism was humanitar-
ian. Elites and leaders had to act for the betterment of all of mankind.
This formed part of Nordau’s concept of human solidarity, a notion
which, needless to say, was entirely absent from Nietzsche.52 Similarly, for
all of Nordau’s disdain for organized religion, and quite unlike the author
of The Antichrist, his critique was enunciated as part of an affirmation
of the progressive nature of European civilization, not its overall denial.
His positivist vision represented itself as part of a direct continuity, an
advanced stage even, furthering the classical humanizing axioms of West-
ern morality, rationalist Enlightenment, and liberal notions of progress.
These were, one by one, Nietzsche’s announced enemies and what he con-
sidered to be the sources of European life-denying slave-morality and its

nihilism, decadence, and degeneration. While Nordau ultimately sought
to defend the Western rational and moral tradition, then, Nietzsche’s post-
nihilist goal was to demolish or at least radically problematize and trans-
value it.
Ultimately the prophet of The Birth of Tragedy longed for the Diony-
sian condition, “a passionate-painful overflowing into darker, more fuller,
more floating states,” 53 while Nordau sought to “abolish all laws which
can not stand the criticism of natural science, and to have reason and
logic govern all the relations between man and man.” 54 If Nordau’s mor-
ality, like Nietzsche’s, was immanent and not transcendental with its
content constantly in flux, then, unlike Zarathustra’s asocial, even anti-
social, bias, its essence lay in its communal species-nature whose aim was
the overcoming of selfishness and “consideration for one’s neighbour.” 55
While Nietzsche insisted that “not the corruption of man but the extent
to which he has become moralized is his curse,” Nordau proclaimed the
aim of morality to be “the humanization of the animal, the spiritualiza-
tion of the man, the exaltation and enrichment of the individual by means
of sympathy, neighborly kindness, a sense of joint responsibility, and the
subjection of Instinct to Reason, which . . . is the noblest product of
Nature.” 56
Perhaps, in the end, Nordau does not come out quite as grotesquely
anachronistic as he at first sight may appear. To be sure, his monochro-
matic positivism and aesthetic traditionalism narrowed his vision and
openness to the point that he had no capacity to absorb vital new devel-
opments of a nascent modernist culture. Nietzsche’s playful perspectivism
and indeterminate epistemology was indeed to become the wave of the
intellectual future, though even here Nordau more faithfully reflected the
ongoing tenor and more conservative tastes of popular culture. For all
that, even if Nordau wrote, together with Nietzsche, from within what
today we consider the highly dubious presuppositions of the discourse
of degeneration, he was determinedly skeptical of moral relativism and
integrated his naturalism into an evolving progressive social morality.
Nietzsche’s immoralist, vitalist ethics “beyond good and evil” may have
been more exciting and experimental, but they played a part in unthink-
able political developments, the nature of which should reawaken us, in
our own species-threatened, fin-de-siècle situation, to the importance of
Nordau’s message of universal human solidarity.
Two
Thinking the Nietzsche Legacy Today

A Historian’s Perspective
To speak of “Nietzsche today” perforce alerts us to the historicity of the

topic.1 For, presumably, the Nietzsche of today differs from the Nietzsche
or indeed, the Nietzsches, of the past and—if you believe, as I do, that his
protean relevance remains strikingly alive—of the future as well. Today’s
Nietzsche—at least in this respect so different from the one that reigned
in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s—is among other things the “play-
ful” one. So in that spirit let me playfully suggest that every culture, every
generation, and every political movement constructs the Nietzsche it de-
serves. Or, to put it in less facetious fashion: Nietzscheanism—the nature
and extent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s impact upon politics, culture, and our
collective and individual sense of self—has always functioned as a histori-
cally dynamic phenomenon simultaneously influencing, reflecting, and be-
ing reshaped by the fluid political and cultural circumstances of which it
was a part.2
The history of the still vibrant Nietzsche legacy must be regarded as
the dynamic history of its manifold appropriations and as the product
of an ongoing dialogue between the peculiarly accessible, relevant, and
multifaceted qualities of Nietzsche’s oeuvre and its various interested
mediators (sympathetic or otherwise) acting within diverse institutional
frameworks and changing cultural and political contexts. This has always
been a relatively open-ended, reciprocal, creative process that entailed se-
lective filtering and constant interpretive reshaping of Nietzschean the-
matics according to divergent perceived needs. In the spirit of the Stefan
George circle, Nietzsche’s most important Völkisch interpreter Ernst Ber-
tram succinctly summed up the process. “Great men,” he wrote in 1918,
“are inevitably our creation, just as we are theirs.” 3 Yet who, in the cli-
mate of today’s Nietzsche, remembers or even wants to remember the
Völkisch Nietzsche shaped during World War I—and how militantly tri-
umphant it became in the Weimar Republic?
13
If we are to gain any perspective on today’s Nietzsche we should keep

in mind that the challenge and significance of his legacy has throughout
resided precisely in its pervasiveness, in its manifold and often contradic-
tory penetration of crucial cultural and political arenas. There have been
not one, but many “Nietzschean impulses” influencing and reflecting
their changing times. Only a Rezeptionsgeschichte (reception history)
sensitive to the fluid and transformational nature of this legacy will be
able to appreciate its rich complexity. “Today’s Nietzsche” must be lo-
cated as part of this ongoing history and made amenable to the kind of
historical analysis applicable to all other Nietzsche annexations. Nietz-
sche today must be considered precisely that—contemporary yet histori-
cally situated—without foreclosing on who or what he will be tomorrow.
Nietzsche-reception has always possessed scavenger-like, casuistic prop-
erties. Only thus has it been possible to construct the remarkable variety
of Nietzscheanisms (some more outrageous than others) revealed by the
historical record: vegetarian, expressionist, socialist, feminist, Zionist,
anarchist, sexual libertarian, nationalist, and so on. If we are to get a
proper historical handle on today’s Nietzsche and understand the elastic-
ity and manifold implications of the legacy, we have to remind ourselves
of something which twenty years ago was blatantly obvious but which
today has been (or stands in danger of being) almost forgotten. If today’s
Nietzsche is, above all, the post-structuralist Nietzsche, during the 1930s
and 1940s the not entirely implausible Fascist and Nazi Nietzsche virtu-
ally (though never completely) eclipsed every other version.
If each generation constructs its own most appropriate Nietzsche, dur-
ing the years of the Third Reich and immediately after, Nietzsche ap-
peared to be paradigmatically Nazi, while National Socialism itself
seemed best understood as a kind of Nietzschean project.4 Both National
Socialists and many of their opponents tended to agree that Nietzsche
was the movement’s most formative and influential thinker, the key vi-
sionary of a hierarchical, biologized Lebensphilosophie society fueled by
regenerationist, post-democratic, post-Christian impulses in which the
weak, decrepit, and useless were to be legislated out of existence. For
those interested in making the case, any number of prophetic themes and
uncannily appropriate (and always selectively enabling) quotes were avail-
able. “From now on,” Nietzsche wrote in The Will to Power, “there will
be more favorable preconditions for more comprehensive forms of domin-
ion, whose like has never yet existed. And even this is not the most impor-
tant thing; the possibility has been established for the production of inter-
national racial unions whose task it will be to rear a master-race, the
future ‘masters of the earth.’ The time is coming when politics will have
a different meaning.” 5
Thinking the Nietzsche Legacy Today 15
The paradigmatic Nietzsche of the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s,

then, was the Nietzsche regarded as the thinker most crucially and inti-
mately definitive of the Nazi order. To be sure, there were always dis-
senting voices both within and without the Nazi camp. Indeed, as many
contemporaries were aware, Georges Bataille—who later admitted that
he and his friends shared a certain “paradoxical Fascist tendency”—
articulated the major themes of the “French” Nietzsche that was to erupt
in the 1960s.6 Nevertheless the prevailing wisdom held that Nietzsche
was proto-Nazi, that he prefigured and even in some way “caused” Na-
tional Socialism, and that in fundamental ways the movement itself had
to be regarded as “Nietzschean.” 7
This perception began to shift in about the mid-1950s and, although
there have always been counter-challenges, it has proceeded so apace
that, for many younger people educated from about the 1970s on, the
identification seems virtually incomprehensible. Not only Nietzsche’s de-
Nazification—and a corresponding de-Nietzscheanization of Nazism—
but also his disassociation from the political right has become close to a
fait accompli within English-speaking countries and France.8 This, in the
main, has been the product of two quite different intellectual forces that
in consonance with wider political changes have rendered the only other
early major competitor and counter-interpretation, Georg Lukács and his
Destruction of Reason, less compelling. With good reason: Lukács’s guid-
ing thesis that “Hitler . . . was the executor of Nietzsche’s spiritual testa-
ment and of the philosophical development coming after Nietzsche and
from him” 9 easily sounds if not downright quaint then certainly a little
anachronistic.
I am not sure if it is an exaggeration to claim that the basic aim of
Nietzsche’s most insistent and influential post-war expositor, translator,
and popularizer, Walter Kaufmann, was to exegetically rid Nietzsche of
these sullied associations and to provide him with the kind of liberal-
humanist face consonant with American academic values of the time.
Kaufmann’s 1950 masterwork portrayed the Nazified Nietzsche as a pure,
virtually inexplicable distortion. Essentially a good European, Nietzsche
was a thinker who had to be grasped in terms of his emphases on creativ-
ity, culture, and critical individualism, and one whose contempt for na-
tionalism, racism, and anti-Semitism could not have been more apparent.10
Kaufmann was, of course, a more or less systematic philosopher who
insisted upon pressing Nietzsche’s thought into a comprehensible and com-
prehensive system. Such systematization is, however, an anathema to many
scholars in a different, less liberally certain and determinate age—expo-
nents of postmodernism or post-structuralism and deconstructionism, for
example, who have functioned as notable colonizers of Nietzsche while
at the same time being crucially shaped by him. Unlike Kaufmann, for
these circles (with some conspicuous exceptions such as Jacques Der-
rida)11 the issue of the connection to National Socialism by and large
goes quite unmentioned, unnoticed, and the very need to even engage the
putative Nietzsche-Nazi link has been virtually obliterated. This Nietz-
sche is quite dissimilar to Kaufmann’s. Here he is the radically skeptical
perspectivist, the anti-totalizing prophet of heterogeneity, fragmentation,
and discontinuity.12
But the post-structuralists, like Kaufmann,13 have also fashioned an
ultimately epistemological14 and rather sterilized Nietzsche, shorn of all
vestiges of his vitalist Lebensphilosophie and his Great Politics of degen-
eration and regeneration.15 If anything he appears not as the embodiment
of National Socialism, but as the therapeutic answer and the antithetical
response to it. This postmodernist Nietzsche is one with postmodernism’s
larger agenda, so often presented as an explicit antidote to the Nazi expe-
rience. For Lyotard, Auschwitz reveals the bankruptcy of the grand meta-
narratives of the Enlightenment and their accompanying belief in progress
and reason. In a post-Auschwitz world, such totalizing, homogenizing,
and manipulating modes must give way to non-privileging heterogeneous,
pluralistic, and ironic narratives.16 This, of course, is very much open to
question. Lyotard’s is a reductive treatment of the Enlightenment project
in which, as one analyst provocatively notes,
all narratives suffer a certain spurious homogenizing: “modernity” for Lyo-

tard would seem nothing but a tale of terroristic Reason and Nazism little
more than the lethal terminus of totalizing thought. This reckless travesty
ignores the fact that the death camps were among other things the upshot
of a barbarous irrationalism which, like some aspects of post-modernism
itself, junked history, refused argumentation, aestheticized politics and
staked all on the charisma of those who told the stories.17
The harnessing of Nietzsche to these new sensibilities and cultural and

political agendas, his post-war de-Nazification, occurred above all in
France from where it was imported to the United States. It was not so
simple to loosen him from these moorings in Germany where, after all, he
had been so intimately tied to the Nazi regime. Among upholders of the
new German liberal-democratic regime, committed to models of renewed
Christian values or humanist Enlightenment, the resistance to Nietzsche
was perhaps the greatest.18 We should remember that the most vociferous
contemporary critic of Nietzsche, indeed of postmodernism itself, and
what he considers to be its parallel irrationalist, anti-Enlightenment
thrust, is Jürgen Habermas.19 It is tellingly symptomatic that when, in
March 1983, Habermas gave a series of lectures at the College de France,
they were a disaster partly because they were delivered in garbled English
(!) but also because in the presence of France’s most famous living Nietz-
scheans, Paul Veyne and Michel Foucault, he devoted time to uncover
what he claimed to be the fascist implications of Nietzsche’s way of think-
ing. By then the distance between the “old” and the “new” Nietzsche
seemed so great that, as one reporter put it, Habermas’ line seemed a
strange proposition: especially “in a place where two prominent Nietz-
scheans teach, neither of whom can be mistaken for anti-democrats.” 20
The post-war resuscitation of Nietzsche and his appropriate recon-
struction into a prophet eminently suited to our own times (as he is thus
refitted for all other times) required therefore that he emigrate into more
hospitable waters. France and the nascent, politically ambiguous, post-
structuralist revolution of the 1970s seemed to have been tailor-made for
this. It is still not clear why the deconstructionist impulse was born in
France and at that particular moment. Numerous explanations, some
more persuasive than others, have been offered.21 Whatever the explana-
tion, there can be little doubt about the obviously dominant role of Nietz-
sche within this new dispensation. In paradoxical fashion, Nietzsche
came to possess canonic status within a body of thought that sought to
problematize the very notion of canon. As a recent volume “Nietzsche as
Postmodernist” puts it: “Nietzsche paved the way for the philosophical
concept of postmodernism” itself. In this view Lyotard’s increasingly au-
thoritative definition of postmodernism as a “distrust of metanarrative”
can be seen simply to be drawn from a particular strain within Nietz-
sche’s thought.22
To be sure, it would be an error to lump all the so-called post-
structuralist trends and thinkers together. Not all its exponents are
equally enthusiastic Nietzscheans and not all use him in the same way.
Moreover, at times they critique each other on the basis of a kind of im-
plicit Nietzschean purity. Derrida once accused Foucault of “confirming
metaphysics in its fundamental operation,” perhaps the most dire anti-
Nietzschean deed in the entire deconstructionist lexicon.23 Whatever the
differences, however, there can be little doubt that—together perhaps
with another old Nietzschean, Martin Heidegger—Nietzsche and what
has been called his “unremitting interrogation of Western civilization” 24
is most central to this project and its sensibility.
Nietzsche’s genealogical conception of history, and what is not always
convincingly taken to be its radical problematizing of origins;25 the em-
phasis on the discourse of power; the radically skeptical perspectivism; the
experimental quest for self-creation; the fascination with the outer reaches
of human experience (the realms of madness, cruelty, violence, and pain
repressed by metaphysics and reason); the transgressive “Dionysian” im-
pulses; the dissolution or the problematization of the very category of

the self; the notion that truth is alternatively illusory, metaphorical, and
institutional; the sense of stylistic play, heterogeneity, indeterminacy, and
rupture: these Nietzschean echoes are all crucial constituent parts of the
postmodernist project.26 This Nietzsche, we should note, is not all that
new. Already in 1950—in his post-Nazi phase—the German expression-
ist poet Gottfried Benn wrote that Nietzsche had destroyed philosophy,
theology, causality, eros, truth, being, and identity. There was no transcen-
dental, binding Archimedean point. Nietzsche had demonstrated the er-
ror of assuming that humans had an intrinsic or metaphysical content.
There was, in fact, no such thing as the “person”: there were only symp-
toms.27
Unlike in the 1930s and 1940s, Nietzscheanism today is not most
clearly and officially represented in the life and ideologies of radical pol-
itical movements but more as an infiltrative, atmospheric presence in-
forming the culture and defining the lives of particular individuals. The
case of the most famous Nietzschean of our time, Michel Foucault, is too
familiar to bear repeating in detail here but it does exemplify the themes
we have just outlined and perhaps reveals some of the hidden connections
with Nietzscheans of an allegedly quite different political order.28 The
centrality of Nietzsche to Foucault’s project has been attested to by all
who have examined it. His analyses of the historicity (rather than ficti-
tiousness) of the constructed self as it emerges within shifting discourses
and institutional settings and his perception that power creates its sub-
jects (rather than being exercised by them) were explicitly inspired by
Nietzsche as was his own individual quest to understand “how one be-
comes what one is.” What could be more Nietzschean than his descrip-
tion of his later aestheticized personal vision that there could be only one
practical consequence flowing from the idea of self not being given to us:
humans must create themselves as works of art.
Increasingly it has been established to what degree, however, his work
and life—as an ultimate Nietzschean, Foucault considered the two utterly
intertwined—consisted not, as so many of his admirers believed, of a cri-
tique or an attempt to escape the grasp of power, but as a celebration
of it. His sadomasochism was a kind of exercise of the will-to-power, a
fascination with the domination of self and other. What could be more
resonantly Nietzschean than his disdainful definition of the humanist, En-
lightenment tradition as “everything in Western civilization that restricts
the desire for power.” His Discipline and Power, as various commentators
have recently pointed out, is replete with vitalistic reveling in blood and
cruelty that stands in clear contrast to the demonization of the coolly
efficient institutions of modern life.29 The internalization of surveillance
is condemned, as Mark Lilla has put it, not because it subtly perpetuates
power but because it seeks to displace it from body to soul.30 In Foucault’s
work, then, the question of nihilism is left wide open. In the absence of
any unchangeable rule or norm, the positive and destructive capacities of
which Nietzsche spoke coalesce as permanent possibilities.
There is a veritable rush in various feminist quarters to render this
postmodernist Nietzsche as inspirational source. Jacques Derrida has spec-
tacularly demonstrated the radical heterogeneities, the reversals, the en-
coded complexities of Nietzsche’s treatment of women (“Nietzsche might
well be lost in the web of his text, lost much as a spider who finds he is
unequal to the web he has spun”), and their centrality to his project.31
But its politicization too often elides such complexities. Here Nietzsche
is simply invoked “to find ways of understanding and affirming sexual
differences that do not imply social relations of domination and subordi-
nation; . . . conceptions of power and practices of criticism which are not
confined to the reactive perspective of slave morality; . . . the desire . . . to
find . . . forms of relations to others, to knowledge and to self which
might provide bases for less oppressive social relations.” 32 The mighty
exegetical efforts involved in suitably transforming the Zarathustrian
whip and the explicitly and radically anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian
Nietzsche into this soft humanizing role have not been lost on even the
most enthusiastic members of these circles.33
Contemporary feminist Nietzscheanism may have its own particular
emphases, but we should remind ourselves it is no new creation. The same
interpretive imperatives and tensions between Nietzsche’s apparent dis-
missal of women and its exegetical interpretive overcoming, his radically
emancipatory and transvaluative side,34 and his emphasis on a biologistic,
essentialist conception of the “identity” of women beset its advocates,
many of whom flirted openly with various forms of bio-eugenic politics,
as early as the 1890s.35 It may be salutary to remember that historically
there have been feminist Nietzscheans of all stripes. For example, the fu-
turist vitalist Valentine de Saint-Point, who sought “to make lust into a
work of art” and who argued that after battle “it is normal for the victors,
to turn to rape in the conquered land, so that life may be re-created,”
translated the notion of the Übermensch into a new myth of the masculin-
ized superwoman. Give woman, she proclaimed, “a war cry and with joy
she will ride again on her instinct and lead you towards undreamed of
conquests . . . Let woman rediscover her own cruelty and violence that
make her turn on the beaten . . . and mutilate them.” 36 While for some
de Saint-Point’s construction may have been less attractive, can we say
that it was less plausible than the rival feminist appropriations of her own
or the present day?
In many obvious ways the Nietzschean corpus has formed and influ-
enced contemporary sensibilities, but it is equally true that the Nietz-
sche(s) of our own times could only arise, like those of other times, be-
cause changed circumstances induced and encouraged him to be read and
emphasized in this particular way. Nietzsche has simultaneously influ-
enced but also been appropriately reconstructed to fit what his champions
take to be our own age of radical ideological and epistemological indeter-
minacy. Like other constructions—including my own—all interpreta-
tions of Nietzsche are particular and historically conditioned. Indetermi-
nacy is in many ways a Nietzschean legacy, and the deconstructionists are
surely correct to highlight historical and textual contingency. Yet they do
not differ in kind from the multiple Nietzscheanisms that form the history
of the ongoing Nietzsche legacy. The making of this particular Nietzsche,
like all other Nietzscheanisms, involves a series of selective interpretive
operations. They too have constructed their own privileged, “meta”-
Nietzsche: the self-subverting, paradoxical one of indeterminacy.
If many contemporary critics are to be believed, this Nietzsche simply
consists of another, not always persuasive, reading: one, they argue, that
entails not the jettisoning of metaphysics but rather the elaboration of yet
another one. Of course, the post-structuralists continue to teach us much
that is valuable about the textual and perspectivist nature of language
and truth, and several have done so by apparently drawing sustenance
from Nietzsche’s formulations. As Avital Ronell has put it: “The question
of the text erupted with Nietzsche, everything appears to be organized
around the absence of an oeuvre.” 37 But equally plausible counter-
interpretations have been made that Nietzsche was the first to see through
such claims and that his intra-linguistic play “does not amount to an ab-
sence of origins and absence of foundation,” a mere play of signifiers, but
an overabundance of plastic forces, a surplus of force, part of the physics
of the will to power.38 Furthermore, some have argued that for all Nietz-
sche’s iconoclasm, and indeed, perhaps because of it, he remains, after
all, within the classical philosophical mode a “seeker after truth.” 39 One
critic has recently gone so far as to suggest a “Nietzsche who is merely
rehashing familiar Kantian themes, minus the rigor of Kant’s exposi-
tion.” 40 Be that as it may, others claim that Nietzsche’s insistently judg-
mental stance posits the principle of rank-order as overriding. This pre-
supposes the “supra-perspectival” truth that postmodernists deny.41
They point to the fact that the canonic postmodernist Nietzschean
text—“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”—was only published
posthumously and that many other similar musings appeared in the un-
published notes to The Will to Power.42 They argue that Nietzsche at-
tacked specific modes of logic and rationality rather than Western
thought as such, that he disavowed particular conceptions of truth, not

the possibility of truth as such, and that he very much insisted both upon
the notion and the possibility of “incorrect reading.” 43
The deconstructionist Nietzsche, on the other hand, is intentionally
self-subverting. As one author puts it, rather than denying or ignoring
the contingency of his own textual authority, especially in Zarathustra,
Nietzsche “forges a deconstructive relation between himself and his read-
ers . . . [and] forces his readers similarly to acknowledge their contingent
construction of their own claims to authority.” 44 But if the postmodernist
Nietzschean paradigm emphasizes self-subversion, one wonders whether
it leaves room for its own self-subversion (especially by Nietzsche, its pur-
ported champion and incarnation).
This is not the place to examine some of the more obvious transparen-
cies involved in some of the postmodernist popularizations and political
annexations of Nietzsche. Still, it is worth quoting the conclusions of one
recent commentator, Mark Warren. Nietzsche’s philosophy, he writes,
when appropriately purged of subjective political views (!), implies “a
pluralistic society in which egalitarianism underwrites individuality.” 45
The Nietzschean collapse of any metaphysical source of authority is held
to bring liberation from repressive closures in discourse and practice, un-
dreamed-of transvaluations, and a newfound freedom going beyond all
previously sanctioned limits.
But only a very slightly developed historical sense will remind us of the
irony that the advocate of the “merciless extermination” of the weak, the
degenerate, and the parasitic—a man whose thought, whether parodisti-
cally or not, could be regarded as foundational to and definitive of the
Nazi order—should now be commonly heralded as a powerful advocate
of tolerance and difference, as spokesman for the emergence and protec-
tion of the powerless Other, and as prophet of relationships shorn of
domination.46 In good deconstructionist manner we cannot know what
Nietzsche really meant when he wrote that the Jews were “the most cata-
strophic people of world history,” guilty of nothing less than the radical
falsification of “all nature, all naturalness, all reality, of the whole inner
world as well as the outer.” 47 Good scholarship and Nietzsche apologists
no doubt can casuistically explain and contextualize such remarks. But
that is just the point. The history of Nietzsche appropriation is replete
with just such casuistry by all interested sides and when anti-Semites of
the most radical kind invoked and were influenced by such passages they
did not concern themselves with the finer points of textual emendation.48
The current liberationist Nietzsche thus fits into a long tradition of Nietz-
sche appropriation by socialists and other egalitarians. It demonstrates
the ongoing remarkable capacity to filter out an enormous amount of
many very unambiguous and extreme anti-democratic, anti-socialist, anti-

egalitarian, elitist, and even eugenic and racist convictions.
Most Nietzscheans, and especially historians of the Nietzsche legacy,
have sought to press the rich complexity of his appropriations into a nar-
row essentialist framework, classifying the various deployments either as
deviations from or faithful representations of the “real” Nietzsche.
Whether such a single, grand meta-narrative is or is not best able to ac-
count for his thought is, to be sure, a methodological and philosophical
issue that itself must be considered part of the thinker’s ongoing legacy. I
believe, at least as a historical principle, that the postmodernist insistence
upon plurality and textuality is very beneficial, and in many ways my own
conception of writing the history of the Nietzsche legacy has been shaped
by the perception that Nietzsche has been read and has encouraged such
reading in vitally heterogeneous ways.49 In normative terms, this appro-
priation may even be richer than most others for it incorporates and the-
matizes Nietzschean complexity and multiplicity into its own reading.
Nonetheless, such a reading must also be regarded as only part of an
ongoing history: no more than a chapter of an unfinished Nietzsche leg-
acy, a fact underlined and appreciated by the deconstructionist insistence
upon the openness of texts to historical and future others. Like other
interpretive constructions, its exponents, after all the necessary qualifica-
tions and exceptions have been inserted, have selectively molded what
they take to be a “paradigmatically” postmodern Nietzsche.50
But if there is one constant in the history of Nietzsche-reception, it is
the perception, variously and continuously reinterpreted, that Nietzsche
was “paradigmatic.” The notoriously vague and shifting meanings of
terms like “modern,” “modernism,” and “postmodern” need not detain
us here.51 Suffice it to say that, for our purposes, these designations
may themselves be regarded as landmarks of changing modes of historical
self-understanding, and that Nietzsche—the man of multiple faces—has
consistently been regarded as the very exemplification of these changing
paradigmatic conditions and self-representations.
What accounts for this insistently continuous transnational fascina-
tion? In the final analysis, the answer must be sought in his almost un-
canny ability to define—and embody—the furthest reaches of the general
post-Enlightenment predicament and to encapsulate many of its enduring
spiritual and intellectual tensions, contradictions, hopes, and possibili-
ties. Admirers, opponents, and critics alike have always agreed that one
did not simply read Nietzsche; rather, as Thomas Mann put it in 1918,
one “experienced” him.52 More than any other modern thinker Nietzsche
has acted as a kind of seismometer of our spiritual and intellectual life, a
personalized stamping ground and battlefield upon which our tensions,
conflicts, contradictions, and possibilities have been played out.53 From

the 1890s through to the present, his life and thought have provided an
acutely relevant prism through which to express and confront the chang-
ing meanings and problems of a fluid, always unclear, yet ultimate moder-
nity most radically conceived, in the words of Leszek Kolakowski, as the
belief “in the unlimited possibility of mankind’s self-creation” 54 and char-
acterized by the predicament of nihilism and its interconnected, transval-
uative, liberating, and cataclysmic potential. Because he stands so close
to the center of our ongoing concerns, Nietzsche has not been exhausted
by, nor can he be reduced to, any particular political system or cultural
movement or historical time frame.
While his paradigmatic status has not varied, perceptions as to the na-
ture and content of the paradigm have changed in response to shifting
intellectual, political, and generational circumstances. The dominant
postmodernist Nietzsche has, for the moment, erased the overtly substan-
tial and programmatic Nietzsche, so crucial to the political history of his
reception and appropriations. But, whatever disputed conservative or rad-
ical political functions this indeterminate Nietzsche may serve, his “post-
modern” guise may not be the last word.55 While we cannot predict its
future contours, the Nietzsche legacy will in all probability live on as a
dynamic force and assume new forms, dangerous as well as potentially
liberating, responding to the dilemmas and needs of changing times and
integrated always into our own tentative self-definitions and representa-
tions. Because Nietzsche remains perhaps the most potent symbol of the
variegated, continuously experimental, post-Enlightenment project, his
legacy and its almost boundless capacity for renewal will persist, as will
the opposition to it. Our relationship to him will thus surely continue to
confirm Ernst Bertram’s dictum that “great men are inevitably our cre-
ation, just as we are theirs.”
Three
Against Social Science

Jewish Intellectuals, the Critique of Liberal-
Bourgeois Modernity, and the (Ambiguous)
Legacy of Radical Weimar Theory
. . . the Social Sciences, an abominable discipline from every

point of view.
—Hannah Arendt to Mary McCarthy,
21 December 1968
W. H. Auden coined that delightful injunction: “Thou shall not commit

social science.” 1 But much of its animating spirit, its diverse theoretical
articulations and various ideological impulses, seems to emanate from a
number of Jewish thinkers whose intellectual worlds were molded in and
by the Weimar Republic and whose biographies and subsequent thought
were, in quite different ways, indelibly marked by the catastrophic expe-
rience of National Socialism. I want here to consider the genesis and
the later, more nuanced elaborations of these varied critiques of social
science. These constitute an important part of Weimar’s ongoing and am-
biguous legacy that, I would suggest, has become part of our own late-
twentieth-century cultural sensibility. Under investigation here is a dispa-
rate group of thinkers whose intellectual stock has dramatically risen over
the years and whose thought—each in its own very different fashion—is
now regarded in some way as seminal or foundational. I am referring to
the work and worlds of Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and what has be-
come known as the Frankfurt School (especially Theodor Adorno, Max
Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse).
At first glance the differences seem more glaring than any commonali-
ties. Leo Strauss has come to embody, perhaps misleadingly so, a mili-
tantly elitist neo-conservatism;2 Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse are
recognized as crucial formulators of what is now termed “Western Marx-
24
Against Social Science 25
ism,” albeit of a highly refined culturally and philosophically re-tuned va-

riety;3 and Hannah Arendt is today regarded above all as a determinedly
post-traditional, anti-ideological political thinker.4 The ideological differ-
ences between these thinkers are compounded, moreover, by a remarkable
absence of reciprocal reference and public acknowledgement. Almost no
statements of mutual recognition, let alone indebtedness, can be found.5
Indeed, there was often a nasty, profound dislike.6 Thus Arendt not
only rejected Strauss’s attempt to court her when they met at the Prussian
State Library, but acerbically criticized his conservative political views. As
her biographer points out, the “bitterness lasted for decades . . . Strauss
was haunted by the rather cruel way in which Hannah Arendt had judged
his assessment of National Socialism: she had pointed out the irony of
the fact that a political party advocating views Strauss appreciated could
have no place for a Jew like him.” 7 In return, Strauss openly agitated
against Arendt upon the appearance of Eichmann in Jerusalem and en-
couraged students and acquaintances to pan it.8 Arendt’s dislike for
Adorno was, if anything, even more intense. When he rejected her first
husband’s (Guenther Stern) musicological work on what Arendt took to
be tendentious Marxist ideological grounds, she declared: “That man is
not coming into our house!” 9 On the basis of the discovery of an obsequi-
ous 1934 piece Adorno wrote in a semi-official Nazi journal praising a
song-cycle with words from Baldur von Schirach’s poetry, Arendt declared
that he was amongst those Jews who “would have gone along with Hit-
ler if they had been allowed to.” 10 (It is, perhaps, the crowning irony
that recently Arendt herself has been berated similarly for her continuing
loyalty to and defense of another apparently unrepentant Nazi, Martin
Heidegger.)11
For all that, the similarities between these seemingly disparate figures
are striking, all the more so for thus far having gone relatively unnoticed
and unanalyzed.12 All were acculturated German Jewish intellectuals, phi-
losophers whose formative sensibilities were shaped in the Weimar Re-
public and whose personal biographies and subsequent worldviews were
decisively stamped by Nazism and the experience of exile in the U.S. In
one way or another they all experienced the travails described by Arendt
in her “We Refugees.” 13 (Their view of American society was exceedingly
narrow, Walter Laqueur has observed laconically, because none of them
had driving licenses!)14 All in quite different—yet quintessentially Wei-
marian—ways were attracted to heterodox, radical, and even subversive
modes of thought. They thus inhabited what can only be described as
a post-Nietzschean universe,15 and all of them, regardless of subsequent
criticisms, came under the bewitching spell of Martin Heidegger.16 Like
so many of the Weimar intelligentsia, they were all critics of “mass soci-
ety,” deeply suspicious of rationalist-technological modernity and liberal

bourgeois democracy. This is precisely what renders their legacy for us
an ambiguous one.17 All of them formulated critiques of the social and
behavioral sciences and adumbrated overall political and cultural alterna-
tives to the negative modernity they felt these social sciences embodied.
But there is still another important commonality. Given the circumstances
of the time, they were all confronted with and had to formulate responses
to what Strauss called the Jewish “theologico-political” predicament.18
As a consequence, all of them, albeit in varying degrees of commitment,
grew to acknowledge the symbolic and actual importance of Jewish mat-
ters and increasingly integrated these concerns into the marrow of their
work. Consciousness of the “Jewish Question” and their own Jewishness
informed, sometimes quite profoundly, both the critiques and the alterna-
tives they posited.
We must also concede that in many ways their critique of technology
and liberal-leveling modernity was derived from the Weimar radical right.
Leo Strauss’s turn to the medieval rationalist philosophy of Maimonides
as the antidote to the conceits of modern liberalism should thus perhaps
be read as the Jewish mirror-image of his erstwhile friend Carl Schmitt’s
appeal to a unifying, saving Catholic rationalism.19 In his 1933 critique
of Schmitt’s “Concept of the Political,” Strauss upbraided Schmitt for not
going far enough and for not executing the day’s most “urgent task”:
undermining liberalism at its very foundations. Schmitt’s “critique of lib-
eralism,” he noted, “takes place within the horizon of liberalism; his illib-
eral tendencies are arrested by the as yet undefeated ‘systematics of liberal
thinking.’ The critique of liberalism that Schmitt has initiated can there-
fore be completed only when we succeed in gaining a horizon beyond
liberalism.” 20 It is not surprising then to note that Strauss was almost
contemptuously critical of his Doktorvater Ernst Cassirer, who exempli-
fied liberal thought and “the decrepit state of rational philosophy,” espe-
cially when the comparison to Heidegger was in question.21
Yet, despite this palpable influence, none of these thinkers were content
with the moral and political conclusions drawn by the radical right.22
Strauss took offense at the Schmittian “adoration of animalist power” 23
and defined politics (or, rather, political philosophy) not as a relentless
struggle between friend and foe but in the sublimated terms of the never-
consummated quest for the good and the noble;24 Arendt turned not to a
Heideggerian being-toward-death but to natality and new beginnings as
the sources of human hope and creativity; and the Critical Theorists,
alarmed though they were by the grip of instrumental rationality, held on
however grimly to the universal emancipatory promise rather than submit
to a brutalized Juengerian type. Whether out of a sense of their own per-
ceived vulnerability, or a commitment to older Enlightenment humanizing

traditions,25 or even because of their own Jewish ideals, it is clear that
these Jewish thinkers resisted both proto-Fascist notions of a resolute
warrior-power society and the apocalyptic impulses of Weimar intellec-
tual culture.26 Their opposition to liberalism and bourgeois-capitalist mo-
dernity proceeded from within determinedly humanist frameworks, how-
ever elitist and idiosyncratic their biases may seem to have been. It was
this spirit that animated their common antipathy for a positivist social
science whose narrowing, reductionist preconceptions they regarded, in
one way or another, as diminutions both of the actual and potential hu-
man condition.27
All these thinkers recognized the centrality of the social sciences in the
intellectual economy of a modernity they viewed as sorely flawed and thus
spent much time countering what they took to be its pernicious logic and
implications. Social science was regarded as both a symptomatic reflec-
tion and agent of what, in their different ways, these thinkers took to
be a fundamental pathology. At their hands the giants of “bourgeois”
sociology—Auguste Comte, and, indeed, their own Weimar contemporar-
ies, Karl Mannheim and Max Weber—underwent detailed scrutiny and
critique.
Although Arendt and Strauss also took Auguste Comte to task,28 it
was the Marxist-oriented Frankfurt School that repeatedly damned him
for the original sociological sin of positivism. The very term “sociology,”
Adorno and Horkheimer wrote, was a “malformation, half Latin, half
Greek . . .” 29 and was, of course, coined by Comte. His “positivism,”
which by virtue of its revolt against metaphysics and Hegelian “nega-
tionism” prided itself on its empiricism, had created a static inductionism
that wholly replaced the consciousness of the dynamic totality of society.
Moreover, it was a vision shorn entirely of the critical impulse.
From the very beginning of the new science the joy in progress was muted:
its thought on society took pride in not transcending that which was. The
impulse of philosophy to transform the Ought into the Is readily gave way
to the sober acceptance of the Is as the Ought . . . sociology has remained
“positive” not only because it desires to keep to the given . . . but also be-
cause it takes a positive stance toward that which exists. It has enjoined
itself to refrain from treating that which exists critically.30
Marcuse, in his famous wartime investigation of the roots of Fascism,

Reason and Revolution, went so far as to argue that Comteanism, which
rapidly became transformed into the defense of middle-class society as it
existed, bore the seeds of a later philosophic justification of authoritarian-
ism and irrationalism. By equating the study of society with the study of
nature and its laws, by negating the very idea of a dialectic, “social prac-
tice” was effectively “throttled by the inexorable.” This sociology was
charged with establishing the “general limits of all political action” and
preparing men for obedience and resignation to the existing order:
The laws positivist science discovered and that distinguish it from empiri-
cism, were positive also in the sense that they affirmed the prevailing order
as a basis for denying the need to construct a new one. Not that they ex-
cluded the idea of reform and change—on the contrary, the idea of prog-
ress loomed large in the sociology of Comte—but the laws of progress
were part of the machinery of the given order . . . the authority of natural
laws in place of free action . . . The idea of order, so basic to Comte’s posi-
tivism, has a totalitarian content in its social as well as methodological
meaning.31
The great sociologists of their own Weimar time came in for similar
treatment from our thinkers. The Critical theorists railed that Karl Mann-
heim’s concept of “ideology’ in effect reduced all knowledge to a kind of
“false consciousness.” 32 And, indeed, Hannah Arendt’s very first publica-
tion (in 1930) was devoted to a defense of the autonomy of philosophy
in the face of the reductionist threat posed by Mannheim’s Ideology and
Utopia (published in 1929).33 Sociology, the young philosopher indig-
nantly proclaimed, “denies reality to thought as a matter of principle . . .
Everything in the mental or intellectual realm is regarded as ideology or
utopia.” In effect, Arendt adopted a technique which many years later
(1969) Peter L. Berger described as “relativizing the relativizers.” 34 It was
not thought but sociology’s (and psychoanalysis’) “mistrust of the mind,”
she wrote, that was suspect and in need of explanation. The discipline
had to be understood as a product of the homeless condition induced
by a bourgeois economistic modernity and the breakdown of tradition.
“Sociology itself,” she wrote,
is bound to a historical moment without which it could not have arisen
in the first place, the moment when a justified mistrust of the mind was
awakened through its homelessness. . . . The interpretation of mental life
purely in terms of reducing it to ideology or utopia is justified only when
the economic component has gained such predominance in life that
thought in fact can and must become “ideological superstructure.”. . .
Only when people no longer see their existence in community as given,
only when, as by means of economic advancement, the individual sud-
denly finds himself belonging to a completely different community . . .
does the question of meaning arise.35
On the surface, Leo Strauss does not appear to share this hostility.36
Quite the contrary, actually, he once (quite disingenuously, I think) de-
clared that “my specialty is . . . social science” 37 and formulated his “so-
ciology of philosophy” in explicitly Mannheimian terms, describing it as
“a legitimate subdivision of sociology of knowledge.” 38 Yet this “sociol-
ogy of philosophy” contains a frontal attack upon the assumptions of the
sociology of knowledge and, furthermore, is designed to grasp and pre-
serve what that science, according to Strauss, grossly denies: the privi-
leged, irreducible role of the philosopher in society.
Sociology of knowledge emerged in a society which took for granted the

essential harmony between thought and society . . . It did not see a grave
practical problem in that fundamental relation. It tended to see in the dif-
ferent philosophies exponents of different societies or classes or ethnic
spirits. It failed to consider the possibility that all philosophers form a
class by themselves, or what unites all genuine philosophers is more impor-
tant than what unites a given philosopher with a particular group of
nonphilosophers.39
For Strauss, perhaps somewhat melodramatically, the practice of phi-

losophy was a definitionally precarious one. Even in the apparent safety
of a liberal-democratic society, he argued, one should not be blinded to
“the existence of a danger which, however much its forms may vary, is
coeval with philosophy.” Radically subverting both the intent and struc-
ture of the traditional sociology of knowledge, Strauss pronounced that
“the understanding of this danger and of the various forms which it has
taken, and which it may take, is the foremost task, and indeed the sole
task, of the sociology of philosophy.” 40
Even more significantly, Strauss, Arendt, and the Critical Theorists were
all compelled, in more or less complex ways and from varying perspectives,
to engage the sociological colossus Max Weber. Perhaps most bluntly, and
crudely, the Frankfurt School regarded him as essentially a continuation
of the conservative-bourgeois positivist tradition in sociology, a thinker
whose formalistic dualism of facts and values acted in service of the status
quo.41 The Critical Theorists could, no doubt, sympathize with Weber’s
tragic awareness of the victory of the technocratic-instrumental realm
and bureaucratic rationality as part of the “disenchantment of the world,”
since this was not all that far from their conception of the “dialectic of
enlightenment.” But they rejected Weber’s contention that capitalism was
the highest form of socioeconomic rationality: witness, for instance, Mar-
cuse’s famous presentation at the 1964 Soziologentag in Heidelberg
where he attacked Weber as an outright apologist for capitalism.42 As
Marxists, they held that unplanned economies without socialized means
of production were bound to be irrational.43
Hannah Arendt’s relationship to Weber, on the other hand, is more
complicated and requires some exegesis. Certain key aspects of her

thought, such as the concepts of “world alienation” and “homelessness,”
conjure up (and perhaps derive from) Weber’s notion of the “disen-
chantment of the world.” 44 Indeed, she usually referred to the master with
great respect and, when critical, attributed attendant weaknesses to the
vulgarizations of his followers.45 But this is only part of the story. Peter
Baehr has recently suggested that Arendt’s negative judgements are often
coded or deflected, prompted by her desire not to hurt the feelings of her
great friend and mentor, Karl Jaspers, whose admiration for Weber was
virtually unbounded.46 Whatever the case, as Baehr notes, in many ways
it may be useful to view Arendt’s philosophy as presenting a rather com-
prehensive alternative to Weber’s politico-sociological outlook. Arendt
certainly disapproved of the functionalist and instrumental bias attendant
upon his kind of sociology.47 But her deeper dissensions, although seldom
overtly declared, revolve around their radically opposed conceptions of
“action.” The notion of “action” is pivotal to Arendt’s philosophical re-
configurations and is diametrically opposed to that of the social sciences,
especially the dominant Weberian kind, as Baehr has argued.
In contrast to theories that posit action teleologically as a means-end rela-

tionship or as a “system,” Arendt understands it as the ability to initiate a
new course of events. . . . Action, in Arendt’s account, is a category of poli-
tics, not of sociology . . . it is not primarily the result of a “motive” (Max
Weber) or of a “project” (Alfred Schutz) but instead a corollary of [what
she called] “natality”. . . Moreover a categorical feature of action is its in-
determinacy and irreversibility. For no person ever knows exactly what
they have initiated, and the “meaning” of their action is less a force that
impels them on, and more a retrospective judgment by the spectator . . .
who weaves the strands of many actions into a story which as “history”
or remembrance, preserves the actor’s words and deeds.48
Arendt opposed these notions of action within social science because

ultimately, she argued, they rested upon the reductive metaphorics of
“fabrication” and instrumentality. She sought to strip action of its We-
berian means-ends nexus and render it instead as revelatory of the human
capacity for freedom. Action indicated the capacity to initiate, the ability
to start something new and unpredictable.49 Because action is freedom
and thus the political characteristic par excellence, Arendt at least implic-
itly challenged the Weberian conception of politics as modes of rulership
and domination and placed in its stead the normative (albeit idiosyncratic
and to many even bizarre) proposition of politics as public spaces for the
expression of freedom and individual self-disclosure, shorn of any partic-
ular or sectional “material” interests. This is far removed indeed from
Weber’s conception of politics and state power as the capacity to monopo-

lize the means of violence; and it is utterly opposed to Schmitt’s dichoto-
mous friend-foe conception of politics. Instead, power is conceived as a
positive form of energy deriving from a rather idealized notion of volun-
tary collective action.50 For Arendt, Weberian domination cannot be po-
litical because it imposes a monopoly on speech and action, a monopoly
that destroys plurality, the very basis of the human condition.51 The dis-
sension from notions of politics as rule and domination is radical; free-
dom is to exist in a state neither of rule or being ruled. Arendt also never
endorsed the “competitive elitist” of liberal democracy supported by We-
ber and in its stead proposed the revitalization of the lost revolutionary
tradition of councils.52
If Arendt’s dialogue with Weber was largely indirect and implicit, such
was not the case for Leo Strauss. Strauss too respected Weber, and re-
garded him as the intellectual giant with whom open engagement and
argument was crucial if the “modern” project was to be both understood
and “overcome.” 53 As he put it in Natural Right and History: “No one
since Weber has devoted a comparable amount of intelligence, assiduity,
and almost fanatical devotion to the basic problems of the social sciences.
Whatever may have been his errors, he is the greatest social scientist of
our century.” 54 Strauss’s engagement with Weber was, of course, part of
his larger critique of modern historicism and social science—and thus
of liberal democracy—as destructive of conceptions of “natural right” (I
shall return to this later). But it was precisely because of Weber’s eminence
and sophistication that Strauss singled him out for confrontation and
analysis.55
Weber’s distinction between facts and values and his insistence upon
the ethically neutral character of social science, Strauss disapprovingly
noted, derived from his belief that no genuine knowledge of the Ought
was possible. A plurality of values existed in the universe “whose de-
mands conflict with one another, and whose conflict cannot be solved by
human reason . . . Weber’s thesis necessarily leads to nihilism or to the
view that every preference, however evil, base or insane, has to be judged
before the tribunal of reason to be legitimate as any other preference.” 56
The Weberian categorical imperative thus took on a kind of existential
hue of authentic resoluteness: to be base is to be lukewarm. “Follow God
or the Devil as you will, but, whichever choice you make, make it with
all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your power.” 57
In numerous complex, sometimes sophistic forays, Strauss questioned
whether Weber’s basic premise of an unresolvable conflict between human
values, had “really been demonstrated, or whether it has merely been pos-
tulated under the impulse of a specific moral preference.” 58 Strauss’s proj-
ect, after all, his return to the verities of pre-modern philosophy and its
assumptions, was based upon the search for universals denied by the
postulates of Weberian social science and its associated historicist as-
sumptions.59
But, of course, all these individual confrontations were really parts of
broader critiques against social science itself, and these in turn were re-
flections of the wider alternative philosophies and politics respectively be-
ing adumbrated. Strauss, the Critical Theorists, and Arendt not only re-
garded social science as essentially “instrumental,” but also as a reflection
and reinforcement of a technico-reductionist mentality characteristic of
liberal-capitalist modernity.60 One need not elaborate on this for the Criti-
cal Theorists, for if the Frankfurt School is famous for anything it is for
its enduring, multifaceted efforts to demonstrate the pernicious permuta-
tions and domination of “instrumental”—as opposed to substantive—
reason in modern society.61 Indeed, it is precisely its rather undifferenti-
ated critique, its tendency in this regard to collapse distinctions between
liberal-bourgeois and Fascist regimes or between mass murder and the
Hollywood culture industry, that has aroused much of the criticism
against it.62 In their reading, bourgeois sociology becomes the very incar-
nation of this kind of instrumental reason, defined as a form of false con-
sciousness. Bourgeois sociology, they argued, assumed an unproblematic
unity between individual and society by, as it were, abolishing social an-
tagonisms and the idea of a dialectical totality that would allow for genu-
ine radical criticism.63 It treated “society, potentially the self-determining
subject, as if it were an object, and could be determined from outside . . .
Such a substitution of society as object for subject constitutes the reified
consciousness of sociology.” 64 Indeed, it was in order to construct a kind
of dialectical anti-positivist counter-sociology, which they dubbed “Criti-
cal Theory,” that their alternative Institute for Social Research was
founded in 1923.
While the Frankfurt School rejected positivistic sociology on the re-
demptive (albeit fragile) grounds of an as yet historically unrealized eman-
cipatory dialectic, Leo Strauss dismissed it in favor of a resurrected pre-
modern notion of enduring rationality and natural right. The positivist
assumption that modern science represented the highest form of knowl-
edge, he noted, inevitably deprecated an always existent and necessary
pre-scientific knowledge. It was precisely these pre-scientific assump-
tions—for instance, the presupposition that social science can tell human
beings from other beings—that not only remained valid but were the es-
sential precondition for all later “scientific” operations.65
But this logical matter was not primary. Time and again, as with his
analysis of Weber, Strauss returned to positivism’s prescriptive inabilities
and its paralyzing or trivializing effects. Serious issues become evaded, he

bemoaned, “by the simple device of passing them off as value prob-
lems.” 66 Even more bitingly, he wrote: “Moral obtuseness is the necessary
condition for scientific analysis . . . The more serious we are as social
scientists, the more completely we develop within ourselves a state . . .
which may be called nihilism.” 67 But of course, for Strauss, the distinction
between facts and values itself (so foundational to modern social science)
was fallacious, its inner contradictions legion. The social scientist resisted
all values, he wrote, in the name of truth. “But according to his principles,
truth is not a value which it is necessary to choose . . . Social science
cannot pronounce on the question of whether social science itself is
good,” he wrote in quintessential Nietzschean fashion.68
For Strauss, neither social science nor historicism could be compatible
with political philosophy since the latter unashamedly concerned itself
with the search for the good,69 while political “scientists” simply absolut-
ized the given political order by remaining “within a horizon which is
defined by the given political order and its opposite.” 70 In quite Heideg-
gerian manner, Strauss posited a conflict between “thinking about Being”
and the purely external, relative, “objective” method practiced by the be-
havioral sciences.71
By contrast, Arendt’s general judgments on the social and behavioral
sciences, its functionalizing biases apart, always concentrated on their re-
ductive and what she took to be their essentially demeaning method. I
will come back to this point soon but here it is worth noting that, if any-
thing, her comments on psychology and psychoanalysis were even more
scathing than those concerning sociology.72 This is somewhat surprising,
especially given Arendt’s own penchant for flashing psychological insights
scattered throughout her work, though these were admittedly more of the
intuitive than the theoretical and systematic kind.73 While both disciplines
were reductive, refusing to accept anything at face value, sociology—if,
admittedly, in misguided fashion—at least attended to the historical di-
mension, while psychological analysis entirely ignored it.74 Ironically, Ar-
endt herself hardly ever took anything at face value; on the contrary, she
almost willfully sought to make commonsense seem obscure, and obscu-
rity commonsensical. At any rate, I would argue, the deeper source of
both her unwillingness to abide psychoanalytical method and her overall
disdain for social-scientific methods sprang from her performative em-
phasis, the notion that selves disclosed themselves and took on signifi-
cance in the public realm. Thus she ideologically opposed the emphasis
on unconscious motives, even on interiority (Innerlichkeit) itself, as anti-
thetical to that which counted politically: the manifest world of action.
Arendt, Strauss, and the Critical Theorists alike historicized the social
sciences as functional handmaidens of mass modernity. They variously

argued that the very notion of “the social” and the accompanying “sci-
ences” that proceeded in its name were both a reflection of the develop-
ment of this particular kind of society. For the Critical Theorists, “soci-
ety” was a bourgeois idea that contained both emerging, progressive, and
later regressive moments: “The concept of society, itself,” Adorno and
Horkheimer proclaimed, “. . . was formulated only in the course of the
rise of the modern bourgeoisie as ‘society’ proper in contrast to the court.
It is a concept of the Third Estate.” They hastened to point out, of course,
that consciousness of “sociation” was of ancient provenance. But there it
“had the character of something that existed for itself, something sub-
stantial and unproblematic, something predominating in relation to . . .
the life process of mankind.” Only in the age of the fully developed bour-
geosie, “when the oppositions between the institutions of Feudal absolut-
ism and that stratum which already controlled the material life process of
society became strikingly evident, did the concept of society again be-
come more fluid.” Only then did its oppositional stance to existing institu-
tions, such as the state, become actual.75
This was an essentially dynamic conception, they wrote, that also
changed its character in accord with the changing plight of its articula-
tors: “The concept of society, which is specifically bourgeois and anti-
feudal, implies the notion of an association of free and independent hu-
man subjects for the sake of a better life and, consequently, the critique of
natural societal relations. The hardening of Bourgeois society into some-
thing impenetrably and inevitably natural is its immanent regression.” 76
In Hannah Arendt’s work, there are also numerous meanings attrib-
uted to the terms “social” and “society,” and these and their different
uses have already been thoroughly analyzed elsewhere.77 What must be
stressed here, however, is that Arendt also “historicized” both its develop-
ment and located the very possibility of the discipline of social science
within this horizon: “Sociology itself, then, is bound to a historical mo-
ment without which it could not have arisen in the first place, the moment
. . . when the economic component has gained such predominance in life
that thought in fact can and must become ‘ideological superstructure.’
The primacy of the ‘economic power structure’ in reality has its own his-
tory and is part of the history of modern thought . . . .” 78 For Arendt, the
notion of the “social” was “a product of the modern market economy, the
concomitant transformation of fixed property into mobile, exchangeable,
monetarized ‘wealth’, and of mass culture.” 79
All this is most explicitly worked out in The Human Condition where
she declares that “the emergence of the social realm . . . is a relatively new
phenomenon whose origin coincided with the emergence of the modern

age and which found its political form in the nation-state.” 80 Essentially
a kind of bastard hybrid—neither genuinely private nor public—it is akin
to the realm of the household, to consumption, necessity, and the “life-
process.” We view “the body of peoples and political communities in the
image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a
gigantic nationwide administration of housekeeping.” 81 It was this uncon-
trolled modern process of leakage of the household to all other realms
that ate away at the possibilities of politics, freedom, and action,82 and
indicated that the animal laborans—Marx’s “socialized humanity”—had
become the virtual reality, the archetype of contemporary existence.83 So-
ciety here, she writes, becomes “the form in which the fact of mutual
dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public signifi-
cance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted
to appear in public.” 84
Such a mode of organization, Arendt argued, rapidly generates its own
appropriate norms and disciplines. There is a Foucaultian ring to all this:
Society “expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior,
imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to ‘normalize’
its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or
achievement.” This is a negative definition rendering “society” as that
form of human organization that serves only sheer survival, one in which
“behavior” replaces—indeed excludes—action.85
Most relevant to us is the fact that for Arendt the “social sciences”
represent the cognitive expression of this very development. Sociology
was “no isolated phenomenon occurring in some ivory tower of scholarly
thought. It is closely connected with the growing functionalization of our
society, or rather with the fact that modern man has increasingly become
a mere function of society.” 86 “Under the concerted assault of the modern
debunking ‘sciences’, psychology and sociology,” she wrote in On Revo-
lution, “nothing indeed has seemed to be more safely buried than the
concept of freedom.” 87
There was an ominous history and logic of the development of the
social sciences:
It is the same conformism, the assumption that men behave and do not
act with respect to each other, that lies at the root of the modern science
of economics, whose birth coincided with the rise of society and which, to-
gether with its chief technical tool, statistics, became the social science par
excellence. Economics—until the modern age a not too important part of
ethics and politics and based on the assumption that men act with respect
to their economic activities as they act in every other respect—could
achieve a scientific character only when men had become social beings
and unanimously followed certain patterns of behavior, so that those who
did not keep the rules could be considered to be asocial or abnormal.88
The precondition for the very possibility of the discipline called statis-
tics was
great numbers . . . behaviorism and automatism in human affairs . . . The
unfortunate truth about behaviorism and the validity of its “laws” is that
the more people there are, the more likely they are to behave and the less
likely to tolerate non-behavior . . . Statistical uniformity is by no means a
harmless scientific ideal; it is the no longer secret political ideal of a soci-
ety which, entirely submerged in the routine of everyday living, is at peace
with the scientific outlook inherent in its very existence.89
Like “society” itself, the “social sciences” carry a totalizing, enveloping

logic.
To gauge the extent of society’s victory in the modern age, its early substi-
tution of behavior for action and its eventual substitution of bureaucracy
. . . it may be well to recall that its initial science of economics, which
substitutes patterns of behavior only in this rather limited field of human
activity, was finally followed by the all-comprehensive pretension of the
social sciences which, as “behavioral sciences,” aim to reduce man as a
whole, in all his activities, to the level of a conditioned and behaving ani-
mal. If economics is the science of society in its early stages, when it could
impose its rules of behavior only on sections of the population and on
parts of their activities, the rise of the “behavioural sciences” indicates
clearly the final stage of this development, when mass society has de-
voured all strata of the nation and “social behavior” has become the stan-
dard for all regions of life.90
Arendt also critiqued notions of “scientific” historiography. She not

only entirely dismissed all teleological systems but held causality itself to
be “an altogether alien and falsifying category . . . Not only does the ac-
tual meaning of every event always transcend any number of past ‘causes’
which we may assign to it . . . but this past itself comes into being with
the event itself. Only when something irrevocable has happened can we
even try to trace its history backward. The event illuminates its own past;
it can never be deduced from it.” 91 Like her comments on social science,
this critique was closely linked to the Arendtian reaffirmation of action,
and the redemptive capacity for new beginnings. For historians, she in-
sisted, causality constituted a denial of their own subject-matter for
“within the framework of preconceived categories, the crudest of which
is causality, events in the sense of something irrevocably new can never
happen . . . each event in human history reveals an unexpected landscape

of human deeds, sufferings and new possibilities which together tran-
scend the sum total of all willed intentions and the significance of all
origins.”92
Arendt distinguished “information” and “scientific knowledge” from
“understanding,” that complex, unceasing activity never able to produce
unequivocal results and which, necessarily, preceded and succeeded
knowledge. The task of the historian was thus to detect these novelties
and analyze and articulate their implications and significance. Such novel-
ties consisted of disclosive stories that had many beginnings but no end.
“Ends” were actually always new beginnings. Indeed, precisely this capac-
ity for new beginnings represented a (perhaps faint) hope that ultimately
the nightmare fabricated by social science could be foiled. “No matter
what sociology, psychology and anthropology will tell us about the ‘social
animal’, men persist in making, fabricating and building although these
facilities are more and more restricted to the abilities of the artists, so that
the concomitant experiences of worldliness escape more and more the
range of ordinary human experience.” 93
Let us now recover our bearings somewhat. That all these figures for-
mulated critiques of social science should by now be obvious. Less obvi-
ous, perhaps, and precisely because they were all engaged in one way or
another with social analysis, is the fact that they all proposed “alterna-
tive” social sciences. The Critical Theorists, after all, are virtually defined
by this. Their “Institute of Social Research,” founded in 1923 with the
express intention of developing an anti-positivist counter-sociology and
built upon conceptions of totality and dialectics and untapped social po-
tentialities, is the most obvious example of this.94 But, more modestly and
subversively, Arendt’s sociology of “mass society” and Strauss’s “sociol-
ogy of philosophy” sought similarly dissenting routes that would buttress
their own larger worldviews and sense of the political.95 Theirs was a
quintessential Weimarian radicalism infused by the search for definitively
non-liberal, non-bourgeois forms. This constitutes part of the attraction
as well as the disturbing ambiguity of their legacy.
All not only articulated in various ways the discontents of modernity
and liberalism but also drank rather deeply from the Heideggeran well. As
Steven Smith has recently suggested, such an Heideggerianism provided
a critical perspective on “modernity” not available to those operating
within a more standard liberal democratic framework.96 (Is it not this
peculiar combination that still lends a peculiarly exciting and dangerous
air to what we today term Weimar intellectual culture?) Yet their various
critiques of liberalism went in quite different directions from that of, say,
Ernst Juenger, Carl Schmitt, and Heidegger himself, all exponents of what
today we regard as the radical, and rather brutalized, Weimar intellec-

tual right.
Perhaps it is here that their Jewish and “marginal” status becomes of
relevance. All sought anti-reductionist, humanizing, and redeeming possi-
bilities rather than forms of hardness and domination. As Strauss put it:
“Whatever the significance of modern natural science may be, it cannot
affect our understanding of what is human in man. To understand man
in the light of the whole means for modern natural science to understand
man in the light of the sub-human. But in that light man is wholly unin-
telligible.” For Strauss, it was classical political philosophy that “viewed
man in a different light,” 97 whereas for the Frankfurt School, with its em-
phasis on dialectics and potentiality, it was, as Martin Jay demonstrates,
a subtle defense of theory as itself a form of non-resigned practice.98 For
Arendt this entailed a thorough rereading of the Western tradition, press-
ing for a valorized understanding of politics and reconceptualizing free-
dom as action instead of some kind of internalized, apolitical “will.” This
common sensitivity and resistance to the reductive, reifying ingredients of
social science characterized the (Jewish) Weimarians analyzed here, and
prompted them to redirect their critique of liberal modernity in more “hu-
manizing” ways and directions.
Inferring the ways in which such ill-defined psychological sensibilities
and commitments as “Jewishness” enter the thought and values of think-
ers is, of course, a notoriously difficult and subtle, perhaps even danger-
ous, matter, especially given that the nature and degree of Jewishness
manifested itself in quite different ways amongst these thinkers. Thus,
only Strauss immersed himself in, and placed integral value upon, Jewish
texts and tradition itself. After all he began his career as a research fellow
in Jewish philosophy at the Academy for the Science of Judaism in Berlin
from 1925–1932 and immersed himself in and wrote about Maimonides,
Spinoza, Isaac Husik, Moses Mendelssohn, and Hermann Cohen. The
problem of Athens versus Jerusalem stood at the center of his thought.
Arendt too explicitly placed issues and questions of Jewish politics, sensi-
bility, and identity at the center of her life and thought but, unlike Strauss,
paid almost no attention to the substance of the tradition and its content
except to document its breakdown and the consequences flowing from
it.99 For the Frankfurt School, Jewishness was a far more problematic and
subliminal matter—despite the fact that scholars have begun to underline
more strongly the Jewish component.100 Gershom Scholem, for instance,
defined it as one of the most remarkable “Jewish sects” produced by Ger-
man Jewry; perhaps for this reason non-Jewish members like Paul Mas-
sing and Karl Wittfogel felt somewhat marginal.101 Yet one could argue
that much of the Critical Theorists’ growing interest in Jewishness and
Judaism had purely negative, external roots, and was simply a response
to Weimar anti-Semitism and its later murderous Nazi incarnation, even
if the evolution of their deepening attempts to grasp it indicates a rather
far-reaching change in attitude. Witness, for example, Horkheimer’s early
and mechanical reduction of the “Jewish problem” to capitalism102 —“he
who does not wish to speak of capitalism, should also be silent about
fascism” 103 —as well as the use of conventional empirical methods in the
famous 1950 study of The Authoritarian Personality through Adorno
and Horkheimer’s far more subtle philosophical ruminations on Ausch-
witz and its implications.104
Still, here we want to examine whether the peculiar resistance to social
science of these thinkers can in any other “more positive” way be linked
to their Jewish predicament and (variously understood) sensibility. There
are a number of possible approaches to this question. If a common thread
is to be found perhaps it lies in the peculiar German tradition of Bildung
which, in the context of a protracted struggle for emancipation, George
Mosse has argued, ironically became integral to German Jewish intellec-
tual identity itself. With its emphasis on the primacy of culture, the goal
of an individual emancipation beyond religion and nationality, and its
insistence upon personalized, humanizing modes, the Bildung’s ideal be-
came an almost automatic part of German Jewry’s cultural and intellec-
tual radar. Mosse even argues that it was with the Frankfurt School—
the least explicitly Jewish of those considered here—that this peculiarly
German Jewish identity reached its climax!105
For the Frankfurt School, this may help illuminate the connections be-
tween their awareness of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, the resistance
to positivist reductionism, and the still glimmering hope for some kind of
transcendence, a hope which animated their project to the end. While
they sought to expose the murderous dialectic of the Enlightenment and
the falsity of the present, they nevertheless did cling to an admittedly more
blurred, ever more abstracted utopian ideal of universal human emanci-
pation, which in the post-Holocaust era they defined as the paradoxical
desire for the saving of the hopeless.106 Martin Jay has suggested that in
all this a clearly Jewish ingredient can be found. In the “cardinal tenet of
Critical Theory: the prohibition of premature positivity,” he writes, “. . .
the Jews became the metaphoric equivalent of that remnant of society
preserving negation and the nonidentical . . . underlying the Frankfurt
School’s refusal to describe the utopian alternative to the present society
was the traditional Jewish taboo on naming God or picturing para-
dise.” 107 At the same time, Anson Rabinbach has recently suggested,
Adorno traced the origins of anti-Semitism to this Jewish Bildverbot. The
enforcement of this taboo fostered enormous hatred and resentment. In
this way a false, mythologizing mimesis became linked to the murderous

hatred and extermination of the Jews.108
For all that, if the Jewish dimension did become increasingly central
for the Critical Theorists, they never “essentialized” it—rather, they made
it part of a greater problematic.109 This also applied, in many ways, to
Strauss and Arendt even though they were far more explicit about their
Jewish loyalties and identifications. Their work as German Jewish intel-
lectuals cannot be understood outside of a situation and consciousness
of ambivalence, multiple loyalties, fissures, breakdowns, and partial re-
constitutions. I would even argue that much of their acuity and creativity
derived from an internalization and negotiation of these tensions, espe-
cially as they manifested themselves in the productive turbulence of the
Weimar Republic. Would it be too far-fetched to suggest that their senses
of complexity and vulnerability alerted them very early on to a profound
distrust of reductionism in all its varieties?
In Strauss’s case it is important to note that from his early Weimar
days, he regarded with great skepticism the modern rationalist and social
scientific critique of orthodoxy and revelation. By remaining within the
horizons of the present order, “science” elided primary or fundamental
questions.110 Already in the 1920s his highly normative conception of sci-
ence and philosophy (in contrast to what he took to be the debilitating
Weberian distinction between facts and values) was stated in relationship
to, and informed by, Judaism: “The norm of any science of Judaism,” he
wrote in 1929 in an essay on Franz Rosenzweig, was “the vindication of
our existence as Jews.” 111
Jewish thought, like ancient philosophy and medieval religious ratio-
nalism, constituted not only a form of necessary opposition to conven-
tional opinion, but preserved truth in an insidious world deformed by
both historicism and social science.112 It is interesting to note the way in
which Strauss, the conservative, employs what can only be described as a
kind of postmodernist, post-colonialist Nietzsche to couch his most radi-
cal dismissal of social science and thereby achieve a vantage point to up-
hold Jewish tradition. “Nietzsche,” he wrote,
has a deeper reverence than any other beholder for the sacred tables of the
Hebrews as well of the other nations in question. Yet since he is only a be-
holder of these tables . . . he is not subject to the commandments of any.
This is true also and especially of the tables, or “values,” of Western cul-
ture. But according to him, all scientific-concepts, and hence in particular
the concept of culture is an outgrowth of nineteenth-century Western cul-
ture; its application to ‘cultures’ of other ages and climates is an act stem-
ming from the spiritual imperialism of that culture. There is then a glaring
contradiction between the claimed objectivity of the science of cultures
and the radical subjectivity of that culture.113
It is of some relevance to note that it was, pointedly, in a talk entitled

“Why We Remain Jews” that Strauss insisted that sociology and psychol-
ogy were “superficial and thoughtless”: in no fundamental way did, or
could, they reflect upon themselves. Science was poised against Jewish
faith and history. “It is surely,” he wrote, “nobler to be a victim of the
most noble dream than to profit from a sordid reality and to wallow in
it.” That noble dream (which could “not be denied even by the unbeliev-
ing Jew of our age”) was “the perception of the ultimate mystery, of the
truth of the ultimate mystery—the truth that there is an ultimate mystery,
that being is radically mysterious. . . .” 114 Jewish history, Jewish existence
itself, was in this conservative, anti-scientistic view, proof of the perma-
nently unredeemed condition of the “noble vision.”
While the experience of Nazism was central to all these thinkers’ lives
and reflections, Strauss responded in the most sublimated manner. Argua-
bly his attack upon liberalism became more muted and refined as a result
of Nazism and the emigration.115 Still, even in the midst of concrete prob-
lems, as his tortuous, autobiographical comments on the “theologico-
political predicament” indicate, his always abstract thought tended to
spiritualize the political.116 His aim throughout, as Alfons Söllner puts it,
was to “rehabilitate the tradition that had—wrongly, in his opinion—
been discredited by modernity.” 117
Arendt’s Jewishness did, of course, relate much more explicitly to con-
crete political and personal questions. Her attitudes to Jewishness were
peculiarly complex and here we must limit ourselves to the ways in which
this was linked to her critique of social science and modernity and the
alternative worldview that she espoused.118 We should not forget that she
undertook her first analysis of the “social” (beginning during the Weimar
period) in the context of her Zionist-inspired “Jewish” book on Rahel
Varnhagen. There, in apparent contrast to the rest of her work, the arena
of the Berlin salon provides the “social”—or at least “sociability”—with
an unexpected positive valence. But this would be a misperception, for
her point was that the salons provided a social area outside of respectable
bourgeois society and were characterized by the anomalous condition of
the strata they brought together (“impoverished” nobility, actors, and
Jewish women).119 Their importance lay in the fact that they suspended
normal social conventions. Jews and “society” stood somehow in a rela-
tion of antagonism. This assumption, of course, animates Arendt’s em-
phases on the modern Jew as pariah and parvenu, as an outsider of a
particular kind.120
Arendt’s awareness of Jewish marginality and difference and her sensi-
tivity to the duplicities and machinations entailed in the assimilation
process, I would suggest, have some bearing upon the formulation and
content of her conceptions of “the social”—and its accompanying be-
havioral sciences—as equivalent to a process of flattening and homogeni-

zation, the draining and loss of distinctive collective and individual iden-
tity. The anti-plural nature of “the social” leaves no room for Jews (or,
for that matter, other minorities).121
To be sure, the fear of social leveling and homogenization was an over-
all Weimarian concern, characteristic especially of the intellectual radical
right. But here Arendt’s consciously Jewish concerns and traumatic expe-
riences did perhaps make a decisive difference. Schmitt reduced plurality
to factional, selfish interests, and Heidegger subsumed it under the sense-
less chatter of “the public.” For him the political realm was essentially
inauthentic, “fallen.” 122 In response to Heidegger, I would argue, Arendt
radically reclaimed the authenticity and centrality of the political—which
she defined quite differently from Schmitt’s friend-foe conception. Politics
is envisaged as autonomous, no longer subservient to the “social” but
conceived as its crucial antidote. Moreover, uniquely in her time, Arendt
rendered plurality and difference as intrinsic, central values. Natality, not
being-toward-death, is placed at the center.
One should never reduce thought, as Arendt herself insisted, to its bio-
graphical roots. Yet it is difficult to sever these emerging emphases from
Arendt’s experiences in the Weimar Republic, her own trauma under Na-
zism and her analysis of it, and her self-consciousness as a Jew. Arguably,
her classical work on totalitarianism is, among other things, a record of
the obliteration of individual and collective identities and differences, of
the triumph of the homogenizing social over humanity itself. After all,
she regarded the nation-state as the political form of the “social.” The
moment it reneged on its promises of political equality for all its citizens
and embarked upon policies of ethnic exclusion, it brought about the
mass twentieth-century predicament of “Statelessness” that effectively
ended the Rights of Man and ushered in the age of refugees, totalitarian-
ism, human superfluity, and total extermination.123 Much of her later
work was spent working out the implications of these insights, both
within a Jewish and a general context. Her Zionism, as well as her cri-
tique of it,124 was based upon these commitments to politics, plurality,
and the right of distinctive identities to have rights.125
Already in The Origins of Totalitarianism not all was darkness. It was
there that Arendt began formulating her positive counter-vision. As its
poetic ending indicates, the triumph of the social could not be complete:
“But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily
contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only ‘mes-
sage’ which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a
political event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical
with man’s freedom. . . . [It] is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed
every man.” 126
How, finally, can we place these thinkers into historical perspective and
assess their concerns and contributions? The inability, combined with the
lack of desire, to give liberalism its due no doubt constituted a continuing
and grave blind spot in their intellectual arsenal. Their condemnations
and fears of “modernity” as such (never properly distinguished from its
totalitarian variants) may appear today as overheated, melodramatic.
These biases, built into the fabric of Weimar radical theory, do indeed
render that legacy an ambiguous one. Yet, surely, the fact that these and
other Weimar intellectuals continue to generate excitement and maintain
their varied, yet foundational, relevance at the end of the twentieth cen-
tury should give us some pause. Perhaps their ideas and sensibilities still
speak to us because the unease with “modernity” (however understood)
and its characteristic cognitive modes has never really been fully alleviated
and because these (Jewish) thinkers, imbued with humanizing impulses,
provide redemptive clues to understanding—and perhaps transcending—
a still homogenizing and reductive age.
Four
Nazism and the Holocaust in

Contemporary Culture
Within Western sensibility, Nazism and the atrocities committed in its

name have over the years become endowed with a peculiarly powerful
and distinctive status. Since World War II, Treblinka and Auschwitz (and,
I would add, Hitler and Himmler) have evolved into what Jean Amery
has called “symbolic code words.” 1 They have come to function as a kind
of outermost metaphysical norm, as tangible shorthand incarnating the
culture’s conception of “radical evil,” 2 encoded into consciousness as the
measure of absolute inhumanity.3 There are of course good and obvious
reasons for this but, I would argue, the special sense of shock and outrage
is generated above all by the acute discomfort occasioned by the penetra-
tion of the barbarous into the allegedly cultured, the transgression of ba-
sic taboos within the framework (and by the means) of advanced indus-
trial civilization. The enduring fascination with National Socialism and
the especially deep need to account for it and its atrocities—the rich mul-
tiplicity of ruminations it has produced as well as the accompanying and
growing attempts to relativize or neutralize or elide and displace its sig-
nificance and impact—resides precisely in this rather ethnocentric sense
of scandal and riddle, the abiding astonishment that a so-called enlight-
ened and modern Kulturnation could thus deport itself.4 I shall later come
back to this Eurocentric issue.
In a quite distinctive way, then, “Nazism” has developed into a dense,
available paradigm, an emotionally charged limit-case serving manifold
purposes of discourse, a figural commodity with powerful, putatively
“absolute” associations. Twenty years ago Greil Marcus phrased it rather
quaintly: Nazism was a kind of supreme “bogeyman,” a mythology with
which children scared themselves, “the single commonality onto which
one could project fantasies of hatred without the slightest feeling of
guilt.” 5 Yet these absolute associations have always and necessarily inter-
acted with, and at the same time been transformed by, changing modes
44
Nazism and the Holocaust in Contemporary Culture 45
of self-understanding; so too have they been mobilized and manipulated

by divergent political and psychological needs and interests. There is a
dynamic at work here, I suggest, that simply will not allow inscriptions
of Nazism to be carved into canonic, normative monoliths of meaning.
The cultural developments and academic debates of the 1980s and 1990s
and, indeed, the resurgence of mass murder and genocide as a part of
contemporary actuality, have made it increasingly clear that this is highly
contested terrain and that the impulse to conceive of Nazism in “Ortho-
dox” manner, in absolute and moralistic terms which insulate it from on-
going political conflicts, cultural shifts, and wider historical processes,
will be rendered increasingly difficult, if not quite impossible.6 The para-
digm’s peculiar location and loading—the central metaphorical and sym-
bolic functions it has come to assume (especially as it relates to German
and Jewish identity)—has always generated certain tensions. More than
ever, however, it is presently beset by pressures toward redefinition, chal-
lenges to its status, and quite striking processes of ironic self-subversion.
Here I can point to only a few divergent examples of the tensions in-
duced by this potent symbolism and the resulting drive to exploit, prob-
lematize, or undermine it. In the first place, I would suggest that one way
of understanding the recent controversy amongst German historians, the
Historikerstreit, is through this peculiar absolute emplacement of Na-
zism.7 The demand to “historicize” the narrative around National Social-
ism and its defining atrocities aroused such indignation and heated debate
to a large degree because of the metahistorical dimensions with which it
has been so regularly endowed. As Dan Diner puts it: Auschwitz “is a no-
man’s land of understanding, a black box of explanation, a vacuum of
extrahistorical singificance, which sucks in attempts at historiographic in-
terpretation . . . As the ultimate extreme case, and thus as an absolute
standard of history, this event can hardly be historicized.” 8
But, by training, historians “historicize,” and with most other historical
events (the French Revolution, the decline of the British Empire, and so on),
they do so as a matter of course. Historians operate on the assumption
that historical events and phenomena are, by definition, unique—thereby
rendering insistence on “uniqueness” as relatively superfluous—while at
the same time possessing both general and distinguishing features. To a
large extent, the singularity of any particular event becomes assertable
and comprehensible only within a comparative historical perspective. In
this respect, the Historikerstreit did not raise a genuinely historical ques-
tion but it did highlight the moral functions and extra-historical nature
of the discourse of National Socialism and its genocidal impulses within
various national moral economies and identities. Its genuinely pernicious
ingredient was not the question of historicization or singularity, but
rather Ernst Nolte’s depiction of the Holocaust as an act of anticipatory

self-defense in which the Nazis took preventive action against their Jewish
Bolshevik enemies because “they regarded themselves and their ilk as po-
tential or real victims of an ‘Asiatic’ deed.” 9
To take another example, it is largely within the terms of this para-
digm—and the need to somehow weaken, if not entirely unravel it—that
the very phenomenon of Holocaust denial should be understood.10 On
the surface, this is an almost incomprehensible project.11 It begins to be a
little more understandable (though no more legitimate) if one grasps that,
because the extermination of European Jewry acts as a kind of morally
negative absolute within post-World War II sensibility, any attempt to re-
legitimize either anti-Semitism or a fascist agenda within Western society
will have to seek to undermine and subvert that code at its very core.
Moreover, in the broadest terms, and although there is clearly no direct
link between them, this kind of so-called “revisionism” is nourished by
the intellectual atmosphere attendant upon elements of a postmodernist
sensibility and its perception of the essentially self-referential (well-nigh
arbitrary) nature and equal validity of almost all competing historical
narratives. As the recent volume edited by Saul Friedlander demonstrates,
postmodernism has radically problematized the very possibility of accu-
rately “representing” the Holocaust; in fact, for some, the crisis and con-
sciousness of the sharp limits of representation itself derives from the ex-
perience of Nazism and the impossibility of getting “inside” the Shoah.12
At the very least, postmodernism’s ironic sensibility—that severs moral
judgement, aesthetic norms, and intellectual analysis—has undermined
the monumental-didactic mode most suited to the code’s moral tone.
In addition, Martin Jay has recently pointed out that the current ob-
session with problems of narration, history, and memory has made it
practically impossible to ignore the “constructive” moment in our re-
construction of these events. Self-conscious “second- or even third-order
reflection” on the meaning of it all has become impossible to avoid. To
make matters more complicated, the fluidity and mingling of competing
and changing narratives and perspectives render any “pure” version, any
separate framing of the event in contemporary consciousness, less persua-
sive.13 This overall problematization of the discourse is, on the one hand,
profoundly disturbing, yet it may also contain within it some positive pos-
sibilities. It may, in the long run, perforce, constitute the only way of keep-
ing the issues raised by National Socialism alive.
In Germany and Israel, for obvious historical reasons, the fluid inscrip-
tions of both Nazism and the Final Solution have always been integrally
linked to core questions of national identity and negotiated in some way
or another into the respective prevailing national ideologies and self-
definitions. If there were obvious and enormous differences in the Ger-

man and Jewish and Israeli situations and interpretations—involving
nothing less than the distinction between the perpetrators and victims of
genocide—there were, nevertheless, certain structural parallels at work.
Both sides were immediately confronted with perplexing questions of
comprehension and remembrance. In both cases there were clearly dis-
cernible, and significant, distinctions between public and private re-
sponses. Furthermore, until the mid-1960s—albeit for entirely different
reasons—the respective public commemorations and explanations in
both Germany and Israel assumed a rather formulaic character, inserted
into compensatory, meaning-bestowing narratives that conformed to the
prevailing ideologies of the time.
It is true that in the Germany of the Adenauer years, in many respects
at least, a veil was drawn over the past: de-Nazification and war-crimes
trials ceased; there was considerable continuity with past regimes in the
personnel of the civil service, judiciary, and universities. Yet, for all that,
all the leading politicians publicly committed themselves to democracy
(even if “democracy” was to be achieved at the expense of “justice”),
forcefully disavowed National Socialism, and drew the appropriate “les-
sons” from it, lessons that always dovetailed with and reinforced their
own particular political philosophies.14 Moreover, Adenauer’s policy of
reparations meant that, at least on the public level, as part of its formal
identity and “official” collective memory, there was a rather unique will-
ingness of a nation to incorporate recognition of and responsibility for
the horrendous crimes it had committed.15 But from the beginning official
recognition of German criminality carried with it built-in tensions and
resistances: if the nation had been diabolically criminal, what would con-
stitute acceptable self-definitions? If ritual enactment at Bitburg16 explic-
itly revealed a certain sense of resentment and longing for “normaliza-
tion,” these underlying emotions long predated that particular event.
What is known of the less formalized, private responses tends to support
the notion that serious confrontation with the past, genuine Trauerarbeit,
was very much the exception than the rule, a fact upon which the genera-
tional revolt of 1968 played. As Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich
have demonstrated, the impossibility of mourning the death of one’s own
de-legimitized leaders produced a series of projective and denial mecha-
nisms rendering comprehension of the evil and destruction Nazism had
wrought as remote indeed.17 Empathy for the victims was the exception,
not the rule. But in our context what needs to be stressed is that the very
“need” to mobilize these psychological mechanisms was generated by re-
peated internal and external allegations concerning an unprecedented
personal and collective German evil and guilt.
As a result, the discourse on Nazism and the Shoah very early on high-
lighted the general question of the limits and possibilities of empathy, an
issue that with Bosnia and Rwanda has again become searingly relevant.
It also produced, and quite quickly so, the unfortunate syndrome of
“comparative victimization.” Already in 1945 there was a German ten-
dency either to blame or claim parity with (or, indeed, even greater suffer-
ing than) the classic victims of Nazism. No less a member of the exiled
German resistance than Volkmar von Zuehlsdorff announced in 1946
that “Today the Jews and Poles are not the victims, but the Germans ir-
respective of their political persuasions.” 18 “The ovens of Auschwitz,” he
wrote later, “have become the glowing fires of Hamburg and Dresden, of
Berlin, Leipzig, Cologne, Essen, Dortmund . . . .” 19
Since then, this “competition” as to who constitutes the most “authen-
tic” victim has become one of the great hallmarks of contemporary politi-
cal discourse not only within Germany and Israel but far beyond; Ameri-
can culture, for example, is rife with a kind of cult of the victim. The
point here is that the rapid and deep enshrinement of paradigmatic status
upon Nazism ensured that its uses and applications would reach far be-
yond its original historical circumstances.
On the one hand, given its symbolic-emotive force as a guiding moral
metaphor, the “Holocaust” and the language of genocide have been used
to characterize any number of historical and contemporary persecutions
and atrocities, ranging from the medieval witch craze through black slav-
ery to Vietnam. The differences in origin, scope, and consequences were
usually rather significant and the analogies did not necessarily illuminate
either the Shoah or the comparative historical case in question. On the
other hand, over the years the insistence upon the uniqueness of the Holo-
caust assumed the form of an extra-historical and political vested interest,
becoming a crucial means of defining the particularity of Jewish identity.
The rhetoric—and elevation—of singular Jewish victimization (in itself
not inaccurate when viewed in its purely historical context) inevitably
produced a certain resentment and initiated a kind of fruitless compe-
tition in both historical and ongoing victimization that informs, for in-
stance, even current tensions between Black and Jewish people. Michael
Bernstein has elegantly formulated the problem: “once victimhood is un-
derstood to endow one with special claims and rights, the scramble to
attain that designation for one’s own interest group is heated as any other
for legitimacy and power.” 20
The radical singularity, the “uniqueness” that is built into this para-
digm of “absolute evil”—one that from its beginnings has satisfied mul-
tiple “extra-historical” cultural and political functions—has thus itself
become a site of conflict. The Holocaust was certainly singular, unique,
but, given the fact that historical events are such by definition, the status
of such a categorization is far from clear. As David Biale has pointed out,
the very discourse of uniqueness is . . . meaningful only either when

history is invoked in political debate (as in the German historians con-
troversy) or in theological speculation; for historians concerned with
understanding the past for its own sake, “uniqueness” is either trivial,
meaningless or a code word for an extra-historical agenda . . . the best
medicine for the vulgar exercise of comparative victimization is not the co-
pious assertion of Jewish uniqueness, but an end to the fruitless debate be-
tween the uniqueness and universality of suffering in the first place.21
In an acute and unresolved way the legacy of the catastrophe has opened
up ultimate questions relating to the possibilities and limits of human
empathy, solidarity, and the ability to block out or recognize the suffering
of others. It has raised the delicate problem of balancing historically
meaningful distinctions between atrocities with the commonalities of ex-
perience that allow for some kind of common ground and solidarity.
The centrality of the Nazi trauma within Israeli life needs little elabora-
tion.22 But there too its inscriptive meanderings have been complicated,
dynamic, and ambiguous. There too, at least in the initial stages, a deep
divide pertained between public commemoration and private experience;
the mute pervasiveness of this within private experience is most poignantly
captured in David Grossman’s remarkable novel, See under Love.” 23
In the early years of Statehood, the Churban (destruction), as it was
initially called, was made publicly manageable by incorporating it—as
the extreme edge, to be sure—into the traditional, Zionist narrative of
the transition from a powerless Diaspora to potent sovereignty, a saga
that moved from exile and catastrophe to resistance and, ultimately, col-
lective national deliverance. But because this version more or less locked
the event into conventional ideological categories of martyrdom and re-
demption (laden as it also always was with the equalizing heroic motifs
taken from the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto), this somehow lessened
the need for a differentiated, direct confrontation with the horrific speci-
ficities of the event. It possessed, rather, a kind of shadowy mythic status,
an event from a remote world populated more by archetypes than real
people. This was certainly true for the way in which the Kastner trial of
the 1950s was conducted, and the televised re-staging of the trial in 1994
was distinguished precisely by a nuanced, differentiated psychological
and political understanding of the complexities involved. Moreover, the
opposition to reparations headed by Menachem Begin, though powerful,
could still not be articulated in a framework that transcended the concrete
issue itself.
Beginning in 1961 with the Eichmann trial and accelerating during and
after the high point of June 1967, a particular constellation of events
produced paradigmatic shifts in Israeli (and general Jewish) representa-
tions of the catastrophe and placed what had been latent at the very de-
fining center of consciousness. The outlines of these developments are
familiar enough. In the days and weeks immediately preceding the Six-
Day War a feeling of utter isolation and vulnerability, indeed, the fear
of possible extermination, permeated the country. As the most obvious
available existential and historical analogy, the Shoah suddenly assumed
a central experiential relevance. No longer remote exilic history but a
perceived imminent prospect, its meaning and salience underwent dra-
matic transformation. The prevailing wisdom and governing ideology
were transformed. The predicament of the Jewish state and the powerless
Diaspora were now no longer regarded as antithetical; Jewish fate was
existentially and politically one. The uniqueness of Jewish continuity,
fate, and victimhood—with the Holocaust as its measure and standard—
was now, more than ever, underlined. While Diaspora Jewish self-
definition was more and more tied to identification with the Holocaust,
Israeli political culture increasingly invoked it as the crucial legitimizing
force behind the state’s existence.
Despite the insistence of many uncomfortable intellectuals at the time
that Jerusalem was not Auschwitz, that the fact of sovereignty made all
the difference, and that the structure of the Arab-Israel conflict was not
analogical to the anti-Semitic Nazi project,24 the Shoah was continually
invoked as part of a continuing Jewish historical isolation—as expressed
in the popular song, “the whole world was and is against us”—and made
into the governing metaphor of the Arab-Israel conflict. Menachem Be-
gin’s famous reference to Yassir Arafat in Beirut during the Lebanon war
as “Hitler in his bunker” is only the most well known of an ongoing
tendency. (Note, however, that such rhetoric of extermination was not
originally limited to the right: Abba Eban described the pre-1967 map of
Israel as “Auschwitz lines.”) The contemporary Israeli radical right derives
its sustenance from this perception and takes it to an extreme. The world
is depicted in terms of the murderous enemies and destroyers of the Jew-
ish people and the Arabs portrayed as a mix of the Nazi and Amalek
metaphors. The general phenomenon of Kahanism—and indeed the par-
ticular act of Baruch Goldstein and his multiple murder of Arabs at the
tomb of the Fathers in Hebron in 1994—is incomprehensible outside of
this mindset.
It was, then, in the late 1960s that the Shoah exploded into public
consciousness in Israel and the Diaspora alike. Since that time it has insis-
tently occupied a defining central role in political discourse. Placing the
Shoah at the center of events, making it an explanatory key and moral

arbiter of Jewish identity, made it “respectable” and brought it out of the
dark, vaguely obscene recesses that it had inhabited before. Previously
quite unintegrable, unamenable to conventional frameworks, it was now
able to find eloquent, unashamed, and even triumphalist public relevance
and expression by speaking to, no doubt, a compelling need in the collec-
tive psyche. Given the staggering enormity of the event and its imprint on
the victims, some kind of transformation in official collective memory
was bound to occur. In numerous ways, this assumed the form of a secular
religion. At the deepest level, precisely because they were the locus of
desecration, of violations of basic taboos, the sites of obscenity came to
possess an aura of sanctity: Auschwitz and Treblinka took on the aura of
“holy” places, and Yad Vashem increasingly became its shrine, a visit to
which has been obligatory for all foreign dignitaries until very recently.
Ironically, perhaps, this first serious engagement with the past was in-
extricably tied to ideologically and politically dubious premises. More-
over, if the 1967 war produced this new ideology, the political conditions
it brought about almost immediately threatened its consensual possibili-
ties. For the unleashing of Holocaust rhetoric (that most immediately ac-
cessible emotional shorthand), the incessant appeal to the Shoah (that
most resonantly evocative, but variously interpretable, absolute meta-
phor) entailed its inevitable engagement in the political and cultural con-
flicts that have characterized the country since then. Mobilized and bran-
dished as a weapon in the ongoing political divide for and against the
occupation and annexation of the territories acquired during the June
war, no side developed a discourse in which the Holocaust was or could
be left honorably above and beyond the battle. The imperative to invoke
the analogies (or lack of them) and draw the appropriate, if always prob-
lematic and ideologically loaded, “lessons” became irresistible. Far from
being statically and uniformly inscribed, the catastrophe has been con-
stantly reapplied and reworked to become, in the words of Sidra de
Koven-Ezrachi, a dynamic “prism of the ambiguities and contradictions
that inhere in the society itself.” 25
For many years now, for instance, certain sectors of the Israeli liberal
left have criticized what they take to be the politically manipulative
functions of this “secular religion.” In so doing it has sought to de-
particularize and universalize the “lessons” of the Holocaust. Insisting
that dehumanization and murder were not peculiarly German but univer-
sal human possibilities, they invoked the most sensitive point of the code,
challenging its most ultimate premise: that Jews—as ultimate victims—
could never be victimizers and were indeed incapable of oppression and
cruelty. Some argued that the very enormity and uniqueness of the Shoah
was being employed as a pretext, a means of soothing the conscience for

those perpetrating present, if obviously lesser, injustices and wrongdoing.
Instead of justifying a cult of military might, the Jewish experience of
ultimate victimization, they argued, should act as a spur towards the fully
realized recognition of the humanity of the Palestinian “Other.” The fact
that IDF soliders were often the children of Holocaust victims did not
constitute a warrant for the continuing violation of Palestinian rights,
they asserted. The Left’s “imperative” posited that one’s own historical
experience could provide the necessary empathic qualities for a sympa-
thetic imagination of the catastrophe of others, even, or perhaps espe-
cially, one’s own victims (without fudging necessary and important
distinctions).26
But such delicate comparative distinctions were not always possible.
Precisely because of the Holocaust’s status as a governing metaphor and
symbol, for many years a staple of anti-Israel propaganda has been the
Zionism-Nazism equation, a line even to be found in quite unexpected
literary quarters. Thus George Steiner’s 1981 The Portage to San Cristo-
bal of A. H. intimated that the Jewish myth of the chosen people and its
genocidal impulses ultimately produced an identical Nazi offspring.27 Is
it surprising then that many of those who see themselves as its victims
depict Zionism as a genocidal force intent on systematically destroying
the fabric of Palestinian society? The Shoah, far from constituting an ob-
viously different, incomparable case, is seen here as a lesser one. Not only
are the archetypes of the Nazi and the Israeli occupier melded but the fate
of those under occupation is presented as worse than those who perished
in Treblinka and Auschwitz, for, so the claim goes, while in the camps
death was instant and the suffering over in one day, under occupation,
the pain, suffering, and killing is unending.28 This wisdom has now
crossed the Atlantic. In a 1996 verdict a Quebec judge told a woman who
had slit her husband’s throat that such wanton cruelty could only have
been performed by a woman and that her act was worse than those com-
mitted by the Nazis for at least the Jews killed in the gas chambers had
not suffered.29
What this illustrates, among other things, is a process in which the
unleashing of absolute Holocaust discourse, precisely because it has so
pervasively penetrated the cultural and political marketplace, has increas-
ingly assumed radical and anti-canonic forms. It has ricocheted in multi-
faceted, often contradictory directions and become unhinged from its of-
ficial versions, transmuted, in de Koven-Ezrachi’s words, into “radical and
subversive symbols. The images themselves, the emblems of Nazism, now
seem to be released from social taboo. . . .” 30
In contemporary Israel, Western Europe, and the United States, pre-
cisely because of its immense emotive and symbolic power and its rele-
vance as the governing metaphor of “evil,” the accusation of or compari-
son with Nazism and Nazi-like behavior and intentions is employed by
virtually all sides of many political and cultural debates as a potent “la-
bel,” the ultimate critique and form of political outlawing and an effective
means to either propel or still action. We in Israel tend to take for granted
both the depth of penetration of this discourse, its speed, and multiple
controversies: how many of us remember the outrage provoked by the
attempt to commemorate the Nazi murder of homosexuals and lesbians
at Yad Vashem, the invocation by the Sephardi “rebel” Uzi Meshulam of
the “Ashke-Nazi” analogy, accusations by the settlers during the Rabin-
Peres years that the army was behaving like Nazis, and the maverick reli-
gious dove Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s recurring damnation of post-1967 Is-
rael as Judeo-Nazi? In the period of just a few weeks in early 1995 there
occurred the scandal over the attempt to auction Holocaust “soap,” the
debate over the visit to Israel of the converted survivor, Cardinal Lustiger
of Paris, and the outcry prompted by the historian Moshe Zimmermann’s
portrayal of the attitudes of Hebron settlers as akin to that of the Hitler
youth. Most revelatory, and shocking, of course, was that infamous (in-
deed fatal) pictorial fabrication—of Yitzhak Rabin dressed in SS uni-
form—paraded so prominently at right-wing political rallies prior to the
assassination.
The intensity in Germany and Israel may be the greatest but the use of
the code as metaphor for ultimate evil and a mode of positioning one’s
self and condemning one’s enemies is exceedingly powerful and frequent
in American culture as well. Who has not heard abortion characterized
as Holocaust? The Gun Owners of America liken the FBI to the Gestapo,
while Minister Louis Farrakhan compares the condition of a deprived
Iraq’s hospitals to those of the death camps. The examples are endless.
What does this all amount to? I am suggesting that National Socialism
and the atrocities its adherents committed will continue to play founda-
tional roles but will increasingly do so not only in problematic but also
in consciously problematizing ways. More and more the subject will be
torn out of its known, predictable contexts and undergo critical “defami-
liarization.” The controversies around its proper interpretation, appro-
priate lessons, and commemoration will generate its eventual cultural cen-
trality and vitality.
While the future content of these discourses cannot be predicted, they
will certainly be affected by changing sociopolitical constellations. In
Germany, with its increased political and economic power, unification
and greater self-confidence will no doubt constitute a spur to reconsider
and rewrite a relatively “normalized” national history that mutes if not
represses the more problematic elements of its past. Germany, James

Young has suggested, “will recall primarily its own martyrs and triumphs.
These include civilian victims of Allied bombings, dutiful soldiers killed
on the front, and members of the wartime resistance to Hitler.” 31 The
recent commemorations underlined the “equivalence” of German victim-
ization and the indivisibility of the deaths of all victims. Nevertheless, I
would suggest, the coded power and symbolism of the Nazi experience
has not been expunged. The very tensions and ambiguities surrounding
it will continue to serve as a means of somehow perpetuating it.
Indeed, as I write, a new cultural variation of this tension is being
played out in Germany, adding yet another layer to the unresolved tenac-
ity of such memories. On one hand, there is the rather strange and power-
ful affirmation among many German youths of Daniel Goldhagen’s por-
trait of “ordinary Germans” as jovial and sadistic killers32 while, on the
other, an emerging image within German popular culture of the German
as possible savior of the Jew—as evidenced by the mass sales of the dia-
ries of the German Jewish survivor, Victor Klemperer, the extraordinary
reception of Schindler’s List, and Völker von Schlöndorff’s film of Michel
Tournier’s The Ogre, in which the German hero is depicted, in classical
mythic fashion, as rescuing the Jew and literally carrying him on his back
through fire and ice.33
In Israel, to be sure, there is of course no prospect of the Jewish experi-
ence under National Socialism “disappearing” from memory. Still, well
before the Oslo agreement was signed, Yitzhak Rabin insisted on chal-
lenging the old rhetoric, arguing that not victimization but prudent power
and self-reliance were the significant achievements of Zionism. The hori-
zons that the still highly uncertain peace process have opened up may
point to it perhaps assuming different symbolic functions and occupying
a less central mobilizing role in a more secure and maturing political cul-
ture whose future outlines are as yet unclear.
At a time of the recurrence of mass murder and genocide throughout
the world, more and more observers are drawing our attention to some
unexpected consequences of the invocation of this “absolutizing” dis-
course in relation to contemporary atrocities. As Scott Montgomery has
recently pointed out, it may be a “closed system that does not aid us in
posing new questions, continually offers a revue of shallow finalities and,
still worse, promotes voyeurism . . . transformed from historical truth
into icons both of the machine and of modern malevolence, the Nazis
have been given a disturbing purity, a kind of sacred uniqueness. . . .”
Could it be, he asks, “that recent atrocities in various parts of the world
have not seemed to demand immediate attention intervention because . . .
these events do not appear to sufficiently obey the requirements of a ‘true
Holocaust’? . . . Is it perhaps conceivable that our political leaders would

feel a greater . . . urgency to deal with genocidal acts . . . if these acts
closely simulated those of fascism, mimicking more precisely the mon-
strousness of the Hitlerian regime?” 34 This, I should point out, is not
merely an intellectual but a political distinction. International law re-
quires intervention when genocide occurs, and in both Bosnia and
Rwanda the reluctance to define either as such has already been keenly
noticed. At the same time, the opposite case may also hold: the constant
invocation of Auschwitz as a model, a metaphor, and an analogy may
produce a reflexive sort of moral deadening and rhetorical numbing. As
Montgomery goes on to argue, the enthronement of Nazis as ultimate
demons and “the horror at Auschwitz by virtue of being fully modern,
occurring in the very center of Europe” makes other horrors in Africa,
Asia, and South America, “no matter how brutal or planned, somehow
qualify as more primitive . . . In a strange twist of logic, the Holocaust is
made to seem more sophisticated, more advanced than any other incident
of its kind. The terrible irony here is that Nazism finally becomes, at this
elevated symbolic height, a perverted reflection of Eurocentrism.” 35 As
Shiraz Dossa provocatively puts it, it is the classic instance of “cultured”
perpetrators massacring “cultured” victims.36
The historically accurate perception of the radical, unique evil of Hit-
ler’s war on the Jews has brought about an insistence on the very strict
definition of genocide. But this admirable desire to maintain proper dis-
tinctions may not necessarily make people more willing to take action
when the real necessity arises. “Never again,” goes the saying. Rather, as
David Rieff has recently pointed out, such conceptions of ultimacy may
drive people to even greater complacency as they dismiss the overwhelm-
ing number of crimes that do not correspond to the exacting definitions.
Sharply, he writes: “In the matter of genocide, strictness of definition can
have the same unfortunate effect as sloppiness of definition. Our sense
of genocide must be as flexible and as inventive as the human capacity
for evil.” 37
These are, to my way of thinking, powerful considerations. Yet the
matter is far from decided and in certain recesses of my own mind the
“purity” of the Nazi case remains not merely a part of contemporary
mythology but a historically valid perception. Nazism presents us with a
case in which—notwithstanding all attempts to blur, relativize, or paper
over—the distinction between victims and perpetrators is surely as clear
and as simple as it is possible to be in the realm of human affairs. In the
new cases, even if, as I believe, one can establish genocide or genocide-
like behavior in Bosnia and Rwanda, the moral clarity is simply not there.
Both cases, horrifying as they are, are characterized by enormous com-
plexity and by the unalterable (though clearly not mathematically sym-

metric) fact of massacres followed by counter-massacres. It thus appears
that we must be on double-guard: not to allow the trivializing, shoddy
use of the analogy while at the same time remaining open to the possibil-
ity that genocide (even if it does not approximate the Nazi case) can recur
and may in fact be recurring at present.
The perhaps unfortunate but inevitable temptation to find ultimate
“meanings” and draw alternative “lessons” will, of course, continue un-
abated as will its dubious place in political rhetoric. We all have our own
meanings and lessons and will admire some more than others even if, like
Martin Jay recently suggested, they are somewhat utopian. He writes,
Only in Hollywood movies can the Holocaust be contained within the
boundaries of an aesthetic frame; in real life, it spills out and mingles with
the countless other narratives of our century. Its real horror, we might say,
is not confined to the actual genocidal acts it has come to signify. Histori-
cizing the Holocaust need not mean reducing it to the level of the “nor-
mal” massacres of the innocents that punctuate all of recorded history, but
rather remembering those quickly forgotten and implicitly forgiven events
with the same intransigent refusal to normalize that is the only justifiable
response to the Holocaust itself.38
But whatever “lessons” are being proposed, would it be too much to

hope that they will all encompass, as Primo Levi phrased it already in
1947, “the shame that the Germans never knew, the shame which the just
man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and
he feels remorse because of its existence, because of its having been irrevo-
cably introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will
has proven nonexistent or feeble and was incapable of putting up a
good defense”?39
Part II
(Con)Fusions of Identity—
Germans and Jews
Five
Excursus
Growing Up German Jewish in South Africa
I was born in South Africa, and it was in that shaping context, as a child
of German Jewish refugees who had come to the shores of that country
during the 1930s, that some of the sensibilities associated with the Ger-
man Jewish legacy were transmitted to me.1 Over the years, of course, my
understanding of the meaning of that legacy changed and deepened as it
became more conscious, and the task of this essay will be to delineate
briefly that evolution. But from a child’s emotional point of view, to the
extent that one can distinguish the specifically German Jewish compo-
nents from the general experience of growing up Jewish, it was initially a
rather embarrassing inheritance.
It was, no doubt, my parents’ German accent, at once comfortingly
familiar yet clearly foreign, which first alerted me to the “alienness” of
my background. To the outside world, or so I believed, the fact of Ger-
man foreignness was especially unforgivable in the years following World
War II. In the first few weeks of primary school, when asked where my
parents came from, I murmured “Australia.” How could a child, even
around 1950, acknowledge German origins, admit that in some way he
had been the mortal enemy? Of course, already at that age I intuited the
difference well enough but it was well-nigh impossible to articulate that,
no, my parents were not the enemy but victims, and that defining them
as archetypal Germans was an obscene irony.
There was, in fact, a double bind in such a predicament. For if from a
child’s point of view being Jewish did not exempt one from the stigma of
Germanness, very often in the eyes of our conventionally bigoted, lower-
middle-class teachers, Germanness was little more than a synonym for
Jewishness. This was brought traumatically home to me when a particu-
larly sadistic manual-training teacher descended upon me and scolded me
for crude behavior (what exactly I had done remains a mystery to this
day). He was fully aware that I was Jewish—in South Africa a finely tuned
59
60 (Con)Fusions of Identity—Germans and Jews
ethnic radar is indispensable—and it was this animus which informed his

question: “Where do your parents come from?” Upon hearing the answer
he proclaimed loudly for all to hear: “That accounts for your manners.”
At other times, the anti-Semitic intent was less veiled and the anti-
German, anti-Jewish thrust explicitly fused. One day, in the middle of a
science class, the teacher settled his gaze directly on me and asked why I
believed World War II had been fought. Without waiting for a reply, he
himself provided the enlightening answer: “Because of the Jews, Asch-
heim, because of the Jews.” Incidents like this pushed me ever deeper into
the Zionist Youth Movement (in South Africa, unlike the United States, a
vibrant “counter-institution” expressive of an oppositional Jewish youth
culture) and at the same time into an increasingly critical stance toward
the overall system of racial injustice in South Africa.
It has been suggested that this sensitivity was influenced by the culti-
vated liberal-humanism of German Jewish Bildung. Does this hold? Only,
I think, in subtle, perhaps even subliminal ways. For that legacy (forged
during a century-long struggle for emancipation) was largely the product
and ongoing activity of the Jewish intelligentsia, while people like my
parents, the overwhelming majority of the approximately 6,000 German
Jews who immigrated to South Africa in the 1930s, came from the ini-
tially almost destitute, commercial, non-intellectual classes. Presumably
the refugee German Jewish intellectual elite carried out a voluntary selec-
tion process, rejecting even the possibility of going to what they probably
conceived as the remote kulturlos jungles of Africa. The manifestations of
German Jewish Bildungsideologie in South Africa accordingly bore little
resemblance to the cultural and intellectual productivity or the moral and
critical acuity which, according to the recent work of David Sorkin (The
Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840, 1987) and George L.
Mosse (German Jews beyond Judaism, 1985), marked the tradition at
its best.
When Bildung did manifest itself in South Africa, it did so usually in
other, more familiar ways: as the cultivating complement to successful
commerce, the refining twin of Jewish Besitz (property). This is not meant
disparagingly. As they rose up the economic ladder, some German Jews
did indeed become pioneering patrons and practitioners of music, theater,
and the fine arts, contributing to South Africa’s cultural development, and
here their European background doubtless stood them in good stead. But
their numbers were not all that significant and, in any case, these kinds
of activities, more often than not, served to tame and aestheticize the
vaunted critical and moral edge of the Bildung legacy.
But the category of Bildung does not properly reflect the historical real-
ity of the German Jewish relationship to South Africa. For it was, quite
Excursus 61
simply, gratitude which was the most characteristic and understandable

response of these German Jewish immigrants to their adopted country. At
a time when the gates of the world had been closed to them, South Africa
had given them refuge. The warmth of the welcome and the gratitude they
felt was reinforced by the professional and financial success many of them
rapidly achieved in an expanding and industrializing economy: they too
had acquired a vested interest in things as they were. This was a powerful
combination limiting, if not entirely eliminating, any inclination to gener-
alize from their own experience of racial injustice in Germany and protest
against what was happening in South Africa.
For all that, I believe that this German Jewish background did play a
conditioning role in the larger sensitizing processes of my life. In the first
place, the imprint, brutality, and mystery of Nazism and the Holocaust
have been with me ever since I can remember. These were topics that were
never really analytically confronted, but they were nevertheless somehow
omnipresent, palpably transmitted through my parents’ revulsion for
Germans and things German (my father adamantly refused reparation
money), their reminiscences about the move from Germany to South Af-
rica, and an unstated but quite unambivalent message about the fragility
of the Jewish condition. Unlike my parents I was not beholden to South
Africa as a refugee, and I could therefore translate this sense of vulnerabil-
ity into quite different Jewish and general terms.
In the first place, Zionism seemed almost self-evident, the obvious so-
lution to the Jewish plight of victimization, the basic precondition for the
recovery of a constantly threatened dignity. At the same time, it naturally
went hand in hand with a post-adolescent awakening to the fact that my
own society was based upon an all-encompassing victimization of its non-
white inhabitants. Not all children of German Jewish immigrants, by any
means, saw things this way. But in my own case these sensitivities were,
surely, colored by the cadences and emotional texture, if not the overt
ideology, of a first-generation German Jewish home. This too presumably
provided some of the affective background for a later awareness of the
ironies of victimization implicit in my own chosen Zionist solution, an
awareness made conscious in great part by discovering the writings of
German Zionists like Robert Weltsch and Martin Buber—Bildung intel-
lectuals who brought that critical humanizing tradition to bear on their
own Zionism.
With all their distaste for Germany, my parents, like other new arrivals,
carried Europe with them in a way that the Litvak majority of the South
African Jewish community never did. This went beyond any ideological
stance and reflected, quite simply, inherited reflexes and childhood habits
revelatory of the cultural tastes and preferences of almost all German Jew-
ish homes, and it was transmitted in a variety of ways. My father would,

for instance, effortlessly and quite unselfconsciously, reel off reams of (to
me, rather incomprehensible yet strangely attractive) poetry from the
inevitable Goethe and Heine. Our house rang with the songs of Joseph
Strauss, Richard Tauber, and Marcel Witrich, marvelous tenors whose
78–rpm records we possessed in abundance and which set the founda-
tions, no doubt, for a later enduring passion for German classical music.
There was a hidden, compounding irony here. I always took my father’s
“Germanness” for granted. His great warmth and humor seemed, indeed,
to point to the fundamental inaccuracy of the “stiff Yekke” stereotype. It
was only years after his death that I discovered he was born an “Ostjude,”
a Galizianer who had come to Kassel as a small boy and, like so many
others, elegantly combined these two inheritances! The fact that he had
chosen never to reveal those origins was made even more poignant by the
fact that I learned all this as I was completing my dissertation on the
problematic interdependencies between Eastern and Western Jewish
identity.
My receptivity to German and German Jewish history and culture,
then, springs from these domestic roots. I have never doubted that essen-
tially biographical and existential impulses were behind my later scholarly
interests: understanding the nature of the German catastrophe and the
complexities of the German Jewish experience. The impulse to study the
German world flowed from the dual desire to comprehend and in some
way perhaps to perpetuate the lost reality from which my parents came,
and at the same time, to grasp what had made Nazism and the Holocaust
possible. To a young mind, part of the fascination of German culture lay
in its compelling, although at that stage still quite incomprehensible, com-
bination of the profound and the demonic (I only discovered Thomas
Mann’s explanation of the necessary connection between the two in his
Dr. Faustus much later). Not yet able to penetrate the esoteric language
in which they wrote, I found to my uninitiated, adolescent ears that
names like Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche possessed a kind of magic, an al-
luring and almost evil ring, resonant with the promise of dark and dan-
gerous brilliance. The questions and fascination persist to this day.
But there is still another pertinent level. Since student days I had, quite
unconsciously, equated what I valued most in German thought with what
I later understood to be the legacy of German Jewish humanism. What
was most attractive in German intellectual and moral life turned out, in
most cases, to be linked, in one way or another, to its German Jewish
component. Even if I had not really read them, the giants who in my mind
at least were associated with this legacy—Marx, Freud, and Einstein—
were heroic precisely because they were universal men, makers of modern
Excursus 63
secular thought and yet, in their different ways, quintessentially (or at

least socio-psychologically) Jewish, embodiments of an always humaniz-
ing moral and rational impulse. In a sense this was to be expected—many
educated Westerners’ intellectual experiences surely included these fig-
ures. But a similar elective affinity applied also (and still does) to the end-
less other examples of German and Central European Jewish cultural and
intellectual creativity, to the bewitching names and works of people as
diverse as Gershom Scholem, Ernst Cassirer, Theodor Adorno, Franz
Kafka, Franz Rosenzweig, and Georg Lukács, to name but a few from just
the present century. These rather than French or British thinkers somehow
acted as magnets, natural emulative models. Similarly, it was the work of
post-World War II German Jewish or Central European exile-intellectuals
such as Hannah Arendt, Jean Amery (originally Hans Meyer), George
Steiner, Walter Laqueur, Raul Hilberg, Leo Strauss, George Mosse, Fritz
Stern, Peter Gay, and others that seemed most relevant to me: in the post-
Holocaust era they were as much the incarnation of the German Jewish
spirit as they were chroniclers of its disappearance.
Rationally seeking the roots of irrationalism (only later did I begin to
ponder the too-easy distinctions between the “rational” and the “irratio-
nal”), clinging onto the humanizing fragments of an always vulnerable
culture: this is how George Mosse has, quite correctly, in my view,
summed up the meaning and ultimate significance of this legacy.2 To be
sure, the totality of the German Jewish historical experience must not be
romanticized. The distinction between “rationality” and “irrationality,”
for instance, needs to be more rigorously problematized. Thus German
Jewish intellectual creativity was often fueled by diverse founts of “irra-
tionalism,” even by non- and anti-liberal streams of thought.3 There was
no “pure,” undiluted German Jewish “spirit.” Instead, that experience in-
corporated much that was human, all too human, and some things that
were even mean and small-minded. But now that much of it has been
physically extinguished—the present reassertion of Jewish life in Ger-
many, I think, must be judged within a different frame—it is surely the
legacy of this fragile, humanizing sensibility, independent of any particu-
lar time or space, that we should take care to preserve.
Six
Assimilation and Its

Impossible Discontents
The Case of Moritz Goldstein
In March 1912, a young Zionist, Moritz Goldstein, published an explo-

sive article, “The German-Jewish Parnassus.” There he proclaimed that
“We Jews are administering the spiritual property of a nation which de-
nies our right and ability to do so.” 1 Goldstein, it needs to be added, was
himself a literary scholar, a Germanist, who, as he later ironically put
it, was himself “by profession, an ‘administrator’ of the spiritual property
of the German nation.” 2 Jewish cultural domination, he argued, was
multi-sphered and permeated the worlds of German literature, theater,
journalism, and so on. Non-Jewish resentment over this state of affairs,
Goldstein insisted, had to be acknowledged and its implications honestly
confronted. Such a situation could be remedied, Goldstein wrote, only
through a form of German Jewish cultural disengagement and the con-
struction of a new, specifically “Jewish” culture in Germany.
Anti-Semites had long been espousing the view that over the course of
the nineteenth century Jews had taken over the economics, culture, and,
indeed, the very inner life of Germany. But no Jew—not even militant
German Zionists ideologically predisposed to uncover the duplicities of
assimilation—had openly pronounced this before. What made Gold-
stein’s challenge to the tacit liberal agreement to pass over such sensitive
matters in discreet public silence particularly provocative was the fact that
this analysis appeared in the prestigious Der Kunstwart (The Art Guard),
a cultural journal whose editor, Ferdinand Avenarius, was an avowed
German nationalist and whose literary critic, Adolf Bartels, was a notori-
ous anti-Semite. Previously, and for obvious reasons, Goldstein’s piece
had been rejected by the quintessentially liberal, and Jewish-owned, Ber-
liner Tageblatt.
Goldstein, to be sure, castigated the ressentiment of anti-Jewish
64
Assimilation and Its Impossible Discontents 65
forces—those “German-Christian-Teutonic envy-ridden fools” who had

brought about this state of affairs. But the “worse enemy,” he insisted,
were “those Jews who are completely unaware, who continue to take part
in German cultural activities, who pretend and persuade themselves that
they are not recognized” when, in effect, their cultural creations were
widely viewed as un-German: instead of being fused with the spirit of
Deutschtum (Germanness), non-Jewish Germans regarded them as being
imbued with essentially foreign, “Asiatic,” “Jewish” characteristics. As-
sertions of this kind predictably delighted anti-Semites. One of those,
Ph. Stauff, contributed a vicious piece to Der Kunstwart and outraged
liberals, especially Jewish liberals.3 The two sides rendered inevitable a
protracted and heated debate that spread well beyond the pages of Der
Kunstwart.
There was, of course, nothing new in either the critique or the defense
of assimilation. What was perhaps novel, apart from airing the issue in
public, was Goldstein’s advocacy of the creation of a separate Jewish cul-
ture on German soil—a recommendation that, like the article itself, was
occasioned by the perception of a persisting anti-Jewish feeling in Ger-
many and channeled by a radicalized “post-assimilationist” sensibility
characteristic of second-generation German Zionists. Indeed, Goldstein’s
plea was comprehensible only in terms of a prior vaunted “Jewish renais-
sance” whose seeds were already planted at the fin-de-siècle. His thoughts
were as much a product of that development as it was a call for its pub-
lic recognition.
If this proposed radical cultural disjunction between Germans and
Jews was unthinkable for Jewish liberals—the well-known critic Julius
Bab dubbed the very attempt as a deliberate act of retrogression4 —the
same held for the first generation of German Zionists. In 1910, only two
years before Goldstein dropped his bombshell, Franz Oppenheimer de-
fined the original German Zionist relation to culture thus: “We are collec-
tively German by culture . . . because we have the fortune to belong to
cultural communities that stand in the forefront of nations. . . . We can-
not be Jewish by culture (Kulturjuden) because the Jewish culture, as it
has been preserved from the Middle Ages in the ghettos of the East, stands
infinitely lower than modern cultures which our [Western] nations bear.
We can neither regress nor do we want to.” 5
But for Goldstein and others the new culture, conceived upon essen-
tially organic assumptions, would resolve a problem that liberals and
older Zionists either denied or sidestepped: it would recreate a condition
of authentic wholeness for essentially bifurcated, fragmented Jews. To be
sure, the exact contours and nature of this “Jewish” culture were, as
Goldstein himself admitted, exceedingly vague. What would constitute
the framework and content for such a revival? Apart from the Zionists,
other radical circles—such as the one associated with the journal Der
Freistaat—joined the debate and proposed different solutions. Like the
Zionists, they believed that the creative Jewish instincts were repressed
under the dictates of a “foreign culture” and that authentic expression
was possible only in a Jewish milieu suited to the structure of the Jewish
soul. But they went beyond Zionism in arguing not for some vague, uto-
pian Jewish culture of the future in Palestine but for the immediate union
(Anschluss) of German Jewry with existing Eastern European Jewish cul-
ture. For these disaffected Zionists—most prominently Fritz Mordecai
Kaufmann—the culture of Ostjudentum (Eastern European Jewry) was
synonymous with Jewish culture itself.
More than its vagueness, Goldstein’s posited solution, as well as his
mode of diagnosis, revealed a kind of bewildered despair. It is here that
the document retains its compelling historical interest. Perhaps, indeed,
it should be read as a classic and pained restatement: a symptomatic ex-
pression of the ongoing and unresolved issue of the modalities and duali-
ties of Jewish identity within German culture, a problem that both pre-
ceded and postdated his ruminations.
If the essay was informed by a Zionist sensibility, its tone was more
confused than it was triumphalist. For Goldstein, the psycho-historical
tragedy of acculturated Jews was to be found in their persistent condition
of duality and fragmentation. The creation of a full Jewish, Hebrew-
speaking culture was possible only in Zion, he wrote, but that was not
really an option for the present generation of German Jews, those who
had “left the ghetto, we lucky-unlucky beneficiaries of West European
culture, we eternal-halves, we excluded and homeless.” The cultural con-
dition of German Jewry was thus part blessing, part curse. For although
Goldstein proposed the creation of a distinct culture in which Jews would
work unconditionally as Jews, it did not mean that the deeply ingrained
German inheritance had to—or could or should—be simply jettisoned:
“We cannot cast it off as one exchanges a garment. We do not want to
give this all up; it means draining the blood of our life.” 6 Ironically
enough, some later radical Zionists were convinced that German Jews
were so thoroughly acculturated, their German “spirit” so deep, that they
were incapable of inhabiting a Jewish one. Thus, in 1917 a student Zion-
ist, G. Wollstein, proposed that in order to prevent the “Berlinization” of
the future Jewish state, German Jews should marry only Eastern Euro-
pean Jews and refrain from writing in Hebrew journals, for their contri-
butions could consist only of Jewish words wrapped in the German
spirit!7
Forty-five years after the appearance of his Kunstwart piece, Goldstein
reflected on the insolubility of the Deutschtum-Judentum nexus: his piece

had been (mis)understood as “a programme for action whereas I merely
wanted to free myself of a tormenting trouble by ventilating it.” 8 There
was, indeed, even something cloying in the cliche-ridden, romantic mode
in which he described the relation of German Jews to German culture and
their sense of being slighted by their exclusion from it: “The German
spring is our spring, as the German winter is for us winter. . . . Were we
not raised on German fairy tales? . . . Is not the German forest alive for
us, are we not also allowed to behold its elves and gnomes, do we not
understand the murmur of its streams and the song of its birds?” 9
But of course his article was not received as a testament to German
patriotism, nor even as an expressive document of cultural bewilderment.
Ernst Lissauer (1882–1937), the Jewish author of the famous World
War I “Hate Song Against England,” insisted at the end of his indignant
reply to Goldstein that the dualities over which Goldstein struggled could
be straightforwardly resolved. A simple decision had to be made: either
to “become German” or to leave the country.10
The polemics occasioned by this piece produced rather formulaic re-
sponses and have been thoroughly analyzed elsewhere. What has gone
less remarked is the degree to which the discussion—indeed, the wider
debate around Deutschtum and Judentum, the possibilities and limits of
assimilation and of cultural creativity in general— employed a peculiar
species of discourse that turned upon a hypostatized conception of “es-
sences,” of visible and hidden, external and internal characteristics taken
to be profoundly determinative of “Jewishness.” These characteristics
were represented as both markers of a distinct identity and the “content”
of such Jewishness, the inward and outward manifestations of an elusive
but powerful Jewish being and “spirit,” which assimilation in the last
analysis could neither repress nor dissolve.
Goldstein, for instance, couched his arguments on the basis of what
he regarded to be “inherited, ineradicable characteristics” of the Jews.
Other participants in the debate spoke as if this were an unproblematic
given of a constitutive Jewish “national substance.” 11 It is significant that
even the liberals, who were most obviously opposed to such essentialist
thinking, were forced to construct their arguments within these terms, if
only to dismiss the determinative role of such categories. Thus Lissauer,
who categorically denied the existence of an inherent Jewish “national
substance”—what one meant by that term, he argued, was simply the
collectively acquired characteristics of ghetto life that were constitutive
of East European Jews—noted that assimilation was a slow process and
admitted that German Jews, already a quite distinct species from their
East European branch, still exhibited some recognizable physical and
mental signs of that past existence. But this was because they were still in
a transitional phase. What one took to be inherent characteristics of the
Jewish physique and psyche were simply products of their historical and
sociological—and thus alterable—contexts. To speak of such an inborn
substance, Lissauer exclaimed, was to speak in precisely those racial
terms employed by enemies of the Jews.12
This underside of the debate, we should point out, merely refueled and
underlined an intuition of an evasive yet palpable Jewish “otherness” that
had been sensed and discussed throughout the period of modern German
Jewish acculturation. This was a sentiment that was shared, even though
it was evaluated and deployed in radically different terms, by Jews, non-
Jews, and anti-Semites alike. Hannah Arendt has suggested that the dy-
namic governing the notion of an indistinct, yet powerfully felt, Jewish
“spirit” or inner essence was embedded in the logic of emancipation, in
the very terms of the assimilationist pact: “Instead of being defined by
nationality or religion, Jews were being transformed into a social group
whose members shared certain psychological attributes and reactions, the
sum total of which was to constitute ‘Jewishness.’ In other words, Juda-
ism became a psychological quality and the Jewish Question became an
involved personal problem for every individual Jew.” 13
It was this hypostatization of some invisible but determinative inner
essence that from the late-eighteenth century increasingly characterized
both Jewish and non-Jewish perceptions. With the passing of time it be-
came increasingly definitive of Jewish identity itself: as the overt signs
of Jewish difference receded, this simultaneously elusive yet ultimately
constitutive internality (whether viewed approvingly or with distaste) be-
came of paramount importance. Heinrich Heine provided some of the
earliest and most powerful expressions of both the positive and negative
psychological valences of a “Jewishness” experienced both as a kind of
mental defect—“Incurable deep ill! defying treatment. . . . Will Time, the
eternal goddess, in compassion / Root out this dark calamity transmitted
from sire to son?”—and as an expression of “the genuine, the ageless,
the true”: it was the “character of the Jewish people,” he wrote, that was
the “cause,” the key agent in the moralization of the West.14
Goldstein’s assertion of ineradicable inherited Jewish characteristics,
then, was not simply a passing fancy, the mutterings of a whimsical eccen-
tric, but part of a larger cluster of convictions that seemed if anything to
become more pronounced during this period. As moderate a German
Jewish journal as Ost und West announced in its 1901 opening statement
that, apparent differences notwithstanding, all Jews “shared the same in-
herited characteristics.” 15 Like others involved in the fin-de-siècle Jewish
renaissance, it implied, rather remarkably, that genetics somehow doomed
the politics and culture of assimilation.
Strikingly, the debate did not center on the issue of external character-
istics. It focused instead on the question of internal content, of the cor-
responding Jewish “spirit,” because there was, more or less, general
agreement that Jews did in fact possess physically distinguishing features
and mannerisms. Liberal Jews like Lissauer recognized that there were
painfully obvious physical landmarks of Jewishness, but they asserted
that these were hangovers from the ghetto and would disappear with the
successful completion of the assimilation process. Similarly Ludwig Gei-
ger, the editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, elsewhere admit-
ted the existence of this external dimension, but he did not quite know
what to do with such an awkward perception. Jews, he wrote, were easily
identifiable by the way they moved, by the shape of their noses, and by
other bodily cues, but he drew no cultural or sociological conclusions
from these observations.16 Still other liberal Jews of the time were often
shocked by what appeared to be an “instinctive,” physical recognition of
kinship. Wrapped in a scarf so that only his eyes were visible, the play-
wright Richard Beer-Hoffmann was shocked when a caftan-clad Ostjude
stopped him and said, “My good sir is one of us. . . . He will tell me how
I can get to the Nollendorfplatz?” 17
Many identifying German Jews claimed that they too possessed this
instinctive capacity for mutual recognition. The radical anarchist Gustav
Landauer, for instance, was convinced that he could identify fellow Jews
merely by looking at them.18 At the same time, for those interested in
escaping their historical fate, Judaism could be regarded as a physiologi-
cal defect. Thus, the famous linguist Fritz Mauthner experienced it as a
kind of “duct” in the brain, a disease he was afraid to contract.19
Like Goldstein, it was yet another young Zionist and Germanist (per-
haps such people most sharply and paradoxically experienced the ten-
sions between Deutschtum and Judentum), Ludwig Strauss, who did
most to radicalize and polarize the debate and who—on the basis of pop-
ular physiognomic and racial wisdom—sought to derive internal conclu-
sions and content from these external characteristics, thereby providing a
literal and unified psycho-physiological form to the notion of a Jewish
“national substance.” In Strauss’s conception, Jewish identity was locat-
able by external signs that betrayed an inner life. “The obvious bodily
differences between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans,” he exclaimed, “is
necessarily connected to an inner difference, a dissimilarity in national
substance.” 20
Even if deployed for quite different, positive purposes, if such notions
did not exactly mimic, they seemed at least to parallel a longstanding,
anti-Jewish discourse that linked the external to the internal, the physio-
logical to the spiritual and cultural. Richard Wagner’s 1850 essay “Juda-
ism in Music,” for instance, explained the roots of an “instinctive,” “in-
voluntary repellence” to the Jew in terms that equally emphasized Jewish

physical and spiritual structure and the interdependence between them.21
The most extreme articulation, partly expressive and partly satirical, of
this physio-cultural discourse was contained in Oskar Panizza’s night-
marish short story “The Operated Jew” (1893).22 Panizza’s tale relates the
desperate attempts of a stereotypical Jew, the culturally and physically
deformed Itzig Faitel Stern, to alter his inner and outer nature and turn
himself into a modern Aryan Christian. This physio-cultural transforma-
tion, which included a number of excruciating surgical procedures on the
repellent Itzig’s entire skeletal framework in order to bring about the re-
quired metamorphosis, ultimately fails. The grotesque denouement moves
from his cultural regression—the lapse into his ugly Jewish accent and
stereotypical mannerisms—to his quite literal reversion from normal to
Jewish physiology: “Faitel’s blond strands of hair began to curl. . . . Then
the curly locks turned red, then dirty brown and finally blue-black. . . . His
arms and legs which had been stretched and bent in numerous operations
could no longer perform the newly learned movements. . . . A terrible smell
spread in the room . . . [the surgeon] Klotz’s work of art lay before him
crumpled and quivering, a convoluted Asiatic image in wedding dress, a
counterfeit of human flesh, Itzig Faitel Stern.” 23 The assimilationist proj-
ect was revealed in all its interrelated cultural and genetic absurdity.
In order to draw a similar conclusion but from a quite different source
and for different purposes, Strauss explicitly employed the Buberian
model of a Jewish essence that assimilation could perhaps hide and dis-
tort but never fully eradicate. This was a notion that Martin Buber devel-
oped in his influential 1909 “Bar Kochba” lectures, in which he portrayed
the “community of blood” as the profound core of Jewishness, “the deep-
est, most potent stratum of our being . . . our innermost thinking and our
will are colored by it.” 24 Buber drew upon the common racial coinage of
his day, obviously not as a tool for domination of others, but as a po-
tent—some would argue merely metaphorical—device to imagine or con-
jure up a concealed but still pulsating Jewish essence. Ultimately, he pro-
claimed, Jewish belonging would be decided in terms of this community
of blood rather than by the external “community of experience,” those
spheres and fields of assimilation to which Jews only apparently and
superficially belonged.
It was on such Buberian premises that Strauss proceeded to argue that
the greater the attempt to integrate into an alien (fremdartig) mode, “the
‘national substance’ becomes increasingly deeply repressed and hidden
inside.” In a startling confirmation of anti-Semitic and racial theses and
couched in a similar organic discourse, Strauss proposed that to the ex-
tent that the “foreign” mixed with the Jewish soul, it would be appre-
hended as alien and a generalized Jewish ethnic distinctiveness (Stam-

meseigenart) would so assert itself in the individual that the instinct of
survival would push him back toward his own ethnic particularity.25
To be sure, Strauss emphasized, after such a long dispersion it was not
simple to locate and identify this essence (Buber, some time before, had
described assimilation as an ongoing form of Jewish self-alienation), but
no matter how vague it was, the feeling of something substantial, essential
(wesentlich) was sufficient. The content of this essence would be clarified
through diligent work; this was the most urgent and binding Jewish obli-
gation of the moment. Affirmation of Jewishness as the informing center
of one’s life, thought, and deeds would render bifurcated Jewish lives
whole again.
But Strauss was extreme in his physio-psychic fusion of identity. The
importance of the Kunstwart affair for certain Jewish intellectuals who
were not affiliated with religious or official communal life, yet who felt
in some vague yet deep way “Jewish,” was that it brought out the convic-
tion that there were, indeed, real limits to assimilation and that these had
to be explained not merely in terms of external antagonisms but also by
acknowledging the intangible but powerful inner sense of Jewishness. In
a private correspondence with Strauss over the issue that Goldstein had
raised, the young Walter Benjamin voiced his enthusiastic support for the
idea of a new Jewish (German-language) journal that would encourage,
as Strauss put it, “conscious Jews to delineate the nature of the Jewish
spirit clearly and credibly.” But although Strauss sought to formalize and
channel this “Jewish spirit” into explicitly Jewish frames, for Benjamin
its value consisted in the absence of formal definition. The essence of Jew-
ish, or Western European Jewish, identity was contained in this peculiar
“sensibility” and should in no way, therefore, be harnessed to any fixed
framework.26
For Eastern European Jewry, Benjamin declared, Zionism provided a
solution of sorts—whereas for Western European Jews it was an irrele-
vance. Strauss’s suggestion of creating an autonomous center of Jewish
culture in Germany linked to the spiritual center that would arise in Pales-
tine was objectionable because Jews in the West were at the forefront of
a larger process that transcended parochial boundaries and activities.
They were at the forefront of such a project because their ethnic-national
bonds created a kind of shared spiritual and mental sensibility—never an
end in itself—that rendered Jews an “elite in the party of intellectuals,”
“the most eminent bearer and representative of matters spiritual and in-
tellectual.” 27 Strauss also proposed an inner essence, but at the same time
programmatically advocated what Paul Mendes-Flohr has called an “exo-
teric” conception of Zionism and Judaism, the formation of explicitly
Jewish cultural forms and the conscious practice of Jewish deeds. For
Benjamin, Judaism was an “esoteric” matter: its power derived from the
fact that it was both ill-defined and yet self-understood.28 He was cer-
tainly not alone. For many intellectual Jews, the importance of Jewishness
lay in its implicit nature; it was not a formal commitment or series of
obligations but a hidden sensibility that powerfully informed one’s spiri-
tual and mental life.
In the years following the Kunstwart affair there were, nevertheless,
numerous positive, “exoteric” developments in the direction that Gold-
stein had advocated. World War I and the years of the Weimar Republic
witnessed the appearance of divergent, self-affirming “Jewish” journals
of high intellectual quality, such as Martin Buber’s Der Jude and the Cen-
tralverein’s Der Morgen (under the editorship of Julius Goldstein); a vir-
tual cult of the “Ostjuden” (or at least a serious reassessment of the East-
West Jewish relation among various circles of German Jewry);29 an
outburst of “Weimar” Jewish intellectual and theological creativity that
blossomed in diverse directions30 and included the work and thought of
Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem (and even
the “esoteric” Walter Benjamin).31
But of course the tensions, ambiguities, and casuistic definitions con-
cerning Deutschtum and Judentum continued unresolved. They were de-
finitive, perhaps the source of much that was creative in German Jewry
through 1933. Beneath all these exoteric re-definitions there remained a
persistent, positively evaluated experience (indeed, an ideology) of an elu-
sive, indefinable, yet radically determinative inner Jewish essence. Jew-
ishness, as Franz Rosenzweig put it, was “no entity, no subject among
other subjects, no one sphere of life among other spheres of life; it is not
what the century of emancipation with its cultural mania wanted to re-
duce it to. It is something inside the individual that makes him a Jew,
something infinitesimally small yet immeasurably large, his most impene-
trable secret, yet evident in every gesture and every word—especially in
the most spontaneous of them.” 32
Sigmund Freud, too, regarded Jewishness and its “many dark emo-
tional powers” as “all the more powerful the less they could be expressed
in words,” and as “the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the famil-
iarity of the same psychological structure.” 33 This insistence on a Jew-
ishness that resists definition, or as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has put it,
the intuition of a distinct sensibility, essence, or character deprived of any
particular content,34 did not only play an important role for intellectual
German Jews. We may also dub it a prevailing ideology of our own times,
a way in which countless contemporary secular Jews approach articulat-
ing their own persistent but difficult to locate sense of a “Jewish self.”
Seven
Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem
In the intellectual discourse of our day, Hannah Arendt has become some-
thing of an icon. The climate of postmodernism and identity politics, and
the search for a non-ideological, post-totalitarian posture, has endowed
her work with renewed relevance and vitality. In Western Europe, the
United States, and even in Eastern Europe, her work has become the sub-
ject of intense, often celebratory, interest and analysis.1 In Israel this en-
gagement has been conspicuously lacking. This may tell us as much about
our own cultural self-understanding and biases as it will about the nature
of Arendt’s person and thought. In Israel—beginning prior to, but cer-
tainly coming to a climax with, the appearance in 1963 of her deeply
controversial, explosive book on Eichmann2 —Arendt has, to all intents
and purposes, been relegated to the status of an adversary, an “enemy”
tainted by “self-hating,” even anti-Semitic impulses, one condemned as a
thinker whose tone and work violated some of the society’s most basic
taboos.3 The experience of reading Arendt, I have been told by a number
of sophisticated Israeli intellectuals, still evokes a visceral sense of physical
revulsion! This is a distaste that has been marked, moreover, not so much
by overt confrontation and refutation as by stark collective silence and
implicit communal excommunication.4
It is a quite remarkable but telling fact that none of Hannah Arendt’s
work was translated into Hebrew before the year 2000—it was only then,
after much politicking, that Eichmann in Jerusalem appeared.5 It will not
do to claim, as some have, that other major thinkers of the Cold War
period (such as Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek) went similarly untrans-
lated. For, quite unlike these authors, Arendt’s life and thought were pas-
sionately linked to core predicaments of the modern Jewish experience.
Furthermore, her work often analyzed in pioneering and provocative
fashion almost all the great issues—the complex dynamics of emanci-
pation and assimilation, the tortuous binds of Western Jewish identity
and its “psychologized” forms, the phenomenon of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Jewish intellectual and cultural creativity, the nature
of anti-Semitism and totalitarianism, Jewish politics and Zionism, and
73
above all the genocidal eruption of Nazism and the Holocaust.6 It was
precisely her involvement in these matters, her troubling relevance, that
rendered her so threatening. In Israel, in a still-developing, insecure, and
highly ideological culture wary of partial identifications and provisional
commitments, Arendt’s critiques (especially in the ironic mode, often
made in an offhand, arrogant manner) could not easily be absorbed.
Today, in a later, quite different climate, there are signs—as the confer-
ence for which this paper was prepared perhaps attests—of a new genera-
tional openness, a willingness to receive and read Arendt somewhat dif-
ferently, perhaps even to appropriate selected aspects of her thought.7 But
to understand the history and nature of Arendt’s reception in Jerusalem to
date, we must also examine the closely interrelated ways in which Arendt
herself engaged and imagined Jerusalem—both actually and metaphori-
cally. In order to do this satisfactorily, it is necessary to place Arendt
within the relevant historical context.
Like the figures she vividly brought to life—Rahel Varnhagen, Hein-
rich Heine, Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, and many others—Hannah
Arendt’s achievements and biases, her creativity, and inner conflicts must
all be seen as part of the quite extraordinary history of post-emancipation
German Jewish intellectuals and their wider engagement with the impera-
tives of German culture and its later great breakdown. Arendt was not
only a keen analyst of that experience but was herself a central expression
of it.8 Much of her acuity derived from the fact that she embodied the
tensions and contradictions that fueled so much of its creativity, especially
as they manifested themselves in the productive turbulence of the Weimar
Republic in which she spent her formative years. Her Weimar friends,
lovers, and adversaries—ranging from Karl Jaspers and Martin Heideg-
ger to Kurt Blumenfeld, Theodor Adorno, Gershom Scholem, and Walter
Benjamin—were all lightning rods of this history, incarnations of its man-
ifold yet related sensibilities.
Arendt was both an explicator and a living example of what Dan
Diner, in another context, has termed the “Western” Jewish narrative.9
Unlike its East European counterpart—constructed upon the basis of col-
lective national experience and a relatively singular self-understanding—
this narrative takes as its starting point the individual and the rupture
with community and tradition, as well as the engagement with manifold
cultural worlds and political affiliations. It highlights ambivalence, mul-
tiple loyalties, fissures, breakdowns, and partial reconstitutions. One
could argue that perhaps one source of difficulty of absorbing Arendt
within Jerusalem was that such a model of fracture and conflict did not
sit easily with more organic national narratives, cut out of more unified,
heroic materials.
Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem 75
But, of course, the situation is more complicated than this. Events

around Arendt pushed this classic Bildungs intellectual10 to turn sharply
away from that tradition’s unworldly, apolitical cultivation of individual
interiority.11 In reaction to the duplicities of Western Jewish social assimi-
lation (which she critiqued as acutely as she diagnosed them) and the rise
of the Nazis and her own experience as a refugee, we should not forget
that she advocated what amounted to an activist Zionist solution: a
worldly, affirmative politics of collective Jewish existence and national
Jewish rights. Witness her militant call for the formation of a Jewish army
during World War II.12 Throughout the 1930s and 1940s she entirely
devoted herself, not just intellectually, but also practically and profes-
sionally, to Jewish and Zionist commitments.13 None other than her later
nemesis, Gershom Scholem, in 1941 described her as “a wonderful
woman and an extraordinary Zionist.” 14
If later she rather controversially opposed statehood and wrote highly
critical articles about Zionism, she did not question the need for a Jew-
ish homeland, and her historiography of modern Jewish life and anti-
Semitism was laden with Zionist assumptions. And, even after the great
disputes around the Eichmann book, which she described as “the war
between me and the Jews,” 15 she wrote to Mary McCarthy concerning
the 1967 war: “Any real catastrophe in Israel would affect me more deeply
than anything else.” 16 In the wake of that war, even her critical judgment
was momentarily suspended, overtaken by the prevalent euphoria of the
time. She wrote to Jaspers:
Israel: In many respects, in most actually, very encouraging. It’s really

quite wonderful that an entire nation reacts to a victory like that not by
bellowing hurrah but with a real orgy of tourism—everybody has to go to
have a look at the newly conquered territory. I was in all the formerly
Arab territories and never noticed any conqueror behavior in the stream
of Israeli tourists. The Arab population was more hostile than I expected
. . . as far as the country itself is concerned, one can clearly see from what
great fear it has suddenly been freed. That contributes significantly to im-
proving the national character.17
It is precisely because of the complexity of her commitments, her par-

tial “insider” status, and the difficulties of classifying her that Arendt was
so inassimilable, baffling to Jewish establishments both within and with-
out Israel.18 After all, it is far easier to pigeonhole and dismiss classic
disaffected intellectuals or what Isaac Deutscher called universalist non-
Jewish Jews. They fit a pattern. Arendt was something else.19 She is best
understood in terms of Michael Walzer’s portrait of “connected critics,” 20
those figures whose life and thought are characterized not by detachment
but rather by passionate, yet essentially ambiguous, engagement. It is pre-

cisely this relationship that rendered her challenges and the responses to
them particularly charged, emotionally over-determined. Moreover, Ar-
endt’s insistence upon what she termed “thinking without bannisters,”
upon critical judgment and non-ideological categories—peppered by
what critics both in Israel and elsewhere regarded as an almost perverse
desire for originality and a penchant for extreme and arrogant, even at
times bizarre, declarations21 —made her even more anomalous.
On the one hand, the fact of her Jewishness and her strident affirma-
tion of it was never in question. “I belong to [the Jews],” she wrote, “be-
yond dispute or agreement.” 22 “One does not escape Jewishness,” reads
the title of the last chapter of her most revealingly personal book on Rahel
Varnhagen, a work that, as Arendt herself put it “was written from the
perspective of a Zionist critique of assimilation” 23 and which was well
received in Jerusalem.24 Interestingly, her friend Karl Jaspers objected to
the book precisely because of this proto-Zionist bias. In working through
her own issues of identity, he argued, Arendt had presented Varnhagen
entirely one-dimensionally: “you force everything under the rubric of be-
ing a Jew.” 25 She had, he complained, ideologically flattened Varnhagen’s
“unconditional” humanity and, in her antipathy to the Enlightenment,
reduced the full force of her own individual personality.
But, of course, Arendt’s determined identification was by no means
absolute. It was most clear and decisive under conditions of persecution
where, as she put it in her 1959 Lessing Prize address, one had to “resist
only in terms of the identity that is under attack.” 26 “Politically,” she de-
clared in 1946, “I will speak only in the name of the Jews,” but she imme-
diately qualified this by adding “whenever circumstances force me to give
my nationality.” 27 Ultimately, though, she resisted all totalizing defini-
tions, insisting that no single or homogenous identities and identifications
adequately accounted for the disclosive complexities of selfhood. When
asked by Jaspers whether she was a German or a Jew she replied: “To be
perfectly honest, it doesn’t matter to me in the least on the personal and
individual level.” 28 This problem of group versus individual loyalties
formed an essential part of the tension between Arendt and Jerusalem. It
was expressed in Arendt’s famous response to Scholem’s 1963 admoni-
tion that she lacked Ahavat Israel. “Love,” Arendt insisted, was not a
collective matter: “I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of
love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.” 29
At the same time, then, as she unabashedly confirmed her Jewishness
and tried to provide it with political shape and expression, Arendt con-
tinued to challenge the non-reflexive, self-celebratory nature of group af-
filiations.30 She took great pride in the complex, even subversive, nature
of her own intertwined commitments: her second husband, Heinrich
Bluecher, was not only a non-Jew; he was, to boot, a proletarian and so

non-conformist a German Marxist that as an adolescent he joined the
Zionist group, the Blau Weiss!31 As Arendt put it in 1946: “If I had
wanted to become respectable I would either have had to give up my inter-
est in Jewish affairs or not marry a non-Jewish man, either option equally
inhuman and in a sense crazy.” 32 The intimate, sometimes highly erotic,
correspondence between Bluecher and Arendt documents these unortho-
dox predilections in critically prejudiced and humorously self-conscious
ways. Writing to Heinrich in 1936 about a meeting to found the World
Jewish Congress, Arendt comments that the proceedings were partly con-
ducted in Hebrew, “which after all my dismal attempts to learn it, is no
language, but a national misfortune! So, my love, don’t let yourself be
circumcised.” 33 Yet her letters to her friend, the great novelist Hermann
Broch,34 and to Bluecher were literally peppered with affectionate Yid-
dishisms. “I am the only German Jewess anywhere that has learned Yid-
dish,” she declared to Bluecher, whom she addresses as my “beloved
wonder-rabbi”!35
These multiple loyalties clearly colored Arendt’s dialogue with Jerusa-
lem. In 1955 she wrote to Blumenfeld concerning Scholem: “I cannot
tolerate this nationalist chatter that isn’t really seriously intended and that
springs from a quite understandable anxiety. And this gossip about the
goyim gets pretty much on my nerves. I should have mentioned that I
actually am married to such a ‘Goy’ and that one should feel as little free
in my company to talk about this, as one should talk absolutely ‘freely’
about the Jews in Heinrich’s presence.” 36
It is precisely this dual moment, this insider-outsider tension, and the
personal and narrative clashes emerging from deep bonds and commonal-
ities that constitute the complexities of Arendt in Jerusalem. I would sug-
gest that the source of her achievements, conflicts, and limitations lay in
the fact that in her great engagement with the wider world (especially
that of German culture) she exemplified the bifurcated Western Jew that
she so acutely diagnosed and critiqued. “The behavior patterns of assimi-
lated Jews,” she wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism,
determined by this continuous concentrated effort to distinguish them-

selves, created a Jewish type that is recognizable everywhere. Instead of be-
ing defined by nationality or religion, Jews were being transformed into a
social group whose members shared certain psychological attributes and
reactions, the sum total of which was to constitute “Jewishness.” In other
words, Judaism became a psychological quality and the Jewish question
became an involved personal problem for every individual Jew.37
Arendt’s really interesting insights—which both reflected, and were

transformed into, her larger philosophical vision—concentrated upon
both the “Jewish” and general aspects of Western and Central European
cultural fragmentations, breakdowns, and attempted recoveries. These,
of course, were particularly acutely felt and analyzed during the Weimar
Republic.38 Little wonder, for instance, that Arendt was so enamored of
Kafka.39 Her insightful analysis of Benjamin and Scholem applies equally
to her own thought in matters both Jewish and general:
Benjamin’s choice, baroque in a double sense, has an exact counterpart in
Scholem’s strange decision to approach Judaism via the Cabala, that is,
that part of Hebrew literature which is untransmitted and untransmissible
in terms of Jewish tradition, in which it has always had the odor of some-
thing downright disreputable. Nothing showed more clearly—so one is in-
clined to say today—that there was no such thing as a “return” to either
the German or the European or the Jewish tradition than the choice of
these fields of study. It was an implicit admission that the past spoke di-
rectly only through these things that had not been handed down, whose
seeming closeness to the present was thus due precisely to their exotic
character, which ruled out all claims to a binding authority.40
The most clear-sighted of these intellectuals, Arendt added, “were led

by their personal [ Jewish] conflicts to a much more general and radical
problem, namely, to questioning the relevance of the Western tradition as
a whole.” 41 This, surely, was also meant autobiographically. What ulti-
mately was Arendt’s project but the attempt to rethink the Western politi-
cal and philosophical tradition? It is worth noting that many establish-
ment Jewish and Israeli intellectuals have remained stuck at the level of
problems engendered by Arendt’s Jewish narrative. This, at least until
now, has constituted an obstacle to engaging her more general thought.
Of course, if Arendt’s strengths and insights were rooted in this experi-
ence, so too were many of her weaknesses and limitations. This great
critic of assimilationist, bourgeois German Jewry shared many of its most
basic historical prejudices. She poured all of them into a few pungent
sentences in a letter from Jerusalem when she came to report on the Eich-
mann trial:
My first impression. On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry. Below
them, the persecuting attorneys, Galicians, but still Europeans. Everything
is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only He-
brew and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They
would follow any order. And outside the doors, the oriental mob, as if
one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country. In addition, and
very visible in Jerusalem, the peies and caftan Jews, who make life impos-
sible for all the reasonable people here.42
But these were, on the whole, private utterances that need not preoccupy
us here. What does need attention in the present context was Arendt’s
willingness, indeed determination, to publicly challenge fundamental pre-

cepts of collective narrative and memory. While her defenders argue that
she sought to do so as a matter of intellectual principle and honesty, her
critics regard this as a kind of tactless perversity, the desire to damage the
Jews at their most sensitive and vulnerable points. Here I want to try to
capture the emotional undergrowth, the atmospheric resonances, and sub-
texts which, I think, provoked such outraged reactions.
It was, of course, over the Eichmann book (especially Arendt’s by now
very familiar depiction of the behavior of the Judenraete43 and the portrait
of Eichmann) and its seeming violation of what Richard Cohen has called
“the power of the myth and the sacredness of the memory” that the issues
were most intensely played out.44 The key protagonists themselves were
quite aware of the pre-intellectual, pre-rational nature of the issues it
broached and the extreme emotions it evoked. They ranged from feelings
of liberation, of having told the truth in the face of collective pressures,
to accusations of self-hatred, betrayal, and of having “crossed over.” Mary
McCarthy wrote: “To me, Eichmann in Jerusalem, despite all the horrors
in it, was morally exhilarating. I freely confess that it gave me joy and I
too heard a pean in it—not a hate-paean to totalitarianism but a pean of
transcendence, heavenly music, like that of the final chorus of Figaro or
the Messiah . . . The reader ‘rose above’ the terrible material of the trial
or was borne aloft to survey it with his intelligence.” 45 And Arendt,
though she thought McCarthy’s comparisons a little excessive, told her:
“You were the only reader to understand what otherwise I have never
admitted—namely that I wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria.
And that ever since I did it, I feel . . . light-hearted about the whole matter.
Don’t tell anybody; is it not proof positive that I have no ‘soul’?” 46 And,
on the other side of the fence, it was not only this apparent lighthearted-
ness, what Scholem called her “heartless, frequently almost sneering and
malicious tone . . . touching the very quick of our life” that grated, but
the shock that such sentiments could be publicly expressed by someone
whom he regarded, as he put it, “wholly as a daughter of our people, and
in no other way.” 47
Karl Jaspers, though he thought the book was “magnificent,” acutely
recognized the relevant gut level of the matter when he curtly dismissed
Arendt’s theory that the hostility toward her was motivated by her belief
that the Judenrat members she had criticized occupied positions of power
in Israel and by fear of revelations about Zionist-Nazi cooperation during
the War.48 “If that were so,” Jaspers correctly pointed out, “then people
would have some knowledge of these things.” Instead, he suggested:
“What is revealed here is a deep-seated sense of having been struck a
mortal blow . . . Something in ‘Jewry’ itself has been struck a blow.” 49
It is worth pointing out that, although it did not evoke anything like
the same outcry, the same structural tensions applied to Arendt’s October
1945 piece, Zionism Reconsidered.50 Again, what mattered as much as
the content of her arguments was the fact that they touched upon the
question of solidarity and the limits of loyal, connected criticism. Once
more, but this time in an unpublished letter, it was Scholem who angrily
responded. He fashioned a well-wrought, piercing refutation but what
underlies it is the pain and confusion engendered by the fact that this
attack was written by a supposed friend. He registered surprise that her
arguments were based “not on Zionist but rather extreme . . . anti-
Zionist grounds.” Given Arendt’s explicit Zionist commitments at the
time, Scholem had expected an immanent critique, one that took a posi-
tion from “within,” as it were. Instead, as he put it, he found an indiscrim-
inate mix of arguments, stated scornfully and written from the viewpoint
of a universalistic morality that existed in practice nowhere but in the
heads of disaffected Jewish intellectuals.51 Years later, in 1968, he wrote
an embittered letter to Hans Paeschke in which he made it clear that it
was Arendt’s fickleness, her disloyalty to her vaunted ideological and
group commitments that above all disturbed him: “I knew Hannah Ar-
endt when she was a socialist or half-communist,” (an assertion, by the
way, always heatedly denied by Arendt, who consistently claimed that “If
I can be said to ‘have come from anywhere’ it is from the tradition of
German philosophy”),52 “and I knew her when she was a Zionist. I am
astounded by her ability to pronounce upon movements in which she was
once so deeply engaged, in terms of a distance measured in light years
and from such sovereign heights.” 53
Even in his original reply to Arendt’s anti-Zionist polemic, Scholem
made explicit the fact that this was a confrontation about the nature of
ideological commitment: “I confess my guilt with the greatest calm to
most of the sins that you have attributed to Zionism. I am a nationalist
and fully unmoved by apparently progressive declarations against a view,
that since my earliest youth has been repeatedly declared as super-
ceded. . . . I am a ‘sectarian’ and have never been ashamed to present my
conviction of sectarianism as decisive and positive.” 54
As the years went by the rift between the two became even greater. We
should not, however, exaggerate this. Viewed in larger historical perspec-
tive, their differences and the intensity with which they expressed them
were linked, I think, to a certain kind of kinship and flowed from some
profound commonalities. Family quarrels, after all, are often the most
strongly felt. Both exemplified the radical revolt against German Jewish
bourgeois modes of assimilation. Both were classical German Jewish in-
tellectuals, products of the European and Jewish traditions which they
subjected to the most withering critiques (this, I think, in many ways ac-
counts for the current fascination with them in Western intellectual

circles).55 Both, as David Suchoff points out, “created new models for the
transmission of tradition and the relation between culture and political
action. Their writing sought to confront, without repressing, the scandal
that Jewish particularity posed to German culture in their period.” 56
Paradoxically, their negative personal evaluations of each other also
looked like mirror images. Both regarded the other as megalomaniacally
arrogant and self-obsessed.57 Already in 1957, Arendt wrote that Scholem
was “so self-preoccupied that he has no eyes (and not only that: no ears).
Basically he believes: The midpoint of the world is Israel; the midpoint of
Israel is Jerusalem; the midpoint of Jerusalem is the university and the
midpoint of the university is Scholem. And the worst of it is that he really
believes that the world has a central point.” 58
Yet, for all that, the differences are not insignificant. Arendt’s critical
narrative ultimately did depart from a more organic and totalizing na-
tional (and Zionist) version. The twentieth-century experience of forced
statelessness rendered her suspicious of the logic of all homogenizing pol-
itics. Her evolving political thought revolved around, at least in part, the
dynamic possibilities entailed in multiple new beginnings and on an open,
disclosive performativity.59 In works such as The Human Condition and
On Revolution, she developed an alternative conception designed to en-
hance the public spaces and dimensions of freedom and the possibilities
of action. This was politics in which plurality was placed at the center.
Whatever else she may have shared with her lover and mentor Martin
Heidegger (post-metaphysical thinking, the problematic conservative cri-
tique of instrumental modernity and mass society, and so on), Arendt’s
emphasis on the primacy of the political realm and the intrinsic value
of plurality decidedly separated her from him.60 As recent readings have
emphasized, she held that “a political community that constitutes itself
on the basis of a prior, shared, and stable identity threatens to close the
spaces of politics, to homogenize or repress the plurality and multiplicity
that political action postulates.” 61
It was these emphases and not meanness or “self-hatred” that lay be-
hind Arendt’s repeated and not unwarranted warnings62 about chauvinist
Zionist and Israeli attitudes towards the Arabs.63 She did, one must point
out, repeatedly recognize the element of fear that lay behind such egocen-
tric attitudes but held that such fears only increased the dangers.64 If at
times she spoke warmly of certain Israeli achievements, she could also be
extremely cutting.65 Israel, she stated in a 1961 letter, was the “ghetto-
mentality with tanks and military parades.” 66 For her, clearly, the logic of
the nation-state did not solve the problem that totalitarianism had raised
most acutely; rather it both preceded and, to some degree, reproduced
it. “The troublesome majority-minority constellation,” she wrote in May

1948, “is insoluble by definition.” 67
We need to examine a still more acute narrative tension between Ar-
endt and Jerusalem and this in an even more sensitive area. In order to do
so we must make a brief detour. Arendt, we should not forget, became
famous above all for her work on Nazism and totalitarianism. We will be
devoting a whole session of this conference to a reassessment of her Ori-
gins of Totalitarianism, that extraordinarily idiosyncratic book so pat-
ently wrong-minded in parts, so willfully peculiar in its historical method
(or lack of it), yet so obviously punctuated by flashes of brilliance and
original insight. What I want to stress here is that this work was animated
by the conviction that Nazism and Auschwitz—far more than the Soviet
experience—was the great transgressive moment in European history.
This was certainly true for many of her essays throughout the 1940 and
early 1950s.68 Upon learning of Auschwitz in 1943 she later reported: “It
was really as if an abyss had opened . . . Something happened there
to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us ever can.” 69 And as
she wrote to Kurt Blumenfeld in 1947 (while composing the book): “You
see, I cannot get over the extermination factories.” 70 Arendt’s classical
“totalitarian” approach may have employed an essentially comparative
method but, unlike the later Historikerstreit historians,71 it never entailed
a hint of relativization: implicitly, the Nazi case was the one really in need
of explanation, the ultimate against which other crimes were measured.72
Despite all its shortcomings, the appearance in 1951 of The Origins
satisfied an urgent need. Until then and for at least a decade after that,
there were virtually no serious attempts to forge the theoretical, histori-
cal, and conceptual tools necessary to illuminate the great cataclysms of
the twentieth century.73 To this day even, historians find it difficult to per-
suasively and coherently integrate these events into the flow of this centu-
ry’s history. Arendt was seen to provide an account adequate to the enor-
mity of the materials and problems at hand. To be sure, the term
“Holocaust” had not yet crystallized and does not appear in the book. It
may also be that the generalized notion of “totalitarianism” precluded
any thoroughgoing, separate analysis of the “Final Solution” with a dis-
tinct motivational history. Later critics, like Saul Friedlander, did in fact
argue that the “totalitarian framework is the means of destruction, not
its basic explanation.” 74 Nevertheless, for hungry contemporaries, the
work was regarded as revelatory precisely because, as Alfred Kazin put it,
it seemed to address itself “to the gas.” 75
What I want to highlight here, then, is Arendt’s crucial role in the for-
mulation and creation of the ubiquitous post-war “discourse of evil,” one
in which Nazism and Auschwitz have become emblematic of Western cul-

ture’s conceptions of absolute inhumanity.76 Already in 1945 she wrote:
“The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intel-
lectual life in Europe.” 77 The Origins can thus be read as an attempt to
try to answer the question, especially through her organizing idea of “rad-
ical evil,” a notion that gave expression to her conception of the novelty
of these events and the impulses that generated it. Here was an unprece-
dented evil, incomprehensible in terms of traditionally understandable,
sinful human motives. She left the definition somewhat vague but con-
cluded that “radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in
which all men have become equally superfluous.” 78
Arendt’s early awareness of Nazism’s radical transgressiveness con-
vinced her that entirely new (and often, very problematic) ways of think-
ing as well as new categories of analysis were required. Her espousal of a
dubious model of mass society derived from conservative European social
theory79 and her total dismissal of German Sonderweg explanations—
“Luther or Kant or Hegel or Nietzsche,” she wrote, “have not the least
responsibility for what is happening in the extermination camps” 80 —may
have been extreme and somewhat misguided but I do not think were im-
pelled, as has recently been suggested,81 by her desire to exculpate a guilty
culture to which she remained loyal. For her these conventional explana-
tions were simply inadequate. “Nazism,” she insisted, “is actually the
breakdown of all German and European traditions, the good as well as
the bad.” 82 Continuity could not thus account for the emergence of an
entirely new genocidal mentality. Rather, it was the breakdown of older
frameworks, the emergence of new social and political structures and un-
precedented expansionary drives, the urge to destroy all previous limits
and to render everything possible that constituted the key.
But how does all this relate to the Arendt-Jerusalem relationship? If
later there were doubts about placing Nazism and Stalinism under a
single rubric, her emphasis on the link between the extermination factor-
ies and “radical evil” sat well in Jerusalem. So too, one presumes, did
some of her general historiographic impulses. While her depiction of early
modern Jewish power and its alliance with the absolutist state and econ-
omy raised eyebrows (she dismissed all scapegoat theories as painfully
inadequate), her emphasis on situating Jews at the storm center of events
and her desire to grasp anti-Semitism at its deadliest level flowed from her
Zionist sensibilities: it is no accident that Arendt dedicated book 1 of the
German version of The Origins of Totalitarianism to her Zionist mentor,
Kurt Blumenfeld.83
But Arendt, to put it mildly, was not Daniel Goldhagen.84 She was
never happy to see these extreme events portrayed in terms of a simple

dichotomy between wildly anti-Semitic German killers and Jewish vic-
tims.85 From the beginning she was impelled by the conviction that the
method and the nature of the killings went beyond essentialized anthro-
pological distinctions and raised explanatory and moral issues of urgent
universal concern.86 She insisted that Jew-hatred was a necessary but not
sufficient condition for genocide. “Neither the fate of European Jewry
nor the establishment of death factories,” she wrote, “can be fully ex-
plained and grasped in terms of anti-Semitism.” 87 This jelled less easily
with Zionist sensibilities, as did her repeated assertion that anti-Semitism
was not an eternal, ahistorical given.88 Moreover, her contempt for expla-
nations that resorted to German national character or history did not
(and perhaps still does not) sit comfortably with either popular or even
some scholarly Israeli and Jewish archetypal images.89
In its stead, she insisted from the beginning upon general, rather than
national, categories of historical and psychological analysis, viewing
events in terms of universal processes and “human” capacities. Already
in 1945 she stated: “The reality is that ‘the Nazis are men like ourselves’;
the nightmare is that they have . . . proven beyond doubt what man is
capable of.” 90 Whatever the validity or otherwise of this position, her
later, much contested rendering of Eichmann in “ordinary” terms as a
dull, essentially “thoughtless” bureaucrat flowed from these assumptions
and deeply threatened the older, potentially more demonizing view that
constituted, and perhaps still constitutes, the prevailing model. There are
scholarly disputes as to whether or not there is continuity in Arendt’s
various imaginings of evil,91 but clearly the apparent shift from its “radi-
cal” to “banal” expression was not well received, even as it was not al-
ways understood. In the eyes of many, Arendt was seen, quite mistakenly
I believe, to slight the enormity of the event, to domesticate its monstrous
unspeakability.
This was a real source of narrative tension. For, at the same time as she
formulated this discourse of evil, Arendt also presciently problematized
or, better put, sought to demystify it.92 Indeed, in her treatment of the
Judenraete, her apparent blurring of the almost sacrosanct distinction be-
tween perpetrators and victims seemed to violate fundamental sensibili-
ties even though she contextualized this as part of a general moral col-
lapse under the extreme conditions of totalitarian society. Moreover, very
early on Arendt warned that the uniqueness of the atrocities could create
a self-righteous cult of victimization, one that indeed has occurred. Wit-
ness, for instance, the absurd current competition in comparative victim-
ization as a tool of identity politics. She wrote the following extremely
harsh words in August 1946:
Human beings simply can’t be as innocent as they all were in the face of
the gas chambers (the most repulsive usurer was as innocent as the new-
born child because no crime deserves such a punishment). We are simply
not equipped to deal, on a human, political level, with a guilt that is be-
yond crime and an innocence that is beyond goodness or virtue . . . we
Jews are burdened by millions of innocents, by reasons of which every
Jew alive today can see himself as innocence personified.93
Arendt, then, was not prepared to insulate or grant absolute privilege

to Jewish history and suffering despite her emphasis on the radical novelty
of the exterminations. Even in the context of analyzing the murders she
insisted on locating Zionism within a wider victimizing context. While
she maintained that “the State of Israel . . . in no way arose exclusively
from . . . necessity,” 94 she kept very much in mind the tragic price of that
necessity. As she put it in The Origins:
After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was consid-
ered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a
colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the prob-
lem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all
other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely pro-
duced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the num-
ber of the stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.95
Viewed historically it seems that Arendt was indeed inassimilable in

Jerusalem, at least during the earlier years when the state and Israeli soci-
ety were coming into being. Nation building encourages organic, heroic,
homogenous narratives. It could not, I suggest, easily absorb her icono-
clasms or afford her ambiguities, her blurring of boundaries. It may be,
however, that now, in a more secure, mature, increasingly self-critical and
self-ironizing intellectual culture—especially as it cohabits with an ever
more intolerant and dogmatic polity—there can be greater receptivity not
only to Arendt’s insights into the modern Jewish experience and the Nazi
genocide but also her general observations concerning the dangers of ho-
mogeneity and the importance of a free, plural political space.96
At any rate, we in Jerusalem need no longer demonize Arendt. Nor on
the other hand must we canonize her. I am not suggesting that we name
an express train in her honor or place her face on a postage stamp as was
done in Germany.97 And Karl Jaspers’ 1963 prediction is certainly still
premature. He wrote then to Arendt: “A time will come that you will not
live to see, when the Jews will erect a monument to you in Israel. . . . and
they will proudly claim you as their own.” 98 As far as I know there is
not yet even a sculpture. But, surely, the time for greater—critical and
sympathetic— engagement is upon us.
Eight
German History and German Jewry

Junctions, Boundaries, and Interdependencies
I offer the following scattered reflections in the form of a quite unsystem-

atic, indeed playful, Denkschrift.1 It is intended as a means of generating
and exploring ideas and examining new directions of thought and research,
rather than as a polished, fixed product. In a sense it is a preliminary re-
sponse to the symposium on “German-Jewish History” conducted in the
Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XLI (1996),2 and a tentative attempt to go
beyond the “dead end,” to which Shulamit Volkov has drawn our attention,
by providing some possible contours for the desired “new beginning.” 3
In order to begin this task we have to think through the ways in which
“Jewish” and “European” history intersect beyond the familiar narratives
of apologetic “contribution” history or even the more sophisticated
emancipation-assimilation-integration model. Despite their obvious dif-
ferences, both approaches assume a kind of one-way historical direction
in which Jews are remade and absorbed (or not absorbed) into the given,
normative external structures—the homogenizing, centralizing nation-
state, market forms of economy, secularizing cultures, and so on. This, in
many ways, has been the master narrative around which modern Jewish
history, at least in Western and Central Europe, has been constructed.
Historians have examined the complex ways in which such transforma-
tions have proceeded and analyzed the relative successes and failures of
such integration.
I am not for a moment questioning either the obvious power and valid-
ity or the palpable and continuing fruitfulness of this model but am inter-
ested here in examining some of its usually unstated assumptions and
suggesting some possible supplementary viewpoints. Whether written
from a “liberal” or a “national-Zionist” point of view, this transforma-
tive, integrative, modernizing model, while certainly not a “passive” one,
is almost always posited in unidirectional, “absorptive” terms in which
Jews in one way or the other appropriate the majority normative culture.
86
German History and German Jewry 87
Thus even David Sorkin’s brilliant revisionist account of The Transforma-

tion of German Jewry, 1780–1840, which demonstrates the creative mak-
ing of a modernized, new form of Jewish identity, paradoxically sees its
origins in the drive to integration. This appropriative drive and the pri-
mary use of German cultural materials to affect this operation, Sorkin
argues, rendered that sub-cultural identity, as a new basis for separation,
invisible to its own makers!4
How can we begin to think a little differently about these matters?
How can we reconceptualize the relation between “normative” national
and “minority” Jewish history? In which way, for instance, can the new
“multicultural” sensitivity be brought to bear? Of late, some historians
have suggested that its emphases may be helpful in challenging traditional
conceptions of the centralized, homogenous nation-state. By rethinking
the making of Europe “in unfamiliar terms such as diasporas, border-
lands, and peripheries,” John Gillis has recently argued, we will be able
to rediscover the remarkably diverse (yet repressed) multicultural and
multiethnic nature of that civilization.5 Such an approach may help to
significantly challenge and transform accepted perceptions and defini-
tions. Among other things, it questions the given, static categories of cen-
ter and periphery, and seriously problematizes notions of set “minority”-
“majority” relations. The young scholar Till van Rahden has persuasively
suggested that, in relation to both German and German Jewish history,
a sensitivity to the multicultural dimension may lead us to question the
“givenness” of a prior, normative German culture into which Jews and
other groups were to be “fitted.”
In this view assimilation is regarded less “as a process in which outsid-
ers increasingly adapt to a stable core culture” than one in which so-called
“‘minorities’ have a hand in defining and redefining ‘majority’ culture.” 6
This holds out the somewhat mischievous possibility of not only recon-
ceptualizing German Jewish but German history itself.7 Instead of almost
perplexedly registering the sometimes ambiguous “contributions” and
adaptive presence of Jews within German life and analyzing their integra-
tion (or otherwise) into what are taken to be the pre-existent, static,
normative structures of German “liberalism,” market society, “socialism,”
intellectual culture, and the like would have to be viewed dynamically, as
negotiated constructions in which, at critical points, the role of the Jews
(whether or not they identified as such) is conceived not simply as contrib-
utory but well-nigh co-constitutive. As such, it puts into question any
“essentializing” understandings of a fixed “German” or “Jewish” culture
and identity, and it emphasizes the fact that such complex cultures and
identities are contextually and interactively constructed. This is a point to
which I will return.
These suggestions can be applied throughout Central and Western Eu-

rope but they may be most fruitful in terms of Germany where not only
was the process of emancipation exceptionally protracted and contested,
but so too were the virtually coincidental processes of nation building
and constructing a modern culture. From the late-eighteenth century on,
Jews were integrally associated with this (always bitterly contested) mold-
ing process. Ironically, liberal historians have either channeled this co-
constitutive and negotiative role into the less threatening “contribution”
paradigm or tended to deny it entirely because—translated into different
terms—it more or less validates the claim of anti-Semites dissatisfied with
the emergent, modernizing transformations of German society. For did
not the persistent and peculiarly powerful notion of “Verjudung” (“Juda-
ization” or “Jewification”), as it developed throughout the nineteenth
century and through 1945, hold that Jews were increasingly wielding dis-
proportionate influence and occupying pivotal positions of inordinate
economic, political, and cultural power, and also that, most dangerously,
the Jewish Geist was seeping (or had already seeped) through the spiritual
pores of the nation to penetrate and undermine the German psyche it-
self?8 This notion was not merely the province of hostile anti-Semites.
Germans of many hues expressed such sentiments, to one degree or an-
other. Indeed, the young Zionist Moritz Goldstein provoked a scandal
among liberal Jews when, in 1912, he proclaimed that “We Jews are ad-
ministering the spiritual property of a nation which denies our right and
ability to do so.” 9
What do we do in the face of this dilemma? If we genuinely intend to
pursue this co-constitutive foundational track, we will have to take heed
of Jacob Katz’s repeated observation that precisely because (unlike the
liberals) they treated the Jewish dimension with deadly seriousness, anti-
Semitic observations about Jews could at times be as revealing and in-
sightful as their evaluations and intentions were repugnant.10 In any case,
it would not be wise for historians to be affected by either apologetic,
liberal particularist blindness or anti-Semitic hostility. What they should
do is rethink the question of the complex nature and structure of interac-
tions and interdependencies. It would be well, for a moment, to examine
the possibilities of this approach at a very late, critical moment of German
history—the Weimar Republic. After all, many contemporary Germans
and subsequent historians portrayed the Republic in significant, indeed
constitutive, ways as “Jewish” and alien to Germans. In the more subli-
mated phrasing of Peter Gay, this was a society in which the outsider had
become insider.11 How can we determine the nature of Weimar’s intertex-
tual cultural interdependencies and tensions?
It goes without saying, I believe, that Weimar Jewish culture in all its
affirmative expressions is unthinkable outside of general Weimar culture,

whatever we may take that to be. In this sense the older “integrative”
model retains its validity.12 The question here, however, is whether the
opposite applies: can one conceive of Weimar culture, that short era of
explosive and astonishing creativity, without the Jewish presence?13 If
Jews (whether qua Jews or not) could co-found and thrive within its am-
bience, perhaps it is precisely because Weimar was characterized by free-
doms and an openness unprecedented in German history. Indeed, this in-
tensely experimental, avant-garde, and liberal atmosphere has come to
define at least part of what we mean by “Weimar culture.” “Without the
Jews,” Walter Laqueur writes, “there would have been no ‘Weimar cul-
ture’—to this extent the claims of the antisemites, who detested that cul-
ture, were justified. They were in the forefront of every new, daring, revo-
lutionary moment.” 14
Laqueur, of course, should have qualified this by mentioning that many
non-Jews were also very much in the vanguard of this culture: the names
of Brecht, Piscator, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Dix, Emil Nolde, Her-
mann Hesse, Carl von Ossietsky, and many others spring immediately to
mind. Moreover, it would be wise to mention that there were some impor-
tant conservative Jewish intellectuals, men of the right such as Leo Strauss
and Karl Wolfskehl or Ernst Kantorowicz and Friedrich Gundolf of the
Stefan Georg circle. Peter Gay is undoubtedly correct when he says,
“there were many modernists who were not Jews, many Jews who were
not Modernists. And many of the Jews who were Modernists were so not
because they were Jews.” 15 I would also agree with his contention that
viewing modernism from the vantage of the Jewish question “is sheer
anti-semitic tendentiousness, or philo-semitic parochialism.” 16
But what I am suggesting here is something else: not that modernism,
or more precisely Weimar culture, was “Jewish” but rather that it was
jointly constructed by both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals who were
not acting in their “Jewish” or “non-Jewish” capacities. I would argue
instead that in this context the notion of co-constitutionality is not
“multicultural” (at least in the usual sense of the term), but rather high-
lights the search for, and founding of, a new sensibility in which older
ethnic and religious differences are either peripheral or play no role at all.
While the co-constitutive model helps us grasp modes of interaction,
then, we must keep in mind that the dynamics and dialectics of Weimar
society were characterized by an equally important negative reaction to
this perceived co-constitutionality. It is this tension that defines the era.
As Laqueur puts it: “The Jews gave greatness to this culture and at the
same time helped to limit its appeal and make it politically impotent.” 17
The “core of the current Jewish question,” Walter Benjamin painfully ob-
served in November 1923, was the fact that Jews endangered “even the
best German cause for which they stand up publicly, because their public
German expression is necessarily venal (in the deeper sense) . . . nowadays
a salutary complicity obligates those individuals of noble character
among both peoples to keep silent about their ties.” 18
It was precisely the widespread perception of Weimar as a Judenrep-
ublik, as essentially alien, cosmopolitan, rootless, and denigrative of the
German “spirit,” 19 that was also the spur to creating a novel, radical,
right-wing, genuinely “German” counter-cultural alternative. There is an
intertextual irony here. One generally, and correctly, identifies the rise of
modern, self-affirmative Jewish cultures (or sub-cultures) in connection
with a felt need to counter a sense of debilitating dependency. The Wei-
mar case is the strongest example I can think of that illustrates the oppo-
site: the revolt of the putative core of normative culture, the assertion of
a self-affirmative “German” alternative, to overcome what it took to be
a debilitating “Jewish” hegemony. It was exactly against, and yet around,
these points of co-constitutionality that countermodels of Deutschtum
were constructed.
Given the preliminary nature of these remarks, let me suggest that in
the—still insufficiently examined—area of intellectual confrontation,
this ironic process most tantalizingly reveals itself. In one way or another,
and at the very highest levels, these clashes—the titanic Heidegger-
Cassirer 1929 Davos debate on Kant, the confrontations between Martin
Buber and various Völkisch theologians, the subtle polemics between
Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss—whether in explicit or coded form re-
volved around this tension and the desire of the non-Jewish intellectuals
to somehow reassert a threatened “German” spirit.20 Perhaps inherent to
the very act of co-constitutionality is this (Bloomian) “anxiety of influ-
ence,” fueling the desire to proceed from perceived dependency to auton-
omy. It is a process in which the drive for separation unwittingly reveals
a recognition of intimacy and the incapacity to abide it. Paradoxically,
these quasi-Freudian categories beautifully capture the convoluted Freud-
Jung relationship itself, a relationship that poignantly embodies the com-
plex intertextual, interpersonal aspects of our story. The father-son,
teacher-pupil relationship; Jung as the Christian outsider and Freud bend-
ing over backward to keep him within the fold and thus render analysis
more respectable; and then the break, the revolt of the son, the parricide;
and the end in which an angry Freud pinpoints and defines the difference
by confiding to their common patient, Sabina Spielrein, “We are and re-
main Jews . . .” 21 while Jung insists that he has formulated a creative,
healthy “Aryan” psychology as opposed to psychoanalysis which was
sickly, destructive, and “Jewish.” Freud, Jung proclaimed, “did not know
the Teutonic soul.” 22 Out of a previous intimacy, the differences are again
constructed as “essentialized,” incommensurable entities.
Of course, the co-constitutive approach definitionally puts into ques-
tion any “essentializing” understandings of either “German” or “Jewish”
culture and identity, and any development of its ideas will have to try to
distinguish modes of “co-constitutionality” and identity formation from
the traditional, familiar model of “assimilation.” 23 It is a viewpoint in
which, as Samuel Moyn has recently argued in a stimulatingly instructive
paper, “Deutschtum and Judentum . . . deserve to be seen as constantly
evolving and mutually implicated rather than ontologically fixed and po-
larized categories.” 24 But there is a crucial disjunction here between our
own historical understanding and preferences and the ways in which
many nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germans either saw or wanted
to shape their reality. In the first place, the “drive to uniformity” was an
overall characteristic of the emergent, centralizing nation-state. “Essen-
tialist” thinking may have been an inevitable part of this process in gen-
eral but— given the extremely delayed, always precarious nature of Ger-
man efforts first to create and then consolidate a unified national state
and identity out of radically fragmented political, religious, regional, and
class realities—such thinking was at a premium there. The novelty and
insecurity of this identity rendered the quest for its realization ever more
obsessive and exclusionary. The construction of the notion of “Deutsch-
tum” and the evolving discourse around it increasingly assumed an essen-
tialist nature precisely because liberalism continued to be regarded largely
as a problem rather than a solution and heterogeneity a threat rather than
an enrichment.
We should remember that the term Deutschtum emerges only during
the Wars of Liberation25 and that, as late as 1860, Grimm’s Wörterbuch
reports that its usage was mainly ironic.26 Yet by the end of the century
the discourse between these two contrasting hypostatizations—Deutsch-
tum and Judentum—as warring and radically incommensurate prin-
ciples, was already in place. German anti-Semitism is by now too familiar
for it to be necessary to give examples of this. What is more interesting is
that given the increasing power of the discourse, Jews too, willy-nilly, be-
came enmeshed in its logic, forced to conduct the dialogue within this
essentialist framework. As Jakob Wassermann put it in 1921: “The Ger-
man and the Jew: I once dreamed an allegorical dream . . . I placed the
surface of two mirrors together; and I felt as if the human images con-
tained and preserved in the two mirrors would have to fight one another
tooth and nail.” 27 But this was only an extreme expression of a general-
ized, virtually unavoidable mode of thought. Not simply extreme assimi-
lationists but Orthodox and liberal Jews and Zionists alike were increas-
ingly forced to negotiate within its premises. In seeking to counter, re-

code, or deflect it, or even send out an entirely different message, they
automatically became involved in its inner logic. From that point on, one
could argue, the German Jewish experience was defined by these essen-
tialist categories. If these tensions and hypostatizations form part of the
tragedy of German Jewry, they also prompted its unprecedented creativ-
ity, its reshaping of various fields of Jewish, German, and general self-
understanding and knowledge.
This is a very large subject but I must come back to the ways this im-
pinges on our problematic here. For all those concerned, even those most
unwilling to accept it, there was a lurking understanding that however
incommensurable they were supposed to be, Deutschtum and Judentum
were as deeply co-implicated as possibly could be. “German and Jew,” Wal-
ter Benjamin said, “stand opposite one another like related extremes.” 28
This was true even—perhaps especially—for those who were most un-
willing to accept this relationship. “Has it not struck you,” Adolf Hitler
is reported to have said in one of his rambling table conversations, “how
the Jew is the exact opposite of the German in every single respect, and
yet is as closely akin to him as a blood brother.” 29 The discourse tried to
cover up but nevertheless often unwittingly betrayed the perceived bond,
the recognition of mutual co-implication as much as it generated identity
and role confusions.
To be sure, this essentializing reduction of identity rendered more plau-
sible the numerous “psychologized” definitions of Jewishness enunciated
by any number of diverse people (including Freud, Buber, and Rosen-
zweig) as something deeply internal, invisible yet infinitely powerful,
transmitted by unconscious and little understood mysterious forces.30
Further, given the illiberal, threatening framework in which the discourse
operated, Jews more and more were forced to state the sense of mutuality
and connectedness in tragic, continuingly essentialist ways that may well
have been unthinkable to Jews in more obviously pluralist cultures. Ques-
tioned about his relation to Germanness and Jewishness, Franz Rosen-
zweig retorted that he refused to answer: “If life were at one stage to
torment me and tear me into [these] two pieces . . . I would not be able
to survive this operation. . . . I . . . ask . . . not to torment me with this
truly life-threatening question, but to leave me whole.” 31
Nothing better illustrates the degree of German Jewish integration into
German life than this and the later obsessive, horrible impulse to under-
take that eradicative operation and make it truly life-destroying.
Nine
Archetypes and the

German Jewish Dialogue
Reflections Occasioned by the Goldhagen Affair
We Israeli and German historians regularly assemble in Jerusalem to dis-

cuss matters of mutual concern.1 These meetings are usually conducted
in impeccably polite and scholarly, almost other-worldly tones—leaving
largely untouched and unacknowledged the emotional and existential
baggage we necessarily bring to such gatherings.2 Whatever else it has
done, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust has brought this visceral underbrush to the
fore.3 How can it be avoided in the face of a thesis that, boiled down to
its academically unfashionable core, views the Holocaust as essentially a
“national project” explicable only in terms of a persistent and vicious
hatred of the Jews by “the Germans” who, once given the chance, happily
and enthusiastically proceeded to murder them? Defying the conventions
of current scholarship, this is history written in the spirit of ontologically
incommensurable archetypes, the narrative of a radically alien species un-
leashed. The “study of Germans and their anti-Semitism before and dur-
ing the Nazi period,” Goldhagen proclaims, “must be approached as an
anthropologist would a previously unencountered preliterate people and
their beliefs, leaving behind the preconception that Germans were in every
ideational realm just like our ideal notion of ourselves.” 4
The book has been discussed and critiqued ad nauseum5 —I myself
have done this elsewhere and do not intend to repeat it here.6 But its ex-
traordinary reception, the extreme scholarly and popular passions it has
aroused,7 and its reassertion of an almost primordial German Jewish di-
vide present us with an obligation to re-examine the complexities and
dynamics of our own ongoing dialogue, to identify not only its hidden
assumptions, implicit tensions and commonalities, mutual biases and
93
evasions, and tacit compromises—but also the fructifying possibilities—

that inform this relationship.
Exactly what kind of enterprise are we engaged in here? It is, of course,
a charged, rather unique affair. For it is a form of communication that
takes place, as Hannah Arendt noted in 1964, “precisely in the abyss of
Auschwitz,” 8 our culture’s archetypal site of ultimate evil. But the schol-
arly encounter does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of the broader post-
World War II German Jewish meeting with its complex mix of recon-
nection, recrimination, mourning, evasion, guilt, and all the gyrations
summed up in that horrible term, “wiedergutmachung.” 9 Clearly this is
an intellectual and emotional minefield. Because the representation of the
Holocaust is so acutely linked to central dimensions of German and Jew-
ish identity, it will inevitably be marked by any number of transferences.10
In suitably altered forms it will satisfy complex, often contradictory sets
of present needs and interests. But it is precisely “the power of these
needs, often unrecognized and elusive,” 11 that provides the underlying dy-
namic of the dialogue.
Would it be unfair to suggest that when German and Jewish (especially
Israeli) intellectuals meet to discuss these matters, other emotions apart,
there is a certain eros, a mutual attraction, at work? This unspoken affin-
ity, this powerful and problematic commonality, consists in the recogni-
tion that, albeit in radically different roles, “we”— and not any others—
are the most relevant actors in the story? Whatever alternative universalist
narratives we may construct, is there not a gut feeling that, however dif-
ferent our versions and vantage points may be, we are the primary “own-
ers” of the story?
The umbilical chord may be a murderous one but it is, perhaps for
that very reason, both compelling and convoluted and reinforced by the
historic, and brutally betrayed, Jewish relationship to German culture. Is
not the dialogue an attempt, in some mutually placatory way, to resusci-
tate that relationship, and at the same time does it not stand as indicative
of a certain continued Jewish longing for reconnection and acceptance
into that culture? No one has written more biting poetic criticism of what
transpired than the survivor Paul Celan. Yet, as early as 1947–48, he was
hugely proud of his success in the German Kulturbereich. “God knows,”
he wrote, “I was happy when they told me I was the greatest poet in
Austria and—as far as they know—in Germany as well.” 12 There may be
a grain of truth in Henryk Broder’s sly and mischievous observation that
Goldhagen’s project is less a product of “German-bashing” than the de-
sire to be heard and taken note of by the German intellectual establish-
ment, the attempt by the son to reestablish a connection lost by his father
50 years ago, even if such acceptance can be established only through
Archtypes and the German Jewish Dialogue 95
the Holocaust, “the end-point of German-Jewish history, but also the

starting-point for common academic undertakings: the only thing that
existentially binds Germans and Jews.” 13
Moreover, it should be admitted, there is a common fascination with
its unspeakable dimensions: the atrocities and obscenities, the transgres-
sion of limits and taboos, the relations of victimizers to victims. It is at the
level of these archetypal issues, images, and juxtapositions—in “high” as
well as in “popular” culture—where much of the event is emotionally
played out, and from where it receives the energy of its interpretive permu-
tations. The astonishing resonance of Goldhagen’s book—the intensity
and range of emotions it has evoked—is related to the fact that he has
tapped directly into these archetypal and stereotypical reservoirs. The an-
swer to Goldhagen’s own question concerning the success of his book
(“Why are the pillars shaking?”)14 does not necessarily lie, as he would
have it, in his successful challenge to what he takes to be an obfuscating
and apologetic mainstream Holocaust scholarship, but rather in the fact
that it overwhelmingly confirms everyday “commonsense” interpreta-
tions and perceptions. This may account for the peculiar divide in the
reception of the book. The broad fault-line is not, as some commentators
have suggested, between a defensive “German” response and a friendly
American or even Jewish one15 —though in some hostile, anti-Semitic re-
views the latter two have been regarded as quite indistinguishable16 —but
rather between popular acclaim and scholarly derision.
The overall popular acclaim applies not just to the United States but
also, emphatically, to Germany. There too, by and large, it was heralded
by the public and castigated by the intellectual classes. The reasons for
what one journalist described as Goldhagen’s German “triumphal proces-
sion” are complex.17 It derives, in part, from a widespread perception of
unfairness: the brave graduate David persecuted by jealous professorial
Goliaths. Still, this is not sufficient to account for the fact that a book
condemned by the German political and academic establishment as little
more than a restatement of the collective guilt thesis18 —Germany as a na-
tion of murderers—has been so warmly received. Why should so many—
especially young—Germans hail it?19 A major part of the explanation is
related to a generational distance that enables the young to question the
conventional distinction between “bad” Nazis and “ordinary” Germans
and to upbraid their elders for fleeing from the concrete murderous acts
of their parents by depicting the Holocaust as a kind of historical abstrac-
tion, a matter of impersonal industrial and bureaucratic processes, a mass
killing operation shorn of flesh and blood killers.20
But there is, I would suggest, something else at work as well. The suc-
cess of Goldhagen’s book is reminiscent of the astonishing cult status at-
tained in Germany after the war, also among the young, by Celan’s un-
endurably painful poem “Todesfuge.” It gave the Germans, John Bayley
writes, “a kind of enormous and magical relief, the equivalent in great
art of the black joke current at the time: The Germans will never forgive
the Jews for Auschwitz.” 21 I do not intend, for one moment, to suggest
similarities between the two projects. But Celan’s categories, transmuted
into aesthetic form, also belong squarely within the archetypal matrix:
death, after all, is a blue-eyed master from Germany. The poetry comes
astonishingly close to Goldhagen’s portrait of jovial killers: “he whistles
his hounds to come close / he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel
a grave in the ground / he commands us play up for the dance.” Did not
this indictment, Bayley asks, ironically lay “trouble to rest in the hearts
and minds of many Germans, who could feel their guilt wonderfully, and
painlessly, through its medium?”
Goldhagen, of course, has no aesthetics but he makes the guilt even
less painful for subsequent generations by insisting that post–1945 Ger-
mans have purged themselves of murderous anti-Semitism. I would suggest
that documents like these have served throughout as flagellant markers and
ironic acknowledgements of a crucial but submerged dimension of German
identity. What is new is that this emblematic proclamation is no longer
seen as subversive or counter-cultural in nature. The contrary may be true.
How else can one regard the sociologist Ulrich Beck’s suggestion to view
“Auschwitz as German identity”? Very recently, only half tongue-in-cheek,
Maxim Biller, has described the obsession with the “Holocaust-Trauma
as the mother of a finally found German national self-consciousness. . . .”
For, he argues, only this event has finally brought forth the common expe-
rience, the key concept providing a previously quite unattainable unity to
a hopelessly divided nation. That is why, Biller concludes (satirically or
otherwise), “the Germans so love the Holocaust.” 22
The serious divide, then, has not been between German and Jewish
intellectuals. Indeed, with a few exceptions, in both the Anglo-Saxon and
Israeli academic world the critique has been devastating.23 It can be
summed up in the publicly circulated letter of the doyen of Holocaust
studies, Raul Hilberg, who declared that he found “virtually nothing” of
value in the book: “To me it is worthless.” 24 The scholarly anger (to be
sure, itself a complex mix of not always salutary motives) flows partly
from the perception that the book’s popular success is due to its simplistic
monocausality, its uncritical resurrection of archetypes and stereotypes,
and the pervading sense that somehow the national unit of analysis—the
“Germans”—provides a satisfactory explanatory key.
Naturally, this does not mean that there are no tensions and fissures in
the German Jewish/Israeli dialogue. It is because we both “own” the event
that the interpretive custodianship is so much in dispute. This sometimes

reaches absurd proportions. In response to Jewish objections concerning
the nature of the proposed Berlin Holocaust memorial, Lea Rosh, the TV
personality (who changed her name from Edith to the more Jewish Lea,
presumably as an act of identification), sharply exclaimed: “It’s the suc-
cessors of the perpetrators who are building this memorial, not the Jews.” 25
The question of bias entailed in ownership forms part of the mag-
nificent, and refreshingly honest, dialogue between Martin Broszat and
Saul Friedlander. For Broszat “Jewish” historiography and memory must
perforce be “mournful and acccusatory . . . a mythical form of remem-
brance” 26 rather than a scholarly and “scientific” enterprise, while for
Friedlander, “the German context creates as many problems in the ap-
proach to the Nazi era as it does, differently, for the victims.” “If we see
things from your perspective,” he admonishes Broszat, “why, in your
opinion, would historians belonging to the group of perpetrators be able
to distance themselves from their past, whereas those belonging to the
group of victims would not?” 27 This is psychological tit for tat: Jewish
historiography as mournful and mythical, German historiography as
apologetic, or, at least, impelled into impersonal structures and processes,
into modes of explanation that underplay individual agency and ideology
and redirect compassion for the victim into forms of self-empathy.28
These differences, of course, have been sharply highlighted by Gold-
hagen, a fact that perforce will influence the dialogue. In effect, with
his insistence upon the free, even enthusiastic choice of “ordinary” Ger-
mans to undertake the killings impelled by a peculiarly murderous anti-
Semitism, he is offering a reactive mirror-opposite to the apologetic and
simplified Historikerstreit histories of the 1980s, which relativized Ausch-
witz into the regular annals of human murderousness. He, so to speak,
returns the Shoah to the Jews, in much the same way as some German
scholars sought to rehabilitate German identity by “normalizing” it in the
context of other twentieth-century genocides.29 Given the Historikerstreit
and a functionalist scholarship that, he believes, consistently underplays
direct participation and complicity in crimes of the Third Reich, Goldha-
gen, whether consciously or unconsciously, may be construed as speaking
for the victims and survivors. For a variety of reasons—the cruel work-
ings of the passage of time; the notion that theirs is a “mythical” memory;
the postmodernist problematization of witnessing and testimony30 —they
have undergone what amounts to a virtual academic de-legitimization.
Goldhagen does not so much argue their case as seek to throw the moral
and epistemological ball across the national net, to cast doubt upon the
authenticity of current portraits of the perpetrators and present it from
the immediate viewpoint of the victims.
I would suspect that for many survivors, Goldhagen is regarded as the

historian who expresses the unbearable everyday cruelty of their experi-
ences, who makes ineluctably clear the joy their tormentors took in in-
flicting such cruelty. It makes little difference that historians do not deny
the reality of such experiences as much as they question the interpretive
and explanatory framework in which Goldhagen locates them and are
uncomfortable with what they take to be an almost pornographic, voyeur-
istic attention to gory detail that renders understanding more, rather than
less, remote. From the point of view of such survivors, Goldhagen has suc-
ceeded in starkly representing their reality and thus the scholarly attack
upon him may very well be experienced as an attack upon themselves.
The word “case” is apt for this is history written in the prosecutorial
mode. Some German critics even view it as a kind of national provoca-
tion and have responded with rather revealing and thinly veiled threats.
None other than Countess Marion Doenhoff, co-publisher of the liberal
Die Zeit, a journal always sensitive to matters related to Jews and Nazism,
asked whether the book would not “revive the anti-Semitism that has re-
mained more or less dormant?” 31 And, in conversation, a prominent con-
servative German historian commented, quite unselfconsciously, that this
work would help to strengthen traditional “anti-Western sentiments.” 32
It is precisely because of this confrontational dimension that we need
to consider the book in the light of the ongoing post-war German Jewish
conversation. At first glance, the work appears to be quintessentially anti-
dialogical, a cutting off, a stifling, of that conversation. But that is to
misconceive the nature and process of dialogue which occurs, in the first
place, because there are different versions and positions. While ideally
such conversations should assume a Buberian character of mutuality and
openness, they originate in, and function through, discord. Defense and
attack are crucial to its dynamic. To be sure, prosecutorial and archetypal
history may be poor history—it certainly is not the kind of history that I
seek to write—but it is decidedly very much part of the dialogue. It is
precisely through his accusatory stance that Goldhagen has become cen-
tral to it. Whether or not they like it, scholars will have to face this fact.
For, even if he is not interested in listening to the position of the other or
moderating his own and simply wants to extract a mea culpa from “the
Germans,” in effect, to change them, he ardently desires that they listen
to his message. Nothing could be more indicative of the dialogical need
than the act of translation and the publicity and personal appearances
attending it.
If dialogical voices are definitionally non-identical, then the process of
comprehending and writing history is less a dialogue than a “polyphony,”
a multiplicity of contesting voices generating a dynamic interplay of mul-
tiple meanings and interpretations (“polysemy”).33 The plurality of these

continuously changing and revised perspectives are, willy-nilly, the lubri-
cants of historiography: the more we can articulate the tensions, the more
vital the history. In our own charged field, one could argue, the fact that
divergent needs and interests are at play is not only inevitable but helps
to shape and enliven our understanding. They are simultaneously the cre-
ative as well as the limiting ingredients of writing history.
Just as “history” and “collective memory” are not diametrical oppo-
sites but part of a continuum, a relationship that can oscillate from out-
right conflict through tension to mutual nurturing, becoming in the pro-
cess what we call “historical consciousness,” 34 so too is it untenable to
posit a hermetic separation between putatively “scientific” histories, on
the one hand, and “archetypal” versions, on the other. Given the violently
transgressive nature of the “Final Solution,” archetypes form a constit-
uent part of our moral, cultural, and historical imaginations, a kind of
raw material that helps to animate our narrative reconstructions. In more
or less subliminal or explicit, crude or sophisticated ways, archetypal an-
tinomies often lie behind the models with which we work: good and evil;
Germans and Jews; victimizers and victims; the banal and the monstrous,
or demonic; the unique and the universal.35 Of course, responsible schol-
arship will always have to view them critically, refining and deconstruct-
ing them even as we work with them.
These archetypal dimensions are related to the passionate, almost vio-
lent controversies that erupt from time to time within the inflammatory
world of Shoah scholarship. Are not many of the scholarly (as well as
the wider) debates and stakes related to the rearranging, reassembling,
problematizing, transvaluing, and questioning of these kinds of catego-
ries? The Goldhagen affair is only the most recent example. Perhaps the
best foil for comparison would be the equally raw nerves touched by Han-
nah Arendt in her 1963 work, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Was she not also
indulging in a form of a threatening archetypal rearrangement when she
quietly abandoned her nihilistic, demonic, ideological emphasis in The
Origins of Totalitarianism and turned to an explanation of the essential
thoughtlessness, the “banality” of the perpetrator?
Arendt’s case also illustrates the fact that such archetypal schemes are
not a matter of competitive national narrative identity, of monolithically
motivated Jews challenging Germans or vice versa. On the contrary, the
image of the destruction of European Jewry as an impersonal, industrial-
bureaucratic process was articulated in the monumental 1961 work of
the Jewish historian, Raul Hilberg. It was only later that the analyses of
German functionalists like Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat emerged.
Even more radically, though, Arendt caused major outrage when she
rendered the Jewish leadership complicit in the destruction process and

critically blurred the archetypally pure distinction between victim and vic-
timizer. Hilberg, too, argued that inherited modes of submissive ghetto
behavior served to smooth the wheels of destruction, and Bruno Bettel-
heim produced numerous biting critiques unmasking what he believed to
be the self-duplicities of Jewish behavior.36 Arendt, of course, throughout
rejected the relevance of “Germanness” to any explanation of Nazism,37
and it is worth noting that she and Hilberg and Bettelheim were all exiled
products of a German culture with which, in complex ways, they contin-
ued to identify. This may have had something to do with the biases of
their analyses, their downplaying of any Sonderweg explanations, and
their views on complicitous Jewish behavior.38
We have come full circle. Goldhagen has again inflamed and re-
energized the debate by revalidating and recirculating what was thought
to be the discredited Sonderspecies archetype, the notion of “ordinary”
Germans as anti-Semitic murderers impelled to kill exclusively in terms
of this historically conditioned, fanatic belief. Scholars have criticized this
(correctly, in my view) by arguing that individual genocidal acts can be
better explained in terms of a complex cluster of motivational factors.
These obviously include anti-Semitism as a central force but also include
consideration of other ideological ingredients. Moreover, they recognize
the weight of situational factors and take into account generalized psy-
chological mechanisms, evidenced by the equally murderous activities of
other national groups (both in the Shoah and elsewhere) that render more
intelligible the qualitative leap from conventional everyday prejudice to
radical genocidal action. These are the differences between Goldhagen’s
“ordinary Germans” and Christopher Browning’s “ordinary men.”
What must be made clear, however, is that the historical record never
speaks unambiguously for itself: interpreting the nature, causes, and
meaning of such motivations, whether in “simple” or “complex” ways,39
is part of the ascriptive task of historians. This is true too for the general
models that ground these motivational accounts. Goldhagen’s explana-
tion is based on an anthropological, even ontological, gulf between our-
selves and the German murderers, while Browning’s relies on an assump-
tion of a commonality of possible experience and the desire to break
down what he takes to be a comfortable and self-serving distance between
ourselves and the perpetrators; yet both approaches are basically interpre-
tive decisions, not matters of empirical observation. Both, in effect, are
heuristic choices linked to the politics and values informing their diverg-
ing historical representations. Are these not archetypal choices: the geno-
cide of the Jews as a paradigm of human potential? The exemplum of
universal traits unleashed under certain conditions? Genocide as expli-
cable in exceptional terms, the outcome of a singularly murderous anti-

Jewish German polity and culture?40
So where does this leave us in terms of what brings us together—the
German Jewish dialogue? It is clear from what I have said that we should
welcome even as we heavily criticize the opposing positions and tensions
that constitute it. Dynamic historical knowledge arises in the attempt to
somehow negotiate these tensions. In so doing we redefine and refine our
narratives. To be sure, it is only human to believe that our own positions
are the most correct, the most persuasive, but we must also acknowledge
their own historicity.
Still, if we cannot help but bring our collective and personal biog-
raphies and allegiances with us, we must, finally, insist upon rigorously
honest, self-reflexive standards of scholarship that question, rather than
simply reflect, one’s own group affiliations and preconceptions. The dan-
gers of history that understands itself as purely “German” or “Jewish”
are too obvious to require discussion. Proper scholarly interchange de-
mands the critical and refining qualities, the self-awareness of our mutual
biases, so that we are better able to cope with them.
It is fitting then to conclude with the observation that the present mo-
ment is characterized in both German and Jewish historical memory by a
kind of archetypal split consciousness. In Germany we have the paradoxi-
cal identity-affirming acceptance by many of Goldhagen’s portrait of “the
Germans.” Simultaneously, as Frank Stern has recently pointed out, a new
archetype, the myth of the good German—indeed, of the German as sav-
ior of the Jew—is emerging (evidenced by the mass sales of the diaries of
the German-Jewish survivor, Victor Klemperer; the reception of Schind-
ler’s List; and Völker von Schlöndorff’s recent film of Michael Tournier’s
The Ogre in which the hero rescues the Jew by carrying him on his back
through fire and ice, in quintessentially mythical fashion.)41 Can a more
archetypal clash than this be imagined?
At the same time, within Jewish and Israeli circles the question as to
the exceptional or paradigmatic nature of the Shoah remains open. It too
is often couched in quasi-archetypal terms. Omer Bartov, in reaction to
both Goldhagen and interested Israeli representations, has recently put it
thus: “we must not consign Auschwitz to another planet nor perceive the
perpetrators as different species. When we imagine the Holocaust we
must imagine ourselves.” 42 The marvelously unpredictable Hannah Ar-
endt articulated the other side in her 1964 correspondence with Hans
Magnus Enzensberger. When he wrote that “Fascism is not terrible be-
cause the Germans practiced it, but because it is possible everywhere,”
Arendt responded: “If all are guilty, then none are . . . This statement is
even more problematic when it is advanced by a German for it says: not
our parents, but mankind has brought about this catastrophe. This is
simply not true.” 43
Our dialogue is destined to wrestle with these issues and, if we cannot
arrive at ultimate truth, we can be sure that through the constant raising
of such dilemmas and conflicts, through irresolution and problematiza-
tion, the memory of this horrendous event and of those who perished in
it will be most urgently preserved.
Part III
Understanding Nazism and the Holocaust:

Competing Models and Radical Paradigms
Ten
Nazism, Normalcy, and the

German Sonderweg
For is it mere hypochondria to say to oneself that everything

German, even the German mind and spirit, German thought,
the German Word, is involved in this scandalous exposure and
made subject to the same distrust?
—Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus
The atrocities committed by National Socialism have always called for

special modes of explanation.1 From the 1960s through the early 1980s
the ruling conventional academic wisdom invoked, as almost self-evident,
the thesis of an overall German exceptionalism to account for Nazism.
Only an aberrant, perhaps pathological past, it was held, could spawn
such a monstrous outgrowth. Nazism, in this view, was explicable only
in terms of a hinterland of serious national deviance. This paradigm con-
sisted of academic elaborations of much older popular and always stereo-
typical notions that somehow the “Germans”—their character, polity,
culture, and society—were intrinsically different from the rest of the
West. This always had two converse sides to it. Until 1945 many Germans
proclaimed this to be their great virtue: it was these differences that con-
stituted their separate, more exalted national identity. Cultivated inner
Bildung confronted shallow external politics, deep Kultur was juxtaposed
to mere Zivilization. And in the West, especially during World War I,
the image of Germans as intrinsically militaristic, authoritarian, obedient,
rapacious, murderous, and block-headed found a receptive, mass audi-
ence. These notions became immeasurably strengthened with the rise of
Nazism and the outbreak of World War II. In all kinds of ways they have
become an ongoing part of our everyday folklore. (Who has better cap-
tured this than John Cleese in his masterful Fawlty Towers episode
“The Germans”?)
It was, however, only during the 1960s that the more respectable, so-
105
106 Understanding Nazism and the Holocaust
phisticated, and systematic academic elaborations of these—by now thor-

oughly negative—assessments by German, British, and American schol-
ars appeared. During the 1950s, for instance, Western scholars placed a
premium on models of totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt’s classic work The
Origins of Totalitarianism, for example, was virtually devoid of reflec-
tions on the specific nature (normal or otherwise) of the German mind
and polity.2 Nazism, instead, was conceived as one instance of a general,
peculiarly modern, political project of total domination. Its genesis was
not integrally bound to any particular historical culture. It incarnated a
potential latent in the twentieth century itself. Its deadliness derived from
its generality, not its nationality.
Marxists, too, had little time for national explanations. Nazism was
merely a variant of fascism, which, in turn, had to be grasped as part of
the dynamics of capitalism under pressure.3 At the same time, conserva-
tive German historians4 (such as Gerhard Ritter and Friedrich Meinecke)5
similarly disavowed notions of any essential German historical abnor-
malcy. Unlike Arendt and the Marxists, of course, their perspectives re-
mained doggedly national. But they regarded the course of German devel-
opment as basically healthy. Its natural unfolding had been upset by the
importation of alien and corrupting Western practices and ideologies.
With the upheaval created by World War I and its disastrous aftermath,
the fabric of German stability had been destroyed and the way to dema-
gogic chaos in a mass age opened up.
All this was to change considerably in the 1960s when liberal histori-
ans began to apply sophisticated methods from the fields of intellectual
and social history to the critical study of the German past. It was then
that what we understand by the academic thesis of the German Sonder-
weg—the notion that the course of German historical development had
been both peculiar and misshapen—was first systematically expounded.6
In its bare outlines, the structural version of this theory claimed that the
roots of Nazism had to be located in the distinctive and jagged mode of
modernization that marked the German experience in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. The German road to modernity, it was held, was quite
different from that followed by the West, for it was characterized by a
disjunction between economic development, on the one hand, and the
social and political spheres, on the other. This lack of synchronization
was of fundamental importance, for it pointed to the creation of a capital-
ist society in the economic sense of the term, but one that lacked the
concomitant liberal values normally associated with such a transforma-
tion. Germany, in other words, never underwent a successful bourgeois
revolution of the type that ensured liberal-democratic regimes in France,
England, and the United States.
Nazism, Normalcy, and the German Sonderweg 107
In Germany it was the Junker aristocracy, not the bourgeoisie, that set
the tone. Instead of a nobility undergoing embourgeoisement, the middle
classes were feudalized. The failure of the liberal revolution in 1848 and
the Bismarckian mode of German unification, proponents of the Sonder-
weg thesis insisted, were the key events in a lasting historical pattern:
Germany was fated to remain an obstinately authoritarian society domi-
nated by pre-industrial elites. These elites, it was maintained, clung tena-
ciously to power, adjusting to a variety of changing circumstances. At the
critical moment they became the chief agents propelling Hitler into
power. Viewed from this perspective, Nazism was the extreme manifesta-
tion, the last fruits, of a foiled and distorted modernization process.
In what has by now become almost a classic work, two young British
historians, David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, issued a radical and sophis-
ticated neo-Marxist challenge to this prevailing paradigm. First published
in German in 1980 under the telling title Mythen deutscher Gesch-
ichtsschreibung (Myths of German Historiography), the work was pub-
lished in 1984 in English, together with an extensive introduction that
detailed the heated debate their work had evoked up to that point.7 What-
ever the merits of their own alternative theories, a problem to which we
shall presently return, their incisive critique of the Sonderweg model per-
formed an invaluable service and has since that time rendered many of its
positions untenable, forcing its proponents into more and more qualifi-
cations.8 By and large, Sonderweg theories have subsequently gone into
retreat though they still constitute a temptation of sorts and tend from
time to time to reemerge in various guises. Paul Lawrence Rose’s Revolu-
tionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (1990), Liah
Greenfield’s Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1992), and Daniel
Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust (1996) constitute representative examples of this genre. Black-
bourn and Eley exposed assumptions that had already settled into the
mold of an unexamined orthodoxy and opened up debate and possibili-
ties concerning fresh directions in the study of German history.
The idea of a Sonderweg, they pointed out, presumes a norm, a series
of suppositions and expectations as to what constitutes “proper” histori-
cal development.9 “Proper” or healthy development is inevitably taken to
be the Western liberal-democratic experience. Measured according to this
yardstick, German history will always—and definitionally so—be found
wanting. This normative exercise was regarded by Blackbourn and Eley
as virtually worthless. They pointed to the fact that specialists in British
and French history had long ago demolished the picture of bourgeois so-
cial transformation “of the kind that still seems to govern the categories
in which German if-only history is constructed.” 10 They argued that the
elision of the bourgeoisie into liberalism and then popular democracy,

a staple of the Sonderweg model, was simply historically inadmissible.
Nowhere in Europe, they insisted, was the bourgeois revolution identical
with political democracy. Its emergence in France and Britain postdated
the bourgeois revolution and was always linked to “complex popular
struggles against rather than for significant bourgeois interests. . . . The
possibilities for democratic politics resulted from the contradictions of
‘modernization’ rather than its triumph, not as a condition of the bour-
geoisie’s success, but from the new antagonisms it created.” 11
The real bourgeois revolution, Blackbourn and Eley maintained, had
to be located not in surface phenomena such as the presence or absence
of constitutional government but rather in long-term structural trans-
formations. Dominant classes, they wryly observed, are not always rul-
ing classes, and aristocratic visibility did not necessarily mean preemi-
nence (the authors preferred the Gramscian term “hegemony”). The “real
power” of the bourgeoisie “was anchored in the capitalist mode of pro-
duction and in civil society, in the spheres of property relations, the rule
of law, associational life, and so on.” 12 Viewed in this light, they argued,
Germany did indeed undergo a highly successful bourgeois revolution,
one that coincided with national unification.
Paradoxically, it was Bismarck who, in this view, orchestrated a
classic instance of revolution from above, substituting military unification

and political negotiation with the opposition for the far more confusing
and volatile scenario of the English and French Revolutions. In some
ways—the sharpness of the rupture with the past, the definitive character
of the legal settlement, the commanding strength of capital in the new na-
tional economy—German unification was more specifically “bourgeois”
in its effects than either the English or French Revolution had been, pre-
cisely because popular interventions failed to occur.13
In this rendering, Bismarck is metamorphosed into the bourgeois hero,

delivering in a concentrated space of time through a radical process of
political innovation “the legal and political conditions for a society in
which the capitalist mode of production could be dominant.” 14
Seen thus, the modernization of Germany was in no way aberrant but
rather exceedingly effective in securing the basic interests of the bourgeoi-
sie. The Bismarckian state and an authoritarian mode of politics reflected
a functional way of organizing capitalist relationships. These were per-
fectly “modern” responses to German conditions and not the vaunted
machinations of supposedly pre-industrial groupings. German history in
the nineteenth century, Blackbourn and Eley maintained, should be seen
within this context of a burgeoning capitalism and the forms of politics
required for its successful generation.
There is another salutary aspect of Blackbourn and Eley’s work that

merits our attention. This concerns their warnings as to the powerful dan-
gers of teleology that especially attend the study of German history. The
teleological temptation is one which, I believe, many teachers of German
history in general and of Nazism and the Holocaust in particular find
hard to resist. The inevitabilist, linear reading of the origins of Nazism
deep in the recesses of the German past is a trap into which it is all too
easy to fall. The catastrophes unleashed by National Socialism can in this
sense “overwhelm” German history. How simple it is to portray that past
as if it were the mere preparation, the prologue, of what was to come
later! Blackbourn and Eley are correct when they point out that this
makes for a highly undemanding form of history, one in which all sense
of contingency is lost. Regardless of the temptations, German history
should not be written as if 1933 were inscribed in every past event. Good
historians, they remind us, are those who as far as possible do not reduce
historical processes exclusively to their known results.
This rereading of German history, predictably enough, did not meet
with unanimous approval. It was criticized on various grounds—and not
solely by German historians with a vested interest in the concept of the
Sonderweg.15 Gordon Craig, for instance, questioned why Blackbourn
and Eley omitted from their account such crucial comparative events as
the Revolution of 1830 in France or the Great Reform Act and the repeal
of the Corn Laws in England—“bourgeois” events that, according to
Craig, simply had no parallel in the German experience.16 And, as James
Joll pungently asked, if Germany’s bourgeois revolution from above was
so successful, why was “the Bismarckian constitution . . . under strain
from its inception, whereas British parliamentarians weathered many
comparable storms?” 17
These and other weaknesses in their model were certainly present. For
all that, though, the emphasis on Germany as a modern and bourgeois
society was a crucial corrective to the prevailing view; it faithfully cap-
tured critical features that were blurred or entirely filtered out by Sonder-
weg spectacles. Yet, had Blackbourn and Eley been more receptive to
cultural and intellectual history, they would have discovered that contem-
porary work in these fields closely mirrored the same modern and bour-
geois realities that they emphasized. Unfortunately, their neo-Marxist
bias rendered them indifferent to, at times even contemptuous of, the role
that a differentiated cultural-intellectual history can play in understand-
ing German history in general and Nazism in particular. The methods of
intellectual history are generally dismissed as “Nazi pedigree-hunting in
the realm of ideas, with its habitual unwillingness to specify, sometimes
even to recognize as a problem, who was influenced by what ideas, when,
and to what effect.” 18 Some examples of this genre, Blackbourn and Eley
conceded, were better than others. Nonetheless, they argued, as a rule

these works tended to dissect a disembodied “German Mind” and proved
to be intellectually slack and unhistorical. It is a method that, as Eley put
it, typically has “meant reconstructing the intellectual pursuits of an ear-
lier epoch in the image of Nazi ideology. . . . All these ideas are described
as in some way distinctively German and all are traced back to the eigh-
teenth century as aspects of an unbroken linear continuity. . . . This is
surely a fruitless exercise, the worst kind of intellectual history, which
makes its connections by lifting ideas from their sensible context.19
This approach, indeed, captured some of the earlier attempts at intel-
lectual history, as well as some of the popular ones still being written
today. Eley singled out Butler’s The Roots of National Socialism (1941)
for its simplistic ideational reductionism. “The Nazis,” wrote Butler, “say
that might is right; Spengler said it; Bernhardi said it; Nietzsche said it;
Treitschke had said as much; so had Haller before him; so had Novalis.” 20
He could just as easily have mentioned Peter Viereck’s study21 of the same
year where Wagner was indicted as a direct forerunner to, and a clear
manifestation of, Nazi mentality, or Crane Brinton’s similar treatment of
Nietzsche, also written in 1941.22 Simplistic cultural history of this kind
is not confined exclusively to liberals. Perhaps the worst offender in this
regard was Georg Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason.23 His Marxist
treatise identified an unbroken and undifferentiated line of German irra-
tionalism leading inexorably to fascism. Here the rejection of reason
simply reflected the needs of an ever more expansionist and aggressive
imperialist bourgeoisie, a class that in the post-Hegelian period had ex-
hausted its progressive potential. Like Brinton, Lukács placed Nietzsche
at the center of these developments, his open, “mythological” philosophy
at once an anticipation and a foreshadowing of the fascist future.
Good intellectual history is no longer conducted in this fashion. Recent
work is, by and large, infused with the sense of context. It concentrates on
polyvalent modes of reception and appropriation, on the complex ways
in which ideas, ideologies, myths, and stereotypes are diffused and ab-
sorbed, often among radically divergent political circles and institutions.
It demonstrates that intellectual currents and movements commonly asso-
ciated with proto-fascist or Nazi mentalities were adaptable to a wide
variety of political positions and, furthermore, were used to buttress not
only numerous shadings on the right but also the center and, surprisingly
often, progressive and left positions.24 Many of these movements were not
specifically German phenomena but spanned the Continent. Currents like
racism, eugenics, and anti-Semitism may have been strong in Germany,
but they were also present (sometimes powerfully so) in most countries
of Europe. These were ideologies that, in many ways, were flexible sys-
tems easily fitted into a wide variety of molds.25 Strikingly, contemporary

studies emphasize that this was also the case with peculiarly homegrown
Germanic products that, as we have seen, earlier historians treated as al-
most synonymous with Nazism. Wagnerism26 and Nietzscheanism27 be-
came European influences, attracting large and divergent publics and fus-
ing with a range of political postures, including decidedly “progressive”
ones. Neither possessed an inherent political personality. Of crucial im-
portance in their dynamic development were selective modes of mediation
and reception. In this way both heritages became part and parcel of nu-
merous—in fact, often opposed—ideologies.
Reception studies of this kind sensitize us to the complexity of the role
of ideas and make for nuanced distinctions previously overlooked. Not
all racists were anti-Semites, nor for that matter were all anti-Semites
necessarily racist. And, as Alfred Kelly has recently demonstrated, the
popularization of Darwin often resulted in biologistic thinking that was
quite compatible with humanitarian values.28 The path from Darwinism,
Wagnerism, Nietzscheanism, and even racism and anti-Semitism to Na-
zism, it is clear, was never simple or direct. Different roads did, of course,
lead in different directions. Nevertheless, twisted though it may have
been, one did, in point of fact, lead to Auschwitz. However great the
perils of teleology, they should not blunt our determination to understand
the processes and impulses that, at least in one instance, led to this desti-
nation. The fear of complexity is a poor reason, I believe, to abandon
cultural history.
The central problem with which we are concerned in this essay, how-
ever, remains unresolved. How is the course of German history best un-
derstood—as somehow distinct and separate or as part of the spectrum
of “normal” European experience? We have already seen that many of
the materials from which the Nazis later constructed their own particular
worldview were linked to a broader sense of a “crisis of civilization” that
was common throughout Europe from the 1880s, a period of unprece-
dented social change and corresponding anxieties. It was then that a vari-
ety of ideological responses emerged, responses that numerous commen-
tators have designated as proto-fascist.29 Common to all these reactions
was a highly “modern” conception of mass politics and a dynamic ideol-
ogy that, with its promises of rejuvenation and the creation of a New
Man, was quite different from conventional conservative and authoritar-
ian politics. It was a mode of political ideology that tended to blur ortho-
dox left-right distinctions and create a new, coherent, alternative form of
identification. German intellectuals and activists partook in these activi-
ties. In that sense the German experience was “normal.” It shared the
same fears and problems and was part of the larger search for novel solu-
tions that characterized important segments of the bourgeoisie through-

out fin-de-siècle Europe.
There is, though, another sense in which the notion of “normalcy” is
gradually becoming relevant to the study and explanation of Nazism.
This concerns the modalities by which bourgeois society created its own
codes of conformity, constructing notions of “respectability” in the fields
of manners and morals. It was a process that succeeded in creating very
distinct norms of behavior throughout modern Europe. In his new work,
Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in
Modern Europe,30 George Mosse places nineteenth-century as well as
Nazi Germany firmly within the context of this overall embourgeoisement
of morality. Germany is by no means separated from this experience. On
the contrary, the German Sonderweg lies paradoxically in its fanatical
pursuit of the general logic of bourgeois Sittlichkeit (morality). How are
we to understand this unexpected coupling?
The defining characteristic of the nineteenth century, Mosse argues,
was the powerful alliance between nationalism and middle-class morality.
Together they defined modern standards of respectability in such a way
that an ever-tightening distinction between “normality” and “abnormal-
ity” was created and enforced. Those who were perceived as lacking in
the characteristics designated as normal were increasingly consigned to
“abnormal” (outsider) status. This alliance, in Mosse’s view, became in-
creasingly comprehensive, insistent on assigning everyone a fixed place:
man and woman, sane and insane, Jew and non-Jew, native and foreigner.
An ordered and safe “inside” could be created and maintained only by
extending the net of exclusion. A rigid ethic of Sittlichkeit was invoked
to control the reality that the alliance itself had created.
From this point of view, bourgeois morality becomes a kind of autono-
mous historical villain, an ethic whose constrictive and intolerant moral
sense gradually radicalized to the point that, in its Nazi version, it became
an essential ingredient of genocidal motivation. “The new German man,”
Mosse tells us, “was the ideal bourgeois.” 31 Auschwitz is comprehended
here in a shocking new light, far removed from Rauschning’s Nazi nihil-
ists breaking all limits in a kind of Nietzschean ecstasy or from Ernst
Nolte’s portrayal of Nazism as the ultimate naturalist revolt against bour-
geois transcendence or from Thomas Mann’s Faustian and thoroughly
Germanic covenant with the demonic.32 Mosse’s Nazi is none of these nor
is he the reincarnation of a pre-industrial authoritarian world. He is
rather the most extreme and corrupted expression of the alliance between
nationalism and middle-class morality. At least in part, this Nazi is a
bourgeois intent on preserving and cleansing his world against what he
perceives to be the ubiquitous forces of degeneration. The paradigm of
degeneration, as a new volume of essays edited by Chamberlin and Gil-

man reminds us, was always linked to bourgeois fears of losing control.33
It became locked into the definition of the “abnormal,” part of the strat-
egy of labeling any relevant Other perceived to be a threat to the bour-
geois status quo. It also provided the dynamic for theories of social regen-
eration and, correspondingly, classified and circumscribed populations
“who would not or could not progress.” 34
Nazism emerges here as the most radical actualization of a more gen-
eral movement toward the classification and denigration of the Other. The
euthanasia program against the physically and mentally handicapped, the
insane, and the criminal; the persecution and murder of homosexuals,
Communists, and Gypsies; and the Final Solution itself—all of these rep-
resent not a challenge to, nor the antithesis of, the bourgeois project, but
rather an actualization of one final corrupted version of it. Nazi ideology
depicted middle-class men as men striving to maintain the values of order-
liness and cleanliness, “honesty,” hard work, and family life against “un-
natural” groups that seemed to desecrate morally and aesthetically the
basic tenets of national and middle-class respectability.
The Holocaust is now located directly within the larger context of the
dynamics of European bourgeois society. Mosse’s view coincides precisely
with Eley’s plea to view the Jewish fate in relation to other victimized
groups and to relate the Jewish predicament to “specific historical con-
junctures” instead of seeing it as in some way “timeless and universal.” 35
Within this schema, of course, basic distinctions are still necessary. Some
victims were more despised and more vulnerable than others. The destruc-
tion was most fatal to Jews and Gypsies because they were considered
separate-people races, whereas, at least in Germany, other “abnormals”
were partial insiders (asocials and mentally and physically handicapped
non-Jewish German citizens) or deemed in principle capable of undoing
their degeneration (homosexuals). In the case of the Jews, the longstand-
ing tradition of anti-Semitism fundamentally reinforced all of this. Locked
in by racism and quite incapable of overcoming their degeneration, they
stood at the very center of this process. There was, clearly, a great irony
in this. Although Jews aspired to bourgeois status, indeed, created them-
selves in this middle-class image, a counter-tradition insisted on reading
them out of that bourgeois world.
This is truly a suggestive reading of bourgeois morality, but it requires
further fleshing out. If National Socialism represented a “corruption”
and “radicalization” of middle-class values, it would be useful to specify
the nature of these processes—especially their transformative effects. For
while bourgeois Sittlichkeit was often illiberal, it was never typically
genocidal. The conditions and quality of this metamorphosis are in need
of more precise elucidation. Such an analysis would highlight an impor-

tant dual impulse within Nazism itself: its uneasy combination of both
bourgeois and anti-bourgeois elements. For Nazism inherited older, com-
mon materials and attitudes but went well beyond their previously estab-
lished limits. In its unique fusion of the conventional and the radical, Na-
zism succeeded in transcending middle-class morality at the same time
that it paradoxically embodied it.
It is true that this kind of cultural history does not always establish in
sufficiently concrete detail the connecting links between ideology and pol-
icy or the mechanisms facilitating the translation of ideas into action, but
there is at least a growing awareness of the need to make such a connec-
tion. A similar sensitivity is often lacking in the work of the fashionable
“functionalist” school. Their treatment of Nazism and the Holocaust
pays lip service to the broader background, to the larger ideational struc-
tures that provided actions with form and content.36 But functionalist
analyses typically stress the non-ideational, polycratic, even chaotic na-
ture of the Nazi regime, thereby rendering largely irrelevant the broader
question of continuity. To be sure, many of these studies are useful ad-
ditions, enlarging our understanding of the dynamics of Nazi power
and decision-making at all levels. Even within these parameters, however,
the historians are divided. For some, the “Final Solution” was the result
of irrational bureaucratic procedures, the almost accidental outcome of
lowly placed functionaries undergoing radicalization and responding to
immediate field problems and, often, uncertain signals from above. For
others, it was the relentless, systematic product of rational bureaucratic
procedures from above.
Still, these explanations do not take any (or at least, sufficient) account
of the fact that bureaucrats and decision-makers never operate in a void.
They reflect and seek to shape the societies of which they are a part. Over-
emphasis on the structures of decision making and on bureaucratic mech-
anisms contains the danger of reducing fundamental processes to the level
of technical problems. The admittedly complex question of motivation
becomes increasingly remote. Although we are left with a highly differen-
tiated analysis of the Nazi machine (and the machinery of destruction) at
work, we are left uninformed as to why it was activated in the first place,
and no more enlightened about the broader context that shaped the
choices made and created the atmosphere in which the machine operated.
The debate over the German Sonderweg, of course, is concerned with
precisely these broader problems, with the nature of the larger historical
canvas, and it is to these questions that we now return. If Mosse integrates
the German experience into the wider issue of nationalism and bourgeois
respectability, Jeffrey Herf’s important work stresses once again the
uniqueness of Germany—but in a strikingly new light.37 The distinc-

tiveness of German history, according to Herf, lies not in its refusal to
become “modern,” but in its peculiar way of doing it. As against the
Sonderweg model, Herf does not simply collapse modernity into, and
equate it with, its liberal-rational version. He argues, instead, that Ger-
many forged its own mode of modernity, at least from the late-nineteenth
century. “Reactionary modernism” (as he terms it) embraced “the most
obvious manifestation of means-end rationality,” that is, “modern tech-
nology,” at the same time that it rejected the heritage of rationalism and
the Enlightenment. The overriding aspiration was to “liberate” technol-
ogy from the fetters of Western Zivilisation and convert it into an organic
part of German Kultur. The modernization of the right meant trans-
forming a conservative, backward-looking pastoralism into support for a
united, technologically advanced, post-capitalist nation. This was a world-
view, Herf argues, that was born in (of all places) the German technical
universities around the turn of the century. Propagated in Weimar by both
conservative revolutionaries and prominent engineering circles, it was in-
tegrated into Nazi ideology in the 1920s and made into a pillar of the
theory and practice of the Third Reich. Herf here proposes a path to mo-
dernity that consciously espoused the fusion of political irrationalism with
industrial rationalization, what Goebbels called “steel-like romanticism.”
Like Blackbourn and Eley, Herf also questions the extent to which Ger-
many remained locked in “premodernity.” Beyond this, however, his work
represents a kind of mirror-opposite to their neo-Marxist approach.38 For
he has written a Sonderweg of German modernization that emphasizes
the centrality of ideas and traditions within this process.39 The social
background of this ideology, Herf contends, was the unique combination
of intense and rapid industrialization together with a weak liberal tradi-
tion. He thus dismisses those who argue that Nazism and “modernity”
are somehow irreconcilable, while at the same time refuting the view that
developments in Germany merely exemplified “a generalized sickness in-
herent in modern industrial societies.” 40
Of course, this fusion of an industrial-technological outlook with the
rejection of liberalism and Enlightenment rationality was not limited to
Germany. It was also a posture characteristic of numerous European
avant-garde intellectuals of the right. Marinetti and the Italian Futurists,
Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, as well as George Sorel, Drieu La Ro-
chelle, and Charles Maurras in France were all attracted to one version
or another of this aesthetic. Here was a masculine ethic, a vitalistic ro-
manticism infused with the rhetoric of the will to power. Its technological
imagery derived from the Kriegserlebnis, the formative experience of
World War I, from the community forged under fire in the trenches, an
image far removed from an effeminate early-nineteenth-century roman-

ticism with its visions of an idyllic pre-industrial landscape. These, to
be sure, were themes common in non-German modernist circles. But,
according to Herf, what in the rest of Europe was a sporadic mood, a
tendency limited to certain intellectuals, became in Germany wedded to
numerous professional groupings and whole political and cultural move-
ments. A fad elsewhere, in Germany it gradually became part of national
self-representation woven into a tradition that reached back to the nine-
teenth century.
Reactionary modernism, Herf insists, was not the inevitable product
of “capitalism” or “modernity” in general. It represented, rather, the par-
ticular form that modernity assumed in Germany. Acceptance of technol-
ogy could go hand in hand with anti-liberalism. Its modernity went this
way for nowhere else in Europe “was the protest against the Enlighten-
ment a constituent element in the formation of national identity as it had
been in Germany from the early nineteenth century up through Weimar.”
In a rebuff of both the Sonderweg theorists (who stress the failure of mod-
ernization) and the Marxists, Herf proclaims “reactionary modernism to
be the specifically German response to the universal dilemma of societies
facing the consequences of the Industrial and French revolutions.” 41
Had the Nazis been committed Luddites or völkisch pastoralists, Herf
notes, they would never have been able to regard “trains as the embod-
iments of the will to power” or see “the racial soul expressed in the
Autobahnen.” 42 Nor, for that matter, would they have been able to re-arm
Germany and start World War II. But that is where, precisely, the double-
edged character of reactionary modernism becomes apparent. In Herf’s
view it was the explicit irrationalist component in Nazism that created
insuperable barriers to technical innovation and performance. Tragically
enough, Nazi technology was sufficient for genocide. It was not, however,
up to the challenge of war. Notions of the Nordic soul and the triumph
of the will were of little use when it came to scientific research and ratio-
nal, military industrial production. The “will” could not compensate for
lagging tank production or a shortage of laboratories. In this sense reac-
tionary modernism simultaneously provided the dynamic of the regime
and the cause of its downfall.
The alternative account Blackbourn and Eley propose for the rise of
fascism, their own interpretation of the nature of Nazism, is, of course,
quite different from these kinds of explanations, despite agreement as to
the “bourgeois” and “modern” nature of these phenomena. The long-
term origins of Nazism, they argue, lie in a profound metamorphosis of
the German Right between 1870–1920, in the expansion of its social
base, and in the growing radicalization of its style and ideology. They
stress not the manipulative activity of authoritarian pre-industrial elites

from above, but pressure from interest groups from below. This, they ar-
gue, provided the real motive power for German political development.
“If we wish,” Eley writes, “to identify the sources of change in the forms
of conservative politics . . . it is at the points of friction between the politi-
cal parties and the pressure groups, the real mass organizations of the
Wilhelmine Germany, that we must look.” 43 In this friction, Eley argues,
the forms of proto-fascism were born. Once this theory is grasped, their
account becomes almost self-evident, culminating in a description of the
Weimar crisis: the fragmentation of the bourgeois middle, a generalized
hostility of middle-class parties to the Left, and the impossibility both
before and after 1914 of creating a reformist bloc on the model of
Gladstonian liberalism—all in conjunction, of course, with the disastrous
effects of war and revolution.
These conditions rendered the traditional elite increasingly ineffective.
As a result Hitler was needed to exert a radical, populist appeal against
the liberal and left-wing elements of the system. This was something the
older elites could do only partially and rather implausibly. They sought
to ride a tiger that was becoming more and more radicalized and less
open to control. Blackbourn and Eley summarize this process, “[I]f we
see prewar and postwar demagogy as an increasingly reckless process of
attempted political containment, rather than as accomplished political
manipulation by one particular and narrow elite, then the Nemesis of
Nazism becomes more readily explicable.” 44
Few historians nowadays would contest the argument that Nazism was
the outcome of a radicalized political right whose leadership and policies
in many ways reflected the rise of a constituency different in sociology
and mentality from the traditional classes. Their analysis, moreover, pro-
vides an indispensable structural component to our understanding of Na-
zism. The major difficulty that renders their interpretation strangely in-
complete is their reluctance to take seriously the cultural and ideological
dimensions of German history in general and Nazism in particular.
Even when they deal with attitudes, as in David Blackbourn’s discus-
sion of the role of German “cultural pessimism,” 45 ideas tend to be treated
as if their content is exhausted by, and exclusively explicable in terms of,
their class function. Cultural pessimism, Blackbourn maintains, with its
characteristic anti-rationalism, its organicism and celebration of Kultur
over Zivilisation, was not peculiar to Germany but was instead a fin-de-
siècle mood prevailing in a number of European countries. Far from being
a product of the disembodied German “mind,” cultural pessimism was a
reflection of the ambiguities of modernity as such, the response of the
bourgeoisie to its fluctuating fortunes in a time of great economic instabil-
ity and political anxiety. Cultural pessimism was never an ideology that
floated “above class perceptions.” It existed within a particular socioeco-
nomic context. Never a worldview in its own right, it was merely the op-
posite side of the bourgeois coin of optimism and material progress.
Blackbourn’s insistence on the European-wide mood of cultural pessi-
mism has some merit but in certain ways it blurs some German particular-
ities. The distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation was originally and
peculiarly German, one born not in the 1870s but a century earlier, as
Norbert Elias has definitively established.46 At first a conceptual tool of
the Bildungsbürgertum, the educated bourgeoisie, against the aristocracy
and the absolutist court, the distinction was later transposed onto the
national level when it became a distinguishing mark of German identity
against the rationalistic French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic
invasion. German history, to be sure, does not consist of a single, linear
tradition of anti-Enlightenment and anti-Western impulses.47 But to en-
tirely disregard this ongoing tendency may produce a certain historical
colorblindness. Whatever its merits as an objective tool of historical anal-
ysis, many Germans repeatedly asserted a species of the Sonderweg thesis
to describe—and celebrate—their own condition. In that sense the Son-
derweg must at least be considered as a primary datum of German sub-
jective historical consciousness from the eighteenth century onward.
Yet even if we limit ourselves to Blackbourn’s periodization, his discus-
sion remains misleading. For cultural pessimism went far beyond civic
quietism and indifference. Indeed, it became a crucial political factor
when it became linked to a view infused with its own positive dynamic
and content, when it became associated with a new form of German na-
tionalism: völkisch ideology. This Weltanschauung—with its metaphysic
of national rootedness; its symbolism of blood, soil, and will; its anti-
urban, anti-liberal bias—was widely diffused in many middle-class Ger-
man institutions from the 1880s on. Like the anti-Semitism with which it
so often joined forces, völkisch influences with varying degrees of success
entered the political realm. Neither of these trends receives the indepen-
dent treatment it deserves from Eley and Blackbourn. Had they consid-
ered them more carefully, they would have seen (as George Mosse’s classic
study of the subject clearly demonstrated) that in this guise such tenden-
cies went well beyond mere pessimism and assumed a life of their own.48
Activist conceptions of national regeneration stood at the center of a poli-
tics that transcended previous conservative ideas.
To argue that cultural pessimism was merely the opposite side of cul-
tural optimism obscures the positive thrust that transformed its purported
initial impulse. Degeneration, like cultural pessimism, was the obverse
side of the notion of progress. Its significance, however, lay in the fact that
as its mirror-opposite, it took on a more chilling and independent mean-

ing. As Chamberlin and Gilman put it: “[T]he negative model . . . of de-
generation was a particularly powerful one, caught as it was between its
own negative power as the opposite of progress, and a positive energy
which gave the model a fascinating appeal on its own, an appeal not man-
ageable by any dialectic. It lurked in the nature of the Other . . . as it
lurked within those who generated it.” 49 Mirror-opposites are apt, at
times, to be more than mere reflections. Consequently, when cultural pes-
simism was wedded to völkisch ideology, it promised nothing less than
the ultimate Germanic revolution.
The Nazis radicalized this revolution, moving it from its original
national-cultural basis to a racial-biological one. This racial-biological
thrust was the driving force behind the Third Reich, an impulse before
which the competing power cliques and bureaucratic and financial inter-
ests usually had to bow. With their rationalistic model of class interests,
Blackbourn and Eley, like other Marxists before them, are simply unable
to explain or even confront a central aspect of Nazi reality: the regular
primacy of ideological against other considerations. Moreover, there is
no attempt to examine the content of the cultural and ideological world
of the Right and the degree to which it had a coherence, plausibility, and
resonance of its own. Regardless of how the Nazis transformed these ma-
terials, they were its inheritors, deriving much of their legitimacy from
this perceived continuity. Blackbourn and Eley consistently reduce right-
wing ideology to a manipulative “demagogic process,” a form of serving
specific class interests and of containing others. Nazism is related to “the
particular options open to German capital in the circumstances of the late
Weimar Republic” and, in the last analysis, is not much more than a vari-
ant of facism.50
Despite the claims to the contrary, this approach does not go signifi-
cantly beyond the limits of traditional Marxist analysis.51 The authors’
unwillingness to examine the content of the ideas and traditions that we
have discussed in this essay obscures the resonance and specific character
National Socialism possessed. In this respect Eley has turned the matter
precisely upside down. Nazism’s peculiarly irrationalist and extreme char-
acter, he tells us, can be largely explained by the absence of a popular
German radical-nationalist tradition. It was thus constrained somehow
to create such an ideology with its “recourse to new synthetic solutions
(antisemitism, the race-mission in the East, ‘national socialism’). . . .” 52 It
is very unclear why any of these factors, casually placed in parentheses,
should be regarded as “new synthetic solutions.” In what possible way
could anti-Semitism be so designated? There is no need to enter into a
discussion of the role and resonance of a millennial tradition of European
Christian Jew-hatred (although, whatever its disputed weight, it is surely

worth mention and consideration). When analyzing the rise of Nazism
and the problem of continuity, though, it is necessary at the very least to
deal with the admittedly complex links between that ideology and the rise
of an explicitly political anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century. There
was nothing new, either, about the notion of Lebensraum. The idea of
annexing land in Eastern Europe, as Woodruff Smith has recently shown,
can be traced to a mid-nineteenth-century migrationist colonialism linked
to landholding interests and intent on saving Germans—and especially
peasants—from the ravages of uncontrolled modernization. From then
on such ideas maintained their currency in Germany and gradually be-
came linked with notions of “race-mission” (themselves an integral part
of racist ideology that was not born in Weimar but was articulated and
diffused from the mid-nineteenth century on). And, of course, the idea of
a “national socialism”—the fusing of these two concepts in some form
or other—had been part of the rhetoric of the emergent European Right
from the 1880s, and can in no way be regarded simply as a new, syn-
thetic solution.53
What is needed is a comparative analysis of the way in which various
national traditions shaped the character of later right-wing regimes.
Blackbourn and Eley are naturally reluctant to place too much emphasis
on this factor. When they do venture into this area, the solution is still
not satisfactory. As we have already mentioned, Eley argues that Germany
developed a more radical form of fascism because, unlike Italy, it lacked
a strong tradition of popular radical nationalism. This, too, is extremely
unclear. Germany certainly does possess a tradition of nationalism. Why
it is somehow neither popular nor radical requires explanation, not mere
assertion. In any case, what is most germane to the comparative issue is
the fact that Italian Fascism took the course that it did because, unlike
Germany, Italy did not possess a deeply rooted tradition of racism or
anti-Semitism.
No analysis of Nazism that omits the centrality of the biological revo-
lution and the key place assigned therein to the Jew (and, with varying
degrees of animus, to other outsiders) will be able to capture its major
impulse. Utilitarian conceptions of ideology as a function of class are
simply unable to account for the ideological irrationalism that stood at
the heart of the regime. The most sophisticated Marxist attempt to grasp
Nazism, Franz Neumann’s Behemoth, illustrates the difficulty. In 1942
he wrote, “the internal political value of antisemitism will never allow a
complete extermination of the Jews. The foe cannot and must not disap-
pear; he must always be held in readiness for all the evils originating in
the socio-political system.” 54 Neumann wrote his work while the war was
still on. The horrible realities of Nazism had not yet been revealed. Today,
of course, we know differently and that knowledge should compel us to
abandon simple functionalist conceptions and to explain what Herf calls
“the triumph of ideology in the Third Reich.” 55 Neumann was quite cor-
rect when he argued that rationality demanded a break with a two-front
world war and a policy of genocide. But that break never came precisely
because the imperatives of racial revolution and genocide took precedence
over everyday rational economic and strategic interests. Hitler’s Third
Reich, Herf emphasizes, was not moved by common sense or interest-
group politics. “The utopia of a biologically superior master-race, not the
defense of German capitalism, was the core of Hitler’s worldview.” 56 Cap-
italist interests were, in the last resort, subordinate to the fulfillment of
this irrationalist racial utopia. Given this perspective it is not so much
1933 that needs explaining but Auschwitz.57
German conservative revolutionaries, political anti-Semites, völkisch
ideologues, Lebensphilosophie irrationalists, and even avowed racists
cannot simply be equated with Nazism’s radicalized implementation of
racism and genocide. But the impulse did not come from nowhere. The
materials from which the Nazis constructed their vision, they fully be-
lieved, were rooted in, and faithful to, an authentic German past and
tradition. When the time of testing came, the lack of a powerful liberal tra-
dition became critical. Unlike France—similarly beset with racist, proto-
fascist, and anti-Semitic forces—Germany possessed little in the way of
significant countervailing influences. France had antibodies: a normative
revolutionary tradition and a powerful heritage of Cartesian individual-
ism.58 The activation and counter-activation of these traditions remains a
crucial part of the story.
The experience of Germany was indeed “normal” in the sense that it
was exposed, more or less, to the same stresses and problems that con-
fronted the other modern, bourgeois nations of Europe. At a certain level
at least, history is obviously about uniqueness, distinctiveness, and yet
diverse Sonderwege. And, of course, there were distinctive circumstances
that applied in Germany as well as—perhaps most tellingly—the specific
modes of action developed in response to them. But in addition, German
“reality” was shaped, in no small measure, by its own perceptions, myths,
stereotypes, and ideologies. People everywhere create their reality as
much as they respond to it. If it has any meaning at all, perhaps the notion
of a German Sonderweg ultimately comes down to the desire of a per-
verted elite to turn reality into myth and finally to transform that myth
into a new, horribly deformed reality.
Eleven
Nazism, Culture, and The Origins

of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil
The intense intellectual and emotional impact exerted by Hannah Ar-

endt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism1 upon a whole generation of readers
during the 1950s and through the 1960s has been well documented and
is in no need of rehearsal here.2 Any re-reading of the work, any apprecia-
tion of its cultural significance and the role it has played, will have to
seek the reasons for this. Its appearance satisfied a number of real, indeed
urgent, though often unarticulated and perhaps even unconscious, needs.
It would thus be wise to recall that in 1951, and for at least a decade after
that, there were painfully few serious attempts to forge the theoretical,
historical, and conceptual tools necessary to illuminate and explain the
great cataclysms of the twentieth century.3 To this day, in fact, it is difficult
to find satisfactory accounts able to coherently and persuasively integrate
these events into the flow of this century’s history. In its sweep, tone, and
content Arendt’s seemed, at last, to provide an account adequate to the
enormity of the materials and problems at hand.4 As Alfred Kazin recalls:
Hannah Arendt “became vital to my life . . . it was for the direction of
her thinking that I loved her, for the personal insistencies she gained from
her comprehension of the European catastrophe.” 5
At the time, to be sure, most readings of Arendt were relatively naive,
innocent of the personal and philosophical baggage and the political and
existential predilections that shaped and guided her analyses.6 Yet even
then it was obvious that neither in method nor aim was this a conven-
tional work of history. Even if one did not possess the term, it was clear
that this was a highly sophisticated Kulturkritik animated by the attempt
to comprehend, and in some way overcome, “the burden of our times”
(the title of the more appropriately named British edition).
The work, I must hasten to point out, was not only a guide to the
122
Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of Totalitarianism 123
Jewish perplexed. Dwight MacDonald, for instance, hailed the book as

the greatest advance in social thought since Marx7 and, early in her
friendship with Arendt (April 1951), Mary McCarthy proclaimed that
she had been reading The Origins “and the marvel of its construction,”
“in the bathtub, riding in the car, waiting in line in the grocery store. It
seems to me a truly extraordinary piece of work, an advance in human
thought of, at the very least, a decade. . . .” 8 The work evoked such a
response from many intellectuals because in an overarching way the
“meaning”—and perhaps the still remaining, if fragile, promise—of the
century seemed somehow to be laid bare. As one perceptive critic had it,
the book was itself “a myth useful to the very time it analyzes.” 9
Arendt, it bears repeating, was not interested in the ordinary writing
of history: “The representation of the past through the chronological ar-
rangement of all the available evidence struck her as trivial. She had no
interest in explaining how something came to be, step by step.” 10 Rather,
she pursued a kind of didacticism,11 a Heideggerian concern, in Michael
Marrus’ words, “to present events as mere surface phenomena, reflecting
deeper, subterranean currents of meaning.” 12 It is, I would suggest, this
overall meaning-endowing propensity that partly accounts for Arendt’s
current almost auratic status in our culture—Martin Jay, by no means a
slavish follower, recently characterized her as a “charismatic legiti-
mater” 13 —and the subsequent attempt by various camps to appropriate
her thought.14
General though her appeal was, it was particularly powerful for many
of her Jewish readers. Her capacity to remove the Jewish experience from
parochial settings, to lift it from a “ghettoized” frame and integrate it
into the marrow of world—or for her what was virtually synonymous,
European or Western—history, indeed, to make the former virtually con-
stitutive of the latter, provided a kind of dignity and importance to an
existence that had come perilously close to extinction. The emphasis on
situating the Jews at the storm center of events, combined with the desire
to grasp anti-Semitism at its deadliest level, made The Origins particu-
larly beguiling and attractive.15 Irving Howe relates how, after reading
Arendt, his generation “could no longer escape the conviction that, bless-
ing or curse, Jewishness was an integral part of our life.” 16
To be sure, naive readers may have been a little puzzled, if not discon-
certed, by her insistence on the absolute centrality of the Jews in the cre-
ation and maintenance of the modern state and economy, their instinctive
alliances with ruling elites and concomitant deep alienation from “soci-
ety” and the implication—as yet not explicitly spelled out—that the Jews
bore some responsibility for their predicament, that indeed their actions
and roles were not disconnected from the emergence of modern anti-
Semitism.17 It was, of course, only later in 1963, when Eichmann in Jeru-

salem appeared, that this thesis was radicalized, and the Jewish leadership
indicted as an indispensable, complicit factor in the “Endlösung.” Only
then was the outraged attention of critics—in search of the genealogy of
these views—drawn to this submerged theme in The Origins. Within the
context of the ideological war triggered by the Eichmann book, Arendt’s
most virulent opponents went so far as to claim that her views echoed
those aired in Mein Kampf, that her portrait of the determinative cen-
trality of the Jew within the State simply repeated the Nazi view.18
The debate has not ceased since that time, and I thus shall not belabor
it here.19 Personalized accusations as to her “self-hate” apart, Arendt’s
opponents dismiss the analysis as essentially an exercise in blaming the
victim. Leon Wieseltier has most recently stated this view. The sources of
anti-Semitism, he argues, are
to be found in certain aspects of German history, and French history, and

Russian history. Not in Jewish money but in German industry . . . not in
Jewish achievement, but in the pitiful inability of certain political cultures
to tolerate it; not in the Jewish insistence upon difference, but in the non-
Jewish insistence upon sameness. Study the goyim, in short, not the Jews
. . . There is something morally quite simple about totalitarianism . . . the
victims were, in these systems of slavery and murder, simply powerless.20
Whatever the merits and demerits of the debate, in the early years few
pointed out the rather delicious irony that Arendt’s critique of Jewish
elites and leadership was a direct expression of her post-assimilationist
Weimar Zionism, and of a consistently espoused, anti-apologetic view-
point already present in 1929 as she undertook her work on Rahel
Varnhagen.21
As with her analysis of anti-Semitism, so too with the rest of the book.
Only much later retrospective interpretations have been able to demon-
strate that the concepts employed to understand totalitarianism were in-
formed by Arendt’s broader ideational arsenal and a unique—and for
some, rather bizarre—political worldview.22 Such readings—as for ex-
ample the argument that in Arendt’s overall scheme of things totalitarian-
ism is conceived as the ultimate form of false, world-less politics, the
antithesis to her positive worldly ontology of freedom, plurality, action,
and the public realm—became possible only with the later, full oeuvre in
sight. Certainly, the Heideggerian influence and turn of thought were
hardly perceived at the time, and the debate as to the extent of Arendt’s
debt to her teacher and the harmful or beneficial effects is only now
really unfolding.23
At any rate, upon its appearance and ever since then, it was apparent
both to the book’s admirers and its many detractors that in aim, scope,
construction, and conception The Origins was a quite extraordinary and
at the same time a very curious, even eccentric book. It bears constant
renewed scavengings and reveals a mind capable of flashes of brilliance
and original insight. To be sure, there has never been unanimity and some
views have been archly, even contemptuously, critical.24 Still, I believe, Phil-
lip Rieff’s 1951 assessment reflected a more general view: applying Burck-
hardt’s maxim on Machiavelli to The Origins—“Even if every line were
demonstrated to be false, the whole would still present an indispensable
truth”—Rieff declared that if the work “should, in some important parts,
be an error, it is, by its sweep and passion a creative error . . . It will make
public opinion as much as it tries to understand it.” 25 Arendt’s galvanizing
intellectual energy, her knack for perceiving unexpected relationships and
making almost recklessly large generalizations in novel, indeed subver-
sive, ways rendered her always an exciting, almost “shocking” thinker,
capable, on later reflection perhaps, of widely missing the mark but also
of rare illumination. Even her sternest critics granted this.
Her still revelatory comments upon the structure of assimilation and
the “psychologized” nature of modern Jewish identity;26 her instructive
analysis of the general disenfranchisement of minorities and its poten-
tially genocidal implications attendant upon what she called forced
“statelessness, the newest mass phenomenon in history”; 27 her shrewd
and still very pertinent identification of human with civic or political sta-
tus and the almost poetic concluding pages on human plurality and the
recuperative powers of natality and beginnings28 —all these can still be
read with profit. Above all, Arendt’s phenomenological exposition of the
transgressive impulse behind the camps—“the laboratories in which the
fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is being
verified” 29 —retains its evocative power. One irritated scholar admon-
ished that while useful in familiar situations and when applied to estab-
lished concepts, the phenomenological method has no value when ex-
tended “to a new phenomenon and a new idea such as totalitarianism
. . . It then has a kind of inherent and inescapable arbitrariness: whatever
you put into the bag, you can also pull out.” 30 Despite this, Arendt, cer-
tainly no postmodernist believer in the non-representability of things, yet
aware of the difficulties, nevertheless can always be read as attempting to
confront her subject directly, seeking to somehow imaginatively enter the
abyss and render it comprehensible.
At the same time, the glaring inadequacies and weaknesses—both of
the parts and of the book as a whole—have by now surely become crystal
clear. Criticisms of the work abound and it is not my task here to engage
them in detail nor to consider the obvious problems inherent in the very
notion of totalitarianism31 —not to mention Arendt’s own view, about

which one critic caustically and presciently noted, “the totalitarian es-
sence did not arise mysteriously, fully armed out of the mind of History
or of the mind of Stalin. Certain circumstances favored its emergence,
and others will foster its disappearance.” 32 I have already mentioned some
of the numerous objections to her treatment of anti-Semitism. Let me just
touch on a few other basic issues.
In the first place, Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism as both the cause
and the result of the political dynamics of uprooting, atomization, and
loneliness rests upon a clearly flawed, and by now almost universally re-
jected, socio-psychological model of mass society derived from conserva-
tive European social theory.33 Given Arendt’s hostility to social science
her reliance on it is somewhat curious. But while most historians object
to the ahistorical deficiencies of this model, it may be worth pointing out
parenthetically that other commentators, like Lyotard, find her account
disappointing precisely because, as he puts it, her “description is essen-
tially an external one, from a historico-political point of view.” Indeed,
he argues that Arendt subverted her own deepest insight into the matter—
“The need for terror is born out of the fear that with the birth of each
human being a new beginning might raise and make heard its voice in the
world”—when she failed to elaborate upon it.34 Arendt’s recognition of
the resistant function of the onion-like organizational structure of totali-
tarianism to “the shock by which it is threatened by the factuality of the
real world” was a genuine psychological insight. For Lyotard it is here
that Arendt actually locates “the origin of totalitarianism”—as a psycho-
ontological rather than a historical reality—but only fleetingly, only soon
to abandon it.
Not even the most sympathetic reader will be able to clearly grasp the
way in which the book’s three parts cohere. Karl Jaspers tried, not alto-
gether persuasively, to explain it thus: “Hannah never claimed that En-
glish imperialism produced Hitler and Stalin, nor did she claim that there
was any intellectual identity anywhere among them. But the analogies in
the phenomena, which ultimately made the whole disaster possible, would
still be there even if there were no causal relationships at all.” 35 Arendt
herself subsequently wrote that the book “does not really deal with the
‘origins’ of totalitarianism—as its title unfortunately claims—but gives a
historical account of the elements [into] which [it] crystallized.” 36 Yet even
the most kindly disposed have noted how frequently there is a reliance on
flashing paradox where “factual evidence is slight or balky.” 37 There is no
point rehearsing the critiques in detail but, consonant with her view of
mass society, the rise of totalitarianism is linked to a very unclear account
of the decline and collapse of the nation-state and the class system. Even
if one accepts the dubious premise that such a decay took place, it is not
at all apparent why particular societies rather than others became totali-
tarian. Moreover, as Margaret Canovan has noted, Arendt “writes about
the downfall of the nation-state in terms that might give one the impres-
sion that Europe had consisted of such states until the coming of imperial-
ism. When one considers, however, that most of Europe, and particularly
the German and Austro-Hungarian parts of it, with which she is most
concerned, had belonged to states that could not possibly be thought of
as national, it is difficult to tell what she is talking about.” 38
These are all, however, familiar criticisms. I must therefore return to
the main theme of this essay and argue that it is Nazism and Auschwitz—
far more than the Soviet experience—that animates The Origins.39 It is
this great transgressive moment in European history and the prior cre-
ation of a genocidal mentality that obsesses Arendt and drives her anal-
ysis.40 “You see,” she confided to her friend Kurt Blumenfeld in July 1947,
“I cannot get over the extermination factories.” 41 Upon learning of
Auschwitz in 1943 she later reported: “It was really as if an abyss had
opened . . . This ought not to have happened. And I don’t mean just the
number of victims. I mean the method, the fabrication of corpses and so
on . . . Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves.
None of us ever can.” 42 This concern, I believe, similarly explains the spe-
cial attraction of The Origins. As one contemporary noted, “the life of
the mind was of no use unless it addressed itself to the gas,” and it was
precisely this that Hannah Arendt did.43
What, in the light of this question, does The Origins propose? Most
striking perhaps is what it does not say, what it rejects by loud omission.
There is not a hint of the German Sonderweg here, no consideration of
the role and weight of the peculiarities of German political and social
development. It is not continuity but rather radical and nihilistic rupture
that is indicted. “The real trouble,” she wrote already in 1945, “lies not
in the German national character but rather in the disintegration of this
character.” 44 Moreover, in a sharp departure from the conventional wis-
dom (of, say, Thomas Mann, Georg Lukács, Adorno, and Horkheimer),
Arendt explicitly, even extremely, exculpated “culture” from the catastro-
phe.45 Very early on, she dismissed any notion of the complicity not only
of German but also European culture and tradition in what had tran-
spired. She insisted,
Nazism owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition, be it German

or not, Catholic or Protestant, Christian, Greek or Roman. Whether we
like Thomas Aquinas or Machiavelli or Luther or Kant or Hegel or Nietz-

sche—the list may be prolonged indefinitely as even a cursory glance at
the literature of the “German problem” will reveal—they have not the least
responsibility for what is happening in the extermination camps. Ideologi-
cally speaking, Nazism begins with no traditional basis at all . . . only the
experts with their fondness for the spoken or written word and incompre-
hension of political realities have taken these utterances of the Nazis at
face value and interpreted them as the consequence of certain German or
European traditions. On the contrary, Nazism is actually the breakdown
of all German and European traditions, the good as well as the bad.46
She later explained: “one compelling reason why I took such trouble to
isolate the elements of totalitarian governments was to show that the
Western tradition from Plato up to and including Nietzsche is above any
such suspicion.” 47
It was partly this consideration that induced her to locate the alterna-
tive “disintegrative” model in mass society. The roots of barbarism lay
exclusively in the processes of uprooting and atomization, spearheaded
by an imperialist bourgeois politics and economics of expansion for its
own sake, rendering not only the nation-state, but culture and tradition,
superfluous. Indeed, Arendt regards the totalitarian loss of limits itself—
where “everything becomes possible”—as a bourgeois invention. It is sur-
plus capital that produces the precondition for genocide: surplus people.
The Origins, thus, idiosyncratically fuses the conservative theory of mass
society with an exceedingly radical and insufficiently remarked Marxist
analysis of imperialism.48 It elaborates what Young-Bruehl has called a
“frontal assault” on the European nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, con-
ceived as the agent, rather than the victim, of unprecedented breakdown
and nihilistic expansion.49 This is a far cry from the 1960s scholarship of
other German Jewish refugees such as George Mosse and Fritz Stern who
firmly located Nazism within an ongoing anti-liberal, anti-bourgeois Ger-
man cultural tradition.50
Ernest Gellner has commented that given Arendt’s background and ed-
ucation, she was perfectly placed to provide a much-needed historical ac-
count of the German—especially the cultural—roots of the catastrophe
and that her adamant refusal to do so must be regarded as both strange
and significant. Her picture of a mass society controlled by terror, he cor-
rectly notes, obscures the fact “that Hitler’s New Order was indeed an
Order, which as long as it was victorious, was acceptable to many, with-
out the sanction of terror, and which could be justified in terms of themes
that had long been present,” 51 that were a recognizable part of the nor-
mative (rather than subterranean) historical European inheritance. This
“strange refusal” to speak or to confront and indict culture, Gellner
claims, arises from the fact that Arendt was raised in and remained wed-
ded to some of the intellectual traditions taken up by Nazism (such as
romanticism) and thus sought to give such traditions a clean bill of health.
Her “dæmonic” picture of totalitarianism, the over-dramatic presenta-
tion, he argues, “is itself very much in the romantic tradition even if here,
ironically, it is used to exculpate romanticism and philosophy from having
fathered the allegedly alien evil.” 52
Gellner’s comments need careful unpacking,53 but at least his critique
has the merit of not stooping as low as some recent highly personalized
attacks on Arendt linking her exculpation of mind and culture from Na-
zism with her renewed 1950 defense of her ex-lover Martin Heidegger,
who in her mind is held to be “the embodiment” of such a culture.54
This is both a chronological and conceptual distortion. Arendt’s refusal
to indict culture and the specificities of German life in the catastrophe
may well be idiosyncratic, even dubious, history, but as we have already
shown, it far predated her purported 1950 Heideggerian Kehre. And as
I hope this essay will make clear, reducing the complexity of Arendt’s
engagement with the Nazi experience to her amorous rationalizations is
cheap at best.
The refusal to engage culture is, of course, problematic but Gellner is
quite wrong to claim that through distancing it from the catastrophe she
sought to represent totalitarianism as so novel and alien that it was “not
really after all very much concerned with us.” 55 He mistakenly conflates
novelty with alienness. There is no doubt that Arendt believed she was
dealing with radically unprecedented phenomena and was groping for the
intellectual equipment and conceptual vocabulary adequate to the task,
and she was doing this, to be sure, to some extent with the inherited and
problematic tools of romanticism and existentialism, for what else did
she have? But she rejected the Sonderweg approach in part because she
was impelled by the conviction that the issues raised transcended “Ger-
mans” and “Jews” 56 and far from being alien were a matter of urgent
universal concern. Already in 1945, and this was programmatic of what
she defined as her future task, she declared: “The reality is that ‘the Nazis
are men like ourselves’; the nightmare is that they have shown, have
proven beyond doubt what man is capable of.” 57
It may very well be that Arendt’s dismissal of peculiarly German fac-
tors, the continuity of its political and social history, was too extreme,
perhaps even misguided.58 But while conventional historical explanations
may be able to account for novel occurrences they may also require en-
tirely new, alternative ways of thinking even if some of them, like the idea
of mass society, turn out to be markedly inadequate and flawed. Hannah
Arendt, Alfred Kazin writes, saw totalitarianism “Biblically as a great
fall.” The break with tradition was her very definition of totalitarianism,
and rightly or wrongly, she regarded it as her task to radically and thus
controversially think through this novum, this “law unto itself.” 59 There
was nothing, contra Gellner, suspicious or covert about this: Arendt ex-
plicitly critiqued interpretations of Nazism that tended to rely on past
experiences or that employed older interpretational systems which, in her
view, were rather tortuously transposed onto what she regarded as a quite
different, novel sort of phenomenon.60 She consciously sought to repair
this predicament of Begriffslogiskeit, the lack of relevant master-models,
and to provide the missing ethical and cognitive equipment she deemed
necessary for the task.
Gellner, moreover, picks up on what many other commentators have
observed: her propensity for “operatic, metaphysical” description and
overblown analysis. There is very little in Arendt about the humdrum,
everyday world of politics; the quotidian workings of representative lib-
eral democracy hardly excite her interest.61 The Arendtian world revolves
around ultimate existentialist moments—the totalitarian abyss or the ec-
stasy of the revolutionary moment or of disinterested and high-minded
decision making in the polis. Very early on, friends and critics alike were
aware of this “ecstatic” predisposition. In 1954 Raymond Aron shrewdly
observed of the book that “one sees the world as the totalitarians present
it, and one risks feeling mysteriously attracted by the horror and the ab-
surdity that is described. I am not sure that Mme. Arendt herself is not in
some way fascinated by the monsters she takes from reality but which her
logical imagination, in some respects comparable to the imagination of
the ideologues she denounces, brings to the point of perfection.” 62
Aron did not mention the word but it was this predilection for a kind
of “dæmonic” discourse that her always sympathetic friend Karl Jaspers
detected as early as August 1946 when she wrote to him that one could
not think through the Nazi experience within familiar categories of crime,
guilt, and responsibility as Jaspers’ Die Schuldfrage had sought to do.63
“The Nazi crimes,” she wrote, “explode the limits of the law; and that is
precisely what constitutes their monstrousness . . . this guilt, in contrast
to all criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems . . .
We are simply not equipped to deal, on a human, political level, with a
guilt that is beyond crime and an innocence that is beyond goodness or
virtue. This is the abyss that opened before us as early as 1933 (much
earlier, actually, with the onset of imperialistic politics) . . . .” 64
Jaspers retorted: “You say that what the Nazis did cannot be compre-
hended as ‘crime’— I’m not altogether comfortable with your view, be-
cause a guilt that goes beyond all criminal guilt inevitably takes on a
streak of ‘greatness’—of satanic greatness—which is, for me, as inappro-
priate for the Nazis as all the talk about the ‘demonic’ element in Hitler
and so forth.” Anticipating a theme Arendt would pick up 17 years later,
he wrote,
It seems to me that we have to see things in their total banality, in their
prosaic triviality, because that’s what truly characterizes them. Bacteria
can cause epidemics that wipe out nations, but they remain merely bacte-
ria. I regard any hint of myth and legend with horror, and everything un-
specific is just such a hint . . . The way you express it, you’ve almost taken
the path of poetry. And a Shakespeare would never be able to give ade-
quate form to this material—his instinctive aesthetic sense would lead to
falsification of it—and that’s why he couldn’t attempt it. There is no idea
and no essence here. Nazi crime is properly a subject for psychology and
sociology, for psychopathology and jurisprudence only.65
Arendt was aware of this issue even before Jaspers raised it. In 1945
she had already noted that such demonization was a “flight from reality
. . . evading the responsibility of man for his deeds.” 66 I believe that this
ongoing problem—finding a mode of representation adequate to the
transgressive nature of the phenomenon which, at the same time, does
not fall into mystification—is endemic to the material and perhaps unre-
solvable.” 67 To Jaspers she confessed the dilemma and admitted that she
was groping for the correct formulation:
I realize completely that in the way I’ve expressed this up to now I come
dangerously close to that “satanic greatness” that I, like you, totally reject.
But still, there is a difference between a man who sets out to murder his
old aunt and people, who without considering the economic usefulness of
their actions at all (the deportations were very damaging to the war effort)
built factories to produce corpses. One thing is certain: we have to combat
all impulses to mythologize the horrible, and to the extent that I can’t
avoid such formulations, I haven’t understood what actually went on. Per-
haps what is behind it is only that individual human beings did not kill
other individual human beings for human reasons, but that an organized
attempt was made to eradicate the concept of the human being.68
This kind of thinking was crucial to the Arendtian project, which we

must now try to locate within its larger cultural and historical context. To
be sure, Arendt wrote in an age before the term “Holocaust” had become
common currency. The term does not appear in the book. Moreover,
viewing matters through the generalized prism of “totalitarianism” pre-
cluded any thoroughgoing analysis of the specificities of the war against
the Jews (this Arendt was to do twelve years later in Eichmann in Jerusa-
lem). Nevertheless, she fitted into and played a crucial role in the creation
and formulation of an ongoing and increasingly contested post-World
War II “discourse of evil” in which Nazism and Auschwitz have become

symbolic code words, emblematic of our culture’s conceptions of absolute
inhumanity.69 She did this, above all, through her organizing idea of “rad-
ical evil” that expressed and animated her notion of novelty. “The prob-
lem of evil,” she already insisted in a 1945 piece, “will be the fundamen-
tal question of postwar intellectual life in Europe—as death became the
fundamental problem after the last war.” 70 Positing matters in this way, to
be sure, entailed patently extra-historical, perhaps even quasi-theological
formulations. Arendt admitted the vagueness of the term but insisted
upon its necessity in coming to terms with what had transpired. “Evil,”
she wrote in a letter to Jaspers,
has proved to be more radical than expected. In objective terms, modern
crimes are not provided for in the Ten Commandments. Or: the Western
tradition is suffering from the preconception that the most evil things hu-
mans can do arise from the vice of selfishness. Yet we know that the great-
est evils or radical evil has nothing to do anymore with such humanly un-
derstandable, sinful motives. What radical evil really is I don’t know, but it
seems to me it somehow has to do with . . . making human beings as hu-
man beings superfluous . . . This happens as soon as all unpredictability—
which, in human beings, is the equivalent of spontaneity—is eliminated.
This, Arendt added, was a function of the delusion of omnipotence that

differed from the Nietzschean will to power that “wants simply to be-
come more powerful and so remains within the comparative, which still
respects the limits of human existence and does not push on to the mad-
ness of the superlative.” 71
She put it thus in The Origins:
Until now the totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have
proved only that everything can be destroyed. Yet, in their effort to prove
that everything is possible, totalitarian regimes have discovered without
knowing it that there are crimes which men can neither punish nor for-
give. When the impossible was made possible it became the unpunishable,
unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer be understood by the
evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for
power, and cowardice; and which therefore anger could not revenge, love
could not endure, friendship could not forgive. Just as the victims in the
death factories or the holes of oblivion are no longer ‘human’ in the eyes
of their executioners, so this newest species of criminals is beyond the
pale even of solidarity in human sinfulness.
It is inherent in our entire philosophical tradition that we cannot con-
ceive of a “radical evil.” And this is true both for Christian theology, which
conceded even to the Devil himself a celestial origin, as well as for Kant,
the only philosopher who, in the word he coined for it, at least must have
suspected the existence of this evil even though he immediately rational-

ized it in the concept of a “perverted ill will” that could be explained by
comprehensible motives. Therefore, we actually have nothing to fall back
on in order to understand a phenomenon that nevertheless confronts us
with its overpowering reality and breaks down all the standards we know.
There is only one thing that seems to be discernible: we may say that radi-
cal evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have be-
come equally superfluous.72
We must touch now on some of the problematics of this general dis-

course and Arendt’s particular role within it. I have elsewhere recently
noted that under the very many relatively immediate post-war attempts
to comprehend the experience and atrocities of National Socialism, there
lay a common denominator. Whether one approached it as in some way
an outgrowth of or standing in dialectical relation to “history” and “cul-
ture” or, like Arendt, denied any such normative connections, all these
theories were occasioned by essentially the same sense of outrage, the
shock that such events could issue from within a modern, civilized society,
and in particular be perpetrated by what many of these theoreticians had
taken to be the most enlightened Kulturnation.73 I am convinced that the
enduring fascination with and the deep need to account for National So-
cialism and the atrocities it committed—the rich multiplicity of rumina-
tions it has produced and its cumulative imprint on political and intellec-
tual discourse, as well as the accompanying, increasingly ubiquitous
attempts to elide or neutralize and displace its significance and impact—
resides in this rather ethnocentric sense of scandal and riddle, the abiding
astonishment that a modern, allegedly cultured society could thus deport
itself. Arendt’s importance and enduring attraction lies in helping to cre-
ate this paradigm.74
It is a paradigm that has never been problem-free nor has it gone un-
challenged. Arendt herself presciently anticipated some of its problems.
She understood, for instance, that the uniqueness of the atrocities could
potentially create a self-righteous cult of victimization, bringing in its
turn the absurd current competition in comparative victimization as the
site of group-identity confrontation. She already noted, in August 1946,
and to her readers then this must have appeared as strange at best, that
“Human beings simply can’t be as innocent as they all were in the face of
the gas chambers (the most repulsive usurer was as innocent as the new-
born child because no crime deserves such a punishment). We are simply
not equipped to deal, on a human, political level, with a guilt that is be-
yond crime and an innocence that is beyond goodness or virtue . . . we
Jews are burdened by millions of innocents, by reason of which every Jew
alive today can see himself as innocence personified.” 75
But beyond this, we must at least raise the delicate problem of Eurocen-
tricism. If I am correct in saying that the abiding scandal resides in the
fact that it is advanced European, especially German, civilization that
perpetrated these atrocities, the very shock implies both a certain superi-
ority as well as a much-needed self-critical posture.76 By extension, if and
when atrocities occur in places removed from the European center—such
as Rwanda or, a little more threateningly, in “half-Asian” Slavic places
like Yugoslavia—one is tragically less likely to be appalled, less able to
empathically connect. Of late, critics have increasingly drawn our atten-
tion to and questioned this Eurocentric bias, both as it affects the “dis-
course of evil” in general77 and the work of Arendt in particular.78
In Book 2 of The Origins, Arendt directly treats the genocidal imperi-
alist past in Africa and the inhuman treatment and massacres of its native
population as the prelude to later events, the site where the genocidal mind-
set is born. She certainly does not elide these happenings but the critics
correctly point out that the same sense of shock, outrage, and scandal is
missing, the analysis of a different order. This is at least in part because,
as Arendt herself correctly and repeatedly pointed out, the factory-like
method of Nazi exterminations, the systematic gassings, in fact went be-
yond anything previously known. Still, within its own terms her frame-
work of analysis is not altogether innocent. She emphasizes the “ahistor-
icity,” the “naturalness” of African life:
What made them different from other human beings was not at all the
color of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that
they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created
a human world . . . They were, as it were, “natural” human beings who
lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so
that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware
that they had committed murder . . . Moreover, the senseless massacre of
native tribes on the Dark Continent was quite in keeping with the tradi-
tions of these tribes themselves.79
To argue, as some of her critics have done, that Arendt was racist is, I
think, quite absurd given her fundamental belief in plurality—in the “un-
determined infinity of forms of human living-together” 80 —but it is true
that, as Anne Norton has pointed out, the African viewpoint, unlike that
of the Boers, is not even considered. They are not given a voice.81 Another
critic, Shiraz Dossa, has put it even more extremely: with Arendt, he
writes, the enormity of totalitarian atrocities and the Holocaust consists
in “the murder of eminently ‘civilized’ victims by equally ‘civilized’ kill-
ers.” For her, “the issue becomes a profoundly moral one in this context
when ‘unnatural’ human beings are both reduced to and murdered as
pathetically ‘natural’ beings, as if they knew neither a history, a tradition,

nor a past of human achievement. For the European Jews, unlike the Afri-
can, were unmistakably human.” 82 Only with their transformation from
political beings to “natural creatures” bereft of rights and legal claims
could they be, literally, expelled from humanity.
This perception of Nazism as a kind of absolute “bogeyman” (the
phrase comes from Greil Marcus), the most radical embodiment of evil—
“the single commonality onto which one could project fantasies of hatred
without the slightest feeling of guilt” 83 —may act as a kind of psychologi-
cal safety valve, as a belief that such evil has now been wiped out. It may
also function as a form of political justification for inaction concerning
present injustices that can in no way be compared to the ultimate case. In
the words of Scott Montgomery, here is a “closed system that does not
aid us in posing new questions, continually offers a revue of shallow fi-
nalities and, still worse, promotes voyeurism . . . Transformed from his-
torical truth into icons both of the machine and of modern malevolence,
the Nazis have been given a disturbing purity, a kind of sacred uniqueness,
even a mystifying grandeur of depravity that finally gives back to them
certain qualities of myth they sought for themselves.” Could it be, he asks,
“that recent atrocities in various parts of the world have not seemed to
demand immediate attention intervention because . . . these events do not
appear to sufficiently obey the requirements of a ‘true’ Holocaust?” . . .
“Is it perhaps conceivable that our political leaders would feel a greater
. . . urgency to deal with genocidal acts . . . if these acts closely simulated
those of fascism, mimicking more precisely the monstrousness of the
Hitlerian regime?” 84 At the same time, the opposite case also holds—
that the constant invocation of Auschwitz as a model, a metaphor, and
an analogy produces a reflexive sort of moral deadening and rhetorical
numbing. As Montgomery argues, the enthronement of Nazis as ultimate
demons, “the horror at Auschwitz [as] supreme by virtue of being fully
modern, occurring in the very center of Europe,” makes other horrors in
Africa, Asia, and South America, “no matter how brutal or planned, some-
how qualify as more primitive . . . In a strange twist of logic, the Holocaust
is made to seem more sophisticated, more advanced than any other inci-
dent of its kind. The terrible irony here is that Nazism finally becomes, at
this elevated symbolic height, a perverted reflection of Eurocentrism.” 85
These are problems and dangers that inhere in any discourse that insis-
tently, indeed obsessively, presses the case for its “uniqueness.” 86 It is a
code word that invariably contains an extra-historical agenda. At the very
least, it raises the delicate problem of balancing historically meaningful
distinctions between atrocities with the commonalities of experience that
allow for some kind of common ground and solidarity.87 I must note par-
enthetically, however, that this vulgar exercise in comparative victimiza-

tion works both ways. As Alain Finkielkraut has pointed out, the opposite
bias can be cynically and obscenely manipulated.88 Thus the defense at
Klaus Barbie’s trial contended that the genocide of the Jews “offended
only the consciousness of white people.” As merely a moment in the his-
tory of the oppressors, “there was no reason for humanity (and those in
charge of its progress) to mourn its victims. And since the Third World is
the herald of progress, those perceived as its enemies are the logical suc-
cessors of Nazism: the Americans in Vietnam, the French in Algeria, the
Israelis in the West Bank.” 89 The Holocaust, Jewish pain, thus becomes a
means by which to obscure and obstruct world memory of the great colo-
nial and other slaughters.
It is inevitable that, once mobilized and unleashed, Holocaust rhetoric
(that most immediately accessible emotional shorthand) and the incessant
appeal to the Shoah as the most resonantly evocative, but variously inter-
pretable, absolute metaphor, would entail engagement in political and
cultural conflicts and be brandished as a weapon in ongoing political di-
vides. The imperative to invoke the analogies (or lack of them) and draw
the appropriate, but always problematic and ideologically loaded “les-
sons” became irresistible.
How, within this larger picture, may Arendt be located and assessed?
Despite all its drawbacks, it was necessary—indeed, quite unavoidable—
to formulate a discourse that sought to capture something that was, after
all, without precedent and that required modes of conceptualization ade-
quate to it. If the rhetoric was overblown and excessive, the material was
beyond the conventional pale of historical representation. The proper
mode in which to render it remains to this day a heatedly contested mat-
ter.90 In a secular society self-consciously lacking the tools to do so, she
sought to provide a rational vocabulary and explanation of this evil in its
radical or “banal” guise. In many ways this was not successful, but who
can deny the validity and fascination of her search?
Twelve
Post-Holocaust Jewish Mirrorings

of Germany
Hannah Arendt and Daniel Goldhagen
Since 1945 the image of Germany has been inextricably linked to that of
Nazism and the Shoah.1 Tied as they are to core questions of national self-
definition, of personal and collective identity, latter-day representations of
Germans and Germany have perforce become particularly charged mat-
ters in which the ethical, psychic, and cultural stakes remain enormously
high. This is true as much for the scholarly as it is for the popular and
political realms and applies with equal force to both “German” and
“Jewish” narratives. We are only now beginning to explicitly acknowl-
edge the role and force of these inevitable emotional loads and confront
the ways in which trauma is grasped and reworked in historiography.2
In this essay I am going to deal with Hannah Arendt and Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen who have constructed perhaps the most extreme, mirror-
opposite, post-war Jewish scholarly paradigms of Germany, Nazism, and
the Holocaust. But first let me make it clear that I am not claiming any
kind of substantial equivalence between these two figures. The difference
is not only a temporal one. Arendt does indeed remain controversial but,
as her present cult status demonstrates,3 her place as a thinker of sub-
stance, complexity, and originality is surely assured, an assertion that can
hardly be applied to Goldhagen.4 Here I am interested in a comparative
juxtaposition only to the extent that both have articulated antithetical
archetypal narratives of the National Socialist catastrophe.5 Since both,
in their very different ways, touched raw nerves, achieved fame and noto-
riety, and elicited highly emotive support and vitriolic attack, we may be
better placed to understand the underlying needs which such radically
opposed mirrorings of Germany seek to satisfy by examining the genesis,
substance, and stormy reception of their formulations.
If Auschwitz has rendered both plausible and widespread the post-war
137
image of Germany as quintessentially tainted, a murderous and criminal

nation, then the degree to which in her manifold analyses of National
Socialism Hannah Arendt consistently exculpated peculiarly German fac-
tors—its history, politics, character, and culture—from responsibility or
involvement is striking indeed. Arendt explicitly reacted to and consis-
tently negated the long tradition of scholarly and popular stereotyping,
the demonizing of Germans and Germany. In both The Origins of Totali-
tarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem (very different works) she dis-
missed as virtually worthless the notion of the Sonderweg. There was, she
claimed, no relation at all between German or even European culture and
what transpired under National Socialism. Already in 1945 she wrote:
Nazism owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition, be it German

or not, Catholic or Protestant, Christian, Greek, or Roman. Whether we
like Thomas Aquinas or Machiavelli or Luther or Kant or Hegel or Nietz-
sche—the list may be prolonged indefinitely as the literature of the “Ger-
man problem” will reveal—they have not the least responsibility for what
is happening in the extermination camps. Ideologically speaking, Nazism
begins with no traditional basis at all . . . [It] is actually the breakdown of
all German and European traditions, the good as well as the bad.6
While Arendt opposed the very idea of a national essence or an in-

grained national character (her correspondence with Karl Jaspers, who
insisted upon a kind of integral liberal German “Wesen,” makes this point
crystal clear),7 with regard to Nazism she went so far as to rhetorically
exclaim: “The real trouble lies not in the German national character but,
rather in the disintegration of this character.” 8 This total dismissal of the
relevance of any peculiarly German factors, of anything relating to the
continuity of its political, social, or cultural history as complicit in Na-
zism and its atrocities, was no doubt extreme and certainly idiosyncratic.
Indeed, it has prompted some critical commentators to regard these omis-
sions as in some way ominous, strange, and significant. Given her back-
ground and education, it is suggested, who was better equipped than
Arendt to provide what at that stage was still a very much needed cul-
tural-historical account of the German catastrophe? Her picture of a mass
society controlled by terror, Ernest Gellner has correctly pointed out,
obscured the fact that the regime was acceptable to many and was so
precisely because it replicated themes that had long been present and
which were a recognizable part of the normative—not just the subterra-
nean—historical German and European inheritance. This “strange re-
fusal” to indict culture, to consider continuity, Gellner argues, arises from
the fact that Arendt was herself raised in and remained wedded to some
of the intellectual traditions taken up by Nazism—most notably romanti-
cism—and thus sought to give such traditions a clean bill of health.9
Post-Holocaust Jewish Mirrorings of Germany 139
Germany and Germans as such are then more or less absent from Ar-
endt’s narrative emphases. Indeed, in The Origins it is France (the Dreyfus
Affair) and England (Cecil Rhodes and British imperialism) that figure
most centrally in the making of a genocidal mentality. Replacing the
Sonderweg is the definitively supra-national notion of totalitarianism just
as, in radical contrast to Goldhagen’s later portrait, anti-Semitism is char-
acterized by its cross-national, rather than peculiarly German, character.10
It is not continuity but rather radical and nihilistic rupture that is in-
dicted. Not the tradition but the disintegrative model of mass society lies
at the source of the evil. Totalitarianism— and the camps that incarnated
its essence—was such a radical novum, Arendt argued, that the emer-
gence of the Nazi type, actually “has replaced the German.” Such a
type—who decides to turn himself into a destroying force—was “not
confined to Germany alone” but was the result of “the vacuum resulting
from an almost simultaneous breakdown of Europe’s social and political
structures.” 11 The roots of barbarism are to be found in processes of up-
rooting and atomization, spearheaded by an imperialist bourgeois poli-
tics and economics of expansion for its own sake that render not only the
nation-state, but also culture and tradition, superfluous.
Moreover, by the time Eichmann in Jerusalem was written (it was pub-
lished in 1963), even the earlier generalized emphasis on anti-Semitism is
muted or entirely reconceived. Eichmann is not at all viewed within the
ongoing history of Jew-hatred, but as quintessentially non-ideological,
his crime the outcome of a perverted Kantian sense of duty and bureau-
cratic thoughtlessness. Most problematically and shockingly, Arendt goes
further than this depiction and insists upon a new kind of criminal who
“never realized what he was doing” (her italics).12
We must leave aside here whether or not Arendt’s ongoing personal
connectedness to Germany is linked to this stance, though we should note
parenthetically that she was not alone in such emphases. Other Jewish
scholars such as Raul Hilberg and Bruno Bettelheim were also exiled
products of a German culture that shaped their thought and with which,
in complex ways, they continued to identify. As Dan Diner has suggested,
this may have had something to do with the bias of their analyses, with
their downplaying of any Sonderweg explanations and their highly criti-
cal views on complicitous Jewish behavior.13
But we should not make things too reductively easy for ourselves. If
some of Arendt’s elisions of peculiarly German factors seem somewhat
idiosyncratic, very early on she perceptively and presciently concluded
that conventional historical explanations were inadequate to account for
these unprecedented events. Novel occurrences, she insisted, required al-
ternative ways of thinking. To her great credit, this is what the Arendtian
project thereafter became: the effort to think these catastrophes anew and
to ever-greater depth. She explicitly critiqued interpretations of Nazism

that tended to rely on past experiences or that employed older categories
which, in her view, were rather tortuously transposed onto what she re-
garded as a quite different, novel sort of phenomenon. She keenly sought
tools for dealing with the radical magnitude of these phenomena, groping
for the novel intellectual equipment and conceptual vocabulary adequate
to the task. This was as true for her forays into philosophical speculation
and political theory as it was for the more historically oriented works.
Indeed, she rejected the Sonderweg approach in part because she was im-
pelled by the conviction that the issues raised transcended “Germans”
and “Jews.” These were not, she insisted, exotic or alien phenomena but
matters of urgent universal concern. Already by the end of the war, she
declared: “The reality is that ‘the Nazis are men like ourselves’; the night-
mare is that they have shown, have proved beyond doubt what man is
capable of.” 14
It is interesting to note that when Arendt started writing she was doing
so more or less as a pioneer project, groping in the dark, aware of a com-
plexity that went beyond standard modes of thinking and explanation.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s work15 is set in a quite different context. He
quite openly presents his case as a reaction to precisely this kind of ex-
planatory complexity whose historical function, he believes, has been,
above all, to obscure and rationalize. “Simple explanations,” he writes in
his rebuttal to his critics, “are not to be rejected merely because they are
simple . . . The call for complexity is sometimes the refuge of those who
find certain conclusions unpalatable.” 16 The explanation that he does pro-
vide is indeed simple and, as many of his critics argue, simpleminded. It
posits the mirror-opposite of Arendt’s narrative: if, for her, the category
of “the Germans” disappears, for Goldhagen the term is omnipresent, its
constant invocation ultimately transformed into what he takes to be the
explanation itself! If national characteristics and historical continuity, the
Sonderweg, is dismissed in Arendt, its singular, venomous eliminatory
and exterminationist anti-Semitism is the key to Goldhagen’s analysis, the
motor of the special cruelty that characterized the killings— and the basis
of his refusal to make any meaningful distinction between committed Na-
zis and “ordinary Germans.” Moreover, the killers are depicted in diamet-
rically opposite ways: the portrait of thorough but thoughtless bureau-
crats is replaced by jovial ideological killers enthusiastically intent on
carrying out what amounts to a historically grounded, consensual na-
tional project. As opposed to the convolutions and probings of Arendt,
Goldhagen’s thesis can be summed up in one stark proposition: “the Ger-
mans” always hated the Jews and once given the opportunity they killed
them—with zest.
This is not the place to go into the rights and wrongs of the thesis,
since by now this has been done ad nauseum,17 but to compare it with its
extreme Arendtian mirror opposite. For Goldhagen the Nazis are in no
way “like ourselves”: indeed, there is a vast ontological gap between “us”
and them. “The study of Germans and their anti-Semitism before and
during the Nazi period must be approached as an anthropologist would
a previously unencountered preliterate people and their beliefs, leaving
behind especially the preconception that Germans were in every ide-
ational realm just like ourselves.” 18 He restores the portrait of the German
perpetrator almost as a distinct alien species.
In addition, it is clear that Goldhagen is also reacting to a perceived
ongoing academic de-legitimization of the victims and their viewpoint.19
For many, this tendency began in Eichmann in Jerusalem where Arendt
not only “humanized” the image of the perpetrator through his alleged
“normality” and “banality,” but also rendered the Jewish leadership com-
plicit in the destruction process. This critically blurred what until then
had been regarded as a pure moral and conceptual distinction: that be-
tween victims and victimizers, Nazis (or Germans) and Jews. Goldhagen
reestablishes the purity and starkness of the distinction. His is not a narra-
tive from the perspective of “bureaucrats” or “the system.” Even though
the book presents itself as a work about the perpetrators, it is in effect
Holocaust history from the viewpoint of its victims.
It should thus come as no surprise that many survivors regard Goldha-
gen as the historian who most accurately conveys the unbearable everyday
cruelty and reality of their experiences and the joy their tormentors took
in inflicting such cruelty. It makes little difference that other historians do
not at all deny the reality of these experiences even as they question the
interpretive and explanatory framework in which Goldhagen locates
them and are uncomfortable with what they take to be an almost porno-
graphic, voyeuristic attention to detail that renders understanding more,
rather than less, remote. From the viewpoint of such survivors, Goldha-
gen has succeeded in capturing their reality, and this is why the various
scholarly attacks upon him are, quite erroneously of course, experienced
by the victims as attacks upon themselves.
How, within the framework of this conference’s theme, do we place all
this into some kind of conceptual and contextual perspective? Because
Arendt and Goldhagen represent two opposed, extreme, even archetypal,
paradigms of Nazism and the Holocaust, they mirror Germany in radi-
cally antithetical ways. In the one version Germans are exculpated; in the
other they are indicted: while the one entirely dismisses the generalized
framework of national units as valid or relevant categories of explana-
tion, the other places it at its ontological center. If Arendt’s work can be
viewed, at least in part, as a reaction to the negative stereotyping of Ger-

many, then, in turn, Goldhagen’s “Germans” must be regarded, to some
extent, as a reaction to this perceived rehabilitation, to undoing what he
takes to be the apologetics entailed in the division between “ordinary
Germans” and Nazis. But it goes much further than this. In larger terms
his work should be read as a protest against a much broader tendency to,
as it were, “universalize” the Shoah, a tendency associated with but not
at all limited to Arendt.
Such a universalist model holds that genocide, far from being a distinc-
tive German act, was in many ways inherent in the modern bureaucratic,
and especially totalitarian, state and a crime perpetrated not so much by
a Sonderspecies of Germans as by Christopher Browning’s “ordinary
men,” not particularly impelled by malevolent or anti-Semitic motives but
a variety of socio-psychological and ideational pressures and forces. For
Goldhagen these are all flights into abstractions. Explanations that privi-
lege an impersonal bureaucratic “system” and the generalized role of psy-
chological mechanisms (such as obedience to authority, peer pressure,
and so on), he argues, mask the essential free choice, the fact of enthusias-
tic agency entailed in these murders and allow a convenient escape from
personal responsibility for such actions. The perpetrators, contra Arendt,
knew exactly what they were doing—indeed, far from being pressured,
they reveled in it.
In an age of the universalization of the Holocaust, both in its historio-
graphic and memorializing modes, Goldhagen, so to speak, returns the
Shoah to the Jews.20 The event is now restored to its primal, even arche-
typal, simplicity: “the Germans” enthusiastically murdered defenseless
Jews in an orgy of a historically unique, continuous, and culturally condi-
tioned anti-Semitic hate. The degree to which this cultural conditioning
vitiates the issue of choice and agency, and the extent to which such a
venomous Jew-hatred makes it appear that this national project was some-
how a predetermined eventuality, is one that we will not address here.
In order to explain the differences between these two paradigms—the
universalist versus the particular, the exemplum versus the exceptional—
one could, I suppose, invoke Dan Diner’s interesting distinction between
“Western” and “Eastern” Jewish narratives and sensibilities to the work
and divergent emphases of Arendt and Goldhagen.21 But what I want to
suggest here is that for all their differences there is also a hidden common
denominator. Each, in its own diametrically opposed ways, resorts to
stark, extraordinary forms and categories of explanation. What else is
Goldhagen’s Germany and German culture if not anthropological “Other”
or Arendt’s “totalitarianism” if not an entirely novel regime with laws
unto itself? In that sense both, for entirely different reasons, cut the Nazi
experience off from the mainstream of broader European culture. Such

extraordinary explanations have their origins in, and are fueled by, a com-
mon tortured awareness of the deeply transgressive nature of the phenom-
enon in question. In a sense, both ultimately lean upon “archetypal”
schemes: both in effect propose heuristic extra-scholarly models linked to
the divergent needs, politics, and values that inform their different histori-
cal representations. Goldhagen’s explanation— based on an assumed an-
thropological and civilizational gulf between ourselves and the German
murderers—and Arendt’s (and other universalizers’) assumption of a
commonality of experience and the desire to break down what they take
to be a comfortable and self-serving distance between ourselves and the
perpetrators thus remain interpretive decisions, not purely matters of em-
pirical observation.
Both lack a certain balance and present their narratives too starkly, in
simple either/or terms, rather than the complex gray with which most
historians are comfortable. Nevertheless the extreme paradigms that they
present remain the relevant ones for us. On the one hand, as Omer Bartov
has recently put it: “We must not consign Auschwitz to another planet
nor perceive the perpetrators as different species. When we imagine the
Holocaust we must imagine ourselves.” 22 And, in a more intimate, private
moment it was none other than the delightfully complex and never fully
consistent Hannah Arendt who, upon reading Hans Magnus Enzens-
berger’s comment that Fascism is not terrible because the Germans prac-
tice it, but because it is possible everywhere, retorted: “If all are guilty
then none are . . . This statement is even more problematic when it is
advanced by a German for it says: not our parents but mankind has
brought about this catastrophe. This is simply not true.” 23
These two paradigms and the archetypes they represent may be ex-
treme, undifferentiated, simplistic, and even unhistorical, yet to a large
degree in their tension they provide the raw materials, and act as indis-
pensable guides, to both help us think through and memorialize a still
unthinkable episode in the history of human (or is it a peculiarly na-
tional?) cruelty.
Part IV
Historians, History, and the Holocaust

Thirteen
Reconceiving the Holocaust?

Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners
The study of the Holocaust is a visceral and cognitive minefield. Poised

in our consciousness at the crossroads of history, myth, and memory, no
matter how carefully and responsibly constructed the narrative, it elicits
the most powerful emotions. Guilt and hate, sorrow, mourning, and re-
sentment are never far from the surface. The Shoah raises awesome issues
of criminal and moral culpability: it touches on subtle and complex psy-
chological strategies for confronting or repressing an unbearable reality.
As our culture’s symbol of absolute evil it has become the site of multiple
and contested appropriations, harnessed to rival versions of identity poli-
tics, the limit-case in a strange but pervasive cult of comparative victim-
ization. Above all, German and Jewish existence, albeit in different ways,
are inextricably defined by it. How the Holocaust is understood shapes,
in essential ways, the very identities and self-definition of both groups.
This is the backdrop for the conception and extraordinary reception
of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust.1 The lavish praise and popular acclaim as
well as the hostility and unease it has evoked can be traced to the same
source. For this avowed “reconceptualization” essentially confirms older
stereotypical conceptions as to how and why the Holocaust occurred. It
is presented—and possesses its appeal—as a kind of “common-sense”
history that derides conventional scholarship as somehow naive, misled,
and suspiciously self-serving. By viewing the Holocaust exclusively
through the prism of a uniquely German anti-Semitism, as the unleashing
of a long-brewing national project of “the Germans” and not just the
Nazis, and by shearing it of what he regards as its recent scholarly re-
ductions and evasions into universalizing abstractions (“bureaucratic
murder,” the “banality of evil,” “obedience to authority,” and so on), Gold-
hagen, so to speak, returns the Shoah to the Jews. In effect, he offers a
reactive mirror-opposite to the disputed and simplified Historikerstreit
147
148 Historians, History, and the Holocaust
histories of the 1980s that sought to relativize Auschwitz into the “nor-
malized” annals of regular human murderousness. It bears careful scru-
tiny and criticism.
Goldhagen’s “Final Solution” is the logical outcome of a peculiarly
lethal and singularly German “eliminationist anti-Semitism” that, he ar-
gues, was deeply built into the country’s political culture and its social
and religious institutions. Already in the nineteenth century the over-
whelming majority of Germans accepted this view as their “cognitive
model” of the world. With the rise of Hitler, “eliminationist” anti-
Semitism almost seamlessly melded into its racist, exterminationist form,
and the overwhelming majority of Germans either “understood” or will-
ingly engaged in the task of killing the Jews, usually in the most cruel and
humiliating ways possible. For Goldhagen, the Shoah cannot be ex-
plained merely as the outcome of the policies of a dictatorial Nazi elite.
Rather its roots are to be found within the deepest continuities of German
history. As such it reflected the authentic underlying sentiments and the
popular will of the majority of the German nation. Nazism and Hitler in
effect merely provided the state-sanctioned legitimization for a popular
desire awaiting its proper opportunity. With some, though never really
significant, exceptions, “ordinary Germans” either supported or, indeed,
became enthusiastic executioners of a “national project.”
This is a teleologically reworked version of the Sonderweg thesis in
which the peculiarity of German history, its mind, and polity is character-
ized not by the disjunction between advanced economic development and
immature political institutions, not by its illiberalism and late national
unification, but almost completely by the persisting, special character of
its anti-Semitism. Goldhagen is able to reach these conclusions by leaning
upon a vastly more refined and differentiated body of scholarship which
he then either does not acknowledge or summarily dismisses.
That anti-Semitism disfigured, and was profoundly evident in,
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany is beyond dispute; that it was
deeply bound up—as a necessary if not sufficient condition—with the
decision to exterminate the Jews is common coin. However, what is at
issue here is not the existence of Jew-hatred but the question of its relative
weight as a causal agent amidst a welter of other forces and factors. Gold-
hagen’s rendering of anti-Semitism as a kind of disembodied, autonomous
force determining the course of modern German history results in a
grossly imbalanced portrait.
To depict Germany as united in its consensual anti-Semitism is to ig-
nore its particularly conflict-ridden, fractious nature and the constant at-
tacks upon Catholics, socialists, and liberals that were no less characteris-
Reconceiving the Holocaust? 149
tic of this political culture. The generally pro-Jewish Social Democrats—

already in Wilhelmian times, the largest German political party—are
passed over in virtual silence. If German anti-Semitism was as unanimously
popular and respectable as Goldhagen asserts, why were the Nazis con-
strained to mute their anti-Semitic rhetoric from 1929 to 1933? Numer-
ous local studies suggest that ideological anti-Semitism was often the re-
sult of being won over to Nazism rather than the cause of the attraction.
To be sure, the conspicuous absence of protest over the measures that
gradually excluded Jews from German society, the fear and compliance
of life in a dictatorship notwithstanding, also indicates a measure of
shameful assent. But why, one wonders, was the “Endlösung” kept se-
cret? Even if, as Goldhagen asserts, it eventually became an “open” secret,
the authorities continued to do everything possible to maintain complete
secrecy. There is certainly no indication that the genocidal impulse pro-
ceeded from the bottom up, that it somehow represented the pent-up fury
of an enraged citizenry. If Goldhagen’s view is to be believed, the Nazi
removal of restraints of violent action against the Jews imposed by vari-
ous Imperial and Weimar governments should have resulted in spontane-
ous popular anti-Semitic eruptions, in roving bands carrying out Jew-
hunts on the streets of Germany. This never happened.
Most tellingly, Goldhagen never discusses the responses of German
Jews to this purported omnipresent and monolithic anti-Semitic reality.
Had he done so, he would have had to conclude that, from emancipation
on, they were spectacularly blind to their surroundings, grandly deluded.
It is true that German Jews often idealized German society, omitting
many of its less pleasant dimensions. But such idealizations were rooted
within a certain, albeit limited, social reality. Indeed, the whole point
about the German Jewish experience, the source of its enduring fascina-
tion and unparalleled creativity, lies in its ambiguous nature, the tension
between acceptance and rejection. The anti-Jewish impulse was certainly
always there, sometimes very powerfully, but if this were all, it would be
quite impossible to explain why Germany stood for East European Jews
as the magnet, the symbol of enlightenment and emancipation so sorely
lacking in their own societies.
German Jewish life was always negotiated in a social field of essentially
mixed signals. Side by side with rejection, resentment, and hostility, there
was cultural and economic success—and some significant social integra-
tion. In 1911, 13 percent of Jewish men and 10 percent of Jewish women
had married non-Jews. The figures are more or less double that for the
years between 1919 and 1933. This does not jell with the picture of a
virtually unanimous society of Jew-haters. Even within the brutalized,
post-War context of Weimar Germany, it was precisely these mixed sig-

nals that proved so confusing to German Jews. Right-wing political rant-
ings and nationalist agitation proceeded together with unprecedented
Jewish success and participation in virtually all areas of life. Moreover,
for anti-Jewish forces, the problem consisted precisely in the fact that, as
Peter Gay put it, the outsider had become an insider. It is the combination
of integration and assimilation with rejection and hostility that consti-
tutes the more dense reality. Even under the Nazis, as Eric Johnson points
out in his work on the Gestapo, it was precisely the mixed messages of
the authorities and a degree of kindness and friendship shown by various
“ordinary Germans” that proved to be a trap for many German Jews.2
History is strewn with complexities and ambiguities—Goldhagen will
have none of them.
When Goldhagen analyzes the actual murders, he does have some use-
ful things to say. There may be substance to the charge that historians
have increasingly tended to marginalize complicity or even tacit support
and sublimate it into forms of indifference and passivity. Certainly the
degree to which the “Final Solution” was (or could have been) known
seems to be far larger than recent literature suggests. Although Raul Hil-
berg already documented this in 1961, it is salutary to be reminded that
many sectors and layers of German society either supported or were ac-
tively involved in the machinery and activity of destruction. Above all,
Goldhagen’s shift of focus, although not entirely original, is important.
He correctly reminds us that millions of people were murdered outside
of the death camps, and that the dominant image of depersonalized,
bureaucratic-industrial murder tends to underplay the importance of the
perpetrators themselves. Like Christopher Browning before him, he dem-
onstrates that many of these atrocities were carried out not by trained,
ideological SS fanatics but by “ordinary Germans”—men and women.
They did so in numerous police battalions, in indescribably cruel work
camps, and on the death marches where the killings persisted, despite
Himmler’s late orders to the contrary; and Goldhagen’s description of the
scope and scale of their activities is perhaps the most important contribu-
tion of the book. Had Goldhagen written a book emphasizing these as-
pects of the genocide and placing them within a different, more modest
analytic and historical framework, this would have been a far more sig-
nificant work of scholarship.
The interpretive problem, however, remains and revolves around the
issue of motivation. Goldhagen’s ordinary “Germans” are explicitly con-
trasted to Christopher Browning’s ordinary “men.” Browning posits the
murderous willingness of the now infamous Hamburg Police Battalion
101 in situational and “human” terms. In his version anti-Jewish senti-

ment and stereotypes do play a role. For these murderers, he writes, the
Jews “stood outside their circle of human obligation and responsibility.”
But Browning insists upon integrating this factor into a complex cluster
of general situational pressures and dehumanizing mechanisms (group
conformity, deference to authority, the dulling powers of alcohol, routin-
ization, and rationalization) that together facilitated the killings.
For Goldhagen the issue is framed entirely within the confines of a
“national” explanation. Germans believed their national cognitive model
of the Jews and, sharpened by its racist elaboration under the Nazis, when
given the right opportunity, they proceeded to act upon these beliefs. He
mentions but never satisfactorily explains the especially vicious murder-
ousness of non-German auxiliaries. In a work that proposes a peculiarly
“German” exterminationist anti-Semitism, the lack of serious compara-
tive analysis is particularly regrettable. But even if we stay with the Ger-
man case the monocausal argument cannot be sustained. In the case of
these individual field-killers we have no way of knowing whether their
putative anti-Semitism operated as cause or rationalization of their ac-
tions. It was, after all, a posture officially encouraged in ever more bru-
talizing, war-time Nazi propaganda. Goldhagen acerbically dismisses the
social psychological factors adduced by Browning as masking the ele-
ments of choice and agency entailed in the killings. But precisely because
Goldhagen posits it as the single explanatory motivating force (as inacces-
sible to empirical demonstration as the approaches he criticizes), it is his
unidimensional psychology that must be deemed mechanistic, less true to
the vagaries of human complexity to which the historian must always
be sensitive.
What, however, of Goldhagen’s evidence that the killers went about
their murderous work with voluntaristic gusto and enthusiasm? These
men sent gloating, happy pictures home, brazenly advertising their activi-
ties; some even brought their wives along. The perpetrators committed
genocide with essentially undisturbed consciences. But even if we accept
that the murders were committed with relish, the issue of motivation re-
mains unresolved. Saul Friedlander, never one to underestimate the power
of anti-Semitism, has argued that the staggering dimensions of the mass
murders were also facilitated by a quite non-ideological state of mind, a
form of intoxication (Rausch). The perpetrators, he writes, were “seized
by a compelling lust for killing on an immense scale, driven by some kind
of extraordinary elation in repeating the killing of ever-huger masses of
people.” 3 There are simply too many instances of such “dionysian” mass
murders in history for us to accept a peculiarly German genocidal anti-
Semitism as the singular motivating force. During the Spanish civil war,
a distressed Simone Weil wrote incisively of the protagonists:
I have never seen either among the Spaniards or among the French . . . any-
one who expressed, even in private conversation, repugnance or disgust
for, or even only disapproval of, unnecessary bloodshed. . . . Men . . .
would relate with a warm, comradely smile how they had killed priests or
“fascists”. . . whenever a certain group of human beings is relegated, by
some temporal or spiritual authority, beyond the pale of those whose life
has a price, then one finds it perfectly natural to kill people. When one
knows that one can kill without risk or punishment or blame, one kills;
or, at least one smiles encouragingly at those who kill. If one happens to
feel some revulsion, one hides it, one stifles it, fearing to be seen lacking
in virility. There seems to be in this some impulse of intoxication which it
is impossible to resist . . . I have not found it in anyone. On the contrary, I
have seen sober Frenchmen who of their own accord would never have
thought of killing anyone—plunging with obvious relish into that blood-
soaked atmosphere.4
Goldhagen’s monocausal “German anti-Semitism” not only fails at the

level of the field-killers, it also ultimately narrows and distorts the larger
historical context in which these Nazi horrors could become an option
in the first place. It is, indeed, only within the setting-up of a new war-
time framework and the unprecedented creation of an enabling killing-
environment that the debate over ordinary “men” and ordinary “Ger-
mans” makes any sense at all. For the atrocities to occur, Nazism had to
provide the warrant for genocide, to officially and radically loosen pre-
viously intact taboos (taboos that applied equally to Goldhagen’s pre–
1933 Germans). It is this great transgressive transformation that charac-
terized Nazism, in effect rendering the “Endlösung” both a thinkable and
practicable proposition. Historians agree that German and European rac-
ism and anti-Semitism, eugenics, and the discourse of degeneration and
regeneration were part of the informing background, the building blocks
of the Nazi vision. But they also recognize the force of the rupture with
the past, which seriously weakens the force of conventional explanatory
connections. In their unique ideological synthesis and fanatic determina-
tion to implement it, the Nazis created something sui generis.
Certainly demonological anti-Semitism was central to National Social-
ism; the Jews were consistently its most hated and ultimate victim. This
is a pathology that will always require special emphasis. But it is the en-
abling context in which Jew-hatred was transformed into genocide that
is also crucial and left unaddressed by Goldhagen. Nazism’s imperial uto-
pia, its propelling dynamic, flowed from its sustaining vision of a “posi-
tive” biological politics and a radical racial reorganization of the world,

implemented through hitherto undreamed-of, large-scale eugenic and in-
terrelated schemes of regeneration and destruction. Only the Jews were
obsessively targeted for total extermination, but that operation occurred
within a general eugenic framework of German “renewal” and resettle-
ment coupled with exclusionary measures that included mass steriliza-
tions, the killing and gassing of the German sick and insane, the mass
murder of Gypsies, the virtual extermination of the Polish intelligentsia,
the persecution and killing of homosexuals, and, between 1941 and
1944, the deaths of about seven million civilians in Russia. Goldhagen
mentions some of these crimes but their significance is left unexplored;
his explanatory scheme precludes him from setting them into proper con-
text, as part of an ideological continuum of despised and victimized out-
sider groups. This is surprising for in a 1989 review he correctly casti-
gated Arno Mayer for reducing all of Nazism to anti-Bolshevism and
failing to integrate this catalog of crimes into his account!5 It was not the
autonomous strength of Jew-hatred that impelled it to assume its entirely
novel, systematically genocidal apotheosis, but rather its integration
within the implementation of this total, eugenic vision of racial commu-
nity. The Holocaust must be seen within the context of this continuum—
of which it represented the ultimate, extreme edge.
In a laudatory review, Elie Wiesel comments that Goldhagen’s work is
“driven by the suffering of his people.” 6 The graphic, painstakingly de-
tailed descriptions of unspeakable horrors and atrocities do indeed evoke
pain and focus our anger. The book powerfully taps into this emotional
substructure. But Goldhagen should have more carefully consulted a new
body of scholarly literature that seeks not to indulge but harness such
feelings through a concerted and responsible exercise of self-reflexiveness.
His never-doubting explanatory framework is fueled by a vilifying mys-
tique of “the Germans.” He repeatedly insists that “the study of Germans
and their antisemitism before and during the Nazi period must be ap-
proached as an anthropologist would a previously unencountered prelit-
erate people and their beliefs, leaving behind especially the preconception
that Germans were in every ideational realm just like our ideal notion of
ourselves.” 7 This distancing comfortably relieves us from recognizing the
implication of generally “human” (as well as uniquely German) propensi-
ties in the cruelties. But even more important, it signifies a failure to grasp
the very heart of the issue: the glaringly obvious fact that Germany was
not a preliterate or alien but rather a modern, supposedly cultured society
fashioned in many ways after our own Judeo-Christian, Enlightenment-
humanistic image. The enduring outrage and ongoing fascination, the
scandal, and the riddle consists precisely in seeking to understand the

penetration of the barbarous within the familiarly cultured, the transgres-
sion of basic taboos within the framework of advanced civilization.
Generations of scholars and thinkers, many of them Jewish and
equally “driven by the suffering” of their people, have thought and con-
tinue to think deeply and painfully over this issue. They have not reached
a consensus, other than the realization that in matters as dense and com-
plex as these, humility is of the essence and that closure and certainty are
probably unachievable. The refining task of scholarship is surely to call
into question, rather than reinforce, stereotypical thinking and to encour-
age balanced and complex historical judgements on all sides. Goldhagen’s
book does not help in this endeavor. His “reconceptualization” of the
Holocaust is as much a reflection of our own times as it is a history of
the Germans and the crimes they perpetrated. This is the source of its
success—and its failure.
Fourteen
George Mosse at 80
A Critical Laudatio
George Mosse’s Europe has always been peopled by strange and powerful
forces threatening to engulf its precious but fragile humanist heritage. His
cultural history is animated by a complex but unabashed commitment to
that heritage; his work over nearly the last 40 years has also made clear
its radical precariousness.1 The twentieth-century experience of totalitari-
anism and of genocide and the personal circumstance of becoming a refu-
gee2 intertwined with an emerging acknowledgment and consciousness
of his own minority sexual status3 have constrained Mosse to become
perhaps the contemporary historian of the manifold strategies of inclu-
sion and exclusion, of racism and stereotypes, outsiders and respectabil-
ity, war, “irrationalism,” and mass murderousness in the modern age. He
has throughout concerned himself with the deeper roots of Nazism and
its destruction of the Jews, always lifting this subject out of narrow, paro-
chial contexts and linking it to wider—and usually unperceived—modal-
ities of culture. Over the years the foci have become ever more broad,
probing, and daring. Viewed in composite, his work—always evolving
and covering different aspects of the European experience—represents an
unfolding vision of, and ongoing concern with, that continent’s dialectic
of hope and hazard, liberalism and totalitarianism, breadth and nar-
rowness, freedom and constriction.4
Any appreciation of Mosse’s project requires brief mention of the par-
ticular approach he brings to the study of cultural and intellectual history.
Here one is not limited to abstract and rational ideas that are somehow
borne autonomously aloft through the historical process as was the prac-
tice with the traditional “history of ideas” school. Rather, we enter a far
broader realm. Culture, Mosse declared very early on, is “a state or habit
of mind which is apt to become a way of life intimately linked to the
challenges and dilemmas of contemporary society.” 5 We have entered,
above all, the political and popular culture, the mental worlds, of an
155
industrializing nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe—mass socie-

ties—in which the diffusion of consolatory and demonizing myths and
ideologies, symbols, and stereotypes becomes of paramount importance.
In effect, Mosse’s project constitutes a history of mediated human percep-
tions, one that is concerned with the active constructions of meaning and
its consequences. Material factors, Mosse would acknowledge, are funda-
mental to historical life. But, as he notes in the introduction to Masses
and Man: “However much they may be limited by objective reality, men
and women do have choices to make. Indeed, that reality tends to be
shaped by the perceptions men and women have of it. . . . [They] act upon
reality as they perceive it, and thus they help to shape it as well.” 6
Today, even for historians, this notion of culture does not seem surpris-
ing but we should not forget that Mosse was years ahead of his times
when he formulated it and, indeed, shaped our revised conceptions of it.7
In 1966 his anthology “Nazi Culture” had already appeared.8 For many
readers, schooled in older conceptions of the idea of “high” culture, the
title itself must have seemed shocking. Was not the very notion “Nazi
Culture” an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms? Who had not heard of
Goebbels’ perhaps apocryphal (but nevertheless famous) declaration that
“every time I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my revolver?” 9 Docu-
menting diverse aspects of everyday life under Hitler, it sought to discover
how “National Socialism” impinged on the consciousness of those who
lived under it and, in the process, sought to create an integrated racial
universe.
In all of Mosse’s work this understanding of culture is never repre-
sented statically or unidimensionally. History becomes a kind of updated
Hegelian totality, a dialectic in which the political cannot be separated
from the religious, the scientific from the aesthetic, the rational from the
mythological. Although its outlines were already apparent in Mosse’s
first, very successful career as an early modernist,10 it becomes central to
his sustained, multi-pronged effort to come to grips with the later period,
especially his studies on European Fascism in general and Nazism in
particular.
His first foray into the field, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellec-
tual Origins of the Third Reich (1964), has become a classic and contin-
ues to shape our image of Nazism to this day.11 This book took issue with
the conventional view in the 1950s of Nazism as totalitarianism. It denied
the notion that Nazism was simply the product of mass propaganda and
terror, the rule of an atomized and terrified population by a ruthless elite.
Nazism, rather, had to be conceived as an immanent tendency with its
roots in German sociopolitical development and popular culture. Mosse
did not, however, try to demonstrate this via the usual history-of-ideas
George Mosse at 80 157
approach. Nor did he accept the crude argument that Nazism was some-
how inherent in German national character and that the line from Luther
to Hitler was a direct and irresistible one, as one reviewer charged when
the book was published.12
What he sought to identify instead was one particular tradition: the
emergence and crystallization of a habit of thought, feeling, and percep-
tion that he designated as Völkisch ideology. This ideology was a response
generated by the perplexities and singularities of the German experience
of modernization during the latter part of the nineteenth century and re-
inforced and radicalized in the twentieth century. The Crisis of German
Ideology treats us to an erudite and differentiated exposition of this semi-
mystic, organic, nationalist Weltanschauung. The work demonstrates how
it was absorbed into German popular culture and transformed into a cul-
tural resource available for appropriate political tapping.
It was through Völkisch ideology, Mosse contended, that conceptions
of German identity during this period became so critically linked with
the “Jewish question.” The central foil, the salient anti-type of Völkisch
thought and imagery—with its metaphysic of national roots; its symbol-
ism of blood, soil, and will; its anti-urban and anti-liberal bias— focused
most naturally upon the Jew. Who better fit the requisite stereotype of
rootlessness and foreignness and of liberalism and restless modernity than
the Jew? For Mosse, therefore, the eventual development of Nazism into
an “anti-Jewish revolution” became comprehensible largely within the
wider context of Völkisch thinking, which had its beginnings long before
the Weimar period.
If in many ways The Crisis of German Ideology departed from the
conventional wisdom of the day, it did, nevertheless, contain a species of
the Sonderweg thesis, a notion critically analyzed in chapter 10 of this
volume. Mosse, to be sure, disdained simplistic conceptions of German
national character. No historical determinism, no assertions of inherent
murderousness are to be found in that tome. Yet, in the last analysis, The
Crisis of German Ideology held that Nazism could be grasped only as
a result of long-term historical differences between Germany and other
nations. German Fascism, Mosse wrote, was different from Fascism else-
where because it ultimately reflected “the difference between German
thought and that of the other western European nations.” Only there was
the repudiation of the heritage of the European Enlightenment “planted
so deep or for such a long time.” 13
Subsequently, these kinds of analyses have become considerably muted
in his work and, if invoked at all, formulated more in terms of “absences”
and deficiencies than pernicious presences. Thus, Mosse has repeatedly
pointed out that prior to 1914 the most lethal proto-Fascist, racist, and
anti-Semitic tendencies were to be found not in Germany, but in France.14

There were no German equivalents of the Dreyfus Affair, the Panama
Scandal, or the Third Republic. Nevertheless, as Mosse also emphasizes,
France did possess vital countervailing tendencies. Unlike Germany, it did
have a powerful and ongoing liberal, revolutionary tradition. When Ger-
many was defeated in World War I and the crisis erupted, there were no
similar effective and popular antidotes available.15
When viewing Mosse’s work as a whole, we can discern an unfolding
development, an emerging pattern woven onto his ever-broadening can-
vas. To be sure, the animus, the search for the deeper, underlying sources
of Fascism and Nazism, remains a constant leitmotif of his work. “I have
been accused, not without reason,” he candidly writes, “of writing teleo-
logical history, that is to say history which always looked to the future,
ending up in the fascist or Nazi embrace. However, fascism did provide
the climax of many of the trends which have interested me. . . .” 16 But the
oeuvre has become increasingly European-wide and not restricted to the
German realm and linked integrally rather than exotically to the course
of modern cultural and political developments, a part of normative and
mainstream not subterranean history. For instance, in his pathbreaking
work, Fallen Soldiers (1990),17 it is the well-nigh universal twentieth-
century experience of mass death that takes center stage. The unprec-
edented event of total world war—and the later militant, right-wing
appropriation of its thematics into national political mythology and
memory—becomes paramount. The brutalizing events of 1914–1918
were fundamental to the rise of Fascist politics throughout Europe, and
only war and defeat were able to propel prior relatively marginal German
trends such as Völkisch ideology into the center.
The Nationalization of the Masses (1975)—in Mosse’s opinion, “the
real breakthrough in putting my own stamp upon the analysis of cultural
history” —delved into a different dimension of the problem.18 In it,
Mosse sought to uncover not so much the content as the form of what
he identified as a new kind of an essentially sacralized politics. Its most
sophisticated and radical expression was indeed to be found in Nazism
but its origins were virtually co-extensive with modernity itself. Ulti-
mately Fascism and Nazism were part of the broadest, defining political
developments, incomprehensible outside this European backdrop of the
fusion of democracy and nationalism and the creation of a new mobiliz-
ing, liturgical politics. Here we witness the rise of a visually oriented, par-
ticipatory “counterpolitics” to liberal parliamentarianism. In this book
Mosse still defined liberal and bourgeois modes as antithetical to Fascist
and Nazi modes, a position which, as we shall see, he later rendered de-
cidedly more problematic. Characteristically fusing nationalism with de-
mocracy, the new politics had a style which, Mosse argued, could not be
subsumed under the canons of traditional theory.
In order to understand its driving impulse, one had to go beyond expla-
nations such as that found in J. L. Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian
Democracy that sought to account for it in terms of the centrality of ideas
and the continuity of political thought.19 What Mosse proposed instead
was the emergence of an extra-parliamentary, secular religion based not
upon a coherent rational analysis of philosophical premises, but rather
upon salient myths and symbols, concretizing its mystique through the
creation of new ceremonial and liturgical forms. The origins of this were
hardly German. It was the French Revolution, Mosse argues, which ush-
ered in the new visual age of mass politics:
Political movements now had to project themselves upon the largely illit-
erate or semi-educated masses, whose newly roused political conscious-
ness had to be taken into account. They were moved by what they could
see and touch, by politics as a drama which gave them a feeling of politi-
cal participation. We witness a change, slow to be sure, from written to
iconographical language.20
The Nationalization of the Masses demonstrates how mass meetings,

national monuments and symbols, public festivals, and political aesthet-
ics objectified— perhaps even created?—the conscious and unconscious
wishes of the masses, canalizing their desires and harnessing an ever-
present hunger for community into the nationalist framework. In the
preparation of this work Mosse had, after all, conducted personal inter-
views with the great practitioner of this politics, Albert Speer. Yet, it
seems, these talks only confirmed his almost instinctive understanding of
the inner dynamics and emotions of this political religion. Few of his stu-
dents will forget his classroom descriptions of the lure of its mass meet-
ings, of its “fully furnished houses,” its attempt to forge a political envi-
ronment of totality in an era of “wobbles” and confusing alienation. For
Mosse this alternative politics did indeed constitute a general temptation:
the Left, he makes clear, also indulged in its modalities. But it was the
Right that most successfully activated its liturgical political style and an-
nexed it to its own needs. Unlike its liberal and Left opponents, the Right
was not constrained by the tenets of Enlightenment rationalism and ab-
stract theorizing.
George Mosse tends to conceive of culture and cultural process in
terms of a dialectical relationship between center and periphery. The in-
sider acquires identity and defines himself in terms of the outsider he cre-
ates. There can be no ideal types without anti-types: the victor cannot be
understood apart from his victim. The concern with the outsider and the
“abnormal”—with processes of exclusion and victimization—critically

illuminates the “inside” and the “normal.”
The earliest work that pointed both conceptually and methodologi-
cally in this direction was Mosse’s Toward the Final Solution: A History
of European Racism (1978).21 In this text he analyzed perhaps the most
lethal of all modes of exclusion by showing how Jews and, to a somewhat
lesser extent, Blacks became its central victims. What distinguished
Mosse’s treatment of racism from other approaches was his emphasis on
the centrality of visual stereotypes and his insights into the usually hidden
but absolutely crucial role of aesthetics in the making of stereotypical
judgements. Mosse’s racism is bent on creating a divided world according
to ideal types and anti-types. Its model, he argues, was based upon the
deeply rooted ideal of Greek beauty. This aesthetic provided the basis for
making judgments not only about external appearance but also concern-
ing inner moral qualities. Classical beauty came to symbolize not only the
perfect form, but also the form within which a “true soul” was bound
to reside.
It was, inevitably, Christian Europeans who most closely corresponded
to the ideal type and exemplified nobility of appearance and character.
The obvious anti-types were the Blacks and the Jews. No one could claim
a Greek heritage for the thick lips, flat nose, and crinkly hair of the Negro;
nor was the hunched, ugly stereotype of the ghetto Jew any closer to the
ideal. The “sciences” of physiognomy and phrenology buttressed this aes-
thetic, for they espoused notions in which external appearance was held
to reflect internal moral, spiritual, and characterological qualities. Black
deportment confirmed an essential inner violence and primitivism. Jewish
looks validated an inherent criminality and manipulative nature.
Mosse made it quite clear that such “sciences” did not always neces-
sarily have either racist or anti-Semitic intentions. Nor, he emphasized,
was it possible to draw a straight line from eugenics to racial genocide.
Nevertheless, these kinds of beliefs did feed into the worldview of those
committed to racist positions, a worldview found in all European coun-
tries. Its adherents forged what Mosse strikingly termed a “scavenger ide-
ology,” one that annexed all the virtues of the modern age and condemned
those regarded as deficient in such virtues as inferior and “degenerate,” a
category which fused the biological with the social and which attested to
the ever-growing and influential medicalization of discourse.
Beyond this, however, racism, in Mosse’s view, represented the most
stark case of the modern inversion of the relationship between myth and
reality. “The world racism created was realized because racism willed it
so, despite the fact that it lacked any basis in historical, social, or political
reality.” In the concentration camps, the Nazis were able to create the
outsiders of their own fantasies, to realize their myths about the Jew and
other sub-races. Racism succeeded in transforming its stereotype into self-
fulfilling prophecies. Systematic dehumanization turned the victim into
the image that the victimizer desired. “Myth accepted as reality became
the reality.” 22
Mosse has consistently argued for the centrality of the Jewish dimen-
sion in the unfolding of his historical inquiry. Indeed, he has gone consid-
erably further than this and, in a remarkable statement that I shall at-
tempt to unpack over the course of this essay, has stated: “All my books
in one way or another have dealt with the Jewish catastrophe of my time
which I have always regarded as no accident, structural fault or continuity
of bureaucratic habits, but seemingly built into our society and attitudes
towards life. Nothing in European history is a stranger to the holo-
caust.” 23 The Mosseian project therefore, amounts to a cumulative exami-
nation of the manifold, yet always interrelated, components of that his-
tory. Fascism, Nazism, and the “Final Solution” come to be viewed as
the culmination of deeper immanent trends, perceptions, and processes—
albeit in their most radical and corrupted form. While always keeping in
mind the special venom of Jewish victimization, Mosse has increasingly
extended the scope of his inquiry and come to locate the issue within the
frame of the general creation of “outsiders” and “insiders.”
I will return to this point presently but here it is important to note that
already in The Crisis of German Ideology Mosse’s interpretation of anti-
Semitism differed from the conventional view. Neither continuity nor the
sustained influence of traditional Christian Jew-hatred within the modern
world is emphasized. Mosse would not deny these as crucial background
factors. Nevertheless, nineteenth- and twentieth-century manifestations
of anti-Semitism assume qualitatively different forms and substance, com-
prehensible only within the specific configurations and crises of moder-
nity that produced them. As the convenient foil for a host of ideologies—
Völkisch, nationalist, and above all the racist variety—anti-Semitism had
to be placed against the conditioning background of the dynamics of
post-emancipation bourgeois society. Mosse’s insistence on the historical
contingency of anti-Semitism provides a salutary corrective to the ten-
dency—still surprisingly widespread—to regard anti-Semitism as some-
how above history, an eternal metaphysical phenomenon quite beyond
contextual explanation or change. By linking Jewish fate to these central
currents, Mosse reveals the previously obscure, if not entirely hidden, con-
nections between realms normally compartmentalized.
This approach similarly animates his overall conception of modern
Jewish history. Jewish existence is, as it were, de-ghettoized, and its rela-
tion to the surrounding society and the mutual interplay remain always
paramount. Mosse’s analyses of the appropriation of pietism and middle-

class values into Jewish theology,24 the Jewish internalization of Chris-
tian symbols (albeit in secularized form) attendant upon participation in
the national state,25 and the influence of Völkisch ideology on Jewish
self-definition26 define the connections in mischievously unorthodox, yet
highly illuminating ways. At the same time, however, he calls attention to
the unresolved contradictions of this experience and points to the positive
re-appropriation of non-Jewish modes to maintain a distinctive Jewish
identity along modern lines.
Nationalism and Sexuality (1985)27 must be regarded as a landmark,
a departure—most recently elaborated in The Image of Man28 —in which
the continuity of Mosse’s concern is matched by a strikingly new perspec-
tive. The victimization of the Jew remains both central and unique, but
the scope of analysis is considerably broadened: Jews as victims form part
of a continuum and dynamic affecting other victims, and their status and
stereotype becomes comprehensible only alongside other outsiders. “The
Jewish stereotype is not unique,” Mosse proclaimed in a revealing news-
paper interview. “It’s the same as the stereotype of all outsiders: sexual
deviants, gypsies, the permanently insane, people who have hereditary
diseases. They all look alike. They are all absolute lookalikes. And, of
course these are all the people Hitler wanted to exterminate and whom
he did exterminate. They all look the opposite of the middle-class, self-
controlled idea of beauty, energy, all of this sort of thing.” 29 The stage
has not only become European-wide, but the central categories rendered
appear far more a matter of class than of nation.
These works represent the fruits of Mosse’s long-developing, critical
reassessment of the role of the bourgeoisie and its all-pervasive ethic. As
Arthur Mitzman has incisively observed, in The Crisis of German Ideol-
ogy Mosse enunciated the prevailing liberal conventional wisdom that
Nazism represented the pure, irrational antithesis of rational, liberal
bourgeois modernity.30 Over the course of time, his view of the role of the
bourgeoisie and its worldview has been almost inverted: at least in some
of its guises that class is now seen not so much as the mirror opposite,
the victim of Nazi ideology, but rather as an essential expression of it.31
In which way is Mosse able to draw such conclusions? He argues that
from the late-eighteenth century onward, nationalism and middle-class
morality entered into a powerful alliance, together defining modern stan-
dards of respectability, both sexual and otherwise, in such a way that an
ever-tightening distinction between normality and abnormality was cre-
ated and enforced. Both Nationalism and Sexuality and The Image of
Man are histories of manners and morals that, unlike many other contem-
porary studies of sexuality, do not enter the privacy of the bedroom but
rather seek to grasp the collective dimensions of sexuality and unmask its
hidden connections to public ideologies. According to Mosse, the mark-
ers of manliness and virility became essential parts of normal national
and bourgeois self-definition. Anyone perceived as lacking in those char-
acteristics was necessarily consigned to abnormal, outsider status. This
alliance, Mosse holds, became increasingly totalized, insistent on as-
signing everyone a fixed place: healthy and degenerate, manly men and
effeminate homosexuals, sane and insane, productive and lazy, native and
foreigner. An ordered and safe “inside” could be created and maintained
only by extending the net of exclusion. This rigid code, cloaked under the
guise of respectablity and Sittlichkeit, was invoked to control the reality
that the alliance had itself created. “Bourgeois society,” Mosse contests,
“needed its dialectical opposite in order to exist.” 32
These most recent books, with their hints of delicious subversion (so
typical of Mosse’s thinking), are themselves a challenge to the respectabil-
ity they expose. In his insistence on illuminating our own condition,
Mosse has always been the opposite of an antiquarian. The autobiograph-
ical impulses behind the study of Jewish history, anti-Semitism, and the
Holocaust have always been clear. Similarly, we are now able to recognize
that his present forays into the more generalized processes of exclusion,
his unmasking of the pernicious functions of “respectability,” and his in-
sights into the making of the categories of normal and abnormal sexuality
(i.e., homosexuality) have experiential roots. The personal dimension,
Mosse writes, has decisively entered the concern with outsiderdom in
general for “I have also addressed the specific outsiderdoms of which I
have been a member.” The fact that homosexuality only became explicitly
addressed over the last 15 years or so must itself be regarded both as a
testament to the power of—and an indictment against—that very “re-
spectability” he has exposed. In the earlier years, his memoirs relate, “ho-
mosexuality could not be mentioned, and certainly not admitted, without
paying the steep price of being driven out of one’s profession (especially
as a teacher) and expelled from normative society. . . . My preoccupation
with the history of respectability . . . was driven by a sense of discovery
and my own situation as a double outsider.” 33
This, then, is history fueled by autobiography and resonant with social
criticism. It also constitutes part of Mosse’s ongoing concern with the
submersion of individuality and tolerance in an increasingly homogenized
world. From this point of view, bourgeois morality becomes a historical
villain whose constrictive and intolerant moral sense is gradually radical-
ized to the point that, in its Nazi version, it became an essential ingredient
of genocidal motivation. The new man of National Socialism, Mosse tells
us, “was the ideal bourgeois.” 34 In terms of conventional historiography,
this is perhaps the most startling of all of Mosse’s theses: Nazism as the
incarnation, the most extreme defender of bourgeois respectability.
This picture is far removed from Rauschning’s Nazi nihilists breaking
all limits in a kind of Nietzschean ecstasy or Thomas Mann’s covenant
with the demonic or Ernst Nolte’s portrayal of Nazism as the ultimate
naturalistic revolt against bourgeois transcendence.35 Mosse’s Nazi is a
corrupted middle-class man intent on cleansing his world and preserving
it against what he perceives to be anti-bourgeois forces of degeneration.
The so-called euthanasia program against the handicapped, the insane,
and the criminal; the persecution and murder of homosexuals, gypsies,
and communists; and the “final solution”—all represent not so much a
challenge to or the antithesis of the bourgeois experience, but rather an
extreme, corrupted version of it. Here were middle-class men attempting
to maintain the values of manliness, orderliness, cleanliness, honesty,
hard work, and family life against those outsider groups who, in their
eyes, seemed morally and aesthetically to desecrate the basic tenets of
respectability.
During the Nazi period, that morality proved most fatal to the Jews
and Gypsies precisely because, as separate peoples, they seemed radically
different; all other categories of outsiders were at least partial insiders,
deviants with some sort of a claim. Mosse would hold, however, that
bourgeois morality in general is debilitating to outsiders—and potentially
murderous. This thesis contains a suggestive insight,36 but a more detailed
discussion relating middle-class morality to murderous Nazi modes would
be helpful. Bourgeois Sittlichkeit, after all, while often illiberal, was sel-
dom genocidal, and it is surely in the processes of corruption and radical-
ization that such a transformation was engendered. It would be useful to
flesh out further the nature of these processes.
Mosse has argued that the answer is to be found in the totalizing logic
of racism. But unless one works out in very fine detail the exceedingly
unique characteristics of its Nazi variety, “racism” as such may merely
push the argument a step backward. For on its own, racism—while al-
ways pernicious—has to be made murderous, genocidal. This murderous-
ness does not happen automatically. Historically and in principle, after
all, it has coexisted with policies of emigration, separation, enslavement
and domination, or even paternalism. Knowledge of perpetrator motiva-
tion is, of course, always very much a speculative affair but, at some level
of consciousness, however remote, it seems to me, the conceivers and
perpetrators of the Holocaust and associated atrocities were aware of
the transgressive, taboo-breaking—that is, the highly “unbourgeois”—
nature of their acts.37 The analysis of these corrupting and transformative
processes, these transgressive impulses, would bring out, I believe, the
dual moment within Nazism itself: its combination of bourgeois and radi-
cal anti-bourgeois elements. Mosse himself brilliantly demonstrated these
in The Crisis of German Ideology. Precisely in the combination of and
tension between these elements, in the fusion of the conventional and the
extraordinary, could Nazism transcend middle-class morality at the same
time that it embodied it. Whatever future research will bring, however,
Mosse has performed a valuable service in alerting us to these important
middle-class dimensions of the Nazi experience.
Indeed, in more general terms would it be going too far to suggest that
he has cumulatively woven a conceptual and historical critique of the very
notion of “normalcy” and our own complicity within it? In a typically
provocative and offhand remark he once commented to me that “every-
thing normal is boring”! But, of course, it goes deeper than that for he
has demonstrated that such stifling discourses of normative conformity
are also potentially murderous—and rendered effective and dangerous
precisely because they come disguised in the redemptive vocabulary of
nation, race, health, and respectability.
These are the insights of an historian, the product of deep reflection.
One will search in vain for a set of ideological or politically correct posi-
tions. If Mosse has focused on problems of his own outsidership—as a
Jew and homosexual—he also has clearly stated, “I do not belong to a
more recent generation where victimization is a badge of pride rather than
a frustration or a test of character.” 38 An unflagging honesty informs his
work; there is no confusion of his own preferences with the historical
reality he analyzes. This sobriety is very much in evidence in the way he
ultimately frames his overall analysis of respectability. Its normative man-
ners and morals are essential, he insists, “for the cohesion and function-
ing of society itself.” 39 If the gist of Nationalism and Sexuality was criti-
cal—bourgeois morality as intolerant of outsiders and indeed potentially
murderous—the last paragraph of that book hinted at the profundity of
the dilemma, at the conviction that “respectability” was, indeed, built
into the very structure of our societies. “What began as bourgeois moral-
ity in the eighteenth century,” Mosse concluded, “in the end became ev-
eryone’s morality.” 40 That being so, Mosse has defined his task as produc-
ing a critical recognition—not a fundamental subversion—of this reality.
As he puts it, “I like to provoke, to break taboos, but purely theoretically
. . . to get people to think—not in the practice of daily life.” 41 Once in
conversation he perplexedly wondered if it were at all possible to imagine
a world, a society, run along lines qualitatively different from those en-
shrined in this normative bourgeois morality. After a short silence, he con-
cluded, sadly but firmly, that it was not.
There are of course affirmations in Mosse’s thought, and a positive
vision is to be found in his work—one that is in fact related to another

side of the very “bourgeoisie” he criticizes. I shall shortly attend to this.
But before moving on we should pause to elaborate on the nature and
logic of the tapestry he has woven from the 1960s through to the present
for it may help to reveal a perhaps previously unnoticed but crucial di-
mension of his work. I am referring to the tightly interrelated nature, the
mutual implication, of the manifold and apparently separate building
blocks and forces complicit in the process leading toward Nazism and
Fascism. Mosse’s work is informed and animated by a conceptual frame
of ever-constricting incorporation. Nationalism, middle-class morality,
notions of inclusion and exclusion, racism, mass politics, aesthetics, and
stereotypes have different origins, pedigrees, and functions, but in this
evolving portrait they come to coalesce. Mosse’s writings are suffused
with the language of alliance, annexation, penetration, and co-optation.
Nationalism and bourgeois “respectability” stand in “alliance” together
defining increasingly homogenizing standards of inclusion and exclusion;
they “annex” aesthetics and a secular, sacralized mass politics into this
lethal combination; and racism, that great “scavenger,” as Mosse sugges-
tively calls it, penetrates all these forces, driving them to new heights of
exclusivity and radicalism and “locking” them, as he puts it, “securely in
place.” Viewed in composite, we can discern an unfolding development,
an emerging pattern woven into an ever-broadening canvas, in which the
Holocaust and its related barbarities are conceived finally not as some
kind of aberration but as continuous with the normative and mainstream,
rather than subterranean and deviant, dimensions of post-Enlightenment
European society, politics, and culture.
George Mosse is a historian who analyzes phenomena that go against
his grain—a humanist pushed into the study of the inhumane. But, like
Benedetto Croce, who has greatly influenced Mosse,42 he accepts the no-
tion that this is an unavoidable task, for outside of history there is no
reality. The only way, therefore, of confronting the reality is by coming
to grips with history from the inside and in a committed, rather than a
positivistic and descriptive, manner. History, for him, must be a passion,
certainly not “a profession like any other.” 43 Like Croce, Mosse insists
that the mind of the historian is central to historical analysis; as a result,
only history relevant to one’s present situation is worthy of its name. Like
Croce’s work, too, Mosse’s writings are animated by a commitment to
individual liberty in a world threatened by the forces of mass irrationality
and mass politics.
To be sure, over the years both the source and the very nature of this
“irrationality” have undergone change and deepening in Mosse’s work.
Until The Nationalization of the Masses, he did indeed simply equate
“irrationality” with those cultural, political, and ideological forces that

stood opposed to a normative bourgeois liberal rationalism. Michael P.
Steinberg may be correct in discerning in Mosse’s work a kind of “fortress
rationality,” a refusal to accept the complex mixture and intertwining of
the rational with the irrational. This, he argues, is a result of firsthand
experience of European fascism, leading Mosse “to abjure negotiation
with cultural demons by adopting this strict posture.” 44 Steinberg’s char-
acterization may, to some extent, capture the spirit of some of Mosse’s
earlier work. But over the years, he has increasingly stressed that some
of the most problematic, even pernicious, properties themselves lurk in
the fortress.
Still, in this troubled Europe Mosse sees not only points of darkness;
muted potentials for redemption are always present. His legendary lec-
tures at the University of Wisconsin on “The Culture of Western Europe”
(presented in his textbook of the same name) presented many young
American audiences with unknown, almost magical areas of European
culture. Here were liberal, libertarian, Freudian, existentialist, Kantian
socialist, and Hegelian Marxist answers to the contemporary dilemmas
of European society. These answers, to be sure, failed in the inter-war
period in Europe; yet long after the demise of Nazism and Fascism, in
Mosse’s presentation, they retained their vitality, their possibilities appar-
ently far from exhausted. Of course, he has always kept a critical distance
from these options. Nevertheless, as one student of his has pointed out,
he retains a deep empathy for the ethical utopian impulse,45 a hope that
somehow a humanist fusion of liberalism with socialism would be pos-
sible. His writings and lectures unfailingly both encourage and critically
examine these unorthodox alternatives.
There is, however, another source that, I believe, gets us closer to the
core of Mosse’s positive commitments. In order to grasp this, we must
first examine his analysis of the ideal of Bildung. For, as Mosse puts it, if
Sittlichkeit, or respectability, represents bourgeois constrictiveness or the
contraction of tolerance and human expression, then the German En-
lightenment and of course mainly middle-class ideal of Bildung embodies
the ideal of the expansion of human possibilities and stands for tolerance,
cultured self-cultivation, and the primacy of individual autonomy.46 To be
sure, this view goes well beyond a naive liberal Enlightenment position.
Over the years Mosse has become increasingly sensitive to the darker side
of Aufklärung.47 More specifically, he has recently spelled out an impor-
tant critique of the liberalism to which he himself is attached. Liberalism,
he argues, has always equated liberty as such only or mainly with political
freedom. As a result, it also sanctioned the rigid rules of personal behav-
ior as laid down by the precepts of respectability, and legitimized the re-
strictions upon the individual by society, if not by parliaments. His cri-

tique of bourgeois morality (of Sittlichkeit as opposed to Bildung) is, in
the last resort, a plea “to extend the liberal definition of freedom even to
those moral and behavioural restraints which liberalism has sanctioned.” 48
In his recently published German Jews beyond Judaism, Mosse bril-
liantly analyzes the historical process whereby German Jewry slowly, but
irrevocably, became virtually the sole carrier of that humanizing Bildung
sensibility, and witnesses to the gradual desertion by the non-Jewish Ger-
man educated middle class of a doctrine that they had originally shared
with their emancipated Jewish co-citizens; German nationalism, he has
constantly maintained, did not have to take the course it ultimately did.49
For him, the German Jewish heritage ultimately becomes the heritage of
Bildung, which becomes transformed into a kind of new Jewish tradition.
Indeed, it becomes the defining ingredient of post-emancipation Jewish
identity.50 For traditionalists, of course, there is something profoundly
shocking, even subversive, in the notion that nineteenth- and twentieth-
century intellectual Jewishness is synonymous with a particular strand of
German culture, even if albeit its most tolerant, progressive side. They
would likely not join Walter Benjamin in praise of the statement by Lud-
wig Strauss that “in a study of Goethe one finds one’s Jewish substance.” 51
Mosse demonstrates that the internalization of the ethos of Bildung
derived from the specific historical circumstances of the struggle for Jew-
ish emancipation in Germany. For a community emerging from the ghetto
and seeking integration within German life, the prevalent ideal of Bildung
seemed tailor-made “because it transcended all differences of nationality
and religion through the unfolding of the individual personality.” 52 Thus,
Mosse holds, cultural humanism became integrally interwoven into the
fabric of modern German Jewish being. He is characteristically critical of
much of this internalization. He argues, for instance, that Bildung modes
of thought encouraged an almost automatic belief in the primacy of cul-
ture over politics, which tended to distort contemporary perceptions and
blind one to the imperatives of an ever-strengthened mass politics. Bildung
Jews engaged in the politics of delusion, projecting their ideals of a toler-
ant Germany onto a quite different, far more brutal reality. Jews clung to
a heritage that by 1933 was overwhelmed and rendered irrelevant.
For all that, Mosse insists, the heritage lives on. It was kept alive origi-
nally by liberal and left-wing intellectuals in exile and later “by new gen-
erations eager to take up a heritage thought long dead and forgotten.” It
is in this heritage, indeed, that Mosse the man and his work most pro-
foundly meet. Here Mosse himself closely resembles the Jewish intellec-
tuals, ranging from Sigmund Freud to Stefan Zweig and the Frankfurt
School he describes. In them, as he put it, Jewishness became a metaphor
for the critical, unmasking, yet always humanizing and autonomous

mind. It is as much a plea and statement of hope as it is historical analysis.
German Jews beyond Judaism, then, presents Mosse’s creed. It is, he
admits, “certainly my most personal book, almost a confession of
faith.” 53 Mosse is a historian whose essential task has been that of a critic
of culture, ideology, and politics, opposed to mindless conformities and
stultifying orthodoxies of any kind. Yet there is a complexity here that
we should not overlook. We have already demonstrated that Mosse is
aware of the necessity, even the desirability, of order in society, that he
recognizes that the conflicting demands between cohesion and tolerance
require a delicate balance. He is aware, too, that criticism without the act
of positive building, devoid of constructive vision, has historically led to
both impotence and alienation.54 Moreover, and most intriguingly, he of-
ten has a certain sympathy for some of the myths and symbols he studies;
they answer deep needs for human community and meaning and will not
be wished away in terms of mindless negation.
This certainly applies to Mosse’s Zionism, his identification with the
very nationalist myths and symbols he has done so much to demystify.
This, indeed, has been a source of puzzlement to many. How are we to
explain it? At a certain intellectual level, of course, the case can be made
that there is no built-in inconsistency. For Mosse has gone out of his way
to recover the liberal, Bildung legacy of the early German-speaking Zion-
ists, ranging from Robert Weltsch, Kurt Blumenfeld, and Martin Buber55
through Gershom Scholem,56 insisting upon the originally humanist face
of an essentially tolerant liberal experiment which could have avoided
going the way of conventional nationalism.57
Yet the matter is surely more complicated than this. For someone as
acutely aware of the Nazi experience and the destruction of European
Jewry as Mosse is, his Zionist affirmation may well have as one of its
sources a largely unstated appreciation of the need for force and collective
self-defense in a very imperfect, uncultured world: a corrective to the
blind-spot of the Bildungs intellectuals who habitually misdiagnosed the
harsh political realities that directly confronted them. How ironic, one
wonders, was his constant invocation of Max Nordau’s contemptuous
juxtaposition of “coffee-house” with “muscle Jews”?58
Mosse himself disarmingly notes that “I was far from consistent. My
own engagement in Israel told of the need for a more concrete embodi-
ment of my Jewish identity; my accelerated heartbeat when I witnessed
the swearing-in of Israeli paratroopers on Massada—Israel’s Holy Moun-
tain—reveals the attraction of an emotional commitment even for one
who prides himself on the use of his reason. . . . once again, ideal and
reality differ even within my own person.” 59 Later in his memoirs, in relat-
ing his reactions to the Israeli experience, Mosse puts it even more can-
didly: “I remember vividly my joy on my first visit when I saw sturdy, self-
confident Jews, and though this was, once again, a stereotype, I was only
conscious of the contrast between the present and the humiliating past. I
knew full well that this ‘new Jew’ represented a normalization, an assimi-
lation to general middle-class ideals which otherwise I professed to dis-
like. But I could not help myself; faced with this Zionist ideal my reason
and historical knowledge were overcome.” 60
For all his wariness as an exile of passports, his dislike of conformity
and homogenization, his suspicion of labels and stereotypes, and his
uniquely individual personality, Mosse may have found Zionism attrac-
tive simply because it provided him with a “sense of belonging.” 61 Yet,
even though Mosse regards this as the defeat of his reason by his emotion,
I think he does himself an injustice. For he has indeed intelligibly inte-
grated these forces of collective identification within his larger intellectual
vision. Because nationalism, religion, Marxism, bourgeois respectability,
and any number of other ideologies correspond to real human desires and
are built into the modern experience, the crucial question for Mosse is
not how to abolish and dismantle these structures, but how to humanize
them. The challenge for him is to maintain the values of Enlightenment-
Bildung—of autonomy, reason, tolerance, and the free play of mind and
human action—in a world of conformity, mass politics, and mass brutal-
ization. Mosse does not accept total solutions. His is rather a meliorating
response based always on the compassionate, personalizing mode.
It is no accident that among the values he most admires in both the
Enlightenment and German Jewish heritage is that of friendship, the at-
tempt at all times to personalize relationships.62 This is deeply embodied
both in his work and in his caring, scintillating person. The task he sets
before us is to reassert the positive potentials within these forms of com-
munity, to make us aware of the dangers inherent in conformity and
homogenization, and to alert us to the primacy of humanization and sol-
idarity over domination and superiority. His is truly a personal and his-
torical sensibility for all seasons.
Fifteen
On Saul Friedlander
There are few arenas of Western cultural and intellectual life where the
ethical, interpretive, and political stakes are more charged than in the on-
going analyses and debates concerning the nature and implications of Na-
zism and the Holocaust. In this powerfully contested field of Shoah histo-
riography and commemoration, Saul Friedlander constitutes a distinctive,
always stylish, and sophisticated presence, a peculiarly authoritative cus-
todial voice.1 It is this sense of protective custodianship, the eloquent as-
sertion and defense of the historical and moral centrality, as well as the
ultimate inexplicability, of the Holocaust that animates Friedlander’s proj-
ect and provides unity to his work. At the same time, it is the haunting
awareness of the fragility of this centrality that informs his sensitivity to,
identification of, and polemic with those multiple forces constantly op-
erating to undermine, elide, or even eradicate its normative standing.
This sensitivity and authority derives from a unique combination of
personal and intellectual qualities and biographical circumstances. That
this event has indelibly shaped his life, demanding ever-greater reflection
and moral and intellectual probity, will be clear to anyone familiar with
Friedlander’s poignant, elegantly written 1979 memoir When Memory
Comes.2 There he portrays, in fragmented form and with almost unbear-
able restraint, his tale of survival under the Nazis and its effects on his
dismembered life:3 the pain of a Czech Jewish child “abandoned” by par-
ents intent on saving his life by placing him in French Catholic hands for
care; the nature of terror and its regressive effects (“and every morning I
was sopping wet with urine when I woke up”); the confusion of identity
and the consolatory move to Catholicism (in devotion to the Virgin “I
rediscovered something of the presence of a mother”); the secret shame
(“of having passed over to the compact, invincible majority, of no longer
belonging to the camp of the persecuted but, potentially at least, to that
of the persecutors”); learning from a compassionate priest of his parents’
death and of Auschwitz (“to hear him speak of the lot of the Jews with
so much emotion and respect must have been an important encourage-
171
ment for me”); the rediscovery of his Jewishness (with its immediate, al-
beit confused, “sensation of absolute loyalty”) and the ongoing complexi-
ties inherent in the move from Pavel to Sha’ul, from Paul to Saul.4
For all that, Friedlander is seldom associated with those—like Elie
Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Jean Amery—whose fame revolves almost exclu-
sively around the questions and problematics of survivorship.5 He some-
what self-deprecatingly describes his choice of career—“to adopt the gaze
of the historian”—as a “way out for me to attach myself to the necessary
order, the inescapable simplification forced upon one by the passage of
time. . . .” 6 Yet his accomplishment rests upon a rare sublimative capacity
to both integrate and yet surmount the fact of his personal experience
into subtle historical and cultural scholarship. He is alert as few others
are to the nuances separating and joining the personal and the objective
realms, childhood memory (“For me . . . Hitler’s Reich is always summed
up, in one first instant, by two motionless sentinels: not faces but two
helmets”), dispassionate history, and both the tactile-experiential (“The
smell of their leather overcoats!”) and analytic dimensions.7 Indeed, these
sensitivities have helped to define his role within the culture: as a kind of
seismometer consistently identifying and opening for discussion emergent
interpretive questions and meta-issues surrounding the historiography of
the Holocaust.
I would suggest then that the distinctiveness of Saul Friedlander’s work
lies in the close monitoring of changing cultural and political currents and
the rigorous examination of their moral, philosophical, and psychological
implications for the representation of the Shoah within Western ethical
and intellectual discourse.8 This does not mean, of course, that he has
neglected the craft of regular narrative history.9 His first book, a revised
version of his dissertation published in 1963, was a closely documented
study of Nazi policies toward and perceptions of the United States.10 As
the reviewer in The Christian Science Monitor stressed, Friedlander
“practices the self-effacing zeal of the scholar in letting the facts and doc-
uments speak for themselves . . . All is related carefully and dispassion-
ately. Perhaps the most eloquent tribute one can pay to the author is that
unless the reader were told, he would never guess from the book that Saul
Friedlander’s father and mother were caught by the Nazis in 1942 and
killed in Auschwitz.” 11
Indeed, in his second book on Pius XII and the Third Reich, tellingly
subtitled, A Documentation, Friedlander insists that in the face of bewil-
deringly opposed positions regarding the relationship of the Catholic
Church to the Nazis, the only possibility of honest investigation was “to
adhere as far as possible, to the documents.” After a thorough examina-
tion of the available evidence, Friedlander concluded with positivistic cau-
On Saul Friedlander 173
tion that: “At the end of this study, which claims to be nothing more than
an analysis of documents, I cannot make any definite answer to the ques-
tions raised by the wartime policies of the Holy See toward the Third
Reich because I only have incomplete documents at my disposal.” 12 For
all that, the thrust of the work is painfully—if implicitly—accusatory.13
It pointedly noted the continuing predilection of the Pope for the Ger-
mans even when he was aware of the deadly nature of the Hitler regime—
and raised a moral issue always central to Friedlander’s concern: how by
the end of 1943 could the Church (even given its anti-Bolshevist impulses)
continue to wish for victorious resistance in the East “and therefore seem-
ingly accepted by implication the maintenance, however temporary, of the
Nazi extermination machine?” 14
There was only one clue in the book that pointed to Friedlander’s per-
sonal odyssey—the telling dedication: To the Memory of My Parents
Killed at Auschwitz. Only a retrospective reading of the work informed
by knowledge of Friedlander’s own saving engagement with Catholicism
enables one to grasp the pain and poignancy, the caution and restraint,
indeed, the ongoing desire for some kind of future redeeming explana-
tion: “The historian, while noting the lacunae, is reduced to the hope that
the essential documents he lacks, and particularly the documents of the
Vatican archives, soon will be published so that the events and personages
can be brought into proper perspective.” 15
It is, however, less for his conventional historical work that Friedlander
is well known. He has always been particularly alert to the accompanying
moral and psychological complexities that accompanied the extermi-
nations, a sensitivity whose origins may well lie in the complexities of
his own personal experience. It is especially telling today that, as early
as 1967, Friedlander chose a quite “extra-ordinary” German, Kurt Ger-
stein, as the subject of his only biographical study—a “brutally deadpan
historical essay,” as one reviewer put it16 —of what he termed “the am-
biguity of good.” 17 In a rare act of moral conscience and heroic anti-
conformity, Gerstein joined the SS in order to try to impede and inform
the world of the “Final Solution.” The story, as Friedlander relates it, is
rent with paradoxes and tragic ambiguities: Gerstein shipped more liquid
prussic acid than he was able to destroy; he risked his life informing all
and sundry about the exterminations but his warnings were ignored; in-
stead of being celebrated as a hero in 1945 he was incarcerated by the
French and committed suicide; and in his posthumous Tübingen trial in
1950, the court acknowledged his actions and exonerated him from crim-
inality but condemned him for his ineffectuality, and labeled him as
“tainted.”
Gerstein, Friedlander concluded, was condemned
. . . in effect, for the uselessness of his efforts . . . punished, in a way, for

not having behaved like the great majority of “good” Germans and waited
quietly until all the Jews were dead; paradoxically, the “innocence” of such
Germans is contrasted with the “guilt” of a man who was obliged in some
degree to accommodate to the crime in order to resist it. This paradox is
inherent in any opposition carried on from within against a system such
as Nazism, to the extent that it enforces participation in its crimes as a
condition of being able to act against them. Under totalitarianism, right
must at times seem indistinguishable from wrong, good from evil, the re-
sister from the executioner . . . what lends Gerstein’s tragic fate its unique
character and its full magnitude is the complete passivity of the “others.”
Had there been in Germany thousands or even hundreds of Gersteins . . .
then hundreds of thousands of victims undoubtedly would have been
saved by these same “official” accomplices of the regime. If these things
had happened, all of these Gersteins would have been acknowledged
heroes.18
In effect, until this piece, Friedlander’s historical writings had taken on

issues that in some way or another related to the question of the Nazi
extermination of the Jews but had not yet quite touched its causal core:
the issue of perpetrator motivation. Throughout, he has stressed that the
ultimate singularity of the event lay in its fundamentally transgressive and
taboo-breaking nature, in the fact that those who embarked upon and
implemented this project went beyond all thinkable limits. Quoting from
Hannah Arendt to the effect that the Nazis tried to “determine who
should and who should not inhabit the world,” Friedlander comments
that this
is something no other regime, whatever its criminality, has attempted to

do. In that sense, the Nazi regime attained what is, in my view, some sort
of theoretical outer limit: one may envision an even larger number of vic-
tims and a technologically more efficient way of killing, but once a regime
decides that groups, whatever the criteria may be, should be annihilated
there and then and never be allowed to live on Earth, the ultimate has
been achieved. This limit, from my perspective, was reached only once in
modern history: by the Nazis. It goes without saying that one may try to
compare Nazi annihilations to other annihilationist policies, that one may
look for any number of comparable elements; all this does not exclude the
identification of some differences. The aspect just mentioned is what gives
the Nazi regime its specificity.19
For Friedlander, such murderous extremity renders “conventional” his-

tories and methodologies unable to grasp the deep structures and motiva-
tions of the event. Thus in the 1970s, when such theories were more or
less in vogue,20 Friedlander was powerfully drawn to psychoanalysis and
psychohistory as the proper means of addressing and answering these

questions. The fruits of this approach are to be found in the (never trans-
lated) French work, Nazi Anti-Semitism: History of a Collective Psycho-
sis.21 The burden of his thesis was that Hitler and his genocidal followers
shared a collective unconscious fantasy: the Jews constituted a germ and
thus had to be eradicated.
It was this fantasy, Friedlander argued, that led to a behavior of identi-
fication and purification (similar to the structure of many individual ob-
sessions) that would take the ultimate form of the physical extermination
of the Jews. We need not pause too long to point out the by now familiar
difficulties inherent in psychohistory in general and of the Nazi genocide
in particular22 —the entirely speculative nature of the inferences con-
cerning the content and dynamics of the unconscious not only of dead
individuals but of entire groups23 —because Friedlander himself very soon
realized their shortcomings24 and, with a candor rare among scholars,
later wrote regarding the deficiencies of psychohistory: “My own study
of Nazi anti-Semitism poses the same problems.” 25
Though psychohistory was quietly abandoned, Friedlander neverthe-
less continues to insist upon “an independent psychological residue” as
the appropriate level of explanation (unavailable to most conventional
approaches), a crucial component for understanding the unprecedented
nature of the exterminations. Moreover, he continues to chide historians
for regarding the psychological dimension as “a kind of riddle” which
they then subsume under—and reduce to—other explanatory categories
such as ideological motives or institutional dynamics.26 His writings
thus continue to be steeped in an illuminating psychological sensibility.
Most recently, on the basis of his reading of Himmler’s famous speech to
high-ranking SS officers in Posen on 4 October 1943, Friedlander has in-
voked the notion of Rausch, a kind of intoxication, as the psychological
clue behind the radically transgressive, morality-defying behavior of the
perpetrators:
Could one of the components of Rausch itself, as far as killing and exter-
minations of others are concerned, not be the effect of a growing elation
stemming from repetition, from the ever-larger numbers of the killed
others? . . . the perpetrators do not appear anymore as bureaucratic
automata, but rather as beings seized by a compelling lust for killing
on an enormous scale, driven by some kind of extraordinary elation in
repeating the killing of ever-huger masses of people.27
But theorizing about the inner motivations of the perpetrators—a nec-

essarily speculative area28 —does not take up the bulk of Friedlander’s
present psychological interests. His focus has shifted from the subjects of
history to those who perforce must commemorate, culturally re-imagine,

and write it. Those who come after, he insists, will necessarily be encircled
within a structure of “trauma and “transference.” The insights thus gar-
nered, it seems to me, are both less speculative and immensely fruitful
and, indeed, applied not only to the work of other researchers in the field
but also to his own writings. “The extreme character of the events and
the indeterminacy surrounding their historical significance create even for
the professional historian a field of projections, of unconscious shapings
and reshapings, of an authentic transferential situation.” 29 All approaches
to this subject, Friedlander insists, possess a built-in subjective dimension,
and are at least in part existentially and transferentially determined.
These kinds of insights formed an integral part of the dazzling corre-
spondence Friedlander conducted with the German historian, Martin
Broszat. In this, perhaps the exemplary document of a tough, entirely
candid, post-Shoah German Jewish dialogue (of which more later), there
arose the question of bias entailed in the respective “German” and “Jew-
ish” national and scholarly representations of the Holocaust. As Fried-
lander put it there: “This issue . . . has not been openly dealt with up to
now and it is important for all that it be brought to the surface and clari-
fied.” 30 Broszat had argued that, given its victim status and background,
“Jewish” historiography and memory must perforce be “mournful and
accusatory . . . a mythical form of remembrance” that had little to do
with the rational, scholarly, “scientific” enterprise.31 It is interesting that
in his reply Friedlander did not point out the dubiousness of relating to
scholarship in terms of its national background, as “German” or “Jew-
ish.” Instead, while accepting the likelihood of some Jewish bias, he
generalized his transferential insight. “Wouldn’t you agree,” he pointedly
asked Broszat, “that this German context creates as many problems in
the approach to the Nazi era as it does, differently, for the victims? . . . If
we see things from your perspective, why, in your opinion, would histori-
ans belonging to the group of the perpetrators be able to distance them-
selves from their past, whereas those belonging to the group of the victims
would not?” 32 “For us,” he concluded, “a kind of purely scientific dis-
tancing from the past, that is, a passage from the realm of knowledge
strongly influenced by personal memory to that of some kind of ‘detached
history’, remains, in my opinion, a psychological and epistemological
illusion.” 33
Over the years, Friedlander has become a master of the manifold psy-
chological ploys and techniques by which scholarly narratives and collec-
tive memory (always carefully differentiated into its victim, perpetrator,
and other components) seeks to selectively confront—or evade—this es-
sentially “unmastered”(and perhaps unmasterable) past.34 He has identi-
fied and analyzed the diverse currents within both “high” and “low” cul-
ture that in some usually unrecognized way tend to abuse, trivialize,
undermine, or, to use a ubiquitous term in his lexicon, “neutralize” the
scandalous centrality of Nazism and its atrocities.
In his most famous book-length essay on developments within popular
culture, on “Kitsch and Death,” Friedlander charted the signs of what
he took to be not forgetfulness but rather an essential transvaluation of
the memory of National Socialism: “At the end of the war, Nazism was the
damned part of Western civilization, the symbol of evil. Everything the
Nazis had done was condemned, whatever they touched defiled; a seem-
ingly indelible stain darkened the German past . . . . By the end of the
Sixties, however, the Nazi image in the West had begun to change.” In an
exercise of decoding Friedlander set out out to “understand the logic of
this transformation, this reelaboration.” 35 Not surprisingly, he empha-
sized that the key to grasping the new discourse lay in the “autonomous
psychological dimension.” 36 The attraction to Nazism not only in the past
but in its present reflections “lay less in any explicit ideology than in the
power of emotions, images and phantasms.” 37 What attracted contempo-
raries to the new discourse, with its juxtaposition as well as ultimate fu-
sion of kitsch and death,38 Friedlander argued, was important not only in
itself (as an expression both of continued fears and mute yearnings) but
because its profound logic revealed the logic of National Socialism, the
grip Nazism had exerted in its own day: “a deep structure based on the
coexistence of the adoration of power with a dream of final explosion—
the annulment of all power . . . a particular kind of bondage nourished
by the simultaneous desires for absolute submission and total freedom.” 39
For Friedlander the new discourse replicated precisely those elements
that had formed the basis of attraction to Nazism itself and in so doing
crossed a vital barrier of post-Nazi Western sensibility: “Attention has
gradually shifted from the reevocation of Nazism as such, from the hor-
ror and pain—even if muted by time and transformed into subdued grief
and endless meditation—to voluptuous anguish and ravishing images,
images one would like to see going on forever. It . . . is tuned to the
wrong key. . . . Some kind of limit has been overstepped and uneasiness
appears.” 40
It is, indeed, this very uneasiness that over the years has informed
Friedlander’s wide-ranging watch over cultural developments (“the mas-
sive change,” as he puts it, “in the production of the imaginary in Western
societies”) and the ways in which this has affected emergent representa-
tions of Nazism and the Holocaust.41 Whether applied to general inter-
pretive models of National Socialism, the functionalist-intentionalist con-
troversy, the infamous Historikerstreit of the 1980s, the debate over the
ramifications of the historicization of National Socialism, or the chal-

lenge of postmodernism to historical narrative, Friedlander has always
been at the forefront, examining their assumptions and identifying the
challenges they pose to the normative notion of Nazism as the trans-
gressive absolute, Auschwitz as “the indelible reference point of the West-
ern imagination.” 42
It is this absolute nature of the exterminations, the singularity of the
total drive against the Jews, that for Friedlander has consistently consti-
tuted the moral and historical bedrock, a datum which, as he put it in
1976, “makes it impossible to integrate . . . not only within the general
framework of Nazi persecutions, but also within the wider aspects of
contemporary ideological-political behaviour such as fascism, totalitar-
ianism, economic exploitation and so forth.” 43 The validity of the main
global interpretations of National Socialism is undermined, according to
Friedlander, precisely in relationship to Nazi anti-Semitism and Nazi poli-
cies against the Jews, by their inability to incorporate the singularity of
the exterminations within their overall explanatory schemes.
In the first place, Friedlander argues, the “functional” accounts that
they all invoke in order to explain anti-Semitism breaks down in the face
of genocide. How could the Jews be “functional” enemies when the drive
to utterly destroy them was secret, hidden as far as possible from the pub-
lic eye? “For the Nazis, the extermination of the Jews was a fundamental
urge and a sacred mission, not a means to other objectives.” Moreover, in
his differentiated analysis regarding levels of explanation and the distinc-
tion between means and motivations, Friedlander demonstrates both the
uses and, more critically, the limits of generalized “totalitarian” explana-
tions thus:
This is not to say that the Nazi action against the Jews did not utilize the
extreme forms of bureaucratic manipulation and domination which are
typical of totalitarian regimes—and on a more diffuse level—of modern
society in general. Nor does it mean that the complete disregard for hu-
man life and for the value of the individual, so often demonstrated in our
century, did not make the Nazi task easier. But these are circumstances
which facilitated the exterminatory drive: they do not explain its chief
characteristic—its absolutely uncompromising nature.44
As he tersely observed elsewhere “the totalitarian framework is the means

of destruction, not its basic explanation.” 45 Works like Hannah Arendt’s
on totalitarianism and (the early) Ernst Nolte on fascism, while “aware
of the centrality and the specificity of the Jewish question within Nazi
ideology and practice . . . nevertheless built a general theory which, in-
stead of attempting to explain this specificity, disregarded all its main as-
pects.” 46 Friedlander later sharpened the point thus: “the point is not that
such concepts as ‘totalitarianism’ or ‘fascism’ seem inadequate for the
contextualization of the ‘Final Solution’, but, obversely, that these con-
cepts fit much better the particular phenomenon they deal with, once the
‘Final Solution’ is not included.” 47
It is worthwhile noting that Friedlander has never resorted to simple
or monocausal explanations of perpetrator motivations; rather, he has
always carefully differentiated between the driving ideological, pathologi-
cal core, the implementing bureaucratic and field functionaries of murder,
and the outer rim of more or less complicit bystanders. Nor will one find
simplistic generalizations as to a murderous national culture or an anti-
Semitic character. Extreme racial anti-Semitism, Friedlander wrote well
over a decade ago, “certainly fed Hitler’s ideology and that of the ‘true
believer’s’ within the NSDAP, but it offered latent rather than active sup-
port to the policies against the Jews . . . as far as its prevalence among the
general population is concerned.” In his account no enthusiastic national
executionary drive can be found: “public opinion was not particularly
enthusiastic about the anti-Jewish persecutions.” 48 And in his new book
he writes that “the majority of Germans, although undoubtedly influ-
enced by various forms of traditional anti-Semitism and easily accepting
the segregation of the Jews, shied away from widespread violence against
them, urging neither their expulsion from the Reich nor their physical
annihilation.” 49
Indeed, the very relevance of historical continuity as an explanatory
factor undergoes critical scrutiny. While Friedlander would agree that
Nazi anti-Semitism is explicable only within some kind of German na-
tional purview, he specifically points to the difficulties that lie “in asses-
sing the significance of those roots, the relative importance of the völk-
isch ideology, and the place of anti-Semitic themes and attitudes within
German society, be it during the Wilhelmine period or under the Weimar
Republic.” To be sure, no general interpretation could afford not to in-
clude, in some way or another, the factor of national continuity, but “the
importance of that background is often difficult to assess.” 50 Most cru-
cially, Friedlander is critical even of those narratives that place anti-Jewish
impulses at its explanatory center. “The only global historical interpreta-
tion which seems to ‘fit’,” he writes, “is the most traditional one: the in-
cremental effect of an ever-more radical anti-Semitic factor. But even
those historians who still remain close to this view have to admit that
because of the very nature of Nazi anti-Semitism and the ‘Final Solution’,
‘the question of continuity becomes problematic.’” 51
Friedlander’s custodial insistence upon what constitutes the important
as opposed to the side issues has never been in doubt. This certainly in-
forms his leading role in the debates over “functionalist” interpretations

of Nazism and the Shoah that raged in the 1980s. These harshly severed
the ties between the intentional ideological impulses and the political
practice of the Nazis. It was not in the preordained ideological aims of
Hitler and the Third Reich, the exponents of functionalism held, that the
genesis and disposition of its genocidal policies were to be found but
rather but in its non-monolithic, polycratic structure, its structurally
built-in infighting with its struggle for power and resultant “cumulative
radicalism.”
The details of the intentionalist-functionalist debate are too well
known to require rehearsal here. At the time of this writing, a kind of
unspoken compromise, a sort of integration between the two, character-
izes most current approaches. Here we need simply note that Friedlander’s
“intentionalist” defense was, in the first place, characterized by a fair and
judicious analysis of the functionalist position. The functionalist analysis,
he wrote, fitted “better within the mainstream of modern historiography”
and its proponents could “claim, quite correctly, that their position im-
plies a much broader spread of responsibility for the crimes committed
than that recognized by the opposite position which considers Hitler as
the prime mover and the key authority.” Nevertheless, Friedlander has-
tened to spell out the moral and historiographical implications attendant
upon this interpretation: “The image it offers of Nazism is more ‘normal’,
easier to explain: any group can stumble haphazardly, step by step, into
the most extreme criminal behavior . . . functionalism confronts us, im-
plicitly, with Hannah Arendt’s thesis of the ‘banality of evil.’” Functional-
ism, too, thus assumed for Friedlander a neutralizing impulse, one that
overlooked or even denied “that it is Nazi anti-Semitism and the anti-
Jewish policies of the Third Reich that gave Nazism an essential part of
its sui generis character.” 52
Friedlander’s sensitivity to these kinds of elisions was very much in evi-
dence in his prominent role in, and analyses of, the by now infamous
Historikerstreit of the 1980s. There is no need to repeat here the nature
of the debate, the ways in which the work of historians like Andreas Hill-
gruber and, more notoriously, Ernst Nolte, seemed to mirror larger politi-
cal and cultural desires in Germany to somehow “normalize” German
identity by placing the Nazi past within more relative, comparative, and
easily empathic frameworks.53
While Friedlander acutely dissected the historiographical content and
biases of these works, his most distinctive contribution came from an
analysis of the implications entailed in this shift of perspective. Given the
historically unprecedented nature of the crimes, he argued, the ultimate
question—of concern to all approaches to National Socialism—was the
issue of responsibility. For all their differences, Friedlander noted, the tra-
ditional Sonderweg (the special path of German history) and “totalitar-
ian” narratives were “liberal” in nature, viewing Hitler, the Nazi party,
the SS, and its bureaucratic instruments as essentially responsible, while
the bystanders (most of German society) had at least some partial knowl-
edge of crimes committed and were thus guilty of sustained indifference
and passivity. He wrote,
In terms of self-perception within contemporary West German society,

this narrative implies the recognition of a basic historical responsibility
both anchored in the pre-Hitler past and having found its expression in
the events which occurred during the Third Reich. The overall background
for the events may well be found in various trends in European history,
but the immediate supporting system is firmly rooted in German soil. After
the war, this representation shaped official German memory, as well as
Western memory in general.54
Moreover, he argued, even if the structuralist-functionalist account

ended up “with a somewhat paradoxical image of mass murder of a to-
tally unprecedented kind being enacted without any clear representation
of a primary locus of responsibility,” like the older liberal narratives it was
still very much concerned with the issue. All focused “on the fundamental
responsibility of the perpetrators as a German group within a system, the
roots of which were to be found within German society.” Whatever had
divided the older approaches, Friedlander acutely noted, “some kind of
implicit moral stand suffused the representation of the past and the crimi-
nality of the system was perceived from the viewpoint of the victims.” 55
To be sure, like the Historikerstreit historians, the classical “totalitar-
ian” approach employed an essentially comparative method but it did
not, Friedlander insisted, entail relativization because, as he correctly
identified its informing tacit assumption, it “ultimately maintained the
Nazi case as the nec plus ultra, in relation to which the other crimes were
measured.” All the traditional approaches had—at least implicitly—set
the criminal dimensions at center stage. That did not mean that their his-
tory was written from the known outcome backwards. Nevertheless, the
authors as well as their readers agreed that “the sense of those twelve
years was to be found in its catastrophic dimension.” 56 All, explicitly or
implicitly, distanced themselves from the object of study and there was
no hint of relativizing Nazi crimes in any way. A moral consensus had
obtained.
Now, Friedlander argued, conservative German historians like Nolte,
Hillgruber, and Joachim Fest had fundamentally shifted the established
forms of reference and questioned “the specificity of Nazi crimes in order,
essentially, to contextualize the problem of historical responsibility and

thereby to solve the issue of German identity within a traditional national
mode.” 57 In Nolte’s ascription of the Holocaust to “a reaction born out
of the anxiety of the annihilating consequences of the Russian revolu-
tion,” the “traditional perpetrator of the early narratives becomes a po-
tential victim” and “the source of all evil is placed outside of the tradi-
tional framework for the representation of historical responsibility.” 58
Friedlander explicitly distinguished the challenge of historicization
from the work of the above historians. Still, he argued, by its emphases
on the importance of social transformations and on the continuities of
daily life, it “challenges the traditional view of the Nazi epoch which
mainly focuses, in the last instance, on the political sphere and on its
criminal dimension.” It seeks, he wrote in his earliest article on the sub-
ject, to cancel
the distance from the object of study which historians imposed upon them-
selves, quite naturally, when studying Nazism; it aims at reinserting the
Nazi phenomenon into normal historical narrative, that is, at relativizing
what still makes it appear as singular . . . The main thrust of the argu-
ments for historicization is . . . to do away with the black-and-white pic-
ture of the Nazi era . . . by focusing on the bravery of the Wehrmacht on
the Eastern front instead of the murderous core of the system, by follow-
ing diverse social processes rather than the already “well-known” deci-
sions taken in Berlin, there is the possibility that the core be left empty
and relegated to the area of antiquated questions, too obsessively studied
in the past. The new focus substantially changes the landscape and some-
thing—possibly the essential—becomes blurred.59
The champions of historicization presented their revision as if they

were transcending the traditional, moralistic, black and white, partly
mythical historiography of National Socialism and stepping into the
domain of a supposed “objective” or “scientific” history. But this, Fried-
lander wrote, was naive. In effect, these historians were merely proposing
an alternative narrative, dominated by a different agenda. The contending
views could not be settled in historiographical terms, for they were deter-
mined by sets of a priori values.
Friedlander identified Martin Broszat as the main scholarly exemplar
of this impulse and it was, indeed, in the wake of the Historikerstreit and
Broszat’s “A Plea for the Historicization of National Socialism,” that their
quite extraordinary correspondence took place.60 It is a document that
stands alone in the annals of the post-Shoah German Jewish dialogue.
Most have either been sycophantic or, like the strained and defensive let-
ters between Hermann Broch and Volkmar von Zuehlsdorff in the imme-
diate post-war years, mutually uncomprehending, apologetic, and accusa-
tory. The remarkable and prolonged exchange of views between Karl
Jaspers and Hannah Arendt was not marred by such a lack of mutual
empathy—as an early attempt to try to penetrate the depths of the Nazi
evil it has no peer—but it was perhaps their very closeness, the proximity
of views, that precluded it from having the productive tensions that illu-
minate the Broszat-Friedlander correspondence.61 As Friedlander put it
when the dialogue came to an end: “The inner tension, which, to various
degrees, accompanied our exchange of letters, may have been, among
other things, the expression of a fundamental commitment to the values
which have prompted both of us to devote our entire professional lives to
the study of the Nazi epoch. This tension does not stem from a divergence
in basic values, but from differences in perspectives which, nevertheless,
appear to us to be of major importance.” 62
The correspondence is characterized by a self-conscious understanding
of the special, peculiarly charged nature of their post-Shoah conversation.
Friedlander articulated it thus: “The fundamental difficulty of such a dia-
logue remains . . . and is compounded by the layers of ritualized behavior
and gross interests which cover it. . . . Some measure of openness belongs
to our ‘experiment’ and this openness, as you yourself noted, is the only
possible basis for a true German-Jewish dialogue.” 63 Refreshingly shorn
of apologetics and with striking sophisticated candor, these two masters
took up vital issues that until then had been submerged, outlawed as too
sensitive for cross-national academic dialogue.
The letters dealt with numerous issues but at their animating center
stood the question of the place of Auschwitz. Broszat explicitly acknowl-
edged its crucial importance within the Western moral economy. “A point
is reached in confronting the singular event of Auschwitz,” he wrote,
“where scientific comprehensibility and explicability doubtless are far
outstripped by the sheer epochal significance of the event.” But he also
pointed out the historiographical danger that derived from this centrality,
“an attempt to unfurl the entire history of the Third Reich in reverse fash-
ion backwards starting from Auschwitz, instead of unfolding its develop-
ment in a forward direction, in keeping with historical methodology.”
Moreover, he noted, the ease of the liquidations was made possible pre-
cisely because it was not in the limelight of events, because it was able to
be concealed and kept quiet:
It is evident that the role of Auschwitz in the original historical context of

action is one that is significantly different from its subsequent importance
in terms of later historical perspective. The German historian too will cer-
tainly accept that Auschwitz—due to its singular significance—functions
in retrospection as the central event of the Nazi period. Yet qua scientist
and scholar, he cannot readily accept that Auschwitz also be made, after
the fact, into the cardinal point, the hinge on which the entire factual com-
plex of historical events of the Nazi period turns. He cannot simply accept
without further ado that this entire complex of history be moved into the
shadow of Auschwitz— yes, that Auschwitz even be made into the deci-
sive measuring-rod for the historical perception of this period.64
Friedlander has never doubted that Auschwitz should indeed be made

the measuring-rod of the period and his answers in this respect were
tuned to that ongoing sensitivity:
I agree with you that the historian, as historian, cannot consider the Nazi
era from its catastrophic end only . . . we have to start at the beginning
and follow the manifold paths as they present themselves, including nu-
merous developments within German society which had little to do with
Auschwitz, and this throughout the history of the era. But the historian
knows the end . . . This knowledge should not hamper the exploration of
all the possible avenues and interpretations, but it compels the historian
to choose the central elements around which his unfolding narrative is
implicitly built. In short, we come back to the problem of focus.65
Moreover, Friedlander insisted that “although the destruction of the

Jews may have been a minor point in the perceptions and policies of the
Allies during the war, it seems, more and more, that it loomed as a hidden
but perceived fact in many German minds, during the war itself . . . in-
deed, normal life with the knowledge of ongoing massive crimes commit-
ted by one’s own nation and one’s own society is not so normal after
all. . . .” 66 In his reply Broszat hastened to point out that his call for his-
toricization of National Socialism was “a plea for normalization of the
method, not of the evaluation.” 67
Friedlander later reflected “that the ultimate significance of [Broszat’s]
plea and of the debates that followed was, in the most general sense,
about memory itself.” 68 Indeed, a great deal of Friedlander’s personal and
professional life has been concerned with analyzing its mediated, com-
plex dynamics.69 He is a master of the commemorative inscriptions and
the ways in which the “memory” of National Socialism continues to be
molded and refashioned according to changing modes of collective and
personal self-understanding, and mobilized and manipulated by divergent
political interests and psychological needs.70 No one has more acutely
mapped the major strategies of its appropriation and canonization or the
guiles and techniques of its repression, neutralization, and displacement.
Yet, given his sense of the complexities, his thought is torn between
documenting National Socialism’s irrepressible role “as a past that will
not go away” and an anxiety that it will disappear from viable memory.
There is an internal tension between his fear that with the passing of
living personal memories the event will fade into a kind of ritualized ob-
livion, and the conviction that something “in the nature of the events
themselves gives it some of its apparent irreducibility and therefore of
its persistence.” 71 He has chronicled the well-nigh universal recognition
of Nazism as the great transgressive moment of Western civilization, yet
noted that the catastrophe “has not been incorporated into any compel-
ling framework of meaning in public consciousness.” 72
Friedlander is best in dissecting the ways in which this limit-event oper-
ates within various national moral economies, political ideologies, and
collective identities.73 Of course, this most critically applies to German
and Jewish memory where, as Friedlander puts it, “the representation of
this past has a present dimension of major importance.” 74 While perhaps
best known for his watchful eye over the developing gyrations of “perpe-
trator” memory (“For the last forty years, Germans belonging to at least
two generations have been caught between the impossibility of remember-
ing and the impossibility of forgetting”),75 Friedlander has also cast a
watchful eye over modes of Israeli commemoration.76 He has written in-
sightfully on the ideologically interested nature of Shoah inscriptions and
its uses and abuses within Israeli society.77 He has analyzed its “canonic”
functions (the political appropriation of the Holocaust as a mobilizing,
justifying myth bolstering an ultra-nationalist mystique) as well as its
“subversive” uses (its employment as a “comparative” tool to criticize
Israeli occupation policies). He has observed the close ties between the
state of war and the centrality of the Shoah within national narration. He
has strongly stated that it would be tragic if “the memory of catastrophes
and particularly of the Holocaust will be so deeply ingrained in Jewish
collective consciousness as to become an impediment to the progress to-
ward peace.” 78 Yet, perhaps because of his sense of national identification
(complex and ironic though it may be) and an awareness that, regardless
of its manipulations and abuses, these are nevertheless narratives of the
victims, he has always tended to keep such critical remarks rather low-
keyed, and his analytic attention and acuity focused elsewhere.
It will come as no surprise to learn that Friedlander has written far
more intensively and anxiously about the question of German memory,
as we already have had occasion to see. The reason for this is clear: “The
representation of the Nazi epoch cannot be considered as already beyond
the pale of relevant historical consciousness. It remains an imperative
knowledge not only for its own sake or for understanding the scope of
criminal human potentialities, but more directly in terms of present-day

political responsibility.” 79
For all that, the most illuminating aspect of his ruminations on public
memory and collective identity are those concerned with the subtle in-
terdependencies between “perpetrators” and “victims”: “On a symbolic
level . . . one may speak of a Jewish memory of Auschwitz and of a Ger-
man one. Although the incompatibility between these two memories may
be growing, they are helplessly interwoven in what has been called a ‘neg-
ative symbiosis’. . . Any re-elaboration of one memory directly impinges
on the other; any neutralization casts an overall shadow of oblivion. Nei-
ther Jews nor Germans can relate to their own memory without relating
to the other’s as well.” 80 Friedlander is, of course, aware that this model
is too simplistic and that no monolithic “German” or “Jewish” collective
memory can be unequivocally located; differentiations and nuances are
to be found on and between both sides. Still, was not this kind of tension
and dynamic exemplified in the exchange with Broszat and does it not,
to some degree or another, reverberate each time the fragile cultural, polit-
ical, economic, and historiographical relationship between the two groups
is called into question?
“Memory” is, of course, expressed in diverging and competing modes
of representation and historical narration, and, given Friedlander’s sensi-
tivities and priorities, it should come as no great surprise that it was he
who was instrumental in bringing to the fore and raising for discussion
the manifold ways in which postmodernism81 has affected discussion con-
cerning the “Final Solution.” 82 Postmodernism, with its rejection, as
Friedlander puts it, “of the possibility of identifying some stable reality
or truth beyond the constant polysemy and self-referentiality of linguistic
constructs challenges the need to establish the truth and realities of the
Holocaust.” 83 He demonstrates how this decidedly ironic epistemological
sensibility and its accompanying “disconnection between moral judge-
ment, aesthetic norms, and intellectual analysis” tends to undermine
what he tellingly describes as the natural “monumental-didactic” narra-
tive structure of the prevalent paradigm and erodes the normative moral
and symbolic status of Nazism within the culture.84 He takes issue with
a postmodernist positing of “reality” as essentially embodied in (if not
entirely created by) narrative emplotments and rhetorical modes and
choices. “It is,” he argues, “the reality and significance of modern catas-
trophes that generate the search for a new voice and not the use of a
specific voice which constructs the significance of these catastrophes.” 85
Yet if for Friedlander postmodernism problematizes the grounds of
Holocaust historiography, it also renders it more critically self-conscious
and, indeed, provides some subtle modes for its expansion and refine-
ment. He notes some of its possible benefits and advantages thus: “the
very openness of postmodernism to what cannot yet be formulated in
decisive statements, but merely sensed, directly relates to whoever consid-
ers that even the most precise historical renditions of the Shoah contain
an opaqueness at the core which confronts traditional historical narra-
tive.” 86 We should not be blind, then, to a certain affinity, an implicit sym-
pathy, which Friedlander’s stance evinces toward this approach. This is
so because various aspects of this sensibility reinforce Friedlander’s con-
tinuing insistence upon the limits of understanding, “the unease in in-
terpretation,” 87 the ultimate inaccessibility and inexplicability of this
transgressive event. This emphasis on the essential opacity of the “Final
Solution” demands critical attention for it stands at the core of much of
his work.
Few people have written more suggestively or provided such rich in-
sights into the structure of Nazism as Friedlander. Yet, unlike, for ex-
ample, Raul Hilberg’s “process and machinery of destruction,” Hannah
Arendt’s “banality of evil,” Christopher Browning’s “ordinary men,” or
even Daniel Goldhagen’s “ordinary Germans,” he offers no unifying ex-
planatory scheme nor, indeed, would he want his work to be subsumed
into any general theoretical framework. This is a principled resistance. As
we have seen, one of the motivating aspects of his thinking has been to
demonstrate the ways in which the radical singularity of the event makes
it impossible to persuasively integrate it into any global historiographical
interpretation and, thus, render it less amenable to conventional explana-
tion. The unknown, he writes, “is not being assimilated by the known;
the unprecedented, although constantly drawing upon precedent motifs
and images, is not transformed into new understanding; the imaginative
leap has only partly succeeded; the mind is not at rest.” 88
It is true that Friedlander often claims that the extrication of a “ratio-
nal historiography” is “ever necessary.” He has written: “The extermina-
tion of the Jews of Europe is as accessible to both representation and
interpretation as any other historical event.” 89 Already in 1976, he was
quite aware that the positing of a radical singularity laid it open to
charges that it was “. . . an anomaly of history which may have the utmost
significance on a theological or even philosophical level, but falls outside
the scope of any historical interpretation. By trying to escape the banali-
zation of the Holocaust through the use of inadequate generalizations or
outright evasions, do we not fall into the other extreme, that of making
the Holocaust an event so unique in human history that we cannot give
it any signification whatsoever?” His answer, then, was that if the Shoah
resisted these explanatory and contextual generalizations, it was “never-

theless the result of cumulative historical trends which, can, in part at
least, be identified and explained.” 90
Of late—in ways that conform closely to a postmodernist sensibility
and which satisfies the issues of historicization debated with Martin Bros-
zat—he has even programmatically set out the ground rules for an im-
proved, more sensitive historical narrative in which a certain critical self-
awareness remains cardinal and in which the voice of the commentator is
explicitly present:
The commentary should disrupt the facile linear progression of the narra-
tion, introduce alternative interpretations, question any partial conclu-
sion, withstand the need for closure. Because of the necessity of some
form of narrative sequence . . . such commentary may introduce splintered
or constantly recurring refractions of a traumatic past by using any num-
ber of vantage points. The dimension added by the commentary may
allow for an integration of the so-called mythic memory of the victims
within the overall representation of this past without its becoming an ob-
stacle to rational historiography. For instance, whereas the historical narra-
tive may have to stress the ordinary aspects of everyday life during most of
the twelve years of the Nazi epoch, the “voice-over” of the victims’ memo-
ries may puncture such normality, at least at the level of commentary.91
For all that, Friedlander’s most distinctive efforts have been expended
on demonstrating the difficulties, perhaps even the principled impossibili-
ties, of this “ever-elusive goal” of rational historiography.92 He goes so far
as to say that “even if new forms of historical narrative were to develop,
or new modes of representation, and even if literature and art were to
probe the past from unexpected vantage points, the opaqueness of some
‘deep memory’ would probably not be dispelled.” 93 For, as he repeatedly
insists, “we are dealing with an event which tests our traditional concep-
tual and representational categories, an ‘event at the limits.’” 94
In effect, Friedlander’s analyses of such opacity, the sources of this
ultimate un-integrability and inexplicability, are numerous, even over-
determined. The basis of incomprehension derives, in the first place, from
the nature of the event itself. For it broke “the most fundamental of all
taboos: the Nazi perpetration of systematic, prolonged extermination of
categories of human beings considered as non-human. Such behavior
causes instinctive repulsion at the level of the species as well as that of the
individual. The very disappearance of these psychological (or sociobio-
logical) barriers concerning the ‘scientific’ mass killing of other human
beings represents, it seems to me, the first and foremost issue for which
our usual categories of interpretation are insufficient.” 95
It is not only the event itself, but the protective neutralizing responses
to the event, that similarly reinforce and express the limits of understand-
ing. Fifteen years ago Friedlander wrote that
. . . systematic historical research, which uncovers the facts in their most

precise and most meticulous interconnection also protects us from the
past, thanks to the inevitable paralysis of language. That is the exorcism
and the involuntary evasion to which we are all subject and whose mecha-
nism has to be taken apart . . . In some ways the scholarly mind does not
allow an emotional reaction. It is blocked and immediately replaced by a
problem drawn from the text. . . . And paralysis of language aside, what is
the fundamental characteristic of this exorcism? To put the past back into
bearable dimensions, superimpose it upon the known and respected prog-
ress of human behavior, put it into the identifiable course of things, into
the unmysterious march of ordinary history, into the reassuring world of
the rules that are the basis of our society . . . There should be no misunder-
standing about what I am trying to say: The historian cannot work in any
other way, and historical studies have to be pursued along the accepted
lines. The events described are what is unusual, not the historian’s work.
We have reached the limits of our means of expression. Others we do not
possess.96
More recently, Friedlander has argued that the “historian can analyze
the phenomenon from the ‘outside’, but, in this case, his unease stems
from the incongruence between intellectual probing, and the blocking of
intuitive comprehension of events that happened more or less during his
or her lifetime, within his or her society.” 97 Our understanding of the
basic transgressive moving forces—such as the elation that animated the
perpetrators and which was created by the very dimensions of the kill-
ing—is simply blocked at the level of self-awareness.
Indeed, perhaps most compellingly and controversially, Friedlander ar-
gues that the unease, the exorcisms, neutralizations, and interpretive
rationalizations are not only post-facto responses but (as in the commit-
ment to secrecy) were built into the event, practiced by the Nazis them-
selves. “It is a neutralization in which we all take part and which . . . began
in a certain way at the heart of the Nazi phenomenon itself, even as the
extermination was at its height.” 98 In parallel fashion, our own “paral-
ysis of comprehension” is a kind of mirror of the inability of bystanders
and victims themselves to grasp what was transpiring.
I would suggest that Friedlander’s emphasis upon this meta-level, what
he calls the “undefined but clearly felt limits to interpretation,” the need
for “a sense of self-restraint about the available repertoire,” 99 derives less
from methodological or even historiographical concerns than from essen-
tially moral ones. Nothing disturbs him more than “the danger of break-
ing the barrier of the imagination that is Auschwitz.” 100 His insistence
upon radical singularity has entailed adopting a strategy of what can be
dubbed (in almost Adornian terms) as a kind of “negative incommensura-
bility,” a built-in resistance to meaning and lesson-drawing. He underlines
that there is nothing commensurable with the enormity of the event that
this past can teach us. Despite the many tomes seeking to do so, it does
not significantly instruct us about the nature of “industrial society” or
“modernity”: the “linkages are kept at such a level of generality that they
are irrelevant or the contradictions become insuperable.” 101 And while it
is easy to draw a universally valid significance from the Shoah, the “diffi-
culty appears when this statement is reversed. No universal lesson seems
to require reference to the Shoah to be fully comprehended.” 102
“Paradoxically,” Friedlander writes, the very exceptionality of the “Fi-
nal Solution” makes it “inaccessible to all attempts at a significant repre-
sentation and interpretation,” perhaps rendering it “fundamentally irrele-
vant for the history of humanity and the understanding of the ‘human
condition.’” 103 Again, paradoxically, this incapacity to yield meaning—a
judgment which Friedlander notes “applies also to my own work” 104 —
flows either from a “blankness” or from what he terms “an excess,” de-
fined approvingly in Lyotardian terms as “‘something [that] remains to
be phrased which is not, something which is not determined.’” 105 When
Friedlander quotes Maurice Blanchot to the effect that “working through”
consists of the effort “to keep watch over absent meaning,” he is, in effect,
defining a crucial part of his own project.106
Given these kinds of pronouncements and a repeated emphasis on the
opaque core of the matter, Friedlander’s custodianship has been viewed by
some critics as increasingly assuming the nature of a defensive “holding
operation,” an exercise in special pleading. As Martin Broszat put it in
their exchange:
I wonder whether your skepticism necessarily has to burden our discourse

with such a high degree of suspicion, which I can repeatedly sense behind
your comments and remarks. . . . Haven’t you yourself staked out such
definite positions in your suspicious distrust of possible tendencies toward
trivialization and minimization in dealing with the Nazi period in the
work of German historians . . . that you are no longer able to break free
from and abandon these positions, even here in this exchange of letters?
. . . haven’t you also erected a fence around yourself, one which only per-
mits you “some measure of openness”?107
For “bread-and-butter” historians, Friedlander’s utterances regarding

“absent meaning,” “opaqueness at the core,” and so on may well appear
rather vague, too allusive (if not outright elusive), almost mystificatory.
To be sure, Friedlander’s strictures on closure—consonant with postmod-

ernism’s suspicion of totalizing history—are unexceptionable, though
one would want to ask whether, in any area of historical inquiry charac-
terized by its dynamic nature, such closures ever actually occur. The
Shoah was indeed a radically new occurrence characterized by a lack of
comprehension and a stunned Begriffslosigkeit (lack of adequate con-
cepts). But novelty is not equivalent to inexplicability. The unprecedented
may simply require new and increasingly refined categories and tools of
understanding and should not necessarily be regarded as in principle inac-
cessible. There are many historians who simply will not accept that this ob-
ject of study must perforce remain “indeterminate, elusive, and opaque.” 108
Would it be unreasonable to argue that the “Final Solution” was a
secular, human event that occurred at a particular, identifiable time and
place and that—while always keeping the radical and unprecedented di-
mensions of the event clearly in mind—it should be equally amenable
to the rules and methods that govern the increasingly refined and self-
reflexive practice of historiography in general? To be sure, most historians
would agree that no event can ever be fully grasped from “within” or that
we can arrive at some form of “ultimate knowledge.” By and large, the
craft is animated by the conviction that comprehensibility is a finite,
changing, and plural state rather than a single, final one. “In one sense,”
Michael Marrus writes, “the Holocaust will forever be . . .‘unimagin-
able.’ Yet . . . much the same could be said, mutatis mutandis, about many
other things as well. . . . Historians are used to trampling over their fields
while suspending judgements on the fundamental issues that are ulti-
mately at stake. . . . We simply do the best we can, knowing that our ef-
forts are necessarily imperfect, incomplete and inadequate.” 109
Moreover, given the inevitable dynamic, the built-in shifts in historical
perspective that come naturally with time and changing contemporary
experience and the imperatives of the historical profession, in a matter as
complex, loaded, and dense as the Shoah, no theoretical or methodologi-
cal Orthodoxy, no holding operation, can possibly be expected to per-
tain.110 The matter will continue to be fluid and marked by a plurality of
approaches and perspectives even if Friedlander is correct to write darkly
that the sheer diversification, complexity, and multitude of studies of the
Nazi era “tends to erase the sharp outlines of certain central issues, be
they conceptual or ethical. Therefore, whether one wishes it or not, the
very momentum of historiography may serve to neutralize the past.” 111
One could argue against this position and claim that the problematization
of the past and the vital debates thus generated will keep the memory
most relevantly alive: “the surest engagement with memory,” James
Young has written, “lies in its perpetual irresolution.” 112 At any rate, de-
spite—or perhaps because of—its attendant difficulties, the very magni-

tude of Auschwitz has rendered inevitable a plethora of attempts at inter-
pretive historical comprehension. “After fifty years,” Arno Mayer writes,
“the question is no longer whether or not to reappraise and historicize
the Judeocide, but rather how to do so responsibly.” 113
Mayer’s own attempt to contextualize the “Final Solution” within a
larger global historical interpretation was, indeed, far from satisfactory.114
But, it seems to me, attempts of this kind do not necessarily, as Fried-
lander suggests in various places, have to be doomed in principle. Could
not one, for instance, persuasively relate it to the overall imperial vision
of the racial Nazi State with its grandiose bio-eugenic policies of mass
resettlement and enslavement, its interlinked measures combining philo-
regenerative “positive” programmes for the Volksgemeinschaft with a
series of increasingly radical measures against “abnormal” and “un-
wanted” elements? The mass sterilizations, the euthanasia program, and
the murder and persecutions of the Gypsies, the “asocials,” and the
homosexuals are only comprehensible within the informing framework
of such a bio-eugenic framework. They also informed the massive re-
population programs. Himmler’s Generalplan Ost envisaged shifting 31
million non-Germans across Eastern Europe not only in order to get rid
of such “inferior” peoples but also to facilitate the resettlement of Ger-
mans and Volksdeutsche.115 Indeed, in inextricable fashion, the murder-
ous impulses of Auschwitz arose within the context of an overall plan to
ethnically “purify,” reconstruct, and re-Germanize the surrounding upper
Silesian areas. Himmler viewed towns such as Auschwitz, Blachstadt, and
Saybusch as relics of medieval German colonization and sought to con-
vert these into model ecological, urban, and architectural centers.116
Many historians are currently arguing that it is within this informing
bio-eugenic context that the extermination of the Jews needs to be lo-
cated. To be sure, total extermination was reserved exclusively for the
Jews—and Friedlander is correct always to emphasize the specificity of
what he has recently called “redemptive” anti-Semitism, “this synthesis
of a murderous rage and an idealistic goal, shared by the Fuehrer and the
hard core of the party.” 117 “The criminal dimension,” he wrote in 1976,
“is certainly the same in every case of genocide, be the victims Armenians,
Jews or Tutsis; the attempt at total physical eradication may sometimes
be identical, but the motivations are quite different; in that sense, the Nazi
exterminatory drive against the Jew remains unmistakably singular.” 118
But placing this drive within a more global context and theory does not
necessarily weaken the claim; it may instead sharpen our understanding
and explain the major enabling preconditions. Thus the imperial bio-
eugenic framework may help to explain how such anti-Semitic impulses
were able to take on precisely the character upon which Friedlander in-
sists: its entirely novel, systematically genocidal form. In this view, killing
the Jews was not something separate from but triggered by, and the outer
edge of, this total, transgressive vision of racial community.
To be sure, Friedlander does write about, and is sensitive to, these over-
all brutalizing forces and the other victimizing programs of National So-
cialism. But he insists that they were in no way causally linked to the
“Final Solution.” Despite the fact that they were roughly simultaneous
and parallel developments, they were quite separate policies, character-
ized by “different origins and different aims.” 119 He does state that these
ideological trends reinforced each other, that “the separateness and com-
patibility of both the specific anti-Jewish and the general racial and eu-
genic trends were at the very center of the Nazi system.” 120 But this is a
point of view which is simply suggested and which is never quite inte-
grated into the fabric of his narrative. Friedlander’s commitment to the
totality and singularity of the drive against the Jews has resulted in a re-
fusal to locate it within such an informing bio-eugenic framework, a
framework that, while it contextualizes matters differently, in no way un-
dermines the special pathology directed against the Jews.121
Wulf Kansteiner has recently pitted Friedlander’s historiographic strat-
egy of “exceptionality” against the backdrop of what he sees as an oppo-
site, developing trend that regards Nazism and the Shoah as exemplifica-
tions of wider processes, integrable and explicable within larger contexts,
comparable to other historical events, and able to illuminate a variety of
theoretical and political issues. Friedlander’s dictum concerning the in-
accessibility of significant representation and interpretation, Kansteiner
argues, his notion that the only truth of the “Final Solution” is its extra-
ordinary resistance to rationalizations of any kind, necessarily results in a
paradox. While the new contextualism “naturalizes” the event in order
to circumvent the concept of the Holocaust’s incomprehensibility, Fried-
lander takes up “an impossible task, the attempt to stabilize and defend
an interpretive void.” 122
I shall come back to this matter in a moment but before doing so
should note that even if for Friedlander the history of the Holocaust must
ultimately remain opaque, he himself is nevertheless constantly engaged
in the attempt to write it—as his powerful new narrative, replete with
persuasive “positive” interpretations, amply demonstrates. This should
not be regarded as a damning contradiction but rather as a productive
tension in his work. There is no reason why his thought on meta-matters
should always neatly dovetail with the narrative content of his concrete
history. In fact, as we have seen, Friedlander has consistently applied his
meta-critical observations to his own work.
Yet, beyond this, there is something about the nature of his custodian-
ship, his detection of biases, the battles he wages, the level and focus of
his analyses, and the values he upholds that constitutes a unique and in-
dispensable cultural presence. It may or may not be that this “holding
operation,” “keeping watch over absent meaning” will prove to be a Sisy-
phean task. But its eloquent insistencies—morally sensitive, ethically
tuned, yet never cloying, evasive, or self-righteousness—are nevertheless
vital to the slippery interpretive processes whereby Western, German, and
Jewish collectivities continuing to recall, contest, commemorate, and elide
their catastrophic past. Saul Friedlander is a consummate analyst of these
worlds—and a master of a discipline that should never have come to be.
Notes
Index
Notes
preface
1. I have tried to map some of the key dimensions of this paradoxical link in
my Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National
Socialism and Other Crises (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
chapter 1. friedrich nietzsche, max nordau,

and degeneration
Paper first published in Journal of Contemporary History 28, no. 4 (October
1993): 643–57. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications.
1. This essay is based upon a presentation given at a conference sponsored
by the University of Paris in July 1992 on Max Nordau: Parisian Writer, German
Philosopher, Zionist Activist.
2. For a typical example of this, see the various mentions of Nordau in the
collection of essays edited by J. Edward Chamberlin & Sander L.Gilman, Degen-
eration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
3. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 23.
4. See Max Nordau, Degeneration, introduction by George L. Mosse (New
York: Howard Fertig, 1968), 551.
5. Ibid., 537.
6. Ibid., 415.
7. Ibid., 5.
8. Nordau differed in one important respect from Lombroso. He did not
accept that geniuses were insane; rather, the fact that these artists were degenerate
was an indication to him that they could not have been geniuses! Nevertheless,
based on precisely this misunderstanding of his position, one of Nordau’s degen-
erates, Oscar Wilde, produced a characteristic witticism: “I quite agree with Dr.
Nordau’s assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr. Nordau forgets that
all sane men are idiots.” See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin,
1988), 517.
9. Nordau, Degeneration, 17.
197
198 Notes to Pages 5–7
10. See Nordau’s dedication to Professor Caesar Lombroso in Degeneration,

esp. vii.
11. The best known rebuttal is by George Bernard Shaw, The Sanity of Art:
An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists Being Degenerate (London:
New Age Press, 1908).
12. Dr. Hermann Tuerck described the way in which Nietzsche’s mental con-
dition was translated into his moral and philosophical system: “Thus, it may hap-
pen that an intellectual and highly gifted man, born with perverted instincts, and
feeling as torment . . . the nonsatisfaction of instinct, will hit upon the idea of
justifying the passion for murder, the extremest egoism . . . as something good,
beautiful, and according to Nature, and to characterize as morbid aberration the
better opposing moral instincts . . . .” See Hermann Tuerck, Friedrich Nietzsche
und seine philosophische Irrwege (Dresden: Gloess, 1891), 7. Nordau liberally
quoted this work. See also the stamp of medical-professional authority given to
these notions in Paul Julius Moebius, Ueber das Pathologische bei Nietzsche
(Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergmann, 1902).
14. Gilman’s incisive essay, “The Nietzsche Murder Case; or, What Makes
Dangerous Philosophies Dangerous,” appears in his Difference and Pathology:
Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1985). See esp. 59.
15. Whole books—pro and con—were written about the phenomenon of
Nietzsche cults. For examples and an analysis of the cultural significance of this
new influence, see Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–
1990 (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), esp. chap. 2.
17. For a good outline of Nordau’s system of thinking, see George L.
Mosse’s introduction to Nordau, Degeneration, esp. xxi.
19. Ibid., 540.
20. Ibid., 560.
21. For some examples of such treatments, see David B. Allison, The New
Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1985); Nancy S. Love, Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986); Clayton Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays
Pro and Contra (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).
22. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, book 1, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Random House, 1974), 79.
23. Nordau, Degeneration, 55–56. “The consciousness of a healthy, strong-
minded, and consequently attentive man,” Nordau wrote, “resembles a room in
the full light of day, in which the eye sees all objects distinctly, in which all outlines
are sharp, and wherein no indefinite shadows are floating.”
24. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Random House, 1968), 293.
25. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 330.
26. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”
Notes to Pages 8–11 199
(1873), a fragment published posthumously. This piece can be found in The Por-
table Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 46–47.
29. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Random House, 1967), Section 1: 37.
31. Ibid., 543.
32. For some interesting comments on Nordau’s views on art, see P. M. Bald-
win, “Liberalism, Nationalism, and Degeneration: The Case of Max Nordau,” in
Central European History 12:2 (June 1980): 102.
34. Ibid., 541.
35. The most systematic analysis of the nature and wide dissemination of
this discourse is to be found in Pick, Faces of Degeneration.
36. “On the Gift-giving Virtue” 1, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” in Nietzsche,
Portable Nietzsche, 187. Italics in original.
39. Ibid., 557.
40. See Max Nordau, The Conventional Lies of Mankind (Chicago: L.
Schick, 1884), 51.
41. Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde III. Band. Einblicke und Aus-
blicke (Stuttgart: Julius Puettmann, 1930), 257.
42. The entire thrust of my book The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–
1990 is to establish the multiple, often contradictory nature of Nietzsche’s influ-
ence and the impossibility of reducing it to an “essential” political direction or
position. Clearly, this should be kept in mind here but little would be served by
rehearsing all this again. This essay, obviously, deals with only one strand of
influence.
43. For instance, he wrote: “Good nature is in a woman a form of degenera-
tion.” The degree of metaphor, irony, and literality in such statements are clearly
open to interpretation. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” in
Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), Section
5: 266.
44. Ibid., “The Birth of Tragedy,” Section 4: 274. My translation differs
somewhat from Kaufmann’s.
45. For various examples see chapters 8, 9, and the afterword of Aschheim,
The Nietzsche Legacy. While there were always those who opposed this alliance,
these forces were never decisive.
46. On this point see the generally informative article by Jens Malte Fischer,
“‘Entarte Kunst’ Zur Geschichte eines Begriffs,” Merkur 38:1 (January 1984).
47. All the differences between Nietzsche and Nazism notwithstanding, as
Jacques Derrida has pointed out, there “is nothing absolutely contingent about
the fact that the only political regimen to have effectively brandished his name as
a major and official banner was Nazi.” See Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other
(New York: Schocken, 1985), 31. And, as Martin Jay has written, “while it may
be questionable to saddle Marx with responsibility for the Gulag Archipelago or
blame Nietzsche for Auschwitz, it is nonetheless true that their writings could be
misread as justifications for these horrors in a way that, say, those of John Stuart
Mill or Alexis de Tocqueville could not.” See Martin Jay, “Should Intellectual
History Take a Linguistic Turn? Reflections on the Habermas-Gadamer De-
bate” in Martin Jay, Fin-de-Siècle Socialism (New York & London: Routledge,
1988), 33.
48. See George L. Mosse’s paper for this conference, “Max Nordau, Liberal-
ism, and the New Jew,” Journal of Contemporary History 27:4 (October 1992):
565.
49. See Nordau, The Conventional Lies of Mankind, and also Max Nordau,
Paradoxes, trans. J. R. McIlraith (London: William Heinemann, 1906).
50. Nordau, Conventional Lies of Mankind, 132–33.
51. See “Introduction,” in Nordau, Degeneration, xix–xx. Mosse points out
that this tough, disciplined liberalism was quite different from the open and per-
missive twentieth-century version.
52. Ibid., xxi. Nordau’s conception of human solidarity was based upon his
view of the interdependence of all living matter within a scientifically deter-
mined universe.
54. Nordau, Conventional Lies of Mankind, 353.
55. Max Nordau, Morals and the Evolution of Man (Biologie der Ethik)
(London & New York: Cassell & Company, Ltd., 1922), 82. The work was first
published in 1916. See also 276 for an example of how Nordau’s hero differs
from the Nietzschean version: “heroism is the noblest victory of a thinking and
volitional personality over selfishness; it is altruism which rises to self-sacrifice,
the proud subjugation by Reason of the most primitive . . . of all instincts, . . .
self-preservation . . . heroic conduct liberates [the hero] from the trammels of
his individuality and enlarges this to represent a community, its longings, its
resolutions.”
56. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 61; Nordau, Morals and the Evolution of
Man, 278.
chapter 2. thinking the nietzsche legacy today

1. This essay is based upon a paper presented at the New York University
International Conference on “Nietzsche Today” in October 1994.
2. I have explored this in detail for the German case in The Nietzsche Legacy
in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1992).
3. Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie (Berlin: G. Bondi,
1918), 5.
4. See chapters 8, 9, and the afterword of Aschheim, Nietzsche Legacy.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Vintage Books, 1968), 960; (1885–1886), 504.
6. See Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone (New York: Para-
gon, 1992). On Bataille’s politics and special brand of Nietzscheanism see Asch-
heim, Nietzsche Legacy, 229–30, 292–95.
7. There is no end of supporting contemporary examples of this. At the
“higher” levels of discourse this was best illustrated by Heidegger who initially
viewed Nazism (and Fascism) as essentially Nietzschean projects, the most radical
attempts to overcome Western nihilism. “The two men,” he proclaimed in his
1936 lectures on Schelling, “who each in his own ways, have introduced a
counter-movement to nihilism—Mussolini and Hitler—have learned from Nietz-
sche, each in an essentially different way. But even with that, Nietzsche’s authentic
metaphysical domain has not yet come into its own.” Quoted in Thomas Sheehan,
“Heidegger and the Nazis,” New York Review of Books, 16 June 1988.
8. Alain de Benoist was an early French exception to this statement. See his
Nietzsche: morale et grande politique (Paris: n.p., 1973).
9. Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (Atlantic
Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981), 341. The work was completed in 1952
but based on essays written in the 1930s and 1940s.
10. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950).
11. Derrida has considered this question in detail in “Otobiographies: The
Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,” in The Ear of the
Other: Otobiography Transference Translation, ed. Christie V. McDonald, trans.
Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), see esp. 23–
24, 30–31.
12. Our culture is awash with this Nietzsche. All the above-named authors’
works should be consulted. For typical examples of this genre among many see
Clayton Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra (Albany:
State University of New York, 1990), and David B. Allison, ed., The New Nietz-
sche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1985).
13. On Kaufmann’s denaturing of Nietzsche’s power-political dimensions
see Walter Sokel, “Political Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in Walter Kaufmann’s
Image of Nietzsche,” Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983): 432–36.
14. See Ernst Behler, “Nietzsche jenseits der Dekonstruktion” in Josef Si-
mon, ed., Nietzsche in der Diskussion (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
1985), 88–107.
15. For an interesting postmodernist exception, see Avital Ronell’s applica-
tion of Nietzschean immunological themes to current Californian problematics in
“Hitting the Streets” in her Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), esp. 47–61.
16. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
17. Terry Eagleton, “Awakening from Modernity,” Times Literary Supple-
ment, 20 February 1987, 194.
18. In Germany more than elsewhere and for the mainstream intellectuals
at least, the charged Nazi past endows the term Enlightenment with immediate
positive resonance and rich political connotations while the new Nietzscheans
discussed in this essay harbor either a deep suspicion of or an active hostility
towards it as an essential, manipulative tool of Western “metaphysics.” See the
interesting comments by Joachim Whaley, “Enlightenment and History in Ger-
many,” The Historical Journal 31 (1 March 1988): 195–99.
19. The most relevant text in this regard is Jürgen Habermas, The Philo-
sophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1987). Habermas declared prematurely in 1968 that Nietzsche was
“no longer contagious” and has subsequently spent a considerable amount of
time combating the epidemic! For his mistimed proclamation, see his “Zur Nietz-
sche Erkenntnistheorie” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Erkenntnistheoretische Schriften
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968).
20. The fact that Foucault and Habermas got on rather well does not alter
the intellectual differences. See the excellent intellectual biography by James
Miller (a work that I shall be drawing upon extensively in this essay) in The Pas-
sion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 337–38.
21. Terry Eagleton, for instance, relates this to the concrete French genera-
tional experience of 1968 and sees postmodernism as simultaneously a recogni-
tion of the failure and a displacement and recreation of the revolutionary mo-
ment. See “Marxism, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism” in Against the Grain:
Essays, 1975⫺1985 (London: Verso, 1986), 93. Eagleton, one of the shrewdest
Marxist observers of postmodernism, puts it thus:
Its profound pessimism (power is ubiquitous, the law inescapable, the ego impotent
and derisory, truth and communication inconceivable, general theories of society
terroristic, only marginal political activity feasible) is sure to be tracked to that
source, as a later more theatrical version of Western Marxist melancholia. Simi-
larly, the euphoria of post-structuralism—and its paradoxical other face—is at
once displacement and recreation of the revolutionary moment: the orgasmic crisis
of jouissance, the thrills and spills of the skidding signifier, the éclat of écriture,
Lyotard’s aging-hippie points of libidinal intensity.
See too James Miller, chap. 2, “Waiting for Godot,” in Passion of Michel Foucault
and Robert Young, chap. 1 in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West
(London & New York: Routledge, 1990).
22. Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Postmodernist, 5.
23. Of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, Derrida wrote, “The attempt
to write the history of the decision, division, difference, runs the risk of construing
the division of an event or a structure subsequent to the unity of an original pres-
ence, thereby confirming metaphysics in its fundamental operation.” See Jacques
Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference (Lon-
don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 40.
24. Jacques Derrida, Spurs/Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 75.
25. See the interesting volume edited by Richard Schacht, Nietzsche, Gene-
alogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (Berkeley & Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1994) and Gary Shapiro’s essay “Translat-
ing, Repeating, Naming: Foucault, Derrida, and The Genealogy of Morals,” in

Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Postmodernist.
26. Any number of examples of this genre would serve. For one, see Allison,
New Nietzsche.
27. See his “Nietzsche: Nach Fünfzig Jarhren,” in Gottfried Benn, Essays.
Reden. Aufsätze (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1977), 488–93.
28. Here the French connection to Georges Bataille comes to mind. That
early most radically transgressive Nietzschean, a man of the left who flirted with
and was, for a time, attracted to the irrationalist Fascist thematic, displayed a
radicalism and an attraction to the transgressive beyond that parallels Foucault.
See note 6 of this essay.
29. I have summed up the scholarship from a number of sources. The biogra-
phy by James Miller, Passion of Michel Foucault is basic here. See too Alexander
Nehamas, “Subject and Abject: The Examined Life of Michel Foucault,” New
Republic, 15 February 1993, 27–36.
30. See Lilla’s insightful remarks, “A Taste for Pain: Michel Foucault and the
Outer Reaches of Human Experience,” Times Literary Supplement, 26 March
1993, 3–4.
31. See Derrida, Spurs/Nietzsche’s Styles, 101.
32. See the introduction to Paul Patton, ed., Nietzsche, Feminism, & Politi-
cal Theory (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), xi.
33. See Diana Behler, “Nietzsche and Postfeminism,” Nietzsche-Studien 22
(1993): 354–70. For another recent consideration of the issue see Peter Burgard,
ed., Nietzsche and the Feminine (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1994).
34. Throughout the history of this legacy the appeal to any number of (left
and right) political positions has been the radical Nietzschean promise—present
but never clearly articulated; this after all, was the job of individual self-
creation—of personal and collective transvaluation going beyond all previously
thinkable forms. What parts of the feminist movement today regard as the neces-
sary feminine transvaluations—the peace-loving, anti-war, nurturing feminine
values—will not be easily reconciled with the kind of vitalist transvaluation
Nietzsche so graphically outlined in many of his works.
35. See Aschheim, Nietzsche Legacy, 85–92.
36. See de Saint-Point’s “Futurist Manifesto of Lust 1913” in Umbo Apol-
lonio, Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 70–74 and
“Manifesto of the Futurist Woman” (1912) in Futurism and Futurisms (New
York: Abbeville Press, 1986), 602–3. Italics in original.
37. Avital Ronell, “Hitting the Streets,” in Finitude’s Score, 69.
38. David Haar, “The Play of Nietzsche,” in David Wood, ed., Derrida: A
Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 57, 65.
39. See the essay by Maudemarie Clark, “Language and Deconstruction:
Nietzsche, de Man, and Postmodernism” in Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as
Postmodernist.
40. Ken Gemes, “Nietzsche’s Critique of Truth,” Philosophy and Phenome-
nological Research 52 (1992): 49.
41. See Ted Sadler, “The Postmodernist Politicization of Nietzsche,” in Pat-

ton, ed., Nietzsche, Feminism, & Political Theory. See too Brian Leiter, “Perspec-
tivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals,” in Schacht, Nietzsche, Genealogy,
Morality, 334–57.
42. See Walter Kaufmann, ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking
Press, 1954), 42–47.
43. Indeed, the assertion that Nietzsche would not recognize the very notion
of “incorrect” readings has induced at least one critic to charge Paul de Man with
“a grotesque misreading of a central passage about what might be called ‘truth
doing’ in Nietzsche . . . he proceeds almost deliberately to distort the very differ-
ent atmosphere of Nietzsche’s late masterpieces.” Richard H. Weisberg, “De Man
Missing Nietzsche: Hinzugedicthet Revisited,” in Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Post-
modernist, 111.
44. Daniel Conway, “Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: The Deconstruction of
Zarathustra,” in Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Postmodernist, 91.
45. Mark E. Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1988), 157.
46. In an acute review of my work, John Toews commented that it would
have been better had I revealed the ethical and value-laden contours of my own
construction of the historic constructions of Nietzsche. These, I should have
stressed, were clearly marked by my quest to understand the murderousness of the
Nazis and a sense that—no matter how parodistically—Nietzsche was somehow
implicated in this. At the same time, I also believe that his thought is too rich and
complex to be simplistically reduced to this one historical outcome. See John E.
Toews’ review of Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy, in Central European History
26, no. 3 (1993): 353–55.
47. “The Antichrist,” in Kaufmann, ed., Portable Nietzsche, 592–93.
48. See my paper “Nietzsche, Anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust” in Jacob
Golomb, ed., Nietzsche and Jewish Culture (London: Routledge, 1997). See too
Aschheim, Nietzsche Legacy.
49. This may be the place to situate myself within this problematic. As Terry
Eagleton has pointed out (in Against the Grain, 85) both metaphysicians and
“wild” deconstructionists believe that unless you have “the whole truth” you have
none at all, specular images of each other in this as in much else. I would agree
with Eagleton that radical contextualization for the historian does not mean the
subversion of the truth but only adequate understanding of and tentative ap-
proach to it.
50. See the introduction in Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Postmodernist, esp. 6–8.
51. On precisely this problem see the rather uneven collection of essays in
Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Postmodernist.
52. See his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, trans. Walter D. Morris (New
York: F. Ungar, 1983), 13.
53. This has been recognized since Nietzsche-reception began. See Gerhard
Hilbert, Moderne Willensziele (Leipzig: Deichert, 1911), 19. This was a very com-
mon theme adjusted to suit the proclivities of the particular commentator. Thus,
as one put it, Nietzsche’s struggle against his own time and the Christianity of his
age was “the anticipation of our own struggle, Nietzsche’s inner tension, from
which his spirit sprang, is our tension.” See Theodor Odenwald, Friedrich Nietz-
sche und das heutige Christentum (Giessen: Alfred Töpelmann, 1926), 17, 23.
Nietzsche, Thomas Mann wrote in a similar vein, was a kind of incarnation, “a
personality of phenomenal cultural plenitude and complexity, summing up all
that is essentially European.” See his “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Con-
temporary Events” (1947) in Thomas Mann’s Address: Delivered at the Library
of Congress 1942–1949 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1963), 69.
Most recently Ernst Nolte has revived this notion of Nietzsche as a personalized
“battleground” (Schlachtfeld) in his Nietzsche und der Nietzscheanismus (Frank-
furt/Main & Berlin: Propyläen, 1990). For a critical discussion of this work, see
Aschheim, Nietzsche Legacy, chap. 9.
54. See “On the So-Called Crisis of Christianity,” in Leszek Kolakowski,
Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 90–91.
See too his fascinating reflections on the complexity of Nietzsche’s modernity in
the opening essay (from which the book takes its title), esp. 8–9.
55. See the interesting, critical comments by Robert C. Solomon, “Nietz-
sche, Postmodernism and Resentment: A Genealogical Hypothesis,” in Koelb, ed.,
Nietzsche as Postmodernist, esp. 291–93.
chapter 3. against social science

This paper was prepared for an International Conference on “Jews and the Social
and the Biological Sciences” held at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish
Studies, in August 1998.
1. “Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times (Phi Beta Kappa
Poem, Harvard, 1946),” reproduced in W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Ed-
ward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), 259–63. The quote appears
on 262. I would like to thank Stuart Pierson of St. John’s Memorial University,
Newfoundland, for drawing my attention to the source of this quote in October
1999. Auden composed the poem before he met Arendt but—in the light of such
similar attitudes—it is not surprising that they later became friendly.
2. This is a commonplace. But for the most sustained and unqualified attack
on Strauss as an active anti-liberal, anti-democrat see Luc Ferry, Political Philoso-
phy, vol. 1, Rights: The New Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns,
trans. Franklin Phillip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
3. For a sympathetic account, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination:
A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–
1950 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973). For a very skeptical account,
see Leszek Kolakowski’s magisterial Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3, The
Breakdown, trans. P. S. Falla (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), esp.
chap. 10.
4. For some major recent accounts, see Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Mod-
ernism of Hannah Arendt (London: Sage, 1996); Dana R.Villa, Arendt and Hei-
degger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1996); Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cam-
206 Notes to Page 25
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996); Phillip Hansen, Hannah Arendt, Politics, His-
tory, and Citizenship (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993).
5. Arendt mentions Adorno’s involvement with Walter Benjamin—see her
essay, “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Har-
court Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 153–206. Other than that, as far as I can ascer-
tain, there is no acknowledgment of each other’s work in their published writings!
Given the common background, contemporaneity, and similarity of interests of
these figures, such omissions are in themselves noteworthy. In a private communi-
cation of 1 April 1998, Eugene Sheppard points out that given that Arendt and
Strauss spent their lives contemporaneously within the same cities (Marburg,
New York, Chicago) and institutions (and departments and disciplines within
these institutions), this can only be interpreted as a “deafening silence.”
6. For instance, Arendt wrote of Strauss to Karl Jaspers (Letter 159, 29 Au-
gust 1954): “He is a convinced orthodox atheist. Very odd. A truly gifted intellect.
I don’t like him.” See Hannah Arendt & Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–
1969, ed. Lotte Kohler & Hans Saner (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1992), 244.
7. See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 98. Ironically, she later took Strauss to
task for his stand that no Jews after the war should have anything to do with Ger-
many (see 169). The ironies and ambivalences, it should be pointed out, existed
on both sides. Precisely these render their respective biographies so compelling.
8. Letter 343 of Arendt to Jaspers, 23 November 1963, in Arendt & Jaspers,
Correspondence, 535; pers. comm. Eugene Sheppard (presently writing a doctoral
dissertation on Strauss), 2 March 1998.
9. Arendt & Jaspers, Correspondence, 80.
10. For details of Adorno’s piece, the circumstances of its rediscovery, and
Arendt’s comments upon it see her letters (numbers 373 and 399) to Karl Jaspers
in Arendt & Jaspers, Correspondence, esp. 592–93, 644. See also footnotes 2 and
3 to Letter 399 on 793–94.
11. For these rather scurrilous analyses see Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Ar-
endt/Martin Heidegger (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995) and
Richard Wolin, “Hannah and the Magician: An Affair to Remember,” New Re-
public, 9 October 1995, 27–37.
12. Other than occasional ironic comments, like that of Walter Laqueur
(quoted in footnote 14), some commentators, like David Biale, do mention these
thinkers, citing them in common for their radicalism but not extending the anal-
ysis. See Biale’s “Leo Strauss: The Philosopher as Weimar Jew” in Alan Udoff,
ed., Leo Strauss’s Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 1991), 37. There is now a volume on Arendt and Strauss
in America that surprisingly possesses virtually no serious comparative analysis.
George Kateb’s contribution, “The Questionable Influence of Arendt (and
Strauss),” is a partial exception. Arendt and Strauss, he writes, were “two whose
love of Greece, inflamed and mediated by German philosophy, set them against
modern democracy” (12). See Peter Graf-Kielmansegg, et al., eds., Hannah Ar-
endt and Leo Strauss: German Émigrés and American Political Thought after
World War II (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute & Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1995).
13. This is reproduced in Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Iden-
tity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press,
1978), 55–66.
14. See his “Hannah Arendt as Political Commentator” to appear in Steven E.
Aschheim, ed., Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 2001).
15. As is to be expected their attitudes to Nietzsche were complex but his
formative centrality, his relevance to their various problematics, cannot be
doubted. See, respectively, Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); on the Frankfurt school and Nietzsche,
see my The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley & Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1992), 185–92, 289–92; on Arendt and Nietzsche
see Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, chap. 3.
16. Strauss’s admiration for—as well as departures from—Heidegger is doc-
umented in Steven B. Smith “Destruktion or Recovery? Leo Strauss’s Critique of
Heidegger,” Review of Metaphysics LI, no.2 (December 1997): 345–78. Smith
also lists the already large secondary literature on this topic. I thank Michael
Morgan for this reference. The Frankfurt School eventually became known as
great critics of Heidegger. See particularly Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity,
trans. K. Tarnowski and F. Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). The
work was originally published in 1964. Still, apart from the fact that Marcuse
was a Heidegger student, Heidegger’s radicalism and, especially, his rather un-
differentiated critique of modernity proved to be very influential. See Aschheim,
Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National So-
cialism and Other Crises (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 6–8.
Dana Villa, in Arendt and Heidegger, has written a whole book tracing the com-
plex philosophical relationship between the two.
17. The Frankfurt School’s residual Marxism, however diluted and moder-
ated, and its constant critiques of instrumental rationality render further explana-
tion unnecessary. Kateb argues that both Arendt and Strauss had in common an
opposition to modern liberal, representative or constitutional democracy—albeit
from different viewpoints. He views Strauss, far more of a cultural snob and pessi-
mist than Arendt, as an “authoritarian anti-democrat” (39) while Arendt, from
her participatory viewpoint, “reproaches modern democracy because it is not
democratic, or not democratic enough.” See his “The Questionable Influence,”
in Graf-Kielmansegg, et al. eds., Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. And as Albrecht
Wellmer points out, Arendt castigated the liberal (indeed the entire Western philo-
sophical) tradition for downgrading the “political” in favor of the “social” and the
private. See his “On Revolution” in Aschheim, ed., Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem.
18. See Strauss’s typically elliptic analysis of this question in the preface to
the English translation of his Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair
(New York: Schocken Books, 1965). The work, significantly, was dedicated to
Franz Rosenzweig.
19. On their relationship see Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss:
The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). On Schmitt

see John P. McCormick’s excellent Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against
Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
20. This was originally published in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft 67, no. 6
and is reproduced as “Comments on Der Begriff des Politischen by Carl Schmitt”
in Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 331–51. The quote appears on 351.
21. For the “decrepit” quote see Kenneth Hart Green’s “Leo Strauss as a
Modern Jewish Thinker” in Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Mo-
dernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1997), 60 (note 26). For the comments on Cassirer, see the
essay “Kurt Riezler” in What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Glen-
coe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959), 246. In the same volume see too Strauss’s review of
Cassirer’s The Myth of the State, 292–96.
22. The influence and the dissension, it seems to me, remained. Apart from
the constant dialogue of Arendt and the Critical School with Heidegger, even in
the 1940s—in a still unpublished lecture—Strauss could still evince the misguided
but sincerely noble minds of Stefan George, Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger,
Ernst Jünger, and Carl Schmitt. I thank Eugene Sheppard for this information,
communicated on 4 March 1998.
23. This is noted in Alfons Söllner, “Leo Strauss: German Origin and Ameri-
can Impact,” in Graf-Kielmansegg, et al. eds., Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss,
123.
24. Eugene Sheppard, in a private communication, suggests that while
Strauss’s “German” writings contained foundational criticisms of liberalism, his
post-emigration works were more ameliorative in attitude.
25. George Mosse has identified this humanizing, universalist Bildung pro-
pensity—beyond nationalism and religion—to be the defining ingredient of a new
German Jewish identity. See his German Jews beyond Judaism (Bloomington: In-
diana University Press, 1985). We will elaborate on this later.
26. I have elsewhere traced the similarities between the ahistorical or post-
Bildung apocalyptic temper of the Weimar radical right and certain Jewish intel-
lectuals—such as Gershom Scholem, Ernst Bloch, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter
Benjamin. See “German Jews beyond Bildung and Liberalism: The Radical Jewish
Revival in the Weimar Republic” in Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe. The
thinkers considered here, despite their criticism of liberalism, it should be noted,
were quite different. Even for the Frankfurt School, if redemption was to come, it
was out of dialectically induced social—not messianic— developments. Arendt’s
politics produced constant processes of disclosure without any teleological or epi-
phanic end and, as Eugene Sheppard noted in a personal communication of 15
May 1998, Strauss dismissed as naive and misguided any holistic, totalized solu-
tions to political problems. The astonishing intellectual creativity of the Weimar
Republic and especially its Jewish intellectuals needs to take into account both
these commonalities and the differences.
27. I owe some of these insights to a conversation with Antony Skinner.
28. Arendt criticized Comte—by linking him to Marx! See her “Religion and
Politics,” in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. Jerome
Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 377. Leo Strauss too in-
cludes Comte in his severe and ongoing (though differently oriented) critique of
positivism but does so in a more differentiated form:
Positivism is no longer what it desired to be when August Comte originated it. It

still agrees with Comte by maintaining that modern science is the highest form of
knowledge, precisely because it aims no longer, as theology and metaphysics did, at
absolute knowledge of the Why, but only at the relative knowledge of the How. But
after having been modified by utilitarianism, evolutionism and neo-Kantianism, it
has abandoned completely Comte’s hope that a social science modeled on natural
science would be able to overcome the intellectual anarchy of modern society.
See his “What Is Political Philosophy?” in What Is Political Philosophy? 18.

29. Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno, Aspects of Sociology, trans. John
Viertel (London: Heinemann, 1973), 1. Based upon a series of radio talks given
in 1953 and 1954 and designed for a large popular audience, these presentations
are among the most accessible of the Frankfurt School’s writings.
30. Ibid., 7. Note that this was a generalized indictment that flowed from
Comte through to Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Vilfred Pareto.
31. See “The Positive Philosophy of Society: Auguste Comte” in Herbert
Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1960). The quotes have been culled from pp. 340–60. The work
was originally published in 1941.
32. “Mannheim felt quite clearly that the concept of ideology was justified
solely as that of a false consciousness, but was no longer capable of dealing with
such a concept in terms of content, and therefore postulates it solely in a formal
manner, as an allegedly epistemological possibility.” See Horkheimer & Adorno,
Aspects of Sociology, 197.
33. See her “Philosophie und Soziologie: Anlässlich Karl Mannheim, Ideo-
logie und Utopie,” Die Gesellschaft 7, no. 2 (1930): 163–76. Reprinted under the
title “Philosophy and Sociology,” in Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 28–43. All
the quotes provided here are taken from this translation. As so often with Arendt
there was an irony in the publishing history of this piece. Arendt’s biographer,
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl recounts it thus: Die Gesellschaft was a socialist journal.
Its editor, Rudolf Hilferding “wanted a critical review, for he felt that Mannheim’s
work posed a threat to socialism. Hannah Arendt agreed to do the review, but
she saw quite another threat in the work and wrote as a defender of the autonomy
of philosophy.” See Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 83.
34. See Peter L. Berger, A Rumour of Angels: Modern Society and the Redis-
covery of the Supernatural (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971). See esp. the
chapter, “The Perspective of Sociology: Relativizing the Relativizers.”
35. These quotes have been culled from Arendt, “Philosophy and Sociology,”
41. Arendt did qualify her remark by stating that the “question of meaning is,
however, older than capitalism because it goes back to an earlier experience of
human insecurity in the world, that is, to Christianity.” Ultimately, as in Arendt’s
use of the notion of “mass society” to explain totalitarianism—of which more
later—she leaned on the psychological experience of insecurity to ground her

historicizing critique of sociology and psychoanalysis!
36. Strauss, of course, was famous for his principled distinction between
esoteric and exoteric writings, between superficial and deeper meanings. For a
very close analysis and attempt to view Strauss’s essentially admiring attitude to
Nietzsche despite the many (superficial) negative references, see Lampert, Leo
Strauss and Nietzsche.
37. “Why We Remain Jews: Can Jewish Faith and History Speak to Us?” in
Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 312.
38. “Introduction to Persecution and the Art of Writing,” reproduced in
Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 428.
39. Ibid., 417.
40. Ibid., 428.
41. Max Horkheimer, “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie,” Zeitschfrift für
Sozialforschung 6, no. 2 (1937): 186. See too Jay, Dialectical Imagination, 81.
42. See O. Stammer, ed., Max Weber und die Soziologie heute. Verhan-
dlungen des 15.Deutschen Soziologentages (Tübingen: Mohr, 1965). On Weber
generally, see the excellent anthology edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen
Osterhammel, Max Weber and His Contemporaries (London: Unwin Hyman,
1987).
43. Martin Jay, Dialectical Imagination, 121. “Accordingly,” Jay adds, “po-
litical authority in a capitalist society could not be rational in the substantive
sense of reconciling particular and general interests.”
44. I owe this insight to Jeffrey Andrew Barash in a conversation on 23 May
1998, Jerusalem.
45.A brief look at the mentions of Weber in the text and footnotes of The
Human Condition (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959) establishes this
point. 46.
See Peter Baehr, “The Grammar of Prudence: Arendt, Jaspers, and the Ap-
praisal of Max Weber” in Aschheim, ed., Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem. 47.
Although even here, the weight of the criticism was deflected onto followers:
Max Weber coined his ideal type of the “charismatic leader” after the model of Je-
sus of Nazareth; pupils of Karl Mannheim found no difficulty in applying the same
category to Hitler. From the viewpoint of the social scientist, Hitler and Jesus were
identical because they fulfilled the same function. It is obvious that such a conclu-
sion is possible only for people who refuse to listen to what either Jesus or Hitler
said.
See Arendt’s 1953 piece “Religion and Politics,” reproduced in Arendt, Essays in
Understanding, 378. On page 388, note 24, Arendt explicitly qualifies her com-
ments by adding: “I do not mean to imply that Max Weber himself could ever
have been guilty of such monstrous identifications.”
48. Peter Baehr, introduction to The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter
Baehr, (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 43 (of manuscript version).
49. See the admirable analysis by Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 320–21.
50. “‘All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is vio-
lence,’ said C. Wright Mills, echoing, as it were, Max Weber’s definition of the
state as the ‘rule of men over men based on the means of legitimate, that is, alleg-
edly legitimate, violence.’” See Arendt’s On Violence (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1969), esp. 35.
51. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 29.
52. Ibid., 66–67. For Arendt’s most extended discussion of the councils, see
her On Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1963).
53. Although the confrontation was repeated many times and in many ver-
sions, the earliest is to be found in Leo Strauss, “The Social Science of Max We-
ber,” Measure: A Critical Journal 2, no. 2 (Spring 1951): 204–30.
54. See the famous chapter 2, “Natural Right and the Distinction between
Facts and Values” in Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1953). The quote appears on 36.
55. Given Strauss’s penchant for esoteric reading, it is not surprising that
various theorists have argued that his hostility to many of the great thinkers is far
more apparent than real and that, in effect, his engagement amounts to serious
identification. For a thesis contending that “Strauss did not argue that Weber was
a nihilist, but rather sought to determine why Weber was not,” see Robert Eden,
“Why Wasn’t Weber a Nihilist,” in Kenneth L. Deutsch & Walter Soffer, eds., The
Crisis of Liberal Democracy : A Straussian Perspective (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1987), 212–42. The quote appears on 212. For another ex-
ample see the very close reading of the complex Strauss-Nietzsche relationship
(one that entirely contradicts Strauss’s portrayal in various places of Nietzsche as
nothing less than a dangerous philosophical criminal) in Lampert, Leo Strauss
and Nietzsche.
56. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 42. Weber, Strauss added, concealed
from himself the nihilistic consequences of his doctrine of values. Strauss added
that, in examining the process by which Weber reached these conclusions, “we
shall inevitably reach a point beyond which the scene is darkened by the shadow
of Hitler. Unfortunately, it does not go without saying that in our examination
we must avoid the fallacy that in the last decades has frequently been used as a
substitute for the reductio ad absurdum: the reductio ad Hitlerum. A view is not
refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler” (42–43).
57. Ibid., 45.
58. Ibid., 64.
59. Weber, Strauss wrote,
was inclined to believe that twentieth century man has eaten of the fruit of the tree
of knowledge, or can be free from the delusions which blinded all earlier men: we
see the situation of man without delusions; we are disenchanted. But under the in-
fluence of historicism, he became doubtful whether one can speak of the situation
of man as man or, if one can, whether this situation is not seen differently in differ-
ent ages in such a manner that, in principle, the view of any age is as legitimate or
illegitimate as that of any other. . . . Hence what originally appeared as freedom
from delusions presented itself eventually as hardly more than the questionable
premise of our age or as an attitude that will be superseded, in due time, by an
attitude that will be in conformity with the next epoch.
(Natural Right and History, 73).

60. “Our social science,” Strauss wrote, “may make us very wise or clever
as regards the means for any objectives we might choose. It admits being unable
to help us in discriminating between legitimate and illegitimate. Such a science is
instrumental and nothing but instrumental: it is born to be the handmaid of any
powers or any interests that be” (Natural Right and History, 3–4).
61. The examples are endless here. See, for instance, Max Horkheimer &
Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New
York: Seabury Press, 1972). The work originally appeared in 1944. See too Max
Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947).
Much of the great success of Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man: Studies
in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964) is
attributable to this emphasis. A still excellent introduction to these thinkers is Jay,
Dialectical Imagination.
62. On this point see Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe, 6–8.
63. See Adorno’s introduction to his The Positivist Dispute in Sociology
(London: Heinemann, 1976), 19–20: “Scientism becomes false with regard to
central states of affairs by engaging itself one-sidedly in favour of the unified mo-
ment of individual and society for the sake of logical systematics, and by devalu-
ing as an epiphenomenon the antagonist moment which cannot be incorporated
into such logical systematics.”
64. Ibid., 33.
65. Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?” 23.
66. Ibid., 23. Note, too, that this almost foundationalist document defining
Strauss’s creed was, tellingly, presented in Jerusalem.
67. Ibid., 18–19. As was his wont, Strauss qualified his own statement a little
further on. In fact, he wrote, social scientists were inevitably people of integrity. “I
have never met any scientific social scientist who apart from being devoted to
truth and integrity was not also wholeheartedly devoted to democracy.” This was
not so much nihilism “than an alibi for thoughtlessness and vulgarity; by saying
that democracy and truth are values, he says in effect that one does not have to
think about the reasons why these things are good. . . . Social science positivism
fosters not so much nihilism as conformism and philistinism” (20). This, of
course, represented a typical “conservative” position on the issue.
68. Ibid., 19.
69. Ibid., 14.
70. Ibid., 24.
71. See Strauss on “Kurt Riezler” in What Is Political Philosophy?:
The most fundamental proposition of all thought is what one may call the decision
as to what it means “to be.” For instance, modern science may be said to identify
“to be” with “to be observably by everyone” or “to be a possible object” or “to be-
long to the spatial-temporal order.” “To be” thus understood is relative to the ob-
server, to any observer, to the anonymous observer. But we divine somehow that
“to be” means above all “to be in itself” and not merely “to be relative . . .”; “to
be” means, above all and primarily, to be a subject and not an object. . . . More
generally and more cautiously, the fundamental question concerns not this or that
being, not the totality of beings, but beingness. (249)
See too the critical comments in his The City and Man (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1964), introduction and chap. 1.
72. To be sure there was a prior history to the tension between philosophy
and psychology which Arendt reflected. See Martin Jay, “Modernism and the
Specter of Psychologism” in his Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time (Am-
herst: University of Massachusetts, 1998).
73. Her essays on particular individuals contained in Men in Dark Times
are packed with such penetrating observations. Moreover, in his introduction to
The Portable Arendt, Peter Baehr notes that Arendt ignored her own strictures:
“Ostensibly committed to eschewing the psychologizing mode, Arendt showed
little hesitancy in deciphering Rahel’s dream life to a degree that would make the
hardened pyschoanalyst gasp” (8).
74. Arendt, “Philosophy and Sociology,” 33–34.
75. This summary and the quotes therein are drawn from the chapter “Soci-
ety” in Adorno & Horkheimer, Aspects of Sociology, 16–36, and Adorno’s intro-
duction to The Positivist Dispute.
76. See the introduction to The Positivist Dispute, 25. The quote goes on
thus:
Something of the opposing intention was expressed in the social contract theories.
No matter how little these theories were historically correct, they penetratingly
remind society of the concept of the unity of individuals, whose conscious[ness]
ultimately postulates their reason, freedom and equality. In a grand manner, the
unity of the critique of scientific and meta-scientific sense is revealed in the work
of Marx.
77. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, in “Conformism, Housekeeping, and the Attack

of the Blob: The Origins of Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social,” in Bonnie
Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (University Park: Pennsyl-
vania State University Press, 1995), 51–81, has well analyzed and clarified these
various meanings, although the explanatory and pychoanalytical framework into
which she places this—Arendt’s conception of society as “the facsimile of one
superhuman family” derived from her own biographical experience—is dubious
and, as she herself admits, goes against the grain of Arendt’s own warnings in the
preface to Rahel Varnhagen—to avoid “that modern form of indiscretion in
which the writer attempts to penetrate his subject’s tricks and aspires to know
more than the subject knew about or was willing to reveal; what I would call the
pseudo-scientific apparatuses of depth-psychology, psychoanalysis, graphology,
etc., fall into this category of curiosity-seeking” (xviii). Even if, as we have noted,
Arendt never hesitated to provide pyschological explanations when she deemed
them necessary, her principled unwillingness to employ psychoanalytical method
and theory—quite apart from her overall disdain of social science in general—
derives from her performative emphasis, the notion that selves disclose themselves
in the public realm. Indeed, she opposed the emphasis on “interiority” as antithet-
ical to that which counted politically—the world of action.
78. Arendt, “Philosophy and Sociology,” 41.
79. Peter Baehr, Portable Hannah Arendt, 57.
80. Arendt, Human Condition, 27.
81. Ibid., 28.

82. The Human Condition formulates these views most systematically. On
Revolution develops the crucial distinction between the “social” and the “politi-
cal” within revolutionary contexts. See too the essay “The Crisis in Culture: Its
Social and Its Political Significance” in the important collection by Hannah Ar-
endt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (Cleveland &
New York: Meridian Books, 1961). The nuances and development of Arendt’s
ideas on the “social” are too complex for us to do them justice here. For a brilliant
exposition of this component and Arendt’s thought in general, see the indispens-
able work by Villa, Arendt and Heidegger.
83. Clearly, Arendt knew that means-ends relationships and fabrication
were a necessary and even desirable part of the human condition. But, as she
wrote in The Human Condition, 137: “The issue at stake is, of course, not instru-
mentality, the use of means to achieve ends, as such, but rather the generalization
of the fabrication experience in which usefulness and utility are established as the
ultimate standards.” One should also note, as Baehr points out, that Arendt’s
notion of the “social” was not always negative. Arendt approved of salon sociabil-
ity and in her article, “Reflections on Little Rock,” she argued that the “social”
was well worth protecting. If the principle of the public realm is equality and the
private exclusivity, that of the social is “discrimination”: the ability to choose
with whom to mix. It is thus not “society” as such that she feared but “mass
society” which blurs lines of such discrimination and levels group distinctions.
Perhaps here too we can detect a Jewish chord being struck?
84. Arendt, Human Condition, 46. Elsewhere she writes: “Socialized man-
kind is that state of society where only one interest rules, and the subject of this
interest is either classes or man-kind, but neither man nor men. The point is that
now even the last trace of action in what men were doing, the motive implied in
self-interest disappeared. What was left was a ‘natural force’, the force of the life
process itself, to which all men and all human activities were equally submitted
. . .” (ibid., 293).
86. Arendt, “Religion and Politics,” in Essays in Understanding, 379.
87. Arendt, On Revolution, 1. And as she put it elsewhere: “That politics is
nothing but a function of society, that action, speech and thought are primarily
superstructures upon social thought, is not a discovery of Karl Marx but on the
contrary is among the axiomatic assumptions Marx accepted uncritically from
the political economists of the modern age” (Arendt, Human Condition, 31).
88. Arendt, Human Condition, 38–39.
89. Ibid., 40.
90. Ibid. See also, on page 295: “The trouble with modern theories of behav-
iorism,” she added ominously, “is not that they are wrong but that they could
become true, and that they actually are the best possible conceptualization of
certain obvious trends in modern society.” The same quote elaborates a clearly
Heideggerian theme combined with Jungerian metaphors. It “at once becomes
manifest that all his [man’s] activities, watched from a sufficiently removed van-
tage point in the universe, would appear not as activities of any kind but as pro-
cesses, so that . . . modern motorization would appear like a process of biological

mutation in which human bodies gradually begin to be covered by shells of steel.”
91. Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” in Essays in Understanding, 319.
92. Ibid., 319–20.
94. For an analysis of the alternative conception developed by the Frankfurt
School (despite their forays into quite ordinary empirical social science such as
Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality), see Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics:
Studies in the Development of Critical Theory, trans. Benjamin Gregg, (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), and Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Per-
sonality (New York: Harper, 1950).
95. It would take a monograph to develop these differences with any seri-
ousness. One could, I think, get to a crucial difference in terms of their respective
attitudes to foundations. Strauss views classical political philosophy as the basis
for any valid normative conception of the good life and society, whereas Arendt
views politics—very much in a non-foundationalist, post-traditional way—as
performative action, the open-ended sphere best designed for the human condi-
tion of plurality and self-disclosive activity. For Arendt, the “social” is equivalent
to the “natural,” that is, part of the realm of necessity, pre-political and thus to
a degree not yet fully disclosive of real human potentiality; for Strauss classical
rationalism is to be taken seriously because it is there that one discovers “things
which are by nature just” (Strauss, City and Man, 5). As he said of Aristotle:
“Political philosophy is primarily the quest for that political order which is best,
according to nature everywhere and, we may add, always. This quest will not
come into its own as long as men are entirely immersed in political life . . . The
first political philosopher will then be the first man not engaged in political life
who attempted to speak about the best political order” (ibid., 17). Arendt, of
course, would take quite a different, activist tack.
96. Smith, “Destruktion or Recovery?”
98. See the chapter “Theodor W. Adorno and the Collapse of the Lukácsian
Concept of Totality,” in Martin Jay’s Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a
Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1984), 241–75.
99. A recent reviewer, Irwin M. Wall, has correctly noted that the Jewish
content of her ideas was minimal—her intellectual world was clearly not
grounded in Judaic sources as was Buber or Rosenzweig or Scholem—or, indeed,
Strauss. Rather, what needs to be noted are the ways in which her Jewish life-
experiences shaped, and interacted with, the development of her thought. See his
review of Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question in Cen-
tral European History 30, no. 3 (1997): 467.
100. See Jack Jacob’s “A ‘most remarkable’ ‘Jewish sect’? The Institut’s Early
History,” an unpublished paper presented at a conference of The Institute for Ger-
man History, Tel Aviv University, 7–8 June 1998, on “Critical Theory in
Contexts.”
101. Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth,
trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), 131. Scholem’s connec-
tion to the Frankfurt School was, of course, above all through Walter Benjamin.
Apart from Scholem’s indignation at the Horkheimer piece quoted below, he com-
mented to Adorno that anti-Semitism was a matter for metaphysicians and could
not be understood by sociologists. This was somewhat ironic. Scholem addressed
Adorno as a social scientist although ultimately he is far more properly classified
as a kind of metaphysician: “As an old historian, sadly, I can no longer believe
that the social sciences have anything relevant to contribute to this theme.” See
Gershom Scholem to Adorno, Letter 122, 28 October 1943, Briefe Band I, 1914–
1947 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994), 291.
102. On this see Jack Jacobs, “1939 Max Horkheimer’s ‘Die Juden und Eu-
ropa’” in Sander L. Gilman & Jack Zipes, eds., Yale Companion to Jewish Writ-
ing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1997), 571–76.
103. “Die Juden und Europa,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 8, nos. 1/2
(1939): 115.
104. See the nuanced analysis of the complexities involved in Anson Rabin-
bach’s essay “The Cunning of Unreason: Mimesis and the Construction of Anti-
Semitism in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment” in his In the
Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlight-
enment (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). See also
Adorno, Authoritarian Personality.
105. On the Bildungs thesis generally, see George L. Mosse, German Jews
beyond Judaism; on the Frankfurt School in particular, see chapter 4, “A Left-
Wing Identity.”
106. Reinhart Maurer, “Nietzsche und die Kritische Theorie,” Nietzsche-
Studien 10/11 (1981–1982): 41–42.
107. Martin Jay, “The Jews and the Frankfurt School: Critical Theory’s
Analysis of Anti-Semitism” in his Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual
Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), 100. Jay adds that as the School “moved away from the traditional Marxist
belief in the proletariat as the agent of positive totalization and more toward the
conclusion that the best that could be hoped for in the present world was the
preservation of enclaves of negation . . . attention . . . to the Jewish question in-
creased . . . anti-Semitism became a model of the totalistic liquidation of noniden-
tity in the one-dimensional world” (100).
108. Rabinbach, “The Cunning of Unreason,” 186.
109. Thus in the (ironic?) memorandum Adorno sent to Horkheimer in
1944 he suggested that since “not all the recurring objections against the Jews are
of an entirely spurious, projective, paranoid character,” a “manual for distribution
among Jews” be prepared that listed such traits and suggestions as to how to
overcome them. See Rabinbach, “The Cunning of Unreason,” 194. These kinds
of suggestions were, incidentally, an ongoing part of German history. See for in-
stance, the suggestions during the mid-19th century to create special schools to
overcome such traits in my Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in
German and German-Jewish Consciousness (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1982), 10.

111. “Franz Rosenzweig und die Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Juden-
tums,” in Jüdische Wochenzeitung für Kassel, Hessen und Waldeck, 13 December
1929, 2. Quoted in Udoff, “On Leo Strauss,” in Leo Strauss’s Thought, 13–14.
112. David Biale, “Leo Strauss,” in Udoff, Leo Strauss’s Thought, 32.
113. “Jerusalem and Athens,” in Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis
of Modernity, 378–79. This meant that “however much the science of all cultures
may protest its innocence of all preferences or evaluations, it fosters a specific
moral posture . . . by asserting, if only implicitly, the rightness of pluralism, it
asserts that pluralism is the right way; it asserts the monism of universal tolerance
and respect for diversity; for by virtue of being an ism, pluralism is a monism.”
114. See “Why We Remain Jews: Can Jewish Faith and History Still Speak to
Us?” in Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 328–29. Strauss
was able to jump from social analysis—regarding the difficulties of Jewish existence
in liberal, secularizing Christian society—to theological pronouncement: “From
every point of view it looks as if the Jewish people were the chosen people, at
least in the sense that the Jewish problem is the most manifest symbol of the
human problem insofar as it is a social or political problem.” See also Strauss,
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York & London: Basic Books, 1968), 230.
115. Eugene Sheppard (in a communication to me of 15 May 1998) writes
concerning Strauss: “The common denominator throughout his ‘German’ writ-
ings is a scathing assault upon the foundations of liberalism or more broadly
‘liberalism as a system’: liberal culture, religion, and politics. It is only after the
Weimar republic had dissolved that Strauss supplemented the uprooting of liberal-
ism with the search for alternative systems and then more pragmatic ways to ame-
liorate the inherent deficiencies in modern liberal regimes.”
116. This small-print piece is typically given a quite noncommittal title,
“Preface to the English Edition” to his Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York:
Schocken Books, 1965), 1–31.
117. Söllner, “Leo Strauss: German Origin and American Impact,” 123.
118. I have tried to analyze her attitudes toward Jewishness in “Hannah
Arendt in Jerusalem,” reproduced in chapter 7 of this volume.
119. “The Jewish salon . . . was the product of a chance constellation in an
era of social transition. The Jews became stopgaps between a declining and an as
yet unstabilized social group: the nobility and the actors; both stood outside of
bourgeois society—like the Jews . . . .” See Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen:
The Life of a Jewish Woman, trans. Richard & Clara Winston (New York: Har-
court Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 57.
120. On the whole, it would seem, Arendt regarded this as a normatively
positive development that also had consequences for the remarkable feats of mod-
ern German Jewish intellectuals. It should be noted, however, that in Origins of
Totalitarianism, she argued (in my view, rather problematically) that anti-
Semitism was closely related to the alienation of Jews from society and their alli-
ance with ruling State elites.
121. “The Jewish salons united the two features—social ‘outsidedness’ and
theatricality— that Arendt deemed essential in her reappropriation of the Aristo-
telian concept of the polis.” Thus argues an unnamed author in a paper entitled
“Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, and the Origins of Arendtian Political Philos-
ophy” submitted to The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 19.
122. See Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, esp. 137. On Schmitt see John P.
McCormick’s excellent Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as
Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
123. See the brilliant chapter entitled “The Decline of the Nation-State and
the End of the Rights of Man,” in Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York:
Meridian Books, 1958).
124. On her Zionism see my “Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem.” It is instructive
to note that Arendt employed this critique consistently and applied it not only to
Zionism but also to its victims. As she put it in Origins of Totalitarianism,
Hitler’s solution of the Jewish problem, first to reduce the German Jews to a nonrec-
ognized minority in Germany, then to drive them as a stateless people across the
borders, and finally to gather them back from everywhere in order to ship them
back to extermination camps, was an eloquent demonstration to the rest of the
world how really to “liquidate” all problems concerning minorities and stateless.
After the war, it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the
only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then
conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the
stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution
of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs,
thereby increasing the number of the stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to
800,000 people. And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and
in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale in-
volving many millions of people. Since the Peace Treaties of 1919 and 1920 the
refugees and the stateless have attached themselves like a curse to all the newly-
established states on earth which were created in the image of the nation-state
(290).
125. This has to do with Arendt’s conception of political community. For

Arendt, as Bonnie Honig argues, “a political community that constitutes itself on
the basis of a prior, shared, and stable identity threatens to close the spaces of
politics, to homogenize or repress the plurality and multiplicity that political ac-
tion postulates.” See her “Toward an Agonist Feminism,” in Honig, Feminist In-
terpretations, 149.
126. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 478–79.
chapter 4. nazism and the holocaust

in contemporary culture
1. Amery is himself a key contributor to this kind of discourse. See his quite
remarkable At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz
and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld & Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1980), vii.
2. This generally felt intuition was provided with intellectual coherence in
relation to Nazism above all in the work of Hannah Arendt. See her The Origins
of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 443, 459.
3. For suggestive analyses of this, see Yehuda Bauer, “Conclusion: The Sig-
nificance of the Final Solution” in David Cesarani, ed., The Final Solution: Ori-
gins and Implementation (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), 300–309,
and Saul Friedlander, “The Shoah in Present Historical Consciousness,” in Mem-
ory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1993), esp. 50.
4. I have addressed some of these issues at greater length in chapter 1 of
Socialism and Other Crises (London & New York: New York University Press,
1996).
5. See his “Götterdämmerung after Twenty Years” (1976), reprinted in his
The Dustbin of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 52–
69. The quotes appear on 52–53.
6. In a sense this is what the famous “Controversy about the Historicization
of National Socialism” between Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer is all about.
See this in Yad Vashem Studies 19 (1988): 1–47.
7. For a good contextual review of the Historikerstreit, see Charles S. Maier,
The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). The main polemic docu-
ments are to be found in Yad Vashem Studies 19 (1998).
8. “Between Aporia and Apology: On the Limits of Historicizing National
Socialism,” in Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and
the Historian’s Debate (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 144.
9. See his “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will” in “Historikerstreit”:
Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der national-
sozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich: Piper, 1987), 45. The Historikerstreit
actually began with Nolte’s infamous article, “Between Myth and Revisionism?
The Third Reich in the Perspective if the 1980s.” This first appeared in English
in H. W. Koch, ed., Aspects of the Third Reich (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1985), 17–38.
10. See Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of
the Holocaust, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press,
1992) and Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on
Truth and Memory (New York: Free Press, 1993).
11. The phenomenon, distasteful as it is, actually does have contemporary
parallels. How else can one characterize the obtuse and long-lasting denial of
countless liberal and left Western intellectuals concerning the very existence of,
let alone crimes perpetrated in, the Soviet Gulags? On this see T. Todorov, “The
Touvier Trial,” Salmagundi 106–107 (Spring-Summer 1995): 3–13. See esp. 11–12.
12. Saul Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the
“Final Solution” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
13. Martin Jay, “The Manacles of Gavrilo Princip,” Salmagundi 106–107
(Spring-Summer 1995): 14–21. See esp. 18.
14. For a succinct and excellent account of these issues, see Peter Pulzer,
German Politics 1945–1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) and Jef-
frey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
15. This rather unusual acknowledgment of guilt (whatever its underlying
sources and motivations) has been ably documented, and compared to Japan’s
quite different record, by Ian Buruma in The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War
in Germany and Japan (London: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994).
16. For an overview of primary and secondary materials relating to this, see
Geoffrey Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986).
17. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Prin-
ciples of Collective Behavior, trans. Beverley R. Placzek, preface by Robert Jay
Lifton (New York: Grove Press, 1975). The German original appeared in 1967.
18. See “The German-Jewish Dialogue at its Limits: The Case of Hermann
Broch and Volkmar von Zuehlsdorff,” in Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe, 91.
19. Ibid., 94.
20. See “Backshadowing and the Rhetoric of Victimization” in Michael
Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley & Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 85.
21. See Biale’s comments in a review of Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in
Historical Context, in Tikkun 10, no. 1 (January-February 1995): 79–80, 88.
22. The most recent popular and highly controversial treatment of this ques-
tion is to be found in Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holo-
caust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993).
23. Grossman, See under Love (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989).
24. See, for instance, Robert Alter, foreword to Unease in Zionism, ed. Ehud
Ben Ezer (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1974), esp. 12–13. The article was first
published in 1970. The other articles in this collection also provide a window
onto both the popular atmosphere and critical attitudes of the time.
25. See her “Revisioning the Past: The Changing Legacy of the Holocaust
in Hebrew Literature,” Salmagundi (Winter 1985/Spring 1986): 246.
26. For two examples see Amos Elon, “The Politics of Memory,” New York
Review of Books, 7 October 1993, and Adi Ophir, “On Sanctifying the Holo-
caust: An Anti-Theological Treatise,” Tikkun 2, no. 1 (1987): 61–66.
27. Steiner, The Portage of San Cristobal of A. H. (London: Faber &
Faber, 1981).
28. The open espousal of such attitudes is contained in interviews with Pal-
estinian youth visiting the memorial site of Lahamei Haghetto’ot in Israel as
shown in the recent film “Don’t Touch My Holocaust.” Information on this 1994
film scripted by Asher Tlalim can be found in the catalogue to The 11th Jerusalem
Film Festival (Jerusalem: n.p., 1994), 45.
29. CNN Saturday Morning Report, 9 December 1995.
30. de Koven-Ezrachi, “Revisioning the Past,” 246.
31. James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and
Meaning (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 26.
32. I have tried to account for this rather strange affirmation of one’s own
national identity as essentially murderous in “Archetypes and the German-Jewish
Dialogue: Reflections Occasioned by the Goldhagen Affair,” German History 15,

no. 2 (1997). The essay is reprinted in chapter 9 of this volume.
33. Victor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten. 1. Tage-
buecher, 1933–1941. 2. 1942–1945 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1995). Schindler’s
List, dir. Steven Spielberg, 195 min., 1993, motion picture. This “saviour” theme
was suggested by Frank Stern in a lecture entitled “Siegfried’s Cinematic Quest:
From the Germanic Forest to Olympic Virtues” given at an International Work-
shop in Jerusalem on “Paganism, ‘Volk Religion’ and Antisemitism: 19–20th Cen-
turies,” 21–23 October 1996.
34. See the provocative but insightful article by Scott L. Montgomery,
“What Kind of Memory? Reflections on Images of the Holocaust,” Contention 5
(Fall 1995): 79–103.
35. Ibid.
36. See Shiraz Dossa, “Human Status and Politics: Hannah Arendt on the
Holocaust,” Canadian Journal of Political Science (June 1980): see esp. 319–20.
37. See his extremely insightful “An Age of Genocide,” New Republic (29
January 1996), 27–36. The quote appears on 36. Rieff too makes the point that,
given the incomparability of the Shoah with other genocides, “in this way the
Holocaust may be used to exonerate many crimes and many criminals” (36).
38. Jay, “The Manacles of Gavrilo Princip,” 21.
39. These words, Levi tells us, were written as early as 1947 and published
for the first time in The Truce in Italy in 1963. See his chapter “Shame” in The
Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1988),
52–67. The quote appears on 54.
chapter 5. excursus
1. This is a slightly revised version of an essay, “The German-Jewish Legacy
beyond America: A South African Example,” that appeared originally in “The
German-Jewish Legacy in America, 1938–1988: A Symposium,” in American
Jewish Archives (November 1988): 359–64, and then in Abraham J. Peck, ed.,
The German-Jewish Legacy in America 1938–1988: From Bildung to the Bill of
Rights (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989).
2. Most importantly see his German Jews beyond Judaism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1985). See too, in the present volume, chapter 14,
“George Mosse at 80: A Critical Laudatio.”
3. See “German Jews beyond Bildung and Liberalism: The Radical Jewish
Revival in the Weimar Republic” in my Culture and Catastrophe: German and
Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York:
New York University Press, 1996).
chapter 6. assimilation and its

impossible discontents
1. Moritz Goldstein, “Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass,” Der Kunstwart 25 (1912):
281–94. The quote appears on 283.
2. Moritz Goldstein, “German Jewry’s Dilemma: The Story of a Provocative

Essay,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 2 (1957): 236–54. The quote appears on
244.
3. Ph. Stauff, “Die Juden in Literatur und Volk,” Der Kunstwart 25 (1912):
251–59.
4. Julius Bab, “Assimilation,” Der Freistaat 1 (1913–1914): 172–76.
5. Franz Oppenheimer, “Stammesbewusstein und Volksbewusstein,” Jüd-
ische Rundschau 15, no. 8 (25 February 1910): 86–88.
6. Goldstein, “Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass,” 291.
7. G. Wollstein, “Neue Kompromisse,” Der Jüdische Student 15 (January
1917): 353–54.
8. Goldstein, “German Jewry’s Dilemma,” 250.
9. Goldstein, “Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass,” 291.
10. Ernst Lissauer, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” Der Kunstwart 25
(1912): 6–12.
11. Ludwig Strauss (Franz Quentin), “Aussprache zur Judenfrage,” Der
Kunstwart 25 (1912): 236–44.
12. Lissauer, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 6–12.
13. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian
Books, 1958), 66.
14. Heinrich Heine, “The New Israelite Hospital in Hamburg” (1841) and
“Moses” (1854) appear in The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine, ed. Frederic
Ewen, trans. Margaret Armour (New York: Citadel, 1948), 285, 665–66.
15. “Ost und West,” Ost und West 1, no. 1 (1901).
16. Ludwig Geiger, “Zionismus und Deutschtum,” Die Stimme der Wahr-
heit: Jahrbuch für wissenschaftlichen Zionismus (Würzburg: N. Philippi,1905).
17. This story is recounted by Erich Kahler in “What Are the Jews?” in his
The Jews Among the Nations (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1967), 6.
18. See Paul Breines, “The Jew as Revolutionary: The Case of Gustav Lan-
dauer,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 12 (1967): 76.
19. See Gershon Weiler, “Fritz Mauthner: A Study in Jewish Self-Rejection,”
Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 7 (1963): 144.
20. Strauss, “Aussprache zur Judenfrage.”
21. Richard Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Richard Wagner’s Prose Works,
vol.3, The Theatre, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trub-
ner, 1907).
22. Oskar Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” trans. Jack Zipes, New German
Critique 21 (Fall 1980): 63–79.
23. Ibid., 79.
24. Martin Buber, “Judaism and the Jews,” in On Judaism, ed. Nahum
Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1967), 11–21. The quote appears on 15.
25. See Strauss, “Ein Dokument der Assimilation,” Der Freistaat 1 (1913–
1914) and also his “Aussprache zur Judenfrage.”
26. Parts of the Benjamin-Strauss correspondence have been published in
Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann with Theodor
Adorno and Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 836–44.
27. Quoted in the illuminating chapter, “The German-Jewish Parnassus,” in

Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1999), 45–65. The quote appears on 53.
28. Ibid., 54.
29. On this theme see my Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew
in German and Geman-Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1982).
30. See Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Ger-
many (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996).
31. See “German Jews beyond Bildung: The Radical Jewish Revival in the
Weimar Republic” in my Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confron-
tations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 1996).
32. “On Being a Jewish Person,” in Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Nahum N.
Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1962), 216.
33. Quoted in Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable
and Interminable (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 12.
34. Ibid. See generally chap. 1, “The Fourth Humiliation,” esp. 14–15.
chapter 7. hannah arendt in jerusalem

1. The nature of, and reasons behind, this reception are well analyzed in
Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks,
Calif.: Sage, 1996). See especially her “Introduction: Why Hannah Arendt?”
See too the introduction to Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jew-
ish Question (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). The most powerful postmod-
ern reading to date can be found in Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The
Fate of the Political (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). For the
relation to identity politics and feminism, see Bonnie Honig, ed., Feminist Inter-
pretations of Hannah Arendt (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1995). For a post-Marxist reading see Phillip Hansen, Hannah Arendt:
Politics, History, and Citizenship (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1993).
2. See the revised and enlarged edition, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report
on the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1964).
3. An older view, that Arendt’s portrait in The Origins of Totalitarianism
(Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books, 1958) of the powerful centrality of the Jew in
the economy and polity of the absolutist state replicates the Nazi version, is held
by some leading Israeli historians and political scientists to this day. See Tom
Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), 360.
4. Indeed, I recognize that the very title “Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem” has a
rather provocative ring, conjuring up, as it intentionally does, Arendt’s extremely
contentious Eichmann in Jerusalem. The title was suggested by Prof. Wolfgang
Schieder when the idea of this conference was broached. It appears, however,
that this theme confirms the existence of a Zeitgeist. In the recent special issue of
History & Memory 8, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1996), entitled Hannah Arendt and
Eichmann in Jerusalem, and devoted to Arendt, both Richard Wolin and Jose
Brenner have similar titles. See “The Ambivalences of German-Jewish Identity:
Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem” and “Eichmann, Arendt, and Freud in Jerusalem”
respectively. Moreover, Idith Zertal presented a paper (which I have not yet seen)
entitled “Arendt in Zion” at a 1997 International colloquium on Arendt in Pots-
dam. See too Amos Elon’s insightful “The Case of Hannah Arendt,” New York
Review of Books, 6 November 1997, 25–29. I only came upon this piece after
writing my own article but many of its conclusions are very similar to my own.
5. This is made all the more mysterious by Arendt’s comment to Karl Jaspers
in 1966: “. . . the Hebrew edition of Eichmann is finally coming out in Israel. I
think the war between me and the Jews is over.” See Letter 394, 26 March 1966
in Hannah Arendt & Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969, ed. Lotte
Kohler & Hans Saner, trans. Robert & Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1985), 632. See too Tom Segev, Seventh Million, 465.
6. For some of the relevant writings, see her Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of
a Jewish Woman, rev. ed., trans. Richard & Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1974); a collection of her Jewish essays, The Jew as Pariah:
Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman, (New York:
Grove Press, 1978); and Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn
(New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1994).
7. This is, to be sure, still a rather fringe, avant-garde affair. But it is rather
significant that the Tel Aviv journal History & Memory recently devoted a special
issue to Arendt. See History & Memory 8, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1996). The hall in
which Richard Bernstein gave his 1997 lecture in Jerusalem on “Arendt and the
‘Banality of Evil’” was packed beyond capacity. To be sure, these were all English-
language events. Nevertheless, a Hebrew panel on Arendt held in Jerusalem in
March 1997 under the auspices of the Leo Baeck Institute publication met with
similar interest.
8. For her appreciation of the extraordinary nature of that experience
(“nothing comparable to it is to be found even in the other areas of Jewish assimi-
lation”) and the challenge of historically understanding it, see her preface to
Rahel Varnhagen, xvii.
9. See Dan Diner, “Hannah Arendt Reconsidered: On the Banal and the Evil
in Her Holocaust Narrative,” New German Critique 71 (Spring-Summer 1997):
177–90.
10. For a superb portrait of this tradition see George L. Mosse, German
Jews beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
11. “The trouble with the educated philistine was not that he read the clas-
sics but that he did so prompted by the ulterior motive of self-perfection, re-
maining quite unaware . . . that Shakespeare or Plato might have to tell him more
important things than how to educate himself . . . he fled into a region of ‘pure
poetry’ in order to keep reality out of his life . . . or to look at it through a veil of
‘sweetness and light.’” See “The Crisis in Culture” in Arendt’s Between Past and
Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books,
1961). See too Rahel Varnhagen, esp. 9–10.
12. See “Die jüdische Armee—der Beginn einer jüdischen Politik?” in Auf-
bau 7 (14 November 1941). Robert Meyerson’s 1972 doctoral dissertation, “Han-
nah Arendt: Romantic in a Totalitarian Age, 1928–1963,” University of Min-
nesota Department of History, contains useful information about these earlier
years.
13. The relevant biographical information is to be found in the still-definitive
biography by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982).
14. See Scholem to Shalom Spiegel, 17 July 1941, Letter 119, in Gershom
Scholem, Briefe Band I 1914–1947, ed. Itta Shedletzky (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1994), 285.
15. Arendt to Jaspers, 26 March 1966, Letter 394, in Arendt & Jaspers,
Correspondence, 632.
16. Arendt to McCarthy, 17 October 1969, in Hannah Arendt & Mary Mc-
Carthy, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary Mc-
Carthy 1949–1975, ed. Carol Brightman (New York: Harcourt Brace & Com-
pany, 1995), 249. On Arendt’s response to the Yom Kippur war, see Arendt to
McCarthy, 16 October 1973, Between Friends, 349–50 and esp. n. 5 where
Brightman describes her reaction as one of “panic.”
17. Arendt to Jaspers, 1 October 1967, Letter 421, in Arendt & Jaspers,
Correspondence, 674–75.
18. This may be the very reason why Arendt was so compelling during the
1950s and early 1960s to previously unengaged non-establishment American
Jewish intellectuals. Her capacity to integrate Jewish matters into the storm’s eye
of world history, to make them explanatory factors in the great catastrophes of
twentieth-century history, provided a kind of dignity and importance to a pre-
viously marginalized, even derided, existence. See, for instance, Irving Howe, The
Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), 244–45, and Alfred
Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Knopf, 1978), esp. 299.
19. “[M]any Jews such as myself,” she wrote to Jaspers, “are religiously
completely independent of Judaism yet are still Jews themselves.” Arendt to Jas-
pers, 4 September 1947, Letter 61, Arendt & Jaspers, Correspondence, 98.
20. See especially chap. 2 of Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criti-
cism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
21. For letters documenting all these qualities see Gershom Scholem to
Theodor W. Adorno, 29 February1968, Letter 131, and Scholem to Hans
Paeschke, 24 March 1968, Letter 133, in Gershom Scholem, Briefe Band II 1948–
1970, ed. Thomas Sparr (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), 206–7, 209–10 respectively.
See too the interesting comments by Raymond Aron, “The Essence of Totalitari-
anism according to Hannah Arendt,” Partisan Review 60, no. 3 (1993): 366–76.
This appeared originally in the French journal Critique in 1954.
22. Arendt to Scholem, 24 July 1963, reprinted in Arendt, Jew as Pariah,
247.
23. See Arendt to Jaspers, 7 September 1952, Letter 135, in Arendt & Jas-
pers, Correspondence, 196–201. The quote appears on 197.
24. Scholem recommended this work to Benjamin. See his Walter Benjamin:
The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society, 1981), 213–14.
25. Jaspers added that more justice would have been done to
see her not just in the context of the Jewish question but, rather, in keeping with
Rahel’s own intentions and reality as a human being in whose life the Jewish prob-
lem played a very large role but by no means the only one. . . . everything you cite
from “enlightened” thinking is illustrated with negative examples . . . But it was
the greatness of the Enlightenment . . . that carried Rahel. . . . What starts to take
shape in your work but is then lost in sociological and psychological considera-
tions (which should not in any way be omitted but should be incorporated into a
higher level) is the unconditional aspect of Rahel . . . the quality of her personal in-
fluence, the totality of her insight . . . all the things for which being a Jew is only
the outward guise and only the point of departure.
See Jaspers’ brilliant letter to Arendt, 23 August 1952, Letter 134, in Arendt &
Jaspers, Correspondence, 192–96.
26. See her 1959 Lessing Prize address “On Humanity in Dark Times:
Thoughts about Lessing” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace Jo-
vanovich, 1968), esp. 18.
27. See her letter to Jaspers, 17 December 1946, Letter 50, in Arendt &
Jaspers, Correspondence, 70.
28. Ibid.
29. Arendt to Scholem, 24 July 1963, in Arendt, Jew as Pariah, 246–47.
30. Postmodernist, feminist critics, while admiring of Arendt’s resistance to
Scholem’s definitions—seeing in his “identity politics insidous resources for the
homogenizing control of behavior and the silencing of independent criticism”—
take her to task for insisting on the private nature of Jewish identity.
Arendt would have done better to contest the terms of Scholem’s construal of Jew-
ishness as identity . . . Both she and Scholem treat Jewish identity as a univocal,
constative fact . . . They disagree on whether it is a public or private fact . . . In
treating Jewish identity as constative, Arendt relinquishes the opportunity to en-
gage or even subvert Jewish identity performatively, to explore its historicity and
heterogeneity, to dislodge and disappoint its aspirations to univocity, to proliferate
its differentiated possibilities.
See Bonnie Honig, “Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Poli-
tics of Identity” in Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations, 153–54.
31. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 127. Unfortunately Young-Bruehl pro-
vides no explanation for this extraordinary step.
32. Arendt to Jaspers, 29 January 1946, Letter 34, in Arendt & Jaspers,
Correspondence, 29.
33. See letter of 8 August 1936 in Hannah Arendt & Heinrich Bluecher,
Briefe 1936–1968 (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1996), 38–40. The quote appears on 39.
34. See Hannah Arendt & Hermann Broch, Briefwechsel: 1946–1951, ed.
Paul Michael Luetzeler (Frankfurt am Main: Juedischer Verlag, 1996).
35. See the remarkable letter, Arendt to Bluecher, 24 August 1936, in Ar-
endt & Bluecher, Briefe, 57–60.
36. See Arendt to Blumenfeld, 28 November 1955, Letter 49, in Hannah
Arendt & Kurt Blumenfeld, “. . . in keinem Besitz verwurzelt”: Die Korrespon-
denz, ed. Ingeborg Nordmann & Iris Pilling (Hamburg: Rotbuch Verlag, 1995),
135–36.
37. Origins of Totalitarianism, 66. The work appeared first in 1951.
38. On this atmosphere see “German Jews beyond Liberalism: The Radical
Jewish Revival in the Weimar Republic” in my Culture and Catastrophe: German
and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York:
39. See, especially, her “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation” in Arendt, Essays in
Understanding, 69–80 (written originally in 1944). In her famous essay, “The Jew
as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” Kafka is, of course, one of her main examples.
See Arendt, Jew as Pariah, esp. 81–89.
40. See her essay “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” in Arendt, Men in Dark
Times, esp. 195.
41. Ibid., 190.
42. Arendt to Jaspers (written from the Pension Reich, Beth Hakerem), 13
April 1961, Letter 285, in Arendt & Jaspers, Correspondence, 434–36. The quote
appears on 435. The last sentence of this paragraph softens things a little: “The
major impression, though, is of very great poverty.”
43. The debate is by now exceedingly well known. Less familiar is Scholem’s
reply to Arendt (in a letter only recently published) regarding her belief that if the
Jews had “been organized and leaderless” the number of victims would have been
considerably less. Had the Jews done that, Scholem argues, “we would have re-
proached them now. More organization, we would claim, would have helped to
save lives!” See Scholem to Arendt, 12 August 1963, Letter 66, in Scholem, Briefe
Band II, 107–8.
44. The most comprehensive review of responses can be found in Richard I.
Cohen, “Breaking the Code: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and the
Public Polemic—Myth, Memory and Historical Imagination,” Michael 13
(1993): 29–85. The quote appears on 84.
45. This is a quote from McCarthy’s review “The Hue and Cry.” See Ar-
endt & McCarthy, Between Friends, 167, n. 6.
46. Arendt to McCarthy, 23 June 1964, in Arendt & McCarthy, Between
Friends, 168.
47. See Scholem’s published letter, of 23 June 1963, to Arendt in their ex-
change over the Eichmann book reprinted in Arendt, Jew as Pariah, 240–45. We
have already examined Arendt’s response to Scholem’s accusation of lacking Aha-
vath Israel. It is only fair to point out, however, that as Scholem emphasizes in
his later reply, he described her as belonging to the Jewish people in order to
distance himself from those who regarded her as no longer part of it. See Scholem
to Arendt, 12 August 1963, Letter 66, in Scholem, Briefe Band II, 105–8. The
quote appears on 106.
48. Arendt to Jaspers, 20 July 1963, Letter 331, in Arendt & Jaspers, Corre-
spondence, esp. 510–11; Jaspers to Arendt, 20 October 1963, Letter 336, in Ar-
endt & Jaspers, Correspondence, 521–25.
49. Jaspers to Arendt, 25 October 1963, Letter 338, in Arendt & Jaspers,
50. This is reprinted in Arendt, Jew as Pariah, 131–63.
51. See Scholem to Arendt, 28 January 1946, Letter 131, in Scholem, Briefe
Band I, 309–14.
52. See her reply to Scholem, 24 July 1963, in Arendt, Jew as Pariah, 246.
53. Scholem to Hans Paeschke, 24 March 1968, Letter 133, in Scholem,
Briefe Band II, 210.
54. Scholem to Hannah Arendt, Letter 131, in Scholem, Briefe Band I, 310.
55. As it does for the person they both deeply admired, Walter Benjamin.
56. David Suchoff, “Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and the Scandal of
Jewish Particularity,” Germanic Review 72, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 57–76. The
quotes appear on 57–58. I thank Paul Mendes-Flohr for drawing my attention to
this piece.
57. For Scholem’s attitude, see Letter 133 in Scholem, Briefe Band II, 209–
10.
58. Arendt to Kurt Blumenfeld, 9 January 1957, Letter 65, in Arendt &
Blumenfeld, “. . . in keinem Besitz verwurzelt,” 174–77. The quote appears on
176.
59. Dana Villa has most recently and radically underlined these aspects of
Arendt’s thought in his Arendt and Heidegger.
60. Elzbieta Ettinger, in Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), never goes beyond the merely gossipy. The
links and differences are best analyzed in Villa, Arendt and Heidegger. See too
Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, 191–92, esp. n. 6.
61. See the suggestive piece by Bonnie Honig, “Toward an Agonistic Femi-
nism” in Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations, 135–66. The quote appears on
149.
62. “Arendt’s warnings,” writes Amos Elon, “displayed considerable fore-
sight. Today’s readers may be more willing to accept both her essays and her book
[Eichmann] on their merits.” See his essay “The Case of Hannah Arendt,” 25.
63. See, for instance, Arendt’s letter to Bluecher, 18 October 1955, in
Bluecher, Briefe, 413:
dies Ländchen, wo man immerzu die Grenzen sieht. Es ist trauriger und weniger
erbittend, als ich dachte. Vielleicht, weil meine Umgebung hier verhaeltnismaessig
vernuenftig geblieben ist, vor allem auch die sehr reizenden Kinder, von denen die
Juengere etwas Besonderes ist. Die Angst ist sehr gross und ueberschattet alles, auss-
sert sich darin, dass man nichts sehen und hoeren will. Schliesslich werden natuer-
lich die ‘aktivischen Element’ die Oberhand bekommen . . . Allles, was ueberhaupt
den Mund aufmacht, erbittert nationalistisch; die Araber, die noch im Lande sind,
haette man auch rausjagen sollen, na usw.
64. Arendt to Bluecher, 22 October 1955, in Bluecher, Briefe, 414–16.

65. See the remarkable Letter 61 to Jaspers, 4 September 1947, defining her
attitude to Judaism and its future, Zionism, and the “extraordinary” achieve-
ments in Palestine in Arendt & Jaspers, Correspondence, 96–99, esp. 96. For a
balanced treatment of this whole question see “Zionism: Jewish Homeland or
Jewish State?” in Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, chap. 5.
66. Arendt to Bluecher, 20 April 1961, in Bluecher, Briefe, 522.
67. See her “To Save the Jewish Homeland: There Is Still Time” in Arendt,
Jew as Pariah, 191.
68. Many of these have been republished in Arendt, Essays in Understand-
ing. See especially “Approaches to the ‘German Problem,’” “Organized Guilt and
Universal Responsibility,” “The Image of Hell,” “Social Science Techniques and
the Study of Concentration Camps,” and others.
69. Arendt, “What Remains? The Language Remains: A Conversation with
Guenter Gaus,” in Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 14.
70. See her letter of 19 July 1947 in Arendt & Blumenfeld, “. . . in keinem
Besitz verwurzelt,” 43.
71. Much history writing is a matter of tone, context, and underlying moti-
vation. In the Historikerstreit of the1980s, Ernst Nolte was widely perceived as
employing the thesis of Nazi-Soviet equivalence as a form of softening or relativiz-
ing the indictment against National Socialist atrocities. No one would have
dreamed of accusing Arendt of this.
72. Saul Friedlander has incisively analyzed the differences between the orig-
inal “totalitarian” school and the Historikerstreit approach. If both employed
the comparative method, the former never sought to relativize but “ultimately
maintained the Nazi case as the nec plus ultra, in relation to which the other
crimes were measured.” See his “A Conflict of Memories? The New German De-
bates about the ‘Final Solution,’” The Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 31 (New
York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1987), esp. 7–10.
73. Raul Hilberg’s pathbreaking The Destruction of the European Jews
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books) only appeared in 1961. For the rather absurd, yet
symptomatic tensions between Hilberg and Arendt, see Hilberg’s The Politics of
Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996),
esp. 147–57. See too Arendt to Jaspers, 20 April 1964, Letter 351, in Arendt &
Jaspers, Correspondence, 549–51.
74. See his “From Anti-Semitism to Extermination: A Historiographical
Study of Nazi Policies Toward the Jews and an Essay in Interpretation,” Yad Vas-
hem Studies 16 (1984): 16.
75. Alfred Kazin, New York Jew, 298.
76. I have dealt with all this at length in “Nazism, Culture, and The Origins
of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil,” first published in
New German Critique 70 (Winter 1997): 117–39. The essay also appears in chap-
ter 11 of this volume.
77. Arendt, “Nightmare and Flight,” in Arendt, Essays in Understanding,
134. She contrasted this with “death [which] became the fundamental problem
after the last war.”
78. See Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 459, and her letter to Jaspers, 4
March 1951, in Arendt & Jaspers, Correspondence, 166.
79. For an interesting review of the background and genesis of these theo-
ries, see Leon Bramson, The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1961).
80. She wrote this already in 1945. See her “Approaches to the ‘German
Problem,’” in Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 108.
81. See Ernst Gellner, “From Koenigsberg to Manhattan (or Hannah, Rahel,
Martin and Elfriede or Thy Neighbour’s Gemeinschaft)” in Culture, Identity, and
Politics, ed. Ernst Gellner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and
Richard Wolin, “Hannah and the Magician: An Affair to Remember,” New Re-
public, 9 October 1995, 27–37.
82. Arendt, “Approaches to the ‘German Problem,’” in Essays in Under-
standing, 109.
83. While this is so, Arendt also consistently criticized Zionism for its desire
to believe in the eternality of anti-Semitism and its political instrumentalization
of this condition. This prompted Scholem, in his critique of “Zionism Reconsid-
ered,” to comment that he did indeed believe in its “eternality” as witnessed by
the fact that, despite all rational analyses, it seemed to renew itself in ever-new
constellations. Scholem to Arendt, 28 January 1946, Letter 131, in Scholem,
Briefe Band I, 310.
84. For a sustained comparative analysis, see my “Post-Holocaust Jewish
Mirrorings of Germany: Hannah Arendt and Daniel Goldhagen,” Tel Aviver Jahr-
buch für Deutsche Geschichte 26 (1997): 345–53. The essay is reprinted in chap-
ter 12 of this volume.
85. See my “Archetypes and the German-Jewish Dialogue: Reflections Occa-
sioned by the Goldhagen Affair,” originally published in German History 15, no.
2 (1997): 240–50. Reprinted in chapter 9 of this volume.
86. See Arendt to Blumenfeld, 19 July 1947, in Arendt & Blumenfeld, “. . .
in keinem Besitz verwurzelt,” 43.
87. Arendt, “Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration
Camps,” in Essays in Understanding, 235.
88. Interestingly, in his reply to Arendt’s “Zionism Reconsidered,” Scholem
replied that he did indeed subscribe to the notion of an “eternal” anti-Semitism
for, despite all rational analyses, it succeeded in reproducing itself in ever-new
constellations. See Letter 131, in Scholem, Briefe Band I, 310.
89. See Moshe Zimmermann, “Chameleon and Phoenix: Israel’s German
Image,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 26 (1997): 265–80.
90. Arendt, “Nightmare and Flight,” in Essays in Understanding, 134.
91. For one perspective on this, see Richard Bernstein’s essay “From Radical
Evil to the Banality of Evil: From Superfluousness to Thoughtlessness,” in Hannah
Arendt and the Jewish Question, chap. 7.
92. On her earlier struggles with a kind of “demonizing” tendency see
“Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers: Friendship, Catastrophe, and the Possibilities
of German-Jewish Dialogue,” chapter 6 in my Culture and Catastrophe. For the
various critics who took Arendt to task for such “demonizing,” see my “Nazism,
Culture, and The Origins of Totalitarianism,” chapter 11 of this volume.
93. Arendt to Jaspers, 17 August 1946, Letter 43, in Arendt & Jaspers, Cor-
respondence, 51–56. The quote appears on 54.
94. Arendt to Jaspers, 5 February 1961, Letter 277, in Arendt & Jaspers,
95. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 290.
96. This has already begun. Thus Adi Ophir, quoting Arendt to the effect
that “Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes,”
adds: “Indeed, they have survived, even in the State of the survivors.” See his piece
“Between Eichmann and Kant: Thinking on Evil after Arendt” in History &
Memory 8, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1996): 89–136. The brilliant article, in the same issue,
by Leora Y. Bilsky, “When Actor and Spectator Meet in the Courtroom: Reflec-
tions on Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Judgment,” 137–73, demonstrates a sophis-
ticated and critical knowledge of Arendt and a willingness and ability to employ
her categories in ways that were not available ten years ago.
97. See Hilberg, Politics of Memory, 147. In a communication on 4 Novem-
ber 1997, Antonia Gruenenberg informed me that the “Hannah Arendt” is an
Inter City Express that goes from Stuttgart to Hamburg-Altona and (on the way
back) from Kiel to Stuttgart. The postage stamp, she reports, has been sold out!
98. Jaspers to Arendt, 25 October 1963, Letter 338, in Arendt & Jaspers,
chapter 8. german history and german jewry

1. The following essay was presented, with minor changes, at the workshop
on “Varieties of Multiculturalism in Modern European History: The Case of
the Jews” in Jerusalem (5–9 January 1997) as part of an ongoing project on
“The Integration of Jewish History into Modern European History Curricula.”
Originally published as “German History and German Jewry: Boundaries, Junc-
tions and Interdependence” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XLIII (London:
Leo Baeck Institute, 1998): 315–22. Reprinted by permission of Leo Baeck
Institute.
2. Also in the same volume, see the articles by Evyatar Friesel, “The
German-Jewish Encounter as a Historical Problem. A Reconsideration”; Christ-
hard Hoffmann, “The German-Jewish Encounter and German Historical
Culture”; Samuel Moyn, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity. Historiog-
raphy and Theory”; Shulamit Volkov, “Reflections on German-Jewish Historiog-
raphy. A Dead End or a New Beginning?”
3. Volkov, “Reflections on German-Jewish Historiography,” Leo Baeck In-
stitute Yearbook XLI (1996): 320.
4. See David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry 1780–1840
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), esp. 6ff.
5. John R. Gillis, “The Future of European History,” Perspectives: American
Historical Association Newsletter 34, no. 4 (April 1996): 5.
6. Till van Rahden, “Mingling, Marrying, and Distancing: Jewish Integra-
tion in Wilhelmian Breslau and its Erosion in Early Weimar Germany,” in Peter
Pulzer, ed., Jews in Weimar Germany, Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhand-
lungen des Leo Baecks Instituts, no. 57 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997).
7. Perhaps for that reason this analysis has been forwarded by a young non-
Jewish German scholar, questioning the wisdom of his historiographical elders.
For another analysis of why an increasing number of young German non-Jewish
scholars are entering the field, see Hoffmann, “The German-Jewish Encounter
and German Historical Culture.”
8. For an analysis of this in another context see my “‘The Jew Within’: The
Myth of ‘Judaization’ in Germany,” in Jehuda Reinharz & Walter Schatzberg,
eds., The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the
Second World War (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985),
212–41.
9. See my “Assimilation, German Culture, and the ‘Jewish Spirit’: The Mo-
ritz Goldstein Affair (1912)” in Sander Gilman & Jack Zipes, eds., A History of
Jewish Writing in Germany (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).
The essay is reprinted in chapter 6 of this volume.
10. See Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–
1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980) and “Misreadings of
Anti-Semitism,” Commentary 73 (July 1983): 39–44.
11. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York:
Harper & Row, 1968).
12. This applies too—perhaps especially—to the post-liberal, radical, apoc-
alyptic sensibility of those intellectual creations (of people like Gershom Scholem,
Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch) that today seem most vital
to the vaunted Jewish renaissance and which most quintessentially replicate a
mood characteristic of what today we understand by Weimar culture (including
such right-wing thinkers as Ernst Jünger, Oswald Spengler, and Martin Heideg-
ger). See my “German Jews beyond Bildung and Liberalism: The Radical Jewish
New York University Press, 1996). See too Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of
Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1996).
13. I owe this formulation to Eugene Sheppard.
14. Walter Laqueur, Weimar Culture: A Cultural History (New York: Capri-
corn Books, 1976), 73.
15. See the introduction to his Freud, Germans, and Jews: Masters and Vic-
tims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 21.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 77.
18. Benjamin to Florens Christian Rang, 18 November 1923, Letter 122,
in Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, ed.
Gershom Scholem & Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. & Evelyn M. Jacob-
son (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 214–17. The quote appears on
215. I thank Zvi Jagendorf for drawing my attention to this reference.
19. When in 1924 Edmund Husserl, a convert to Protestantism of many
years standing, suggested that the longstanding confessional restriction on the
chair of Christian philosophy at the University of Freiburg be removed (“the Cath-
olic internationale had been accommodated to a very large extent during the
war”), the Catholic scholar Heinrich Finke responded: “This is the kind of thing
we have to listen to from an Austrian Jew. I’ve never in my life been an anti-
Semite; but today I find it hard not to think along anti-Semitic lines.” See Hugo
Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden (London: Fontana
Press, 1993), 114–15.
20. Once such an essentializing logic is unleashed, the ironies entailed in
this commonplace of German cultural criticism become virtually endless. Martin
Heidegger’s mammoth and engaged efforts to formulate the outlines of an authen-
tic “German spirit” are well known—although his explicit linking of this with
the Jewish Question is far less so. This becomes apparent in a letter (written to
Viktor Schwoerer on 2 October 1929) where he states: “. . . what is at stake here
is nothing less than the need to recognize without delay that we face a choice
between sustaining our German intellectual life through a renewed infusion of
genuine, native teachers and educators, or abandoning it once and for all to the
growing Jewish influence—in both the wider and the narrower sense.” But, obvi-
ously the respective German and Jewish “spirits” possessed remarkable flexibility
and protean qualities, at times within the same person. Thus, while in 1929 Hei-
degger championed Eduard Baumgarten as the “great white hope of German in-
tellectual life, a bulwark against the rising tide of Jewish influence,” by 1933 he
described him as “a Jewish protégé.” Clearly here was a casuistic tool of political
labeling that could easily boomerang against its user. Erich Jaensch, a Nazi philos-
opher opposed to Heidegger, wrote in a report to the National Socialist authori-
ties that Heidegger obsessively indulged in the same “hairsplitting distinctions as
Talmudic thought,” a fact that inevitably attracted Jews to him. If Heidegger
would acquire influence “our universities and intellectual life will favour those of
Jewish stock . . . These people, even if the non-Aryan blood entered their family
a long time ago, will invariably take up this hairsplitting nonsense with alacrity
. . . their academic careers will prosper accordingly, while our fine young Germans
cannot compete because their minds are too healthy and they have too much com-
mon sense.” See Ott, Martin Heidegger, 378, 379, and 257 respectively.
21. The quote appears in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Juda-
ism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1991), 97.
22. For an English translation of Jung’s comments, see Frederic V. Grunfeld,
Prophets Without Honour (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 58–59.
23. The need for addressing this distinction was stressed by Shulamit Volkov
at the conference where this paper was originally presented.
24. Moyn, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity,” 295.
25. See Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 17th ed. (Berlin: Wal-
ter de Gruyter, 1957), 129.
26. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch 2 (Leipzig,
1860), 1053.
27. Jakob Wasserman, My Life as German and Jew, trans. S. N. Brainin
(New York: Conrad-McCann, 1933), 220–21.
28. Walter Benjamin to Gerhard Scholem, 22 October 1917, Letter 55, in
Benjamin, Correspondence, 97–102. The quote appears on 98.
29. Quoted in Max Horkheimer, “The German Jews” (1961) in his Critique
of Instrumental Reason (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 111.
30. On Freud see especially chapter 5 of Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses; on

Buber see his “Judaism and the Jews” in his On Judaism, ed. Nahum N.Glatzer
(New York: Schocken Books, 1972); on Rosenzweig, see my Brothers and Strang-
ers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness,
1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 106.
31. Quoted in Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany before and after 1933,
trans. Elizabeth King (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 138–39.
chapter 9. archetypes and the

german jewish dialogue
1. This essay was originally presented at an International Conference of the
Richard Koebner Centre for German History on “Rethinking German Anti-
Semitism” in Jerusalem (26–28 November 1996). It was very slightly enlarged
and updated before being published in German History 15, no. 2 (1997): 240–50.
Reprinted here by permission of German History. Once again, I want to thank
John Landau for helping me to formulate and think through the problem. I could
not have written this essay without him.
2. Such meetings and the quest for a common understanding carry with
them the danger of an overly placatory stance. Upon being confronted with a
desperately apologetic German friend, a colleague of mine reported that she was
tempted to respond that what had happened “wasn’t all that bad!”
3. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Ger-
mans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). The present discus-
sion revolves around the publication of this book and its translation into German,
Hitler’s willige Vollstrecker: Ganz gewöhnliche Deutsche und der Holocaust,
trans. Klaus Kochmann (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1996). The sales in both languages
have been quite extraordinary. The book has been translated into numerous lan-
guages and more are planned.
4. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 45. See also 28.
5. For a sample of diverse reactions to the book (prior to its publication in
Germany) see Julius H. Schoeps, ed., Ein Volk von Mördern: Die Dokumentation
zur Goldhagen-Kontroverse um die Rolle der Deutschen im Holocaust (Ham-
burg: Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, 1996).
6. “Reconceiving the Holocaust?” Tikkun 11, no. 4 (July-August 1996):
62–65. The present article is an attempt to view the issue from a quite different
perspective. “Reconceiving the Holocaust?” is reprinted in chapter 13 of this vol-
ume.
7. For Goldhagen’s reply to his German critics, unprecedented in length for
a newspaper article, see his “Das Versagen der Kritiker,” Die Zeit, 2 August 1996,
9–14. For his reply to his English-language critics, see Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,
“Motives, Causes, and Alibis,” New Republic, 23 December 1996, 37–45.
8. See her conversation with Günter Gaus, “What Remains? The Language
Remains,” in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 (New York;
Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1994), 14.
9. Louis Kaplan has written a wonderful (as yet unpublished) evocation of
the multi-leveled nature of the meeting entitled “‘Geistreiche Wiederjudmachung’:

Jewish Joke Reparations and Mourning in Post-Holocaust Germany.”
10. See, for instance, Saul Friedlander, “Trauma and Transference,” in his
Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993), 117–37, and Dominick LaCapra, Representing
the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
11. See these formulations in Hans Kellner’s insightful, “Never Again Is
Now,” in History & Theory 33, no. 2 (1994): 127.
12. Quoted in John Bayley, “Poet of Holy Dread,” New York Review of
Books, 14 November 1996, 38–40. The quote appears on 38.
13. Henryk Broder, “Ich bin sehr stolz,” Der Spiegel 21 (1996).
14. Goldhagen, “Motives, Causes, and Alibis,” 45.
15. See, for instance, Schoeps’s “Vorwort” in Ein Volk von Mördern, 11.
16. See the critical analysis of this tendency by Andrei Markovits, “Störfall
im Endlager der Geschichte,” in Schoeps, Ein Volk von Mördern, 228–40. These
dubious tones were not limited to Germany. See, for instance, “Taki,” “Book
Burning Lights up the Big Bagel,” Sunday Times, 17 April 1996.
17. See Volker Ulrich, “Goldhagen und die Deutschen,” Die Zeit, 13 Sep-
tember 1996. The sub-title reads: “Die Tournee wurde zum Triumphzug.”
18. “Kinkel weist These von Kollektivschuld zurück,” Süddeutsche Zeitung,
Feuilleton, 9 May 1996, 13.
19. For an attempt to analyze this, see Josef Joffe, “Goldhagen in Germany,”
New York Review of Books, 28 November 1996, 18–21. The cover of the review
calls the article “Goldhagen Conquers Germany.”
20. See Gunter Hoffmann, “Die Welt ist, wie sie ist,” Die Zeit 40, 27 Sep-
tember 1996, and the interview with Hans Mommsen, “Im Räderwerk,” Frank-
furter Allgemeine Zeitung 209, 7 September 1996, 37.
21. Bayley, “Poet of Holy Dread,” 39.
22. Maxim Biller, “Und Sonst?” Die Zeit 46, 8 November 1996.
23. Again, this is a general tendency, not an ironclad rule. Gordon Craig
originally gave the book a rather positive evaluation (which he later quite severely
qualified) as did Volker Berghahn and Dietrich Orlow. This is also true for the
Israeli Holocaust historian, Israel Gutman. It should be pointed out, how-
ever, that most Israeli historians—among others, Gulie Ne’eman Arad, Yehuda
Bauer, Robert Wistrich, Moshe Zimmermann, and myself—have received the
book very critically.
24. In a letter sent to Professor Henry Friedlander on 5 April 1996, he
writes: “Please feel free to share this letter with anyone.”
25. Quoted in Gordon A. Craig, “The New Germany,” New York Review
of Books, 31 October 1996, 61.
26. See Martin Broszat and Saul Friedlander, “A Controversy about the His-
toricization of National Socialism,” Yad Vashem Studies 19 (1988): 1–47. The
quote appears on 7.
27. Ibid., 13.
28. For an early example of these different empathic frames see “The
German-Jewish Dialogue at Its Limits: The Case of Hermann Broch and Volkmar
von Zuehlsdorff,” in my Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confron-

tations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 1996). For an analysis of current popular and scholarly, German em-
pathic and non-empathic biases, see Omer Bartov, “‘. . . seit die Juden weg sind’:
Germany, History, and Representation of Absence,” German Studies as Cultural
Studies: A User’s Manual, ed. S. Denham, et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press, 1997).
29. For good analyses of this controversy, see Charles S. Maier, The Unmas-
terable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988) and Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow:
West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1989).
30. See Shoshana Felman & Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing
in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York & London: Routledge,
1992). For a critical examination of some of these issues, see S. Friedlander, ed.,
Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
31. Quoted in Joffe, “Goldhagen in Germany,” 21.
32. Such statements reinforce the view that many problematic, traditional
German attitudes may remain in place, albeit under the surface. Ironically, these
critics are asserting the opposite of what Goldhagen claims for the post-1945
period: that Germany has been transformed into a firmly liberal and democratic
society, possessed of a political culture that has rendered anti-Semitism virtually
nonexistent.
33. See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael
Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1982).
34. For this view see Friedlander, Memory, History, and the Extermination,
esp. the introduction. See too the introduction to Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions
of Jewish History (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993)
and Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and
Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
35. The notion of archetypes as I use it here fits both definitions given in
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary: “The original pattern or model of which
all things or types are representations or copies” and Jung’s notion of an “inher-
ited idea or mode of thought . . . that is derived from the experience of the race
and is present in the unconscious of the individual.”
36. See Nina Sutton, Bettelheim: A Life and Legacy (New York: Basic
Books, 1996).
37. See my “Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of Totalitarianism: Hannah
Arendt and the Discourse of Evil,” chapter 11 of this volume.
38. This is, of course, a speculative matter. For a suggestive analysis that
touches upon the question see Dan Diner, “Hannah Arendt Reconsidered: On the
Moral and Evil in Her Holocaust Narrative,” New German Critique 71 (1997):
177–90.
39. “Simple explanations,” Goldhagen writes in his recent rebuttal, “are not
to be rejected merely because they are simple . . . The call for complexity is some-
times the refuge of those who find certain conclusions unpalatable.” (Goldhagen,
“Motives, Causes, and Alibis,” 39). This may be so, but even “simple explana-
tions” are not unmediated reflections of a directly accessible historical reality but
products of the ascriptive, interpreting historian.
40. See the interesting article by Wulf Kansteiner, “From Exception to Ex-
emplum: The New Approach to Nazism and the ‘Final Solution,’” History &
Theory 33, no. 2 (1994): 158.
41. Victor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten. 1. Tage-
buecher, 1933–1941. 2. 1942–1945 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1995). Schindler’s
List, dir. Steven Spielberg, 195 min., 1993, motion picture. As yet unpublished
lecture entitled “Siegfried’s Cinematic Quest: From the Germanic Forest to
Olympic Virtues,” given at an International Workshop in Jerusalem on “Pa-
ganism, ‘Volk Religion’ and Antisemitism: 19–20th Centuries,” 21–23 October
1996.
42. See his insightful “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Is-
raeli Youth Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (Winter 1997):
42–76. The quote is on 76.
43. Quoted in Diner, “Hannah Arendt Reconsidered,” 384. The correspon-
dence was originally published in Merkur, April 1965, 380–85.
chapter 10. nazism, normalcy, and

the german sonderweg
1. This essay has been slightly revised and updated from the original version,
which appeared in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 4, The Jews and the Euro-
pean Crisis, ed. Jonathan Frankel. Copyright 䉷 1988 by Oxford University Press,
Inc. Used by Permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, Ohio: Merid-
ian Books, 1958).
3. For a history of Marxist approaches, see Pierre Aycoberry, The Nazi
Question: An Essay on the Interpretations of National Socialism, 1922–1975
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), chaps. 4, 9.
4. For a useful analysis of such tendencies, see Georg G. Iggers, The German
Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from
Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983).
5. See Gerhard Ritter, The German Problem: Basic Questions of German
Political Life, Past and Present (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,1965). The
work was published originally in 1962. This, in turn, was a revised and expanded
version of Ritter’s 1948 treatise Europa und die deutsche Frage (Munich: F. Bruck-
mann Verlag, 1948). See too Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe (Bos-
ton: Beacon Press, 1950). This was published originally in German in 1946.
6. See, for instance, H. U. Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Co-
logne: Kiepenheuer u. Witsch, 1969); H. U. Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich,
1871–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973); and Ralf Dahrendorf,
Society and Democracy in Germany (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969). This,
of course, is a minimal listing. I leave aside for the moment examples of

Sonderweg intellectual history as this will be discussed in detail shortly.
7. David Blackbourn & Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History:
Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford
University Press,1984). In the text I refer to Eley’s essay “The British Model and
the German Road: Rethinking the Course of German History Before 1914” and
Blackbourn’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: Reappraising German His-
tory in the Nineteenth Century.” See too Blackbourn’s Class, Religion, and Local
Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980)
and Eley’s Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political
Change after Bismarck (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980).
8. There were clear political implications in this debate. Sonderweg theorists
by and large happened to be liberal-left historians who felt impelled to counter
previous conservative German historical attitudes. Eley is quite aware of this and
respectful of their achievement, although the political ramifications go further
than this. The Sonderweg historians, Eley writes, have argued
against the accumulated complacency of a society which actively suppressed the

questions of deeper-rooted historical responsibility for fascism, and against the ob-
durate resistance of conservatives in the profession who commanded enormous
reserves of institutional power. . . . Their struggle . . . has been conducted as a
two-front war—not only with the hulking dinosaurs of the Zunft [the “guild”
of German historians], but also with the Marxist-Leninist beast. Since the early
1970s, “critical historians” have carefully negotiated a middle path, exposing the
limitations of traditional history of whatever stripe, but strictly demarcating them-
selves from the German Democratic Republic. (5–6)
This is important as Eley claims that their “proscription of Marxism has extended
not just to the works of orthodox communist [sic] historiography, but to all forms
of a Marxist approach, whatever their distance from the latter” (6). The last re-
mark is clearly self-referential. See the introduction to Eley’s series of essays, From
Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (Boston: Allen & Unwin,
1986).
9. Blackbourn & Eley, Peculiarities of German History, 10.
10. Blackbourn, “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” in Blackbourn & Ely,
Peculiarities of German History, 169.
11. Eley, “The British Model and the German Road,” in Blackbourn & Ely,
Peculiarities of German History, 80–81.
12. Blackbourn & Ely, Peculiarities of German History, 16.
13. Eley, “The British Model and the German Road,” in Blackbourn & Ely,
Peculiarities of German History, 85.
14. Ibid., 84.
15. For some German reactions to the work see, for instance, H. J. Puehle,
“Deutscher Sonderweg: Kontroverse um eine vermeintliche Legende,” Journal für
Geschichte 4 (1981); H. U. Wehler, “‘Deutscher Sonderweg’ oder allgemeine Pro-
bleme des westlichen Kapitalismus? Zur Kritik einigen ‘Mythen deutscher Gesch-
ichtsschreibung,’” Merkur 35, no. 5 (1981). For a more complete listing and a
sense of their perspective on the debate, see Blackbourn & Ely, introduction to
Peculiarities of German History.
16. Gordon Craig, “The German Mystery Case,” New York Review of
Books, 30 January 1986, 20–23.
17. James Joll, “Exactions of Empire,” Times Literary Supplement, 2 August
1985, 861.
19. Eley, “The German Right, 1860–1945: How It Changed,” in Eley, From
Unification to Nazism, 234.
20. R. D. O. Butler, The Roots of National Socialism (London: Faber and
Faber,1941), 277f.
21. Peter Viereck, Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler (New York:
A. A. Knopf, 1941), esp. chaps. 5, 6.
22. Crane Brinton, Nietzsche (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1941).
23. Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (Atlantic
Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981). This was first published in German
under the title Die Zerstörung der Vernunft in 1953.
24. Geoff Eley, review of Roderick Stackelberg, Idealism Debased, in Studies
in Contemporary Jewry 1 (1984): esp. 544. Subsequent to the writing of this
essay, I published The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990 (Berkeley & Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1992). I hope that this can be regarded
as an example of the kind of cultural and intellectual history for which I was
pleading here.
25. It is of significance that George L. Mosse’s Toward the Final Solution
(New York: H. Fertig, 1978) is subtitled “A History of European Racism.” More-
over Mosse stresses the scavenger nature of racism and its compatibility with a
wide number of political positions. He specifically departs from a simplistic
Sonderweg determinism and argues that prior to 1914 it was France, not Ger-
many, that exhibited the most pernicious racist, anti-Semitic and proto-fascist
tendencies (168).
26. To document this, see the series of essays in David C. Large & William
Weber, eds., Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1984).
27. There is a contemporary danger of going to the opposite extreme.
R. Hinton Thomas, in Nietzsche in German Politics and Society, 1890–1918
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), for instance, regards Nietz-
sche’s influence through the Great War as exerted almost totally on progressive
circles. The “deconstructionist” Nietzsche—as I note in chapter 2 of the present
volume, “Thinking the Nietzsche Legacy Today”—has also largely excised the
problematic aspects of Nietzsche’s work. Hopefully my Nietzsche Legacy in Ger-
many has helped to correct these imbalances.
28. Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism
in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).
29. For this whole development, see the instructive and controversial essay
by Zeev Sternhell, “Fascist Ideology,” in Fascism: A Reader’s Guide, ed. Walter
Laqueur (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979).
30. George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnor-

mal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: H. Fertig, 1985).
31. George Mosse interview with Michael A. Ledeen in Nazism: A Histori-
cal and Comparative Analysis of National Socialism (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Transaction Books, 1978), 43.
32. See H. Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism (New York: 1939), and
E. Nolte, The Three Faces of Fascism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1965).
33. J. Edward Chamberlin & Sander L. Gilman, eds., Degeneration: The
Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), viii.
34. Ibid., 290.
35. Geoff Eley, “Holocaust History,” London Review of Books, 3–11 March
1982, 6–9.
36. For reviews of this school, see Tim Mason, “Intention and Explanation:
A Current Controversy About the Interpretation of National Socialism,” in G.
Hirschfeld & L. Kettenacker, eds. Der “Führerstaat,” Mythos und Reaität (Stutt-
gart: Klett-Cotta, 1981); Saul Friedlander, “From Anti-Semitism to Extermina-
tion: A Historiographical Study of Nazi Policies Toward the Jews and an Essay in
Interpretation,” Yad Vashem Studies 16 (1984); Otto D. Kulka, “Major Trends
and Tendencies in German Historiography on National Socialism and the ‘Jewish
Question’ (1924–1984),” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 30 (1985).
37. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics
in Weimar and the Third Reich (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
38. It is unfortunate that Herf never makes the differences with Blackbourn
and Eley explicit as such a confrontation is directly germane to his major thesis.
Given the 1980 date of the German publication of their work, there was ample time
to include it. Such a confrontation, indeed, may well have toughened Herf’s text.
After Blackbourn and Eley, one cannot speak, as Herf does in his book, of “the fail-
ure of the bourgeois revolution” in Germany (217) as if it were a self-evident histori-
cal fact rather than a deeply contested thesis in need of detailed substantiation.
39. Herf, of course, is not alone in this. See, too, Anson Rabinbach, “The
Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich,” in George Mosse, ed., International
Fascism (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1979); Karl Heinz Ludwig, Tech-
nik und Ingenieure im Dritten Reich (Königstein: Athenäum; Düsseldorf: Droste
Verlag, 1979).
40. Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 11.
41. Ibid., 48.
42. Ibid., 13.
43. Eley, “The German Right, 1860–1945: How It Changed,” in Eley, From
Unification to Nazism, 244.
45. See Blackbourn’s “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” in Blackbourn &
Eley, Peculiarities of German History, esp. 206–21.
46. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), chap. 1. The work was published
originally in 1939.
47. For an interesting treatment of a countervailing (though not triumphant)

humanist tradition within German nationalism, see Christoph Prignitz, Vater-
landsliebe und Freiheit: Deutscher Patriotismus von 1750 bis 1850 (Wiesbaden:
Steiner, 1981).
48. George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of
the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964).
49. Chamberlin & Gilman, Degeneration, viii.
50. Blackbourn & Eley, Peculiarities of German History, 26. See, too, Black-
bourn’s “The Politics of Demagogy in Imperial Germany,” Past and Present 113
(November 1986): 152–84.
51. Eley argues that he offers “a careful Marxist approach explicitly dis-
tanced from orthodox Marxist-Leninist ones.” At least in terms of the value of
their critique of the Sonderweg position, I do not believe that Blackbourn and
Eley present “just another rendition of the old vulgar Marxist line.” It is their
alternative theories that are open to question. See Eley’s introduction to From
Unification to Nazism, 18, n. 16.
52. Geoff Eley, “What Produces Fascism: Pre-Industrial Traditions or a Cri-
sis of the Capitalist State?” From Unification to Nazism, 270.
53. There is no need here to list the massive relevant literature concerning
anti-Semitism and racism. On the question of Lebensraum and related matters,
see Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986). On varying conceptions of “national socialism,”
see Sternhell, “Fascist Ideology.”
54. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National So-
cialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), 125.
55. Herf, Reactionary Modernism, see esp. chaps. 8 and 9.
56. Ibid., 229.
57. Blackbourn and Eley are not alone in challenging liberal interpretations.
One such challenge that explicitly sought to displace the centrality of racism and
genocide as the historical key was Geoffiey Barraclough’s series of articles in the
New York Review of Books, 9 October 1972; 2, 16 November 1972. Barraclough
did make some trenchant criticisms. But Nazism’s historical significance can
surely not be satisfactorily summed up in terms of its (largely unintended) mod-
ernizing side-effects. Was its capitalist activity more important than its racial revo-
lution? If Blackbourn and Eley are correct, Germany had experienced its capitalist
transformation long before the Nazis appeared. The argument with them remains
whether an understanding of Nazism is best comprehended in terms of the dy-
namics of this crisis.
58. On this point, see George L. Mosse, “Der erste Weltkrieg und die Bru-
talisierung der Politik: Betrachtungen über die politische Rechte, den Rassismus,
und den deutschen Sonderweg” in Manfred Funke et al., eds. Demokratie und
Diktatur. Geist und Gestalt politische Herrschafi in Deutschland und Europa,
Festschrift für Karl Dietrich Bracher (Dusseldorf: Droste, 1987). But Juergen
Kocka is correct to point out that in many crucial ways Nazism possessed a dy-
namic that far transcended “the old German Sonderweg.” The Sonderweg thesis,
he argues, is helpful in explaining why there were so few barriers to fascism in
Germany but less so when accounting for Nazism’s unique radical impulse. See
his “German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German ‘Sonderweg,’”
Journal of Contemporary History 23 (1988): 3–16.
chapter 11. nazism, culture, and the origins

of totalitarianism
1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2d enl. ed. (Cleveland,
Ohio: Meridian Books, 1958). “Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of Totalitari-
anism: Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil” was first published in New
German Critique 70 (Winter 1997): 117–41. Reprinted by permission of New
German Critique.
2. Indeed, there is a compulsion to reminisce about it in almost confessional
terms! For instance, in a recent paper Michael Marrus reports how taken aback
he was when a reviewer of his first book, The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of
the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (London: Oxford
University Press, 1971), rebuked him for taking Hannah Arendt seriously (“a bad
sign”): “I first read The Origins of Totalitarianism . . . in 1963 and I recall pack-
ing a heavily underlined copy among the few possessions I took with me to gradu-
ate school in the summer of that year. And so the put-down . . . did not sting at
the time. But I remember being puzzled at the very nature of the accusation. Could
there be people who did not take Hannah Arendt seriously, I wondered?” See
Marrus, “Hannah Arendt and the Dreyfus Affair,” New German Critique 66 (Fall
1995): 147. Even readers more critical than Marrus write similarly of the power
exerted by the book. Abbot Gleason, who has just written a kind of retrospective
balance-sheet of the notion of totalitarianism reports that upon first reading the
Origins in 1958, “I was disturbed and enthralled by its vision and rhetoric,” al-
though he adds that even then “its post-war atmosphere of Armageddon seemed
anachronistic.” See Gleason’s Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War
(New York: Oxford University Press), 5.
3. Raul Hilberg’s pathbreaking The Destruction of the European Jews only
appeared in 1961.
4. I owe this formulation to Melvin Richter in conversation, 6 November
1995.
5. Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Knopf, 1978), 299.
6. A good introduction to this and Arendt’s context can be found in Elisa-
beth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press 1982).
7. See the review in the New Leader, 15 August 1951.
8. McCarthy to Arendt, 26 April 1951, in Arendt & McCarthy, Between
Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949–
1975, ed. Carol Brightman (New York: Harcourt Brace,1995), 1–2.
9. See Phillip Rieff, “The Theology of Politics: Reflections on Totalitarian-
ism as the Burden of Our Time,” Journal of Religion 32, no. 2 (April 1952): 119.
10. Judith N. Shklar, “Hannah Arendt as Pariah,” Partisan Review 50
(1983): 69.
11. See Leon Botstein, “The Jew as Pariah: Hannah Arendt’s Political Philos-
ophy,” Dialectical Anthropology 8 (1983): 57. Arendt’s “views on writing history,
despite an enduring insistence on understanding how fact differs from opinion,
showed traces of Heidegger, Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin’s challenge to the
claims of historical objectivity and the static character of historical fact. She stuck
to her didactic story telling.”
12. Marrus, “Hannah Arendt and the Dreyfus Affair,” 14.
13. See Martin Jay, “Name-Dropping or Dropping Names? Modes of Legiti-
mation in the Humanities,” in his Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and
Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993), 168.
14. For a “left” view see Phillip Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History,
and Citizenship (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993). See too Bonnie
Honig, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (University Park: Pennsyl-
vania State University Press, 1995).
15. For a good exposition of the place of anti-Semitism in her overall
scheme, see the article by Ben Halpern, “The Context of Hannah Arendt’s Con-
cept of Totalitarianism” in Totalitarian Democracy and After (Jerusalem: Magnes
Press, 1984), 386–98. Arendt’s totalitarianism was a product of the nation-states
and essentially international. As Halpern puts it: “For it was the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion that became the model the fascists followed; taking the extraterri-
torial survival of the Jewish people as their example, the fascists developed an
essentially anti-national, global conspiracy of their own, with anti-Semitism as its
essential base” (394). Both Jaspers and Arendt were very critical of Halpern. See
their Correspondence 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler & Hans Saner, trans. Rob-
ert & Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 121–23, 162.
Halpern was aware of this hostility and prefaced his article by stressing that he
would “perform the task with all the empathy she deserves” (387).
16. Irving Howe, The Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt Brace Jova-
novich, 1970), 244–45.
17. Arendt’s portrait in Origins not only reflected her overall existentialist
posture that all historical actors exercised certain historical choices for which they
were responsible (at least in the pre-totalitarian phase) but also a defiantly anti-
apologetic form of Jewish history inspired partly by her “post-assimilationist”
mentor Kurt Blumenfeld.
18. See the 1972 Hebrew University M. A. dissertation by Yerahmiel Cohen
(supervised and approved by the leading modern Jewish historian at that time,
Shmuel Ettinger), “On the Question of the Responsibility of the Jews for Their
Extermination by the Nazis as Expressed in the Writings of Bruno Bettelheim,
Raul Hilberg, and Hannah Arendt, and the Debate Surrounding Them,” 45 ff.
Cohen has since then clearly moderated his views (see the next note) but, based
upon various conversations I have had in the very recent past, it would not be
wrong to say that some of Israel’s leading historians and political scientists hold
this view to this day.
19. Indeed, Yerahmiel Cohen, the author of the views quoted in the above
note has now (in much cooler fashion) comprehensively surveyed attitudes in this
respect in his “Breaking the Code: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and
the Public Polemic—Myth, Memory, and Historical Imagination,” in Michael 13

(1993): 29–85.
20. Leon Wieseltier, “Understanding Anti-Semitism: Hannah Arendt on the
Origins of Prejudice,” New Republic, 7 October 1981, 29–32. The quote appears
on 32.
21. This was published for the first time much later in 1957 and in English.
For the latest revised edition, see Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman,
trans. Richard & Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).
Many years later Blumenfeld, her Zionist mentor from Weimar days onward, re-
formulated his position to Arendt thus: “Genuine relationships between Jews and
non Jews will first occur when the Jew too will not be embarrassed to express his
opinions about other Jews . . . .” See Letter 104, 25 July 1969, in Hannah Ar-
endt & Kurt Blumenfeld, “. . . in keinem Besitz verwurzelt” Die Korrespondenz,
Heraugegeben von Ingeborg Nordmann und Iris Pilling (Hamburg: Rotbuch Ver-
lag, 1995), 237–38.
22. As one commentator has recently put it, Origins “is best read as an onto-
logically informed account of a distinctive and frightening political reality which
threatens in a powerful and unprecedented way our human status as political
beings.” See Hansen, Hannah Arendt. The quote appears on 133.
23. Relatively early (1978), Martin Jay critically suggested that Arendt’s
overall views were indelibly stamped by a Heideggerian kind of existentialism
and Weimarian “decisionism” that produced a politics devoid of any guiding and
substantial norms. See “The Political Existentialism of Hannah Arendt” in Jay’s
collection Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany
to America (New York: Columbia Press, 1985), 237–56. For a more recent, highly
detailed depiction of Arendt as a postmodern political theorist who inherited and
creatively reworked the Heideggerian (and Nietzschean) predicament and the col-
lapse of metaphysics but who avoided their pernicious political conclusions see
Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1996).
24. It should be very obvious that this was by no means a consensual view.
Apart from the fury and pain Arendt evoked with her Eichmann book, many
other fine minds were far from persuaded as to the quality of hers. Isaiah Berlin
is an extreme example of this: “I do not greatly respect the lady’s ideas . . . I think
she produces no arguments, no evidence of serious philosophical or historical
thought. It is all a stream of metaphysical free association.” See Ramin Jahanbeg-
loo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Peter Halban, 1992), 82.
25. Rieff, “Theology of Politics,” 119.
26. “The behaviour patterns of assimilated Jews, determined by this contin-
uous concentrated effort to distinguish themselves, created a Jewish type that is
recognizable everywhere. Instead of being defined by nationality or religion, Jews
were being transformed into a social group whose members shared certain psy-
chological attributes and reactions, the sum total of which was supposed to con-
stitute ‘Jewishness.’ In other words, Judaism became a psychological quality and
the Jewish question became an involved personal problem for every individual
Jew.” See Arendt, Origins, 66. See generally chap. 3, “The Jews and Society.”
27. Arendt, Origins, 277. In this chapter (9), entitled “The Decline of the
Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” Arendt is especially illuminating
on the latter and hopelessly confusing (and perhaps confused) on the former.
28. Ibid., 479.
29. Ibid., 437–59. The quote appears on 437.
30. “From Koenigsberg to Manhattan (Or Hannah, Rahel, Martin and El-
friede or Thy Neighbour’s Gemeinschaft)” in Ernest Gellner, Culture, Identity,
and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 89–90.
31. On the concept of totalitarianism in general and Arendt’s in particular,
see Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For general treatments of Origins (fair but
also critical) see Stephen Whitfield, Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitari-
anism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980) and Margaret Canovan, The
Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1974). For a defense of the work in the light of such criticisms see Bernard Crick,
“On Rereading The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Social Research 44, no. 1
(Spring 1977): 106–26. For one important and perhaps surprising rejection (given
the fact that his name was intimately associated with Arendt over the Eichmann
in Jerusalem controversy), see Raul Hilberg, Unerbetene Erinnerung: Der Weg
eines Holocaust-Forschers (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fisher, 1994), 128.
32. Raymond Aron, “The Essence of Totalitarianism according to Hannah
Arendt,” Partisan Review 60, no. 3 (1993): 366–76. Originally in the French jour-
nal Critique, 1954.
33. For a still interesting review of these theories and their problems as well
as their ideological biases, see Leon Bramson, The Political Context of Sociology
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961). A recent attempt to argue that
Arendt’s use of the mass society hypothesis was not conservative can be found in
Hansen, Hannah Arendt.
34. See his essay on Arendt, “The Survivor” in Jean-François Lyotard, To-
ward the Postmodern (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1993), 156–
58. The burden of the essay, in rather Marcuseian fashion, is to argue that given
the ongoing psychological anxieties that both produce and sustain totalitarian-
ism, the totalitarian threat remains not only intact but a reality within advanced
contemporary industrial society. There is something absurdly inappropriate in
the—badly translated?—text: “The historical names for this Mr. Nice Guy totali-
tarianism are no longer Stalingrad or Normandy (much less Auschwitz) but Wall
Street’s Dow Average and the Tokyo Nikkei Index.” (159).
35. Jaspers to Arendt, 12 January 1952, Letter 14, in Arendt & Jaspers,
36. Hannah Arendt, “A Reply,” Review of Politics, January 1953, 78.
37. Thus wrote Mary McCarthy in a letter, 26 April 1951, in Arendt &
McCarthy, Between Friends, 2.
38. Margaret Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, 42.
39. As Walter Laqueur has recently noted, Arendt does not deal with Com-
munism “except in passing”; much is said of Dreyfus and Rhodes and hardly
anything of Lenin. See his “Postfascism, Postcommunism,” Partisan Review 3
(1995): 383–96. The reference appears on 389.
40. The work was begun already in 1946, impelled, as Gleason says, “by
her increasing realization of the scale of the death camps and the radicality of
Nazi intentions” (Totalitarianism, 108). Even before that, in 1945, Arendt pub-
lished relevant reflections upon Nazi mass murder. See her “Organized Guilt and
Universal Responsibility” reproduced in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understand-
ing, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994),
121–32.
41. See Arendt’s letter of 19 July 1947 in Arendt & Blumenfeld, “ . . . in
keinem Besitz verwurzelt,” 43.
42. Arendt, “What Remains? The Language Remains: A Conversation with
Günter Gaus” in Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 14.
43. Kazin, New York Jew, 298.
44. Arendt, “Approaches to the ‘German Problem,’” Partisan Review 12,
no. 1 (Winter 1945): 93–106; reproduced in Arendt, Essays in Understanding,
106–20.
45. I treat these different conceptions in chapter 1 of my Culture and Catas-
trophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other
Crises (New York: New York University Press, 1995).
46. Arendt, “Approaches to the ‘German Problem.’” The quotes appear on
108–9.
47. Arendt to Jaspers, 4 March 1951, in Arendt & Jaspers, Correspon-
dence, 166.
48. For an interpretation placing Arendt squarely on the left (perhaps even
more radically than Marx) and defending her reading of mass society as proceed-
ing from a radical rather than conservative viewpoint see Hansen, Hannah
Arendt.
49. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World, 200.
Hansen argues that Arendt does not indict modernity as such but rather its spe-
cifically bourgeois component as the culprit in the rise of totalitarianism. See
Hansen, Hannah Arendt, 133.
50. George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins
of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964); Fritz Stern, The Politics
of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology (Berkeley & Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1961).
51. Gellner, “From Koenigsberg,” 89.
52. Ibid., 85.
53. One should note that shortly before his death Gellner sought to resusci-
tate the usefulness of the concept of totalitarianism. See his “Coming to Terms,”
New Republic, 4 December 1995, 42–45.
54. This debate has been fueled by the appearance of Elzbieta Ettinger, Han-
nah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995).
The most reductionist argument representing Arendt’s view of Nazism as “kul-
turlos” as a function of her attempt to rehabilitate Heidegger is to be found in
Richard Wolin’s piece, “Hannah and the Magician: An Affair to Remember,” New
Republic, 9 October 1995, 27–37.
55. Gellner, “From Koenigsberg,” 86.
56. Arendt to Blumenfeld, 19 July 1947, in Arendt & Blumenfeld, “ . . . in
keinem Besitz verwurzelt,” 43.

134.
58. In an unpublished letter for instance, Arendt wrote that Raul Hilberg’s ork
on the destruction of European Jewry was almost “perfect” except for the “foolish”
first chapter (that sought to locate Nazi anti-Semitism within the continuity of Ger-
man—and Western—history). See Hilberg, Unerbetene Erinnerung, 135.
59. Kazin, New York Jew, 307.
60. Thus, Arendt remarked of Hermann Broch (whom she deeply admired)
that his categories and values, and especially his emphasis on death, were charac-
teristic of the generation of World War I. He “remained limited to this . . . horizon
of experience; and it is decisive that this horizon was broken through by the gener-
ation for whom not war but totalitarian forms of rule were the basic, the crucial
experience. For we know today that killing is far from the worst that man can
inflict on man and that on the other hand death is by no means what man most
fears.” See her “Hermann Broch: 1886–1951” in Men in Dark Times (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1968), 126–27.
61. See the insightful comments by George Kateb, “The Questionable In-
fluence of Arendt (and Strauss)” in Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German
Emigres and American Political Thought after World War II, ed. P. G. Kiel-
mansegg (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 1995).
62. Raymond Aron, “The Essence of Totalitarianism.” The review is a mas-
terly “common-sense” critique.
63. See the English version of this famous work, The Question of German
Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Dial Press, 1947).
64. Arendt to Jaspers, 17 August 1946, in Arendt & Jaspers, Correspon-
dence, 51–56. The quote appears on 54.
65. Jaspers to Arendt, 19 October 1946, in Arendt & Jaspers, Correspon-
66. In a review of Denis de Rougemont’s The Devil’s Share in Partisan Re-
view 12, no. 2 (1945): 259–60; reproduced in Arendt, Essays in Understanding,
133–35.
67. The “metaphysical” temptation is great indeed, perhaps a given, in this
kind of extreme situation. Sidney Hook, for instance, was acutely aware of the
problem from early on and sought a different, far more concrete mode of analysis
in his “Hitlerism: A Non-Metaphysical View,” Contemporary Jewish Record 7,
no. 2 (April 1944): 146–56.
68. Arendt to Jaspers, 17 December 1946, in Arendt & Jaspers, Correspon-
69. “My mother,” writes Andrew Delbanco, “told me with tears in her eyes
that Joseph Goebbels had been the devil incarnate—Mephistopheles she called
him.” In his recent book The Death of Satan, he writes that America is a culture
that has lost a necessary sense of evil, incapable of constructing an acceptable
symbolic language for describing what nevertheless remains an ongoing experi-
ence. See The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost Their Sense of Evil
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), esp. 5 and 224.
134.
71. Arendt to Jaspers, 4 March 1951, in Arendt & Jaspers, Correspondence,

165–68. The quotes appear on 166. If the camps resemble “nothing so much
as medieval pictures of Hell,” she wrote in Origins, it did not reproduce “what
made the traditional conceptions of Hell tolerable to man: the Last judgement,
the idea of an absolute standard of justice combined with the infinite possibility
of grace” (447).
72. Arendt, Origins, 459. In addition, she writes:
It is the appearance of some radical evil, previously unknown to us, that puts an
end to the notion of developments and transformations of qualities. Here, there are
neither political nor historical nor simply moral standards but at the most, the
realization that something seems to be involved in modern politics that actually
should never have been involved in politics as we used to understand it, namely all-
or-nothing—all, and that is an undetermined infinity of forms of human living-
together, or nothing . . . inexorable doom for human beings. (443)
73. See chapter 1 of Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe.

74. As Greil Marcus puts it: Arendt “does not explain it, because that is not
what one does with an abyss; instead . . . she locates it. Without in any way re-
moving Nazism from history,” she demonstrates its radically transgressive, novel
nature, the ways in which it “altered the limits of action.” See his “Götterdämmer-
ung after Twenty-One Years” (1976) but republished as still valid and relevant in
his recent The Dustbin of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1995). The quotes appear on 61–62.
75. Arendt to Jaspers, 17 August 1946, in Arendt & Jaspers, Correspon-
dence, 54.
76. George Steiner, for instance, is quite candid about this. “The atrocities,”
he writes, “did not spring up in the Gobi desert or the rain forests of the Amazon.”
See the preface to Steiner’s Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature
and the Inhuman (New York, 1977), viii–ix. “My own consciousness is possessed
by the eruption of barbarism in Europe,” he writes. Yet this simultaneously indi-
cates his Eurocentrism as well as its saving critical capacity: “I do not claim for
this hideousness any singular privilege; but this is the crisis of rational, humane
expectation which has shaped my own life and with which I am most directly
concerned” (viii).
77. See my Culture and Catastrophe, 9. I have also just come across Scott L.
Montgomery’s provocative but insightful article, “What Kind of Memory? Re-
flections on Images of the Holocaust,” Contention 5, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 79–103.
78. See, for instance, Shiraz Dossa, “Human Status and Politics: Hannah
Arendt on the Holocaust,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 8, no. 2 (June
1980): 309–23, and Anne Norton, “Heart of Darkness: Africa and African
Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt,” in Honig, ed., Feminist Interpreta-
tions of Hannah Arendt, 247–61.
79. Arendt, Origins, 192.
80. Ibid., 443.
81. Norton, “Heart of Darkness,” esp. 252–54.
82. Dossa, “Human Status and Politics,” 319–20.
83. Marcus, “Götterdämmerung,” in Dustbin of History, 53.

84. Montgomery, “What Kind of Memory?” 79–80; 88; 98–99.
85. Ibid., 100–101.
86. His heated denials notwithstanding, this, I would argue, is the effect
created by Steven Katz in his massive The Holocaust in Historical Context: The
Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1994).
87. See the very insightful review of Katz’s book by David Biale in Tikkun
10, no. 1 (January-February 1995): 79–80, 88.
88. Alain Finkielkraut, Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and
Crimes against Humanity, trans. Roxanne Lapidus with Sima Godfrey, introduc-
tion by Alice Y. Kaplan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
89. Ibid. “Nothing inherent makes a discussion of colonialism cancel out a
discussion of the shoah; nothing inherent makes a discussion of the shoah cancel
out a discussion of the Third World. The political rift between two world perspec-
tives is both tragic and emblematic of our times.” See Kaplan’s introduction (xxi).
90. For a rounded discussion of this problem see Saul Friedlander, ed., Prob-
ing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
chapter 12. post-holocaust jewish mirrorings

of germany
1. This essay was originally presented at an International conference on
“Mirroring Germany: Imagination, Representation, Memory” sponsored by the
Institute for German History, Tel Aviv University, 25–26 May 1997, and originally
published in Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 26 (1997): 345–53.
Reprinted by permission of Institute for German History, Tel Aviv University.
2. See, for instance, Dominick Le Capra, Representing the Holocaust: His-
tory, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994) and Saul
Friedlander, “Trauma and Transference” in his Memory, History, and the Exter-
mination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
3. Her present revival is nothing short of remarkable. Virtually every politi-
cal and cultural strain is currently claiming and appropriating her. For a neo-
Marxist reading, see Phillip Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History, and Cizi-
tenship (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993). Bonnie Honig has
edited a collection entitled Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). The postmodernist angle is most
thoroughly examined in Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the
Political (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). These, one must
note, are all general appropriations. Her more familiar role as a “Jewish” thinker
also continues to fascinate. See, most recently, Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Ar-
endt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). Because of
her critical attitude to Zionism and, most infamously, her book on Eichmann,
until very recently Arendt has been virtually taboo in Israel. This now appears to
be changing. See the admirable special issue “Hannah Arendt and Eichmann in
Jerusalem,” published in the Tel Aviv University journal History & Memory 8,
no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1996). In addition, a Hebrew University international confer-
ence on “Arendt in Jerusalem” was held in December 1997, and the ensuing vol-
ume will be published by the University of California Press.
4. My admiration for Arendt, however critically tempered, is evident in the
pieces I have written on her work. See “Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers: Friend-
ship, Catastrophe and the Possibilities of the German-Jewish Dialogue” in my
Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National So-
cialism and Other Crises (New York: New York University Press, 1996) and chap-
ter 11 of this volume, “Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of Totalitarianism:
Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil.” Goldhagen’s stature as an historian
and thinker is, of course, a quite different matter. See my very critical review of
his book, “Reconceiving the Holocaust?” in Tikkun 11 (July/August 1996):
62–65 and reproduced as chapter 13 of this volume. The present comparative
juxtaposition does not point to any symmetry of importance and depth but only
to their visible roles in the geneses, formulations, and receptions of these central
paradigms.
5. On this theme see my “Archetypes and the German Jewish Dialogue: Re-
flections Occasioned by the Goldhagen Affair,” in chapter 9 of this volume.
6. “Approaches to the ‘German Problem,’” in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Un-
derstanding 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994),
108–9. The article was first published in Partisan Review 12 (Winter 1945):
93–106.
7. As she wrote to her mentor on January 6, 1933: “What troubled me first
of course is the term ‘German character.’ You say yourself how misused it is. For
me it is almost identical with misuse. Even if I were to just to hear the term, as if
you were to speak of it for the first time, I would still balk at it. Perhaps I have
not understood what you meant by an emerging historical totality. I took it to
mean that this character manifests itself from time to time in history. It would
remain, then, despite its basic indeterminateness, something absolute, something
untouched by history and Germany’s destiny. I cannot identify with that, because
I do not have in myself, so to speak, an attestation of ‘German character.’” See
Arendt to Jaspers, Letter 24, in Hannah Arendt & Karl Jaspers, Correspondence
1926–1969 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 18–19.
8. Arendt, “Approaches to the ‘German Problem,’” Essays in Understand-
ing, 97.
9. See Ernest Gellner’s provocative “From Königsberg to Manhattan (Or
Hannah, Rahel, Martin and Elfriede or Thy Neighbour’s Gemeinschaft),” in his
Culture, Identity, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
10. This point is interestingly developed in Ben Halpern, “The Context of
Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Totalitarianism,” Totalitarian Democracy and After
(Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1984), 386–98.
11. Ibid., 97.
12. See the postscript to Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: The Viking
Press, 1965), 287.
13. This is rather a speculative matter. For some interesting suggestions see
Dan Diner, “Hannah Arendt Reconsidered: On the Moral and Evil in Her Holo-
caust Narrative,” New German Critique 71 (1997): 177–90.
14. See her “Nightmare and Flight” in Arendt, Essays in Understanding,
154.
15. The work that caused all the furor is Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordi-
nary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
16. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “Motives, Causes, and Alibis: A Reply to My
Critics,” New Republic, 23 December 1996, 37–45. The quote appears on 39.
17. Even prior to its German translation a whole critical volume appeared
in Germany! See Julius H. Schoeps, ed., Ein Volk von Mördern? Die Dokumenta-
tion zur Goldhagen-Kontroverse um die Rolle der Deutschen im Holocaust
(Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1996).
18. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 45. See also 28.
19. Clearly this is a complex, long-term process that goes well beyond its
early connection with Arendt. The simple passage of time, the notion that some-
how survivors carry with them a form of “mythical” memory and the postmod-
ernist problematization of representation and memory are all components of this
process. Most recently Istvan Deak, has written: “An accurate record of the Holo-
caust has been endangered in my opinion, by the uncritical endorsement, often
by well-known Jewish writers or public figures, of virtually any survivor’s account
or related writings.” See his “Memories of Hell,” New York Review of Books, 26
June 1997, 38.
20. In a recent essay Anson Rabinbach puts it thus:
Goldhagen’s Holocaust is violent, demonizing, particularistic, judeocentric and con-
crete . . . It reestablishes the hierarchy of hatred among the victims, so overwhelm-
ingly rejects the pluralist inclusivity that is so manifest in the new public memory
of Holocaust. . . . Goldhagen’s version of the story has a transgressive dimension
that restores many of the motifs that prevailed when Jewish memory did not have
to contend with its public presence or its universalist instrumentalization. The im-
pact of Goldhagen’s book therefore should be first and foremost considered an
event in the public sphere, and as such serves as a counterdiscourse to the “Ameri-
canization of the Holocaust.”
See his “Explosion to Erosion: Holocaust Memorialization in America from Bit-

burg to Goldhagen,” History & Memory 9, nos. 1/2 (Fall 1997): 250–51.
21. See Diner, “Hannah Arendt Reconsidered.”
22. See Bartov’s insightful comments in “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik’s
Other Planet: Israeli Youth Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no.
2 (1997): 42–76. The quote appears on 76.
23. This correspondence is to be found in Merkur, April 1965, 380–85.
chapter 13. reconceiving the holocaust?

This essay was first published in Tikkun 11, no. 4 (July/August 1996).
1. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Ger-
mans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
2. Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans
(New York: Basic Books, 1999).
3. Saul Friedlander, “The ‘Final Solution’: On the Unease in Historical Inter-
pretation,” in his Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 110.
4. Weil to Georges Bernanos, quoted in Alfred Kazin, “A Genius of the Spiri-
tual Life,” New York Review of Books, 18 April 1996, 21.
5. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “False Witness,” New Republic, 17 April
1989, 39–44.
6. Elie Wiesel, “Little Hitlers,” Observer Review, 31 March 1996, 14.
7. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 45.
chapter 14. george mosse at 80

This essay was first published in Journal of Contemporary History 34, no. 2
(April 1999).
1. This chapter, written prior to George Mosse’s death, consists of a compi-
lation, but also a considerable elaboration and reworking, of my piece “Between
Rationality and Irrationalism: George L. Mosse, the Holocaust, and European
Cultural History” that appeared in the Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 5
(1988): 187–202 and a talk given on the occasion of a celebration of George
Mosse’s 80th birthday in Madison, Wisconsin, in September 1998. It has gained
immeasurably—and I have indeed had the pleasure of having some of its insights
confirmed and deepened—by George Mosse generously providing me access to,
and granting me permission to quote from, his autobiography, Confronting His-
tory: A Memoir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). See Mosse’s in-
troduction to his The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1961), 1–10.
2. Mosse was born in 1918 into the upper-middle class of acculturated Ber-
lin Jewry. His maternal grandfather was the founder of the prestigious liberal
newspaper the Berliner Tageblatt. Mosse fled Germany soon after the Nazi as-
sumption of power, and received his education in England and the United States.
See the interview with Michael Ledeen, in Nazism: A Historical and Comparative
Analysis of National Socialism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1978),
chap. 1, 21–31. See also Sterling Fishman, “GLM: An Appreciation,” in Political
Symbolism in Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of George L. Mosse, ed. Seymour
Drescher, David Sabean, & Allen Sharlin (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction
Books, 1982), 275ff.
3. The homosexual aspect of Mosse’s life, its importance as a sensitizing
influence on the themes, emphases, and insights of his work, has only recently
been made explicit and I shall return to this subject later in the essay. See Mosse’s
biography, especially the chapter “Confronting History.”
4. Accessible analyses of Mosse’s work may be found in the introduction to
Seymour Drescher et al., eds., Political Symbolism in Modern Europe and in the
protracted interview with Mosse conducted by Michael Ledeen in Nazism.
5. See Culture of Western Europe, 2. The work was originally published
in 1961.
6. George L. Mosse, Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions

of Reality (New York: H. Fertig, 1980), 14–15.
7. This is true too in more general terms. Moshe Zimmermann has docu-
mented the ways in which Mosse prefigured trends that later dominated German
historiography but where the willingness to embrace and acknowledge his work
was exceedingly slow. See his “Mosse and German Historiography” in George
Mosse: On the Occasion of His Retirement (Jerusalem: n. p., 1986). That situa-
tion has, of course, been remedied and over the last few years Mosse’s work has
been extensively recognized in Germany and he has been the recipient of various
academic honors.
8. George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in
the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966).
9. In a sense one could argue that Mosse’s career has been a kind of applica-
tion of Malcolm Muggeridge’s retort to Goebbels: “Every time I hear the word
‘revolver’ I reach for my culture!” Mosse is, in many ways (as I shall try to show
later) the incarnation of the German Jewish Bildung Jews he so masterfully analy-
ses. But this too must be qualified as he has often criticized these same intellectu-
als for their overestimation of “culture” and for an ensuing, idealized politics,
quite cut off from more brutalized political realities. See, for instance, the lengthy
essay “Left-Wing Intellectuals in the Weimar Republic” in Germans and Jews:
The Right, The Left, and the Search for a “Third Force” in Pre-Nazi Germany
(New York: H. Fertig, 1970).
10. Many of these have been through numerous editions. See, respectively,
The Struggle for Sovereignty in England, from the Reign of Queen Elizabeth to
the Petition of Right (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1950);
The Reformation (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963); The Holy Pre-
tence, a Study of Christianity and Reason of State from William Perkins to
John Winthrop (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957). Mosse has not entirely ignored the
earlier period even in his second phase. See his remarkably successful Europe in
the Sixteenth Century, co-authored with H. Koenigsberger (London: Longmans,
1968).
11. The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964).
12. Klemens von Klemperer, in American Historical Review 71 (1966):
608–10.
13. Mosse, Crisis of German Ideology, 315.
14. George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European
Racism (London: J. M. Dent, 1978), 168. For an example of his more recent
comparative work, see Mosse’s “Toward a General Theory of Fascism,” in Masses
and Man, 159–96. See too his Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Na-
tionalism (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993).
15. “Der erste Weltkrieg und die Brutalisierung der Politik: Betrachtungen
über die Politische Rechte, den Rassismus, und den deutschen Sonderweg,” in
Demokratie und Diktatur: Geist und Gestalt politischer Herrschaft in Deutsch-
land und Europa, ed. Manfred Funke et al. (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1987), 135–36.
16. Confronting History, 182. The rest of the quote is also revealing: “and
if I have shown how what was latent or inherent in nationalism or in the discrimi-
nation of the outsider became overt through these movements, then I have filled
in a neglected piece of history which is also relevant to the present.”
17. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World
Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
18. George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbol-
ism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the
Third Reich (New York: H. Fertig, 1975). For this quote, see Confronting His-
tory, 177.
19. J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London:
Secker & Warburg, 1952). See Nationalization of the Masses. For his criticism of
Talmon, see Mosse, “Political Style and Political Theory—Totalitarian Democ-
racy Revisited,” in Totalitarian Democracy and After: international colloquium
in memory of Jacob L. Talmon, Jerusalem, 21–24 June 1982 (Jerusalem: Israel
Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1984), 167–76.
20. Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses, 168.
21. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution.
22. Ibid., xiii–xiv.
23. See Mosse’s response in George Mosse: On the Occasion of His Retire-
ment (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, The Koebner Chair of German History,
n.d.), xxviii. This book also contains a full bibliography of Mosse’s work until
mid-1985.
24. See “The Secularization of Jewish Theology,” in Masses and Man, 249–
62.
25. See “The Jews and the German War Experience,” in Masses and Man,
263–83.
26. See “The Influence of the Völkisch Idea on German Jewry,” one of
Mosse’s most original, influential, and provocative essays, in Germans and Jews,
77–115.
27. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnor-
mal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: H. Fertig, 1985).
28. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Mascu-
linity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
29. See the interview with David Strassler in the Jerusalem Post, 17 Septem-
ber 1991, 8.
30. Arthur Mitzman, “Fascism and Anti-Sex,” Stichtung Theoretische
Geschiedenis 12 (1986): 339–43, esp. 340.
31. This critique of the bourgeoisie and this analysis of its place within the
Nazi scheme must be firmly distinguished from Marxist and neo-Marxist inter-
pretations. Although both approaches indict the bourgeoisie, Mosse’s analysis
stresses perceptual and ideological factors, not material ones. He does not argue
that Nazism was a tool of or served the interests of finance capitalism, as do the
Marxists. His analysis is pitched at a different level. For some of the relationships
and dissonances between these analyses, see my “Nazism, Normalcy, and the Ger-
man Sonderweg,” chapter 10 in the present volume.
32. Mosse, interview with David Strasser, Jerusalem Post, 17 September
1991, 8.
33. Mosse, Confronting History, 178–80.
34. Mosse, Nazism, 43.

35. See Mosse’s review, “E. Nolte on Three Faces on Fascism,” Journal of
the History of ldeas 27 (1966): 621–26.
36. For a critical but sympathetic review of Nationalism and Sexuality, see
Peter N. Stearns, in Journal of Modern History 58 (1986): 256–58.
37. This problem is discussed in more detail in this book in “On Saul Fried-
lander,” chapter 15 of this volume.
38. Mosse, Confronting History, 5.
39. Ibid., 180
40. See “Conclusion: Everyone’s Morality,” in Mosse, Nationalism and Sex-
uality, chapter 9, esp. 191.
41. Mosse, Confronting History, 180–81.
42. Mosse discusses Croce in Culture of Western Europe, esp. 302–7. See
also Nazism, 28–29.
43. “Ever since I left Harvard I had lived largely among historians commit-
ted to their subject. While this furthered my own research and writing, it also
made me intolerant of those historians for whom writing history seemed to be
only a profession like any other. . . . I sometimes said publicly—and certainly un-
justly—that some of my present-day colleagues could just as well have been ac-
countants.” Mosse, Confronting History, 171.
44. Michael Steinberg, “Aby Warburg’s Kreuzlingen Lecture: A Reading” in
Aby M.Warburg, Images from the Region of Pueblo Indians of North America
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), esp. 73 n. 27 and 111. The only
place, I would argue, that a celebratory view of such a “fortress rationality” may
still be discerned in Mosse’s work is in his portrait of the rational project of
German-Jewish intellectuals, a subject to be dealt with presently.
45. Paul Breines has published two splendidly evocative articles chronicling
Mosse’s influence as a man and as a teacher: “Germans, Journals, and Jews—
Madison, Men, Marxism, and Mosse: A Tale of Jewish-Leftist Identity Confu-
sion in America,” New German Critique 20 (1980): 81–103; and “With George
Mosse in the 1960s” in Political Symbolism in Modern Europe, ed. Drescher
et. al., 285–99. For similar influence in Jerusalem, see Ze’ev Mankowitz, “George
Mosse and Jewish History,” in George Mosse: On the Occasion of his Retirement,
xxi ff.
46. George L. Mosse, “Jewish Emancipation between Bildung and Respect-
ability,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture, ed. Jehuda Reinharz & Wal-
ter Schatzberg (Hanover, N.H.: Published for Clark University by University Press
of New England, 1985), 1–16. It has also been reproduced in Confronting the
Nation.
47. See Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, chap. 1, 1–16, and Mosse, Na-
zism, esp. 94–95.
48. Mosse, “Political Style and Political Theory,” 176, also 170–71.
49. George L. Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1985).
50. This is a highly astute portrait of the inner essence and the best explana-
tion of the astonishing creativity of German-speaking Jewry that I know. I have
questioned aspects of this analysis but this only strengthens the greater validity of
the whole. See “German Jews beyond Bildung and Liberalism: The Radical Jewish
51. Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism, 14.
52. Ibid., 3.
54. See “Left-Wing Intellectuals in the Weimar Republic,” in Mosse, Ger-
mans and Jews, 214–15.
55. Even in the famous essay, “The Influence of the Völkisch Idea on Ger-
man Jewry,” where Zionism’s problematic sources are highlighted, Mosse un-
derscores the fact that these Zionists always emphasized the more universal, hu-
manist side of nationalism, rejecting its racist and other exclusivist implications.
56. “Gershom Scholem as a German Jew,” in Mosse, Confronting the
Nation.
57. See, most recently, “Can Nationalism Be Saved? About Zionism, Right-
ful and Unjust Nationalism,” Israel Studies 2, no.1 (Spring 1979): 156–73; “Cen-
tral European Intellectuals in Palestine,” Judaism 45, no. 2 (Spring 1996):
134–42; and the contribution to a symposium in New Republic, 8 & 15 Septem-
ber 1977, 19–20. In the latter piece he also proclaims that “Zionism, in the last
resort, is about solidarity and how this can be strengthened in future generations.”
58. See his introduction to Nordau’s Degeneration (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1993) and his “Max Nordau: Liberalism and the New Jew,” in
Mosse, Confronting the Nation.
60. Ibid., 190. And, Mosse adds, “I myself was far from immune to the
irrational forces which as a historian I deplored and that especially when it came
to that group which I regard as my own.”
61. Ibid., 6.
62. See George L. Mosse, “Friendship and Nationhood: About the Promise
and Failure of German Nationalism,” Journal of Contemporary History 17
(1982): 351–67, and Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism, esp. 32.
chapter 15. on saul friedlander

Essay originally published in History & Memory 9, nos. 1/2 (Fall 1997): 11–46.
Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.
1. “It would be ridiculous,” writes Dominick LaCapra, “if I tried to assume
the voice of Elie Wiesel or of Saul Friedlander. There is a sense in which I have no
right to these voices. . . . while any historian must be ‘invested’ in a distinctive
way in the events of the Holocaust, not all investments (or cathexes) are the same,
and not all statements, rhetorics, or orientations are equally available to different
historians.” See “Reflections on the Historian’s Debate” in LaCapra, Representing
the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press,
1994), 46.
2. Saul Friedlander, When Memory Comes, trans. Helen R. Lane (New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979). The French original was published in 1978.
3. As Leon Wieseltier put it in his review, the most remarkable feature of the
work is
its composure, an elegance that is unnerving . . . his language seems armored (even
more formidably so in the French) against the dissolution he describes. Yet dissolu-
tion triumphs. The pieces of memory do not cohere. . . . Friedlander’s life remains
disrupted, despoiled of its dreams; not least because of the honesty with which he
has attempted to discover what the death of the Jews might mean . . . Even the
structure of his memoir thus seems disconsolate; he refuses to impose narrative
order upon his account of the catastrophes.
See “Between Paris and Jerusalem,” New York Review of Books, 25 October
1979, 3–4.
4. These quotes appear in Friedlander’s When Memory Comes, on 45, 120–
22, and 137–38 respectively.
5. Of course, unlike these other writers, Friedlander was never placed in a
Nazi camp.
6. Friedlander, When Memory Comes, 144.
7. Ibid., 29 and 37 respectively.
8. This essay is an attempt to elaborate on some of the suggestions I make in
Socialism and Other Crises (New York: New York University Press, 1996),
115–16 and 192, n. 6.
9. For an overview of Friedlander’s career, writings, and reviews thereof
through 1994, see Contemporary Literary Criticism 90 (1996): 98–123.
10. Friedlander, Hitler et les Etats-Unis, 1939–1941 (Geneva: Droz, 1963).
English translation: Prelude to Downfall: Hitler and the United States, 1939–
1941 (New York: A. Knopf, 1966).
11. Edwin Tetlow, “Of Diplomatic Thrust and Counterthrust,” Christian
Science Monitor, 15 December 1967, 13.
12. Friedlander, Pius XII and the Third Reich: A Documentation (New York:
A. Knopf, 1966), xv and 236 respectively. French original published in 1964.
13. This, indeed, was the burden of a hostile review arguing that, given the
lack of availability of all the documents, selections were necessary. “But the act
of selection is, conversely, the act of exclusion . . . Inevitably, it must appear that
he is not engaged in an objective scholarly inquiry so much as in grinding an ax.”
Given Friedlander’s emphasis on the partial nature of the documents, the reviewer
asks: “Why did he not wait until he had more material and could venture definite
answers, rather than rush into print now with nothing more than conjectures and
insinuations?” See E. H. Wall, “Tragic Dilemma,” National Review, 23 August
1966, 843–44.
14. Friedlander, Pius XII, 236 ff.
15. Ibid., 238.
16. Arthur A. Cohen, New York Times Book Review, 13 April 1969, 10.
17. Friedlander, Kurt Gerstein: The Ambiguity of Good, trans. Charles Full-
man (New York: A. Knopf, 1969). The French original appeared in 1967.
18. Ibid. The quotes are culled from pp. 226–28. Italics in the original. See
generally the “Final Remarks.” If most critics were struck by the restrained nature
of this book, this was not true for all. Thus Norbert Muhlen complained that
Friedlander “attempts to set himself up as a supreme moral judge of the large major-
ity of people as well of Gerstein himself. Given his hostile personal bias and his
superficial treatment of moral as well as factual questions, which he often answers
by cut-rate psychoanalysis and by comic-strip styled over-simplifications, . . . he
appears poorly equipped for such a final judgement. His ambiguous verdict on
the ‘ambiguity of good’ remains as meaningless as its fashionable model and com-
panion piece, Hannah Arendt’s banal charge against the ‘banality of evil.’” See
Norbert Muhlen, America 120, no. 15 (12 April 1969): 454–55. The suggestion
about some kind of relation to Arendt is interesting though asserted not argued.
Would it be unfair to suggest that the tone of the critique, written by a German-
born American journalist, who points out that Friedlander is “an Israeli histo-
rian” may serve as an early example of Friedlander’s analyses of the tensions be-
tween “German” and “Jewish” memory?
19. Quoting from Arendt’s concluding lines of Eichmann in Jerusalem,
Friedlander’s comment that “Hannah Arendt may have unintentionally given us a
clue as to what distinguished Nazi crimes from others” is mysterious. There was
nothing unintentional about it—in fact it formed a cornerstone of Arendt’s think-
ing on this point. See Friedlander’s “Reflections on the Historicization of National
Socialism” in his Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 82–83.
20. Apart from Friedlander, perhaps the best known attempt in this (very
well ploughed) field is the concluding chapter (“A Case-study in Collective Psy-
chopathology”) of Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jew-
ish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Eyre &
Spottiswoode, 1967). Interestingly, Cohn later omitted this chapter in a revised
edition claiming that he now regarded his own interpretation as “somewhat prim-
itive” and in its stead recommended Friedlander’s more “adequate” work.
21. L’antisémitisme nazi. Histoire d’une psychose collective (Paris: Seuil,
1971).
22. The most bizarre example of this rather large literature is Rudolf Bini-
on’s, “Hitler’s Concept of Lebensraum: The Psychological Basis,” History of
Childhood Quarterly 1, no. 2 (Fall 1973), where the Holocaust is related to Hit-
ler’s perception that the Jewish doctor, Dr. Bloch, was responsible for his mother’s
death. All speculative psychological considerations aside, the plausibility of this
theory, one would think, is somewhat dented by the fact that Hitler went out of
his way to protect Dr. Bloch!
23. See Jacob Katz’s illuminating comments on psycho-history in general
and Friedlander’s work in particular, “Misreadings of Anti-Semitism,” Commen-
tary, July 1983, 39–44. The pertinent passages can be found on 40–41.
24. See his later, critically nuanced, general study, History and Psychoanaly-
sis: An Enquiry into the Possibilities and Limits of Psychohistory (New York:
Holmes & Meier, 1978). The French original appeared in 1975.
25. See Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans.
Thomas Weyr (New York: Avon, 1986), 121. The work was first published in
French in 1982 and in English in 1984.
26. See his important and revealing essay, “The ‘Final Solution’: On the Un-
ease in Historical Interpretation,” in Peter Hayes, ed., Lessons and Legacies: The
Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1991), 23–35. The quotes appear on 25.
27. Ibid., 30.
28. Whether “simple” or “complex” in their nature, such theories are never
“immediate” reflections of an unmediated historical reality but are inevitably
shaped by a degree of ascriptive and speculative interpretation. See my “Arche-
types and the German Jewish Dialogue: Reflections Occasioned by the Goldhagen
Affair” in chapter 9 of this volume.
29. See the essay “Trauma and Transference” in Friedlander’s collection of
essays Memory, History, 117–37. The quote appears on 123.
30. See Martin Broszat & Saul Friedlander, “A Controversy about the His-
toricization of National Socialism,” Yad Vashem Studies 19 (1988): 1–47. The
quote appears on 12.
31. Ibid., 7.
32. Ibid., 12–13.
33. Ibid., 41.
34. Thus, in discussing various modes of avoiding confrontation with this
murderous past, Friedlander argues for a fundamental distinction between non-
German and German strategies: “The fifteen or twenty years of ‘latency’ that fol-
lowed the war in regard to talking or writing about the Shoah, particularly in
the United States, should not be equated with massive repression exclusively, in
contradistinction to the German scene.” See Friedlander, “Trauma and Transfer-
ence,” in Memory, History, 126.
35. Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism, 9–10.
36. Though the book was greeted in general with great admiration, it must
be said that some objected to the book precisely on the grounds that it was too
psycho-symbolic and insufficiently historical. As one critic put it:
If Friedlander gets nowhere, it is because from start to finish he goes nowhere.
Though he is a master of the neat phrase . . . the substance of these observations
tend to be trite and unhistoric. For instance, Hitler in victory sits on the mountain,
in defeat he cowers in his bunker. That, according to Friedlander, is the “parabola”
of his career. Actually, Hitler took to his air raid shelter as early as the fall of 1940,
during Molotov’s visit to Berlin; and the subsequent locus operandi of the fuehrer
was determined not by the evolution of symbols but by the growth of allied air su-
periority. . . . the book has a lot to say about death worship, much of it quite out
of context: Hitler’s cult of the martyrs of his movement reflected no particular fixa-
tion, merely a commonplace practice to sugarcoat death as an act of heroism. For
this there were so many models that one wonders whether this involved even con-
scious imitation.
See Hans A. Schmitt, “Hitler: Obsession without End,” Sewanee Review 1 (Janu-
ary-March 1988): 158–68. The quote appears on 165.
37. Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism, xi.
38. Ibid., 15–16: “The important thing is the constant identification of Na-
zism and death; not real death in its everyday horror and tragic banality, but a
ritualized, stylized, and aestheticized death.” On the juxtaposition of kitsch and
death, see 3 ff. On the synthesis—kitsch death as “a means to digest the past”—
see esp. 13.
39. Ibid., xv.
40. Ibid., xvii.
41. See “The Shoah in Present Historical Consciousness,” in Memory, His-
tory, 42.
42. Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism, 62.
43. See his “Some Aspects of the Historical Significance of the Holocaust,”
Jerusalem Quarterly 1 (Fall 1976): 36–59. The quote appears on 37.
44. Ibid., 39.
45. See his “From Anti-Semitism to Extermination: A Historiographical
Study of Nazi Policies Toward the Jews and an Essay in Interpretation,” Yad Vas-
hem Studies 16 (1984): 1–50. The quote appears on 16. The italics are in the
original.
46. Ibid.
47. Friedlander, “The ‘Final Solution,’” in Hayes, ed., Lessons and Legacies,
33. That may be so but it is also true that, however sublimated, Arendt’s The
Origins of Totalitarianism was one of the first serious efforts to think through the
grounds of the Jewish genocide. See my “Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of
Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil,” chapter 11 of this
volume.
48. Friedlander, “From Anti-Semitism to Extermination,” 6.
49. See the splendid Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume One: The Years
of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 4. See the review
by Gulie Ne’eman Arad, “Nazi Germany and the Jews,” History & Memory 9,
nos. 1/2 (Fall 1997): 409–33. Friedlander’s always carefully differentiated analyses
differ in fundamental ways, of course, from Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s work,
which Friedlander curtly dismisses thus: “An interpretation of the events assuming
the widespread presence in German society at large, throughout the modern era,
of an ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism,’ craving the physical annihilation of the Jews,
is not convincing on the basis of the material presented in this study” (387, n. 53).
50. See Friedlander, “From Anti-Semitism to Extermination,” 3 ff.
51. Friedlander, “The Shoah in Present Historical Consciousness,” in His-
tory, Memory, 57.
52. Friedlander, “From Anti-Semitism to Extermination,” 27–28, 49. Fried-
lander’s sense of functionalism’s affinity with Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis
was later validated when its leading analyst Hans Mommsen wrote an introduc-
tion for a later German edition of the book. For the English version see Momm-
sen’s “Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann Trial” in his From Weimar to Ausch-
witz: Essays in German History, trans. Phillip O’Connor (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1991), 254–78.
53. The literature on this is enormous. For an accessible analysis of the de-
bate within the largest political and intellectual context, see Charles S. Maier, The
Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
54. See “A Conflict of Memories? The New German Debates About the ‘Fi-
nal Solution,’” The Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 31 (New York: Leo Baeck Insti-
tute, 1987), 7.
55. Ibid. The last two quotes appear on 8.
56. Ibid., 9–10.
57. Ibid., 12.
58. Ibid., 14–15.
59. See Friedlander’s “West Germany and the Burden of the Past: The Ongo-
ing Debate,” Jerusalem Quarterly 42 (Spring 1987): 3–18. The quote appears
on 9–10.
60. See Martin Broszat, “A Plea for the Historicization of National Social-
ism,” in Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the
Historians’ Debate (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 77–87. The article appeared
originally in German in 1985. Baldwin’s volume also includes Friedlander’s “Some
Reflections on the Historicization of National Socialism” (88–101). Their famous
correspondence is also republished there (102–34). This is not the place to go into
the rights and wrongs of their debate. It must be mentioned here, however, that
already in his first letter, Broszat insisted that such singularity would not go away
for National Socialism itself provided a sufficient guarantee by the very magnitude
of its crimes. See Broszat & Friedlander, “A Controversy,” 4–5.
61. I have analyzed both these correspondences in chapters 5 and 6 respec-
tively in Culture and Catastrophe.
62. Broszat & Friedlander, “A Controversy,” 39.
63. Ibid., 29–30.
64. Ibid., 20–21 for these respective quotes.
65. Ibid., 25–26.
66. Ibid., 27–28.
67. Ibid., 38.
68. See his respectful piece written after Broszat’s death, “Martin Broszat
and the Historicization of National Socialism” in Memory, History, 95. It should
be noted that Friedlander has lately considerably modified his opposition to what
he took to be a crucial methodological tool of historicization—Alltagesgeschichte
(the history of everyday life)—and his suspicion that it essentially served “nor-
malizing” tendencies. Indeed, in his new book, Nazi Germany and the Jews, the
use of such a method precisely for illuminating a Friedlanderian perspective is
explicitly acknowledged:
Nazi persecutions and exterminations were perpetrated by ordinary people who

lived and acted within a modern society not unlike our own, a society that had pro-
duced them as well as the methods and instruments for the implementation of their
actions; the goals of these actions, however, were formulated by a regime, an ideol-
ogy, and a political culture that were anything but commonplace. It is the relation-
ship between the uncommon and the ordinary, the fusion of the widely shared mur-
derous potentialities of the world that is also ours and the peculiar frenzy of the
Nazi apocalyptic drive against the mortal enemy, the Jew, that give both universal
significance and historical distinctiveness to the “Final Solution of the Jewish Ques-
tion” (6–7).
In this book, Friedlander puts into practice his strictures concerning the role of
the historian, the nature of narration, as well as some of the ways in which the
debates between intentionalists and functionalists, and concerning historicization
have been resolved in his mind and work.
69. Although it is not exhaustive, the most accessible and representative col-
lection (his autobiography apart) of Friedlander’s analyses of memory and history
in general, and of German, Jewish, and Israeli inscriptions in particular, is to be
found in Memory, History.
70. For a general outline of these issues see chapter 1 of my Culture and
Catastrophe.
71. See “The Shoah in Present Historical Consciousness,” in Memory, His-
tory, 48–49.
72. Ibid., 43, 47.
73. Friedlander, Memory, History, esp. introduction, chap. 1, “German
Struggles with Memory,” and chap. 3, “The Shoah in Present Historical Con-
sciousness,” where he states: “Major catastrophes such as the Shoah become cen-
trally significant for the collective self-perception of the groups directly involved
in one way or another, while the reworking of these catastrophes through time
mobilizes central symbolic systems at the disposal of these groups” (47).
74. Friedlander, Memory, History, xii.
75. Ibid., “German Struggles with Memory,” 2.
76. It should be noted that I have concentrated in this essay on Friedlander’s
main areas of interest. He has, however, also pursued many other subjects—on
international relations, French politics and so on. He has also written prominently
on general issues related to Israeli society and the Palestinian-Arab-Israeli prob-
lem. See, for instance, the books Reflexions sur l’Avenir d’Israel (Paris: Seuil,
1969); with Mahmud Hussein, Arabs and Israelis: A Dialogue (New York:
Holmes & Meier, 1978), and the many relevant articles and book reviews in the
bibliography accompanying Arabs and Israelis.
77. See, for instance, his piece with Adam Seligman, “The Israeli Memory
of the Shoah: On Symbols, Rituals and Ideological Polarization,” in Nowhere:
Space, Time and Modernity, ed. Roger Friedland and Deidre Boden (Berkeley &
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 356–71. See too “The Shoah
in Present Historical Consciousness,” 43–47.
78. See the introduction to Friedlander, Memory, History, xi–xii.
79. Ibid., xii–xiii.
80. Friedlander, “West Germany and the Burden of the Past: The Ongoing
Debate,” Jerusalem Quarterly 42 (Spring 1987): 17.
81. For a more general discussion of the ways in which the intellectual atmo-
sphere attendant upon a postmodernist sensibility affects the discussion on Na-
zism and the Shoah, see Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe, esp. 12 ff.
82. See Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solu-
tion” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), which was edited by
Friedlander and for which he wrote the introduction. The volume has had a con-
siderable impact.
83. Friedlander, Probing the Limits, 4–5.
84. On this point see Friedlander, “The Shoah in Present Historical Con-
sciousness,” 55.
85. Friedlander, “German Struggles with Memory,” in Memory, History, 10.
Italics in the original.
86. Ibid., 5.
87. See the important essay with that phrase, “‘The Final Solution’: On the
Unease in Historical Interpretation,” 23–35.
88. Friedlander, “The Shoah in Present Historical Consciousness,” 48.
89. Friedlander, Probing the Limits, 2.
90. Friedlander, “Some Aspects of the Historical Significance,” 42.
91. Friedlander, “Trauma and Transference,” in Memory, History, 32. In
many ways Friedlander has applied this technique in his new book—with striking
success. We eagerly await the second volume.
92. Friedlander, Memory, History, x.
93. Friedlander, “Trauma and Transference,” in Memory, History, 134.
94. Friedlander, Probing the Limits, 2–3.
95. Friedlander, “The Shoah in Present Historical Consciousness,” 49.
96. This is a pastiche of quotes drawn from Reflections of Nazism, 89 ff.
97. Friedlander, “‘The Final Solution,’” in Lessons and Legacies, ed. Hayes,
31. Italics in the original.
99. Friedlander, “‘The Final Solution,’” 32. Italics in the original.
101. Friedlander, “‘The Final Solution,’” 34.
103. Friedlander, “‘The Final Solution,’” 35.
105. Ibid., 131.
106. Ibid., 134.
107. Broszat & Friedlander, “A Controversy about the Historicization of
National Socialism,” 30–31.
109. Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (London: Penguin
Books, 1989), 7.
110. See the instructive piece by Hans Kellner, “‘Never Again’ Is Now,” His-
tory & Theory 33, no. 2 (1994): 127–44. See too chapters 1 and 7 of my Culture
and Catastrophe. Martin Broszat put it thus in a letter to Friedlander, concerning
the latter’s insistence that scientifically positive work had to keep the ideological
and criminal dimensions of Nazism at the center: “. . . the wish to prescribe what
should or should not be done scientifically . . . leads us astray, forcing us into a
constrictive narrowing of the possibility to ask scientific questions.” See Broszat &
Friedlander, “A Controversy about the Historicization,” 34.
111. Friedlander, “German Struggles with Memory,” in Memory, History,
5–6.
112. James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and
Meaning (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 21.
113. Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution”
in History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), xiii.
114. Ibid. For critical comments on this book see chapter 4 of Christopher R.
Browning’s The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Aschheim, Culture and Catastro-
phe, 121–24.
115. See chapter 7 of Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe, esp. 124–25.
116. This important new perspective on Auschwitz can be found in Deborah
Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1996).
117. Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 3. Friedlander specifically
distinguishes this “redemptive” anti-Semitism from Goldhagen’s “extermina-
tionist” notion and argues that the former “represented an ideological trend
shared at the outset by a small minority only, and, in the Third Reich, by a seg-
ment of the party and its leaders, not by the majority of the population” (337,
n. 6).
118. Friedlander, “Some Aspects of the Historical Significance,” 41.
119. See Friedlander’s new book, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 42. See esp.
the introduction and chap. 1.
120. Ibid., 157. Italics in the original.
121. See, most prominently, Michael Burleigh & Wolfgang Wippermann,
The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991). See also Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Eutha-
nasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1995).
122. See the very instructive critique by Wulf Kansteiner, “From Exception
to Exemplum: The New Approach to Nazism and the ‘Final Solution,’” His-
tory & Theory 33, no. 2 (1994): 145–71. Friedlander’s “inverted specificity of the
event,” he argues, “tends to undermine its own foundation whenever the notion
of opaqueness and uneasiness solidifies” (151). Therefore he links the inexplica-
bility of the Holocaust alternatively to the event as “inherent in the phenomenon
itself” or presents it as a value judgement, arrived at a posteriori (161).
Index
Abnormalcy, 8, 111 ff., 159–60, 192 “Bar Kochba,” 70

Academy for the Science of Judaism, 38 Bartels, Adolf, 64
Adenauer, Konrad, 47 Bartov, Omer, 101, 143
Adorno, Theodor, 24–43, 63, 74, 127, 190 Bataille, Georges, 15
Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, 69 Bayley, John, 96
Amery, Jean (Hans Meyer), 44, 63, 172 Beast of prey, 9
Antichrist, 11 Beck, Ulrich, 96
Anti-Semitism, 21, 39, 50, 64, 73, 88, 91, Beer-Hoffmann, Richard, 69
93 ff., 110, 119 ff., 147–54, 157 ff. Begin, Menachem, 49, 50
Arab-Israel conflict, 50 Behemoth, 120
Arafat, Yassir, 50 Benjamin, Walter, 71 ff., 74, 78, 89–90,
Arendt, Hannah, 63, 94, 101–2, 106, 174, 92, 168
178, 180, 183, 187; conception of ac- Benn, Gottfried, 18
tion, 30, 35; and Africa, 134 ff.; and Berger, Peter L., 28
anti-Semitism, 83–84, 123–24; and Berliner Tageblatt, 64
“evil,” 122–36; and freedom, 35; and Bernhardi, Friedrich von, 110
Daniel Goldhagen, 137–43; and histori- Bernstein, Michael, 48
ography, 36–37; and Jewishness, 41–43, Bertram, Ernst, 13, 23
68, 73–85; and mass society, 37, 126; Bettelheim, Bruno, 100, 139
theory of Nazism, 82 ff., 127 ff.; politi- Biale, David, 49
cal theory, 30–31, 42–43, 124, 130; Bildung, 39, 60, 75, 167 ff.
and psychology, 33, 35; and Social Sci- Biller, Maxim, 96
ence, 24–43; and Sonderweg, 100, 127 Birth of Tragedy, 12
ff., 138; and totalitarianism, 122–36; Bismarck, Otto von, 108
and Zionism, 41, 75 ff., 124 Bitburg, 47
Aron, Raymond, 130 Blackbourn, David, 107–21
Auden, W. H., 24 Blanchot, Maurice, 190
Auschwitz, 44, 45, 50, 51, 52, 55, 82, 83, Blau Weiss, 77
94, 96, 101, 111, 121, 127, 171, 173, Bluecher, Heinrich, 76–77
178, 183 ff., 190, 192 Blumenfeld, Kurt, 74, 77, 82, 83, 127, 169
Authoritarian Personality, 39 Bosnia, 48, 55
Avenarius, Ferdinand, 64 Brecht, Bertolt, 89
Brinton, Crane, 110
Bab, Julius, 65 Broch, Hermann, 74, 77, 183
Baehr, Peter, 30 Broder, Henryk, 94
Barbie, Klaus, 136 Broszat, Martin, 97, 99, 176, 182 ff., 190
265
266 Index
Browning, Christopher, 100, 142, 150–51, Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 101, 143
187 Eugenics, 9, 19, 110, 152
Buber, Martin, 61, 70, 72, 90, 92, 169 Eurocentricism, 44, 55, 133 ff.
Butler, R. D. O., 109
Fallen Soldiers, 158
Canovan, Margaret, 127 Fawlty Towers, 105
Cassirer, Ernst, 26, 63, 90 Feminism, 19 ff.
Catholic Church, 172 ff. Fest, Joachim, 181
Celan, Paul, 94, 96 Finkielkraut, Alain, 136
Chamberlin, J. Edward, 113, 118 Foucault, Michel, 17–19, 35
Churban, 49 France, 121, 157–58
Cleese, John, 105 Frankfurt School, 24–43, 168
Cohen, Hermann, 38, 72 Freistaat, Der, 66
Cohen, Richard I., 79 Freud, Sigmund, 62, 72, 90–91, 92, 168
Comte, Auguste, 27–28 Friedlander, Saul, 46, 82, 97, 151, 171–94
Conventional Lies of Mankind, 11 Functionalism, 113 ff., 168 ff.
Craig, Gordon, 109 Futurism, 115
Crisis of German Ideology, 156, 161, 165
Croce, Benedetto, 166 Gay, Peter, 63, 88, 89, 150
Cultural pessimism, 117 ff. Geiger, Ludwig, 69
Culture of Western Europe, 167 Gellner, Ernest, 128–30, 138
Generalplan Ost, 192
Darwinism, 111 Genocide, 55
Deconstruction, 15 ff., 21 Georg, Stefan, 13, 89
Degeneration, 3–12, 118 ff. German Jewish dialogue, 93–102, 168 ff.,
Degeneration, 3–11, 112 ff., 152 182 ff.
Derrida, Jacques, 16 ff., 19 German Jews, 59–63, 64–72, 86–92, 149
Destruction of Reason, 110 ff., 168 ff.
Deutscher, Isaac, 75 German Jews beyond Judaism, 60, 168 ff.
Dialectic of Enlightenment, 29 Gerstein, Kurt, 173–74
Diaspora, 49 ff. Gillis, John, 87
Diner, Dan, 45, 74, 139, 142 Gilman, Sander, 5, 113, 118
Dionysian, 7–8, 17–18, 151–52 Goebbels, Joseph, 115, 156
Discipline and Power, 18 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 62, 168
Discourse of evil, 44–56, 132 ff., 180 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, 54, 83, 93–102,
Disenchantment, 29–30 107, 137–43, 147–54, 187
Dix, Otto, 89 Goldstein, Baruch, 50
Doctor Faustus, 62, 105, 112 Goldstein, Moritz, 64–72, 88
Doenhoff, Marion, 98 Greenfield, Liah, 107
Dossa, Shiraz, 55, 134 Grossman, David, 49
Dreyfus Affair, 139, 158 Gundolf, Friedrich, 89
Gypsies, 113, 153, 164, 192
East European Jewry, 66 ff., 71, 149
Eban, Abba, 50 Habermas, Jürgen, 16–17
Economics, 28, 35 Hayek, Friedrich, 73
Eichmann in Jerusalem, 25, 73, 75, 79, 84, Hebron, 50
99, 124, 131, 138 ff. Hegel, G. W. F., 62, 83
Einstein, Albert, 62 Heidegger, Martin, 17, 25, 26, 33, 37, 42,
Eley, Geoff, 107–21 74, 90, 123, 129
Elias, Norbert, 118 Heine, Heinrich, 62, 68, 74
Index 267
Herf, Jeffrey, 114 ff. Kansteiner, Wulf, 193

Hesse, Hermann, 89 Kant, Immanuel, 20, 83, 90
Hilberg, Raul, 63, 96, 99–100, 139, 150, Kantorowicz, Ernst, 89
187 Kastner, Rudolph Israel, 49
Hillgruber, Andreas, 180–81 Katz, Jacob, 88
Himmler, Heinrich, 44, 175, 192 Kaufmann, Fritz Mordecai, 66
Hirschfeld, Magnus, 10 Kaufmann, Walter, 15 ff.
Historicism, 31, 33, 40 Kazin, Alfred, 82, 122, 129–30
Historicization, 45, 182 ff., 190 ff. Kelly, Alfred, 110
Historikerstreit, 45, 82, 97, 147–48, 177, Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 89
180 ff. Klemperer, Victor, 54, 101
Hitler, Adolph, 15, 44, 54, 92, 107, 126, Kolakowski, Leszek, 23
128, 131, 156, 162, 172, 179 Koven-Ezrachi, Sidra de, 51, 52
Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 93 ff., 107, Kulturnation, 44, 133
137–43, 147–54 Kunstwart, Der, 64 ff., 71
Holocaust, 44–56, 93–102, 112 ff., 137–
43, 147–54, 155–70, 171–94 Landauer, Gustav, 69
Horkheimer, Max, 24–43, 127 Laqueur, Walter, 25, 63, 89
Howe, Irving, 123 La Rochelle, Drieu, 115
Human Condition, 34 Lebensphilosophie, 9, 13, 16, 121
Husik, Isaac, 38 Lebensraum, 120
Leibowitz, Yeshayahu, 53
Ibsen, Henrik, 4 Levi, Primo, 56, 172
Ideology and Utopia, 28 Lewis, Wyndham, 115
Image of Man, 162 Liberalism, 3–12
Innerlichkeit, 33 Lilla, Mark, 19
Institute for Social Research, 32, 37 Lissauer, Ernst, 67, 69
Irrationalism, 117 ff., 155 ff., 166–67 Lombroso, Cesare, 4
Israel, 46, 49 ff., 54 ff., 185 Lukács, Georg, 15, 63, 110, 127
Israel Defence Force (IDF), 52 Lustiger, Cardinal Jean-Marie, 53
Luther, Martin, 83
Jaspers, Karl, 30, 74–80, 85, 126, 130–31, Lyotard, Jean-François, 16 ff., 126, 190
183
Jay, Martin, 38, 39, 46, 56, 123 McCarthy, Mary, 24, 75, 79, 123
Jewish Councils, 79, 84 MacDonald, Dwight, 123
Jewish culture, 64 ff., 88 ff. Maimonides, 26, 38
Jewish history, 41, 161 ff. Manliness, 8–9, 161 ff.
Jewishness, 24–43 Mann, Thomas, 22, 62, 105, 112, 127,
“Jewish Question,” 26 164
Jewish renaissance, 65 Mannheim, Karl, 27 ff.
Jewish “spirit,” 67 ff., 88, 92 Marcus, Greil, 44, 135
Johnson, Eric A., 150 Marcuse, Herbert, 24–43
Joll, James, 109 Marinetti, Filippo, 115
Judaization, 88 Marrus, Michael, 123, 191
Jude, Der, 72 Marx, Karl, 35, 62
Juenger, Ernst, 37 Massing, Paul, 38
Jung, Carl Gustav, 90–91 Mass society, 25–26, 37
Maurras, Charles, 115
Kafka, Franz, 63, 78 Mauthner, Fritz, 69
Kahanism, 50 Mayer, Arno, 153, 192
268 Index
Meinecke, Friedrich, 105 Panizza, Oskar, 70

Mein Kampf, 124 Perspectivism, 7
Mendelssohn, Moses, 38 Piscator, Erwin, 89
Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 71 Pius XII, 172–73
Meshulam, Uzi, 53 Plato, 128
Mitscherlich, Alexander, 47 Popper, Karl, 73
Mitscherlich, Margarete, 47 Portage to San Cristobal of A. H., 52
Modernism, 3–12 Positivism: critique of, 27 ff.; and Max
Mommsen, Hans, 99 Nordau, 3–12
Montgomery, Scott, 54–55, 135 Postmodernism, 13–23, 46, 186 ff.
Morel, B. A., 4 Pound, Ezra, 115
Morgen, Der, 72 Psychohistory, 174 ff.
Mosse, George L., 39, 60, 63, 112 ff., 118,
128, 155–70 Rabin, Yitzhak, 53, 54
Moyn, Samuel, 91 Rabinbach, Anson, 39
Rauschning, Hermann, 112, 164
Natality, 30, 42–43 Reactionary modernism, 115 ff.
Nationalism and Sexuality, 112, 162 ff., Reason and Revolution, 27
165 Respectability, 6, 112 ff., 162 ff.
Nationalization of the Masses, 158–59, Ressentiment, 9, 64
166–67 Revisionism, 46
National Socialism, 10–11, 13–15, 25, 38, Rhodes, Cecil, 139
41, 44–56, 105–21, 137–43, 155–70, Rieff, David, 55
171–94 Rieff, Phillip, 125
Natural Right and History, 31 Ritter, Gerhard, 105
Neumann, Franz, 120–21 Ronell, Avital, 20
New Man, 111 ff. Rose, Paul Lawrence, 107
Nietzsche, Friedrich: his legacy today, 13– Rosenzweig, Franz, 40, 63, 72, 92
23, 25, 40, 83, 110 ff., 128; and Max Rosh, Lea, 97
Nordau, 3–12 Rwanda, 48, 55, 134
Nietzsche cults, 5–6
Nihilism, 31, 33 Saint-Point, Valentine de, 19
Nolde, Emil, 89 Schindler’s List, 54, 101
Nolte, Ernst, 46, 112, 164, 178, 180 ff. Schirach, Baldur von, 25
Nordau, Max, 3–12, 169 Schlöndorff, Völker von, 54, 101
Norton, Anne, 134 Schmidt, Joseph, 62
Novalis, 110 Schmitt, Carl, 26, 31, 37, 42, 90
Scholem, Gershom, 38, 63, 72, 74–81, 169
On Revolution, 35 Schuldfrage, Die, 130
“Operated Jew,” 70 Schutz, Alfred, 30
Oppenheimer, Franz, 65 Smith, Steven, 37
Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, 159 Smith, Woodruff, 120
Origins of Totalitarianism, 77, 82–85, 99, Social science, 24–43
106, 122–36, 138 ff. Sociology of knowledge, 29
Ossietsky, Carl von, 89 Sonderweg, 83, 100, 105–21, 138
Ost und West, 68 Sorel, Georges, 115
Sorkin, David, 60, 87
Paeschke, Hans, 80 South Africa, 59–63
Palestinians, 52 Speer, Albert, 159
Panama Scandal, 158 Spengler, Oswald, 110
Index 269
Spielrein, Sabina, 90 Wagner, Richard, 5, 69, 110 ff.

Spinoza, Baruch, 38 Walzer, Michael, 75
Stalin, Joseph, 126 Warren, Mark, 21
Statistics, 35–36 Warsaw Ghetto, 49
Stauff, Ph., 65 Wassermann, Jakob, 91
Steinberg, Michael P., 167 Weber, Max, 27, 29 ff.
Steiner, George, 52, 63 Weil, Simone, 152
Stern, Frank, 101 Weimar Republic, 13, 24–43, 72, 88–92,
Stern, Fritz, 63, 128 115, 119 ff., 149, 179
Stern, Guenther, 25 Weltsch, Robert, 61, 169
Strauss, Leo, 24–43; and Jewishness, 40– Western Marxism, 24–25
41, 63, 89, 90; and Nietzsche, 40 When Memory Comes, 171
Strauss, Ludwig, 69–72, 168 Wiesel, Elie, 153, 172
Suchoff, David, 80 Wieseltier, Leon, 124
Wilde, Oscar, 4
Talmon, Jacob L., 159 Will to Power, 14, 20
Tauber, Richard, 62 Witrich, Marcel, 62
Tournier, Michel, 54, 101 Wittfogel, Karl, 38
Toward the Final Solution, 160–61 Wolfskehl, Karl, 89
Transference, 94, 176 Wollstein, G., 66
Transformation of German Jewry, 60, 87 World War I, 13, 106, 115
Trauma, 176 ff.
Treblinka, 44, 51, 52 Yad Vashem, 51, 53
Treitschke, Heinrich von, 110 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 72
Young, James, 54, 191
Übermensch, 10 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, 128
Van Rahden, Till, 87 Zarathustra, 8, 9, 12, 19, 21

Varnhagen, Rahel, 41, 74, 76, 124 Zeit, Die, 98
Veyne, Paul, 17 Zimmermann, Moshe, 53
Victimization, 48–49 Zionism, 49, 52, 54, 61, 64–72, 73, 75,
Viereck, Peter, 110 169 ff.
Vietnam, 48 Zionist Youth Movement, 60
Völkisch ideology, 118 ff., 121, 157 ff., Zola, Émile, 5
161 Zuehlsdorff, Volkmar von, 48, 183
Volkov, Shulamit, 86 Zweig, Stefan, 168

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In Times of Crisis

essays on european culture,

the university of wisconsin press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Aschheim, Steven E., 1942–

Part I: The Crisis of Culture— Then and Now

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau, and Degeneration 3

Part II: (Con)Fusions of Identity —Germans and Jews

5. Excursus: Growing Up German Jewish in South Africa 59

Part III: Understanding Nazism and the Holocaust:

10. Nazism, Normalcy, and the German Sonderweg 105

11. Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Part IV: Historians, History, and the Holocaust

13. Reconceiving the Holocaust? Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s

This work explores ﬂashpoints of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century

The Crisis of Culture—Then and Now

Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau,

Max Nordau (1849–1923) was a household name to educated late-

a contempt for traditional views of custom and morality . . . a practical

Nordau’s cultural analysis explicitly extended the Morelian and Lom-

proclaimed, as much as criminals, prostitutes, and lunatics (those classi-

Nordau, like other nineteenth-century liberals, had no doubts about

In the confrontation between Nordau and Nietzsche, middle-class so-

But for Nordau ecstasy was regarded quite simply as “a consequence of

underlying afﬁnities may be discovered. What united these apparently dia-

Thus Nordau’s evocation of his ideal type, of “exceptional” man—writ-

These similarities notwithstanding, it should be clear that over the

sche.45 Of course, given Nordau’s background, regardless of what he had

sidered to be the sources of European life-denying slave-morality and its

Thinking the Nietzsche Legacy Today

To speak of “Nietzsche today” perforce alerts us to the historicity of the

If we are to gain any perspective on today’s Nietzsche we should keep

The paradigmatic Nietzsche of the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s,

all narratives suffer a certain spurious homogenizing: “modernity” for Lyo-

The harnessing of Nietzsche to these new sensibilities and cultural and

pulses; the dissolution or the problematization of the very category of

thought as such, that he disavowed particular conceptions of truth, not

many very unambiguous and extreme anti-democratic, anti-socialist, anti-

conﬂicts, contradictions, and possibilities have been played out.53 From

Against Social Science

. . . the Social Sciences, an abominable discipline from every

W. H. Auden coined that delightful injunction: “Thou shall not commit

ism,” albeit of a highly reﬁned culturally and philosophically re-tuned va-

ety,” deeply suspicious of rationalist-technological modernity and liberal

ceived vulnerability, or a commitment to older Enlightenment humanizing

Marcuse, in his famous wartime investigation of the roots of Fascism,

Sociology of knowledge emerged in a society which took for granted the

For Strauss, perhaps somewhat melodramatically, the practice of phi-

complicated and requires some exegesis. Certain key aspects of her

In contrast to theories that posit action teleologically as a means-end rela-

Arendt opposed these notions of action within social science because

Weber’s conception of politics and state power as the capacity to monopo-

and its paralyzing or trivializing effects. Serious issues become evaded, he

sciences as functional handmaidens of mass modernity. They variously

phenomenon whose origin coincided with the emergence of the modern

Like “society” itself, the “social sciences” carry a totalizing, enveloping

Arendt also critiqued notions of “scientiﬁc” historiography. She not

happen . . . each event in human history reveals an unexpected landscape