II

Ahlwardt was an extreme but in some ways not untypical representative of a new kind of antisemitism that was emerging in Germany and elsewhere in Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century. Traditional antisemitism focused on the non-Christian religion of the Jews, and derived its political power from biblical sanction. The New Testament blamed the Jews for Christ’s death, condemning them to perpetual obloquy by declaring that they had willingly agreed to let Christ’s blood be upon them and their descendants. As a non-Christian minority in a society governed by Christian beliefs and Christian institutions, the Jews were obvious and easy targets for popular hatred in times of crisis such as the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, when rampaging mobs all over Europe blamed the Jews for the mortality that afflicted so many of the population, and took their revenge in countless acts of violence and destruction. It was no accident that the history of modern antisemitism in Germany began with the court preacher Adolf Stocker. Christian hostility to the Jews provided a crucial launch-pad for modern antisemitism, not least because it often harboured a strong element of racial prejudice itself and was subsumed into racial antisemitism in a variety of ways. But by the late nineteenth century it was becoming increasingly out of date, at least in its purest, most traditional form, particularly as the Jews were ceasing to be an easily identifiable religious minority and were beginning to convert and marry into Christian society at an increasing pace. Searching for a scapegoat for their economic difficulties in the 1870s, lower-middle-class demagogues and scribblers turned to the Jews, not as a religious but a racial minority, and began to advocate not the total assimilation of Jews into German society, but their total exclusion from it.⁵⁸

The credit for this turn, if credit is the right word, is generally given to the obscure writer Wilhelm Marr, whose pamphlet The Victory of Jewdom over Germandom Viewed from a Non-confessional Standpoint, published in 1873, was the first to insist that, as he put it in a later work: ‘There must be no question here of parading religious prejudices when it is a question of race and when the difference lies in the “blood”’.⁵⁹ Borrowing from the fashionable theories of the French racist Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Marr contrasted Jews not with Christians but with Germans, insisting that the two were distinct races. The Jews, he declared, had gained the upper hand in the racial struggle, and were virtually running the country; no wonder, then, that honest German artisans and small businessmen were suffering. Marr went on to invent the word ‘antisemitism’ and, in 1879, to found the League of Antisemites, the world’s first organization with this word in its title. It was dedicated, as he said, to reducing the Jewish influence on German life. His writing struck an apocalyptically pessimistic note. In his ‘Testament’ he proclaimed that: ‘The Jewish question is the axis around which the wheel of world history revolves,’ going on to record gloomily his view that: ‘All our social, commercial, and industrial developments are built on a Jewish world view.’⁶⁰

The roots of Marr’s despair were personal as much as anything else. Constantly in financial difficulties, he was badly hit by the financial troubles of the 1870s. His second wife, who was Jewish, supported him financially until her death in 1874; his third wife, whom he divorced after a brief and disastrous relationship, was half-Jewish, and he blamed her in part for his lack of money, since he had to pay her substantial sums to bring up their child. Marr concluded from this - boldly elevating his personal experience into a general rule of world history - that racial purity was admirable, racial mixing a recipe for calamity. Given these very personal roots of his antisemitism, it is not surprising that Marr did not become closely involved in active politics; the League of Antisemites was a failure, and he refused to support the antisemitic parties because he considered them too conservative.⁶¹ But he was quickly joined as a propagandist of the new racial antisemitism by a range of other writers. The revolutionary Eugen Dühring, for example, equated capitalism with the Jews and argued that socialism had to be aimed chiefly at removing the Jews from financial and political influence. The nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke argued that the Jews were undermining German culture, and popularized the phrase ‘the Jews are our misfortune’, words that would become a slogan for many antisemites in the following years, including the Nazis. Writers such as these were far from marginal figures of the sort represented by Hermann Ahlwardt. Eugen Dühring, for example, exerted a sufficiently powerful attraction over the socialist movement for Friedrich Engels to pen his famous tract the Anti-Dühring in a successful attempt to combat its influence within the socialist labour movement in 1878. Heinrich von Treitschke’s history was one of the most widely read of all German histories in the nineteenth century, and his diatribes against what he saw as Jewish materialism and dishonesty aroused a massive reaction amongst his fellow-professors in Berlin, including the classicist Theodor Mommsen, the pathologist Rudolf Virchow and the historian Gustav von Droysen, who joined with many other German academics in condemning their colleague’s ‘racial hatred and fanaticism’ in unequivocal terms.⁶²

Such reactions were a reminder that for all the rapidly growing influence of antisemitic writers, the vast majority of respectable opinion in Germany, left and right, middle class and working class, remained opposed to racism of this kind. Attempts to get the German people to swallow antisemitic ideas whole met with little success. The German working class in particular, and its main political representative, the Social Democratic Party (the largest political organization in Germany, with more seats in the Reichstag than any other party after 1912, and the highest number of votes in national elections long before that), was resolutely opposed to antisemitism, which it regarded as backward and undemocratic. Even ordinary rank-and-file party members rejected its slogans of hatred. As one worker was heard to remark by a police agent listening out for political talk in the pubs and bars of Hamburg in 1898:

National feeling must not degenerate into one nation setting itself above another. Worse still, if one regards the Jews as a subordinate race, and thus fights the race. Can the Jews help it if they descend from another lineage? They have always been an oppressed people, hence their scattering (over the world). For the Social Democrat it’s self-evident that he wants the equality of everyone with a human spirit. The Jew’s not the worst by a long way.⁶³

Other workers on other occasions were heard to pour scorn on the antisemites, condemn antisemitic violence and support the Jewish desire for civil equality. Such views were entirely typical of workers in the labour movement milieu before 1914.⁶⁴

The worst the Social Democrats could be accused of was not taking seriously enough the threat posed by antisemitism, and of allowing a few antisemitic stereotypes to creep into a small number of cartoons printed in their entertainment magazines.⁶⁵ In some areas, the Social Democrats and antisemites supported each other in electoral run-offs, but this did not imply approval of each other’s principles, merely a desire to make temporary common cause as parties of protest against established elites.⁶⁶ In a few backward small towns and villages, mainly in the deeply rural east, medieval accusations of ritual murder were occasionally brought against local Jews and won some popular support, even arousing protest demonstrations on occasion. Not one of them was ever proved by the courts. Small businessmen, shopkeepers, artisans and peasant farmers were more inclined to overt antisemitism than most, continuing a tradition of organized popular antisemitism that can be traced back at least as far as the 1848 Revolution in some areas, though not in its modern, racist form.⁶⁷ But among the educated middle classes, non-Jewish businessmen and professionals for the most part worked quite happily with Jewish colleagues, whose representation in the liberal political parties was sufficiently strong to prevent these from taking on board any of the central arguments or attitudes of the antisemites. The antisemitic parties remained a fringe, protest phenomenon and largely disappeared shortly after the turn of the century.

Nevertheless, their decline and fall was to some extent deceptive. One of the reasons for their disappearance lay in the adoption of antisemitic ideas by the mainstream parties whose constituents included the economically imperilled lower-middle-class groups to which the antisemites had originally appealed - the Conservatives and the Centre Party. The Conservatives built on the antisemitic policies contained in their 1893 Tivoli programme and continued to demand the reduction of what they thought of as the subversive influence of Jews in public life. Their antisemitic prejudices appealed to significant groups in Protestant rural society in north Germany and to the artisans, shopkeepers and small businessmen represented in the party’s Christian-social wing. For the much larger, though under the Reich arguably less influential, Centre Party, the Jews, or rather a distorted and polemical image of them, symbolized liberalism, socialism, modernity - all the things the Church rejected. Such a view appealed to large numbers of peasants and artisans in the party, and was spread by autonomous protest groups amongst the Catholic peasantry whose ideas were not dissimilar to those of Otto Böckel; it was also shared by much of the Church hierarchy, for much the same reason. In the Vatican, religious and racial antisemitism merged in some of the anti-Jewish diatribes published by clerical writers in a few of the more hardline Ultramontane newspapers and magazines.⁶⁸

Moreover, antisemitic prejudice was powerful enough in the higher reaches of society, the court, the civil service, the army and the universities to constitute a permanent reminder to Jews that they were less than equal members of the German nation.⁶⁹ The antisemites succeeded in placing ‘the Jewish question’ on the political agenda, so that at no time was Jewish participation in key social institutions not a matter for discussion and debate. Yet this was all relatively low-level, even by the standards of the time. A historian once speculated on what would happen if a time-traveller from 1945 arrived back in Europe just before the First World War, and told an intelligent and well-informed contemporary that within thirty years a European nation would make a systematic attempt to kill all the Jews of Europe and exterminate nearly six million in the process. If the time-traveller invited the contemporary to guess which nation it would be, the chances were that he would have pointed to France, where the Dreyfus affair had recently led to a massive outbreak of virulent popular antisemitism. Or it might be Russia, where the Tsarist ‘Black Hundreds’ had been massacring large numbers of Jews in the wake of the failed Revolution of 1905.⁷⁰ That Germany, with its highly acculturated Jewish community and its comparative lack of overt or violent political antisemitism, would be the nation to launch this exterminatory campaign would hardly have occurred to him. Antisemitic politics were still very much on the fringe. But some of the antisemites’ propaganda claims were beginning to gain a hearing in the political mainstream - for example, the idea that something called the ‘Jewish spirit’ was somehow ‘subversive’, or that Jews had supposedly ‘excessive’ influence in areas of society such as journalism and the law. Moreover, the antisemitic parties had introduced a new, rabble-rousing, demagogic style of politics that had freed itself from the customary restraints of political decorum. This, too, remained on the fringes, but, here again, it had now become possible to utter in parliamentary sessions and electoral meetings hatreds and prejudices that in the mid-nineteenth century would have been deemed utterly inappropriate in public discourse.⁷¹

What the 1880s and early 1890s were essentially witnessing, in addition to this domestication of antisemitism, was the assembling, on the fringes of political and intellectual life, of many of the ingredients that would later go into the potent and eclectic ideological brew of National Socialism. A key role in this process was played by antisemitic writers like the popular novelist Julius Langbehn, whose book Rembrandt as Educator (published in 1890) declared the Dutch artist Rembrandt to be a classic north German racial type, and pleaded for German art to return to its racial roots, a cultural imperative that would later be taken up with great enthusiasm by the Nazis. These authors developed a new language of vehemence and violence in their diatribes against the Jews. The Jews, for Langbehn, were a ‘poison for us and will have to be treated as such’; ‘the Jews are only a passing plague and a cholera’, as he put it in 1892. Langbehn’s book went through forty reprints in little over a year and continued to be a best-seller long after, combining scurrilous attacks on what its author called ‘Jews and idiots, Jews and scoundrels, Jews and whores, Jews and professors, Jews and Berliners’ with a call for the restoration of a hierarchical society led by a ‘secret Kaiser’ who would one day emerge from the shadows to restore Germany to its former glory.⁷²

Such ideas were taken up and elaborated by the circle that gathered around the widow of the composer Richard Wagner at Bayreuth. Wagner had made his home in this north Bavarian town until his death in 1883 and his epic music-dramas were played every year in the opera house he had had constructed specially for the purpose. They were designed not least to propagate pseudo-Germanic national myths, in which heroic figures from Nordic legend were to serve as model leaders for the German future. Wagner himself had already been a cultural antisemite in the early 1850s, arguing in his notorious book Judaism in Music that the ‘Jewish spirit’ was inimical to musical profundity. His remedy was for the complete assimilation of Jews into German culture, and the replacement of the Jewish religion, indeed all religion, by secular aesthetic impulses of the sort he poured into his own music-dramas. But towards the end of his life his views took on an increasingly racist tone under the influence of his second wife, Cosima, daughter of the composer Franz Liszt. By the end of the 1870s she was recording in her diaries that Wagner, whose outlook on civilization was distinctly pessimistic by this time, had read Wilhelm Marr’s antisemitic tract of 1873 and broadly agreed with it. As a consequence of this shift in his position, Wagner no longer desired the assimilation of the Jews into German society, but their exclusion from it. In 1881, discussing Lessing’s classic play Nathan the Wise and a disastrous fire in the Vienna Ring Theatre, in which more than four hundred people, many of them Jewish, had died, Cosima noted that her husband said ‘in a vehement quip that all Jews should burn in a performance of “Nathan” ’.⁷³

After Wagner’s death, his widow turned Bayreuth into a kind of shrine, at which a band of dedicated followers would cultivate the dead Master’s sacred memory. The views of the circle she gathered round her at Bayreuth were rabidly antisemitic. The Wagner circle did its best to interpret the composer’s operas as pitting Nordic heroes against Jewish villains, although his music was of course capable of being interpreted in many other ways as well. Among its leading figures were Ludwig Schemann, a private scholar who translated Gobineau’s treatise on racial inequality into German in 1898, and the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain, born in 1855, who married one of Wagner’s daughters and in due course published an admiring biography of the great man. While Cosima and her friends propagated their ideas through the periodical publication the Bayreuth Papers, Schemann went round the country addressing antisemitic meetings and founding a variety of radical racist organizations, most notably the Gobineau Society in 1894. None of them was particularly successful. But Schemann’s championing of the French racial theorist still did a great deal to bring Gobineau’s term ‘Aryan’ into vogue amongst German racists. Originally used to denote the common ancestors of the speakers of Germanic languages such as English and German, the term soon acquired a contemporary usage, as Gobineau put forward his argument that racial survival could only be guaranteed by racial purity, such as was supposedly preserved in the German or ‘Aryan’ peasantry, and that racial intermingling spelled cultural and political decline.⁷⁴

It was Chamberlain who had the greatest impact, however, with his book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1900. In this vaporous and mystical work Chamberlain portrayed history in terms of a struggle for supremacy between the Germanic and Jewish races, the only two racial groups that retained their original purity in a world of miscegenation. Against the heroic and cultured Germans were pitted the ruthless and mechanistic Jews, whom Chamberlain thus elevated into a cosmic threat to human society rather than simply dismissing them as a marginal or inferior group. Linked to the racial struggle was a religious one, and Chamberlain devoted a good deal of effort to trying to prove that Christianity was essentially Germanic and that Jesus, despite all the evidence, had not been Jewish at all. Chamberlain’s work impressed many of his readers with its appeal to science in support of its arguments; his most important contribution in this respect was to fuse antisemitism and racism with Social Darwinism. The English scientist Charles Darwin had maintained that the animal and plant kingdoms were subject to a law of natural selection in which the fittest survived and the weakest or least well adapted went to the wall, thus guaranteeing the improvement of the species. Social Darwinists applied this model to the human race as well.⁷⁵ Here were assembled already, therefore, some of the key ideas that were later to be taken up by the Nazis.