Alon Confino

Climaxing with the events of "Kristallnacht," Confino is most concerned with what distinguished the Nazi war against Jews and Judaism from acts of mass atrocity conducted by other states. What it comes down to for Confino is he suspects that the Nazis were building on currents of anti-modernism and racism already existing in German society to create a new sense of history, one that would keep Germany in some sense Christian and "Western" but at the same time remove the Jewish experience from the center of that understanding and place the German people and the Nazi will to power in its place. It is that breathtaking agenda that was being acted out until the last day of the Third Reich. Am I totally convinced of this? No. But Confino is to be complimented for drawing together the threads of racism, the drive for power, the reaction against modernity and German religious culture to try and explain the meaning of all this evil.… (meer)

“The Holocaust should be placed within a history of Nazi war and occupation, empire building, and comparative genocide. The Holocaust was not unique. But it was perceived during the war as unique by German Jews, and other Europeans, and if we want to understand why the Holocaust happened, we ought to explain this.”

In his book, A World Without Jews, author Alon Confino looks at many of the controversies and questions that still surround the Holocaust. Was the persecution of the Jews led from the top down by the Nazi leaders and were the German people aware of what was really happening to the Jewish peoples of Europe? Did Christian Churches play a role and, if so, to what extent? Confino looks at both primary and secondary sources and creates a horrifying picture of complicity and awareness of the German people including both the Catholic and Protestant Churches. He also includes many shocking photographs from the period including one of an effigy of a Jewish man hanging from a lamp post and signs outside of towns declaring them ‘Jew-free’.

It is often pointed out that other genocides were just as horrendous if not worse if the only criteria is body count and Confino concedes that. However, it is his contention that, although the Holocaust is not unique, it must be seen as separate from other genocides. He points out, for example that in the genocide of the Ukrainians by the Soviet Union during the 1930s, the Soviets did not ask other countries to send their Ukrainian citizens to be exterminated – what separates the Holocaust from other genocides was the extent to which the Nazis set out to create a world without Jews, not just a single country.

He contends that the Nazis weren’t motivated by past prejudice against the Jews although they were more than willing to use it to motivate the German populace. What they were seeking was a completely new and radical world in which a Christian Germany would be created without any ties or debt to the past. The Jews, with their long presence in Germany and with the obvious connection between the God of both Judaism and Christianity represented that past. In their attempt to deny the debt owed by Germany and Christianity to Judaism, the Germans not only persecuted the Jews and destroyed their temples but they also burned and desecrated the Hebrew Bible, a fact that has been mainly overlooked in discussions about the Holocaust, and eventually banned the Old Testament in German Churches. It is in this imagining of this new German Reich that the Nazis began to conceive of this world completely devoid of Jewish influence.

“But the Nazis did imagine a clear narrative arch of the relations between Germans and Jews from the dawn of history to the present. Right from the beginning they were certain about one thing, which did not change until the last day of the Reich: the Jews and their historical roots, real or invented from the Bible down to the modern period, must be eliminated at all costs and whatever the consequences. The Nazis did not leave standing one cultural edifice that implied a cultural debt to the Jews: this amounted to making a new civilization by uprooting a key element of their own roots.”

With this book, Alon Confino answers unconditionally the question of whether the German people including the Catholic and protestant Churches knew and were complicit in the persecution of the Jews. It gives a well-documented and damning explanation of what led to the Holocaust and should be on the reading list of anyone who wants to see a world without genocide.… (meer)

To make it happen, you must first imagine it

A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination From Persecution to Genocide by Alon Confino (Yale University Press, $30).

University of Virginia history professor Alon Confino makes the case that, far from the mere thuggery of vandals, Nazi book-burning was the mark of a different sort of evil. It was, instead, a symbolic acting out of the very real conflagration intended for the Jews, who represented for them everything bad about the world, in a list that Confino provides which boggles the mind (liberalism and democracy and bolshevism and pacifism—not to mention social “problems” like homosexuality and modern art).

They were everything the Nazis did not wish to be—and yes, that included liberal (in the traditional sense of the word, not the current American meaning) and humane. The rampage of destruction—synagogues, art, literature—was a means of wiping out the history of Jews in Europe and a direct step toward actually wiping out the Jews.

And the participation of the public, in Confino’s study, was not the enforced participation of people cowed by authority figures, but rather an eruption of a deeply diseased society. His argument is that the Holocaust was not unique—and that’s a difficult argument to counter, other than on the grounds of scale and technology, as we now have even more evidence of humanity’s propensity for “ethnic cleansing,” whether from the Rwandan genocide or the Balkan atrocities that gave us the term.

Confino has gone to primary sources from the time rather than relying on recollections; the result is proof positive that the German culture of the time did not need any prodding or coercion from the Nazi Party to make swift work of violent anti-Semitism.

But, to take it even further, what Confino provides in his analysis of the diseased pre-WWII German culture is a way of looking for the sickness in our own; in the blame, the psychological displacement of our sins and blame for our misfortunes; in the marking of the other.

This is a remarkable book, and for all its scholarly heft, accessible enough that it ought to have a wide readership—provided we are willing to look.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com… (meer)