Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews by Peter Longerich (booksvooks TXT) 📕

an expression of the ‘national community’, and that

national community was, as one of the leading National Socialist jurists put it,

defined by two factors: by ‘racial homogeneity’ (Artgleichheit) and by the ‘com-

mon differentiation of friend from enemy’. 41 In fact the new völkisch law—

adapted to the ‘essence’ of the German Volk—was to be reduced to an instrument

in the hands of the National Socialist leadership; in this world of ideas there was

no room for an autonomous sphere of law. Clearly this ‘essential core’ of völkisch

law was not definable and—if the political leadership was not to be hampered in

its actions—was not supposed to be defined more closely. On the other hand it is

not difficult to discern, from the given definition, which ‘enemy’ the ‘racially

homogeneous’ national community united by the new law was supposed to turn

against: significantly, the ‘völkisch legal renewal’ concentrated in its theoretical

discussions upon the ‘unmasking’ of Western and particularly of ‘Jewish’

jurisprudence. 42

In legislative practice, significantly, attempts to codify völkisch legal renewal

in a comprehensive legal reform did not go beyond the drafting stage, while at

the same time an extensive ‘special law’ for ‘ethnic aliens’ (Fremdvölkische) was

created, one which was to be extraordinarily efficient in the practice of

persecution. 43

80

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

In the natural sciences, attempts to establish a ‘German physics’, a ‘German

chemistry’, or a ‘German mathematics’ were limited to relatively small groups of

researchers, and proved finally to be without consequences. Only the devotees of

‘German physics’ managed temporarily to secure a series of important posts for

themselves. Exactly what the specifically ‘German’ aspect of the individual sub-

jects was supposed to be remained nebulous. While the representatives of ‘Ger-

man’ physics turned against the supposed supremacy of a ‘Jewish physics’,

meaning the theory of relativity in particular, and the devotees of ‘German

mathematics’ also sought to distinguish themselves from a ‘Jewish mathematics’,

German chemistry, as a unified ‘theory of matter’, resisted a supposedly ‘Western’

foreign domination of the subject.

The definitive breakthrough of ideas of racial hygiene in medicine and their

contribution to a ‘weeding-out’ population policy (closely bound up with psych-

iatry, social sciences, educational theory, and jurisprudence) illustrates, on the

other hand, the immediate relevance of racist paradigms based on exclusion

within academic disciplines for social-political practice.

This survey has made it clear that the ‘de-Judaization’ (Entjudung) of the

sciences was not accomplished simply by sacking a few Jewish scientists or

removing them from the educational canon. In fact it was a matter of giving the

individual subjects an authentically ‘German’ character via a comprehensive

distancing ‘from the Jewish spirit’ and other ‘foreign influences’. The survey has

also made it clear that, without permanent reference to the rejected Jewish or

foreign ‘Other’, the paradigm shift to a Germanocentric scholarship could not be

achieved, indeed that the planned theoretical reorientation was largely exhausted

in that distancing. The Entjudung and völkisch-racial cleansing of the discipline in

question was thus—for want of ‘positive rationales’—effectively constitutive; it

was not a single action, but a permanent and continuous distancing process which

served to conceal the lack of any substantial content in the ‘German’ renewal.

The intended internal reorientation of the individual subjects succeeded, as we

have seen, to various degrees; where its success was modest, it was often limited to

rhetorical gestures and remained without significant consequences for practical

academic work. However, through the intended Germanocentric conversion of

disciplines or partial disciplines—even if this was purely declamatory in

character—the theoretical discussions within the individual subjects and thus

their identity were also influenced, new structures and career opportunities were

created; here lay the starting point for National Socialist academics not only to

establish themselves in the individual disciplines, but substantially to change the

character of the individual subjects. The keyword Entjudung was the starting

point for this process of change.

Beyond these theoretical discussions—and the survey has also made that

clear—the Entjudung and Germanocentric transformation of individual discip-

lines also had considerable practical consequences: academics who allowed their

Interim Conclusions

81

work to be governed by racist paradigms substantially opened up new areas of

work for themselves: the definition and exclusion of those of foreign race.

The Entjudung of Cultural Life as the

Precondition for a ‘German Culture’

The National Socialist project of creating an authentically ‘German’ culture is

inseparably bound up with efforts to achieve a consistent Entjudung of cultural life

as a whole; indeed, to a considerable extent such negative measures constituted the

whole of National Socialist cultural policy.

According to the National Socialist vision, ‘culture was the highest expression

of the creative powers of a people’:44 every artwork of any distinction could accordingly be interpreted as the expression of primal racial-völkisch powers.

Every ‘clearly distinctive race’, as Hitler said in a speech to the Reich Chamber

of Culture in 1934, had ‘its own signature in the book of art’—citing as an

exception ‘Jewry’, which is ‘utterly without its own artistic productive capability’. 45

According to this idea, the liberation of authentically ‘German’ culture from the

Jewish—that is, unproductive, parasitic, alien, corrosive, and finally destructive—

influence formed a leitmotif of cultural-political discourse in the National Socialist

regime.

However, attempts to define the ‘essence’ of art rooted in the German or Aryan

‘racial soul’ remained diffuse:46 all efforts to free ‘German’ music or ‘German’

painting from the context of the European tradition were inevitably destined to

fail, while ambitious contemporary attempts to produce ‘native’ (arteigene)

artworks appropriate to National Socialism were not as a rule convincingly able

to fulfil this claim. The artistic production of the era generally suffered from a lack

of originality and ended up predominantly in the production of kitsch.

Consequently, as in many other policy areas, the National Socialist cultural

policy makers had no option but to execute the intended homogenization nega-

tively, to produce ‘pure’ German culture above all by means of the permanent

cleansing of ‘alien’ art. This tendency to define National Socialist art in negative

terms became more intense the greater the discrepancy between the bombastic

proclamations of a new, National Socialist aesthetic and the actually mediocre

products of National Socialist art production grew: the ‘cleansing principle’ now

became an ‘absolutely exclusive compulsion to purification’. 47

In this cleansing policy, the removal of the supposedly dominant Jewish

influence in German cultural life was very much in the foreground. This was

not only a matter of the exclusion of Jewish artists and the prohibition or

destruction of their artworks; the Entjudung of German culture also concerned

the exclusion of Jews active in the purveyance of culture, since as