Then the Nazis gave the German people a rationalization for their resentment of Jewish success by interjecting racial theory. Racial arguments about Jews were ultimately about Jewish inferiority and the menace that it posed to Germans. And they should not kid themselves into thinking that anti-Semites of the past were completely different from who we are today. Instead, through striking statistics and economic analysis, he demonstrates that it was rooted in a more basic emotion: material envy. I think this books is brilliant. The book, by a non-Jewish German author, is about the perplexing question of why the allegedly cultured Germans would be the most vicious in perpetrating the Shoah. To compensate, Germans embraced theories of Jewish racial inferiority, the fatal social dynamic that eventually led to the greatest crime in history - the Holocaust.
It is perhaps not possible to explain why but Mr Aly does set the stage for Hitler to make his grand and horifying entrance. That Jewish emancipation remained intact in Germany in the late nineteenth century owed neither to a liberal-democratic political culture devoted to protecting individual rights nor to the absence of agitating Jew-baiters. And if Aly's theory is correct, as he himself points out, this is likely to happen again. He sees himself as an ethnic German except for the accident of his name. I think it is especially telling that Germany did not become a unified country until 1871. Less than thirty years after they were freed from the ghettos, more than half the Jews were firmly middle class, and a sizable proportion of them were in the upper-middle classes.
There were forces no less powerful than envy underpinning anti-Semitism. Both Confino and Aly remind us of the centrality of anti-Semitism in the Nazi genocide. The holocaust was not inevitable as it still required a charismatic person to lead and to overcome any elitist reluctance to kill. I think it is especially telling that Germany did not become a unified country until 1871. Aly addresses one of the most troubling and enduring questions of the 20th century: How could the German nation kill 6 million Jews? Sehr detaillerte Beschreibung der Zeitgeist im neunzehnten und frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, was das Verhältnis zwischen den Juden und anderen Gemeinden in Deutschland angeht. A provocative and insightful analysis that sheds new light on one of the most puzzling and historically unsettling conundrums Why the Germans? But he stresses that the Nazis went further in their anti-Semitic campaign, striving not merely to expunge the Jews from German life, but to eradicate the Jewish roots of Christian European civilization altogether.
He also shows how the Wehrmacht was directly involved in this mass plunder of the conquered populations and how in many cases it was the initiator of policies which led to confiscation and eventual extermination. As Germany made its way through the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, the difficulties of the lethargic, economically backward German majority stood in marked contrast to the social and economic success of the agile Jewish minority. However, a closer analysis of this book shows the opposite. Coupled with Jews desire to get education, Germans felt left behind. Why did the German culture and people allow the Holocaust? The key tool employed by the Nazis in their quest for equality was racial theory. Antisemitism was fed partially by the success of Jewish community which had done so well in integrating with the culture after emancipation.
He maintains that the reason for the massive support the Nazi regime enjoyed among the German population was not so much a consequence of their violent anti-Semitism as their enjoying the fruits of the loot acquired by the Nazis in the occupied territories. In Berlin, Jew account for city 30% tax revenue, although Jews were only 5% of the population. Sie seien jede Opfer um die Bildung ihrer Kinder bereit. Because of the amount of information presented, Aly's book reads like an essay, which may deter some readers, but rarely do history classes touch on the social aspects of Germany in the 19th century, and the majority of what Aly has found in German animosity towards Jews begins there. The Gentile author is quite forthcoming about the prejudices of his own forebears, which serve to highlight typical attitudes of the German majority prior to the rise of Hitler. At times the author is repetitive; however, he succeeds in giving new insight into the virulent, peculiarly German, form of anti-Semitism that underlay the unparalleled tragedy to come. Aly's analysis of a deeply rooted social malady has made the incomprehensible comprehensible.
Historian Gotz Aly tries to figure out why Germany of all countries, one of the most tolerant places for Jewish people in Europe, perpetrated the Holocaust, and why the relationship between German gentiles and German Jews soured so quickly and so badly. This book got many and good reviews in Europe, including press coverage. Education was important to the Jews. And, this book has been one of the most intriguing, yet! Als die Deutschen Ende des Jhs nachholten, wurden alle guten Stellen schon von Juden besetzt. In fact, there were young educated upwardly mobile members of the middle class.
Germany was laggard in creating public schools, and the general population had no tradition of education. In this book, the importance of education and the role of economics, as contributing factors to the Holocaust, are researched and explained. If we follow his logic, it would seem that for hatred to be combated, envy must be eradicated. The author puts forth the theory that it was envy and a lack of a coherent cultural identity that created the perfect petri dish in which the ideology of Naziism could flourish. Popular envy-based anti-Semitism was directed primarily not against Jewish bankers, revolutionaries, department store owners, or racial and religious enemies, but rather against neighbors, classmates, colleagues, and fellow club members who were somewhat better off. By the second half of the 1800s German Jews enjoyed, on the whole, better health and more wealth than their Christian counterparts, and many were moving into the educated professions. I'll definitely read more of Aly's work.
Germany's geography put it in the path of armies, migrants and ideas. Nach GÖ waren die Deutschen Spätentwickler, im Vergleich der Juden der früh Sehr detaillerte Beschreibung der Zeitgeist im neunzehnten und frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, was das Verhältnis zwischen den Juden und anderen Gemeinden in Deutschland angeht. But as the notion of material equality took over the public imagination, the skilled, well-educated Jewish population came to be seen as having more than its fair share. The fact that he himself derives from a German Gentile family, many of whose members were themselves anti Semites gives him a special authenticity. Thus the explosive mixture was right there.