Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (January 2009)

Helmut Walser Smith. _The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. vii + 246 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-89588-0; $22.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-72025-0.

Reviewed for H-German by Anthony J. Steinhoff, Department of History, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

The Holocaust and the Course of German History

Writing about historical continuity, especially in the context of modern German history, seems to have lost much of its credibility. To a degree, this reflects the notoriety of books like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s _Hitler’s Willing Executioners_ (1996) and its poorly supported contention of a continuous history in Germany of “eliminationist anti-Semitism” from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. But even the once powerful _Sonderweg_ thesis, which depicted 1933 as the culmination of a series of nineteenth-century German missteps on the path to modernity, no longer convinces, thanks largely to research that denies that a single, normative template for European modernization even existed. Instead, inspired partly by Michel Foucault, scholars have tended lately to emphasize not continuities, but ruptures. It is the new, rather than the old or the enduring that holds our attention, a mindset that the short shelf life of modern technology only reinforces. And just as it is difficult for contemporary society to think forward in the long term, so too has the general appreciation of the past undergone a foreshortening. Five, fifteen, or at most fifty years now seem sufficient to provide historical understanding. And even this “past” is viewed differently, for in the face of twentieth-century violence and dislocation, memory and history alike have become resolutely fragmented, seemingly incapable of being “whole.”

In _The Continuities of German History_, Helmut Walser Smith urges scholars to resist such temporal narrow-mindedness and engage seriously with long-term historical analysis. In language reminiscent of the _Annalistes_, he argues that only by paying attention to continuity of forms across long spans of time “is it possible to see with acuity the specific kink, the significant shift [in the form], that structures later developments” (p.11).

Yet, this methodological _plaidoyer_ is ultimately a means to an end, a way to provide a more profound understanding of the Holocaust’s historical origins and provoke deeper reflection on its broader meaning for modern German history. Filled with insight and erudition, this book underscores the critical importance that nineteenth-century developments with respect to ideas of nation, religion, and race played in preparing Germany’s path towards Auschwitz. Smith departs from convention, though,by arguing that what made this period fateful was not the invention of new forms _per se_, but rather the radical reinterpretation and intertwining of existing ones after 1800. This powerful, scintillating assertion raises a number of central questions about both German and European history.

Smith describes his book as a set of five essays, five efforts at historical analysis in the _longue durée_. In fact, the five pieces work as elements in a larger, graceful argument about the Holocaust. The volume’s formal introduction lays out the major themes and provides an overview of the chapters’ main points. Yet, the real introduction to the book can be considered the first essay: “The Vanishing Point of German History.” This piece will already be familiar to many readers, since it appeared previously in _History and Memory_.[1] In short, Smith contends here that critical events in Germany’s twentieth-century history have functioned much like visual artists’ vanishing points. Using the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933 as his primary example, Smith demonstrates how scholarly emphasis on this event not only generated considerable research but also powerfully structured the broader historical picture. It determined which elements of German history should be placed in the foreground (for example, high politics, culture, and social structures) and which consigned to the background (liberal dimensions of nationalism, antisemitism). Moreover, by investigating the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antecedents of modern German political and cultural history, historians like Hajo Halborn and Friedrich Meinecke gave 1933-as-vanishing point considerable “depth of field” (p. 19). It is precisely this kind of depth of field, Smith asserts, that is missing in the wave of recent historical writing that takes 1941 as its vanishing point. And this, even though the shift from 1933 to 1941 brings a number of new issues to the fore–notions of community, race, religion, and nation, above all–whose import cannot be adequately grasped if the analysis is limited to twentieth-century developments.

Smith’s remarks on historiographical vanishing points also place his employment of the word “essay” in new light. The remaining essays do indeed constitute a series of attempts: at providing depth of field to the 1941-oriented historical canvas and, in the process, new insights into the nature and origins of anti-Jewish violence. In chapter 2, Smith focuses on the German idea of “nation.” Its invention as a formal concept, he contends, occurred not in the nineteenth century, _à la_ Benedict Anderson or Ernest Gellner, but in the sixteenth century. And, yet, momentous changes to the form had occurred by 1800. Whereas early modern Germans conceived of a nation in external terms, with reference to tangible objects like rivers, mountains, and even the printed page, around 1800 men like Johann Gottlieb Fichte were describing the nation as an internal construct, “a projected space of [personal] identity” (p. 67). It was this shift to “nation as identity,” Smith avers, that gave nationalism its power during the nineteenth and, even more fatefully, the twentieth century (p. 7).

The interplay between religious affiliation and popular violence lies at the center of chapter 3. Smith reminds the reader that religious violence, even of a catastrophic nature, was not an innovation of the twentieth century.

Nor were its targets limited to a single religious group. Jews were repeatedly massacred and expelled from German towns between 1350 and 1550.

Similarly, differences between Catholics and Protestants provoked the destruction of entire areas and villages during the Thirty Years’ War. As Smith points out, though, Christians and Jews remembered this violent past differently, especially during the nineteenth century. Until 1800, Catholics and Protestants largely forgot the Thirty Years’ War. Thereafter, the act of remembering drew attention to the tragic loss of German unity, but this discourse, while confessionally charged, still recognized Catholics as members of the national community. By contrast, Smith asserts, neither Jews nor Gentiles forgot the anti-Jewish violence. Christians built churches where Jewish synagogues once stood, and Jewish liturgies included prayers for the martyrs of medieval massacres. During the nineteenth century, moreover, these memories increasingly placed Jews outside of the nation.

Indeed, from the perspective of integralist nationalists like Heinrich von Treitschke, the Jews’ efforts to “solidify a Jewish identity through historical memory” (p. 114)–that is, their refusal to forget–only emphasized the alterity of Jews’ experiences, marking them not as Germans but only as foreigners.

Smith continues with the theme of anti-Jewish violence in chapter 4, arguably the most impressive essay in the book. Drawing on evidence from across Europe, Smith demonstrates how profoundly such violence changed over the course of the nineteenth century. When, in 1815, anti-Jewish violence reemerged after a relative hiatus of some hundred years, Smith suggests it represented an archaic mode of protest and largely remained so until the 1870s. Triggered by concerns over communal rights and rumors of ritual murder, such incidents almost always took the form of violent “play,” namely ritualized (and thus controlled) violence that targeted property more than persons. Between 1880 and 1900, Smith declares, a more modern approach to anti-Jewish violence set in. Labor problems and nationalist politics (one might think of the Dreyfus Affair) now also served to incite popular violence. Most riots remained ritually bounded and instances of fatality limited,but the magnitude and number of anti-Jewish incidents rose markedly.

And, singular as the Russian pogroms of the early 1880s were, they still marked a first crossing of the “murderous threshold” (p. 137). Events after 1900, Smith concludes, show how anti-Jewish violence had finally broken free from its archaic roots, especially in the Russian Empire. Bloody ritual replaced bounded ritual, with Jews being attacked in word and deed as traitors to the nation. Furthermore, instead of using their power to control violence, states (primarily Russia) began exploiting and fomenting anti-Jewish violence for their own ends. In Germany itself, Smith stresses, murderous rhetoric did not become murderous act until quite late, namely during _Kristallnacht_. Nevertheless, after 1918 the degree of general, indeed, popular anti-Jewish violence there increased steadily, placing Germany very much on the verge of the Final Solution.

Chapter 5 addresses the topic of eliminationist antisemitism. Rejecting Goldhagen’s views on the subject, Smith maintains that as late as August 1914, genocide remained unthinkable in Germany. However, forms of racial “elimination” short of genocide were not beyond the pale, thanks to the gradual intertwining of once separate strands of discourse concerning race, antisemitism, and elimination. To trace this development, Smith examines the views of three late-nineteenth-century German intellectuals. Although noted historian Heinrich von Treitschke considered Jews primarily from the perspective of state and nation, Smith contends that by the 1880s, his antisemitic remarks had helped make race an acceptable framework for discussing Germany’s Jews. For Smith, the work of Friedrich Ratzel, a Leipzig-based geographer, evinces the growing racialization of nationalist discourse during the Wilhelmine period, even if Ratzel himself opposed the eugenics movement and the “metaphors of disease that [also] accompanied the new language of race” (p. 192). With Paul Rohrbach, a one-time student of Treitschke’s, Smith identifies awining of racist and eliminationist ideas, above all as a result of Rohrbach’s experiences as settlement commissioner in German Southwest Africa. Yet, while Rohrbach defended the cultural annihilation of Africans, justified brutal retaliations against uprisings, and sanctioned the creation of concentration camps for the native Nama and Herero groups, even he stopped short of advocating racial elimination. In short, while racial elimination could be thought, at least with respect to non-European peoples, it had not yet been developed into actual policy. In his popular work of 1912, _If I Were the Kaiser_, Heinrich Class connected this racial discourse with popular antisemitism. But there too, Smith emphasizes, Class never pushed his thinking about “elimination” to go beyond the physical removal of Jews from German territorial space, much as had already occurred during the Middle Ages.

Finally, in the conclusion, Smith attends to two questions that lurk in the background throughout the entire book: why did the Final Solution occur and why did Germans launch it? The history of anti-Jewish violence _per se_, he asserts, sheds little light on this matter.After all, the centuries-old drama of Jewish denigration intimated both exclusion and murder, and the German variants of these rituals hardly differed from those enacted in other European lands. Rather, Smith argues, it was the breakdown of a sense of solidarity with strangers in Germany during the nineteenth century that made

1941 possible. Not only did the new languages of nationhood and race in Germany increasingly mark Jews as outside the national community, but they also steadily legitimated the mistreatment of such outsiders, in thought, word, and deed. Thus, even if only a small number of Germans emerged as active perpetrators the fateful combination of antisemitism, racism, and nationalism enabled thousands of Germans to watch the anti-Jewish activities of the 1930s and 1940s as bystanders.

Imaginative and elegantly written, this book is a major piece of scholarship. Smith’s deft use of comparative and interdisciplinary methods, coupled with his long-term perspective, has yielded both depth of field and keen insights into such central topics in Holocaust historiography as modern antisemitism, eliminationist racism, popular violence, and the changing valences of nation and national community. Equally important, Smith has provided a compelling demonstration of why the nineteenth century, not least in Germany, still matters. One can only hope that historians–and university officials–will respond accordingly.

Masterful as Smith’s analysis is, some rough edges remain. Three points in particular deserve mention. First among these is the fairly flat treatment of the topic of religion. I concur wholeheartedly that religion constitutes an important element in Smith’s puzzle. And yet, especially in chapter 2, “religion” seems to be just a form of group reference, denoting people who belong to a specific religious community. Smith includes little about actual religious practices or beliefs or even about how Jews, Catholics, and Protestants constructed their respective identities. The second area of weakness is noticeable in the conclusion. Smith’s assertion that the breakdown of communal ties to strangers during the nineteenth century made the Final Solution possible is brilliant. But it also sits uneasily with the rest of the book. Smith provideslittle information on the types of affective relationships that did exist between strangers in Germany and how these evolved over time.It is also debatable whether German Jews’ status as “outsiders” also made them “strangers.” Third, and perhaps most contentiously, Smith’s vanishing point metaphor raises fundamental questions about historical practice. Ultimately, this metaphor is profoundly teleological. The selection of 1941 as vanishing point logically implies that German history should be read as the run up to and aftermath of Auschwitz. It also produces “necessary” distortions and even marginalizations of the historical past, obstructing efforts to appreciate “how things actually were.” Must one,then,paint the canvas using only single-point perspective? Is it legitimate to investigate topics that do not bear, even indirectly, on the origins of the Final Solution? For now, Smith is silent on such important points. But this does nothing to detract from the accomplishment he has achieved with this book.

This is a wonderful work that will spur reflection and further research on the Holocaust and German history for years to come.

Note

[1]. Helmut Walser Smith, “The Vanishing Point of German History: An Essay on Perspective,” _History & Memory_ 17 (2005): 269-295.