BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Holocaust without Hitler. 58 In place of a vague definition of antisemitic German political culture
leading up to the Holocaust, Brustein sees a “manifestation” of antisemitic attitudes and actions
being produced, like antisemitism itself, “by antecedent and independent factors.” 59
One such antecedent factor can be found in the tradition of collective violence against
Jews in Germany since the Middle Ages, a form of political activism intimately connected with
exclusionary aspects of modern German identity. A consensus has arisen that modern anti-
Jewish violence in Germany represented more than the mere scapegoating of Jews in times of
socio-economic distress or the spontaneous expression of German political culture, even though
Nazi propagandists later tried to sell that idea to make the pogrom of Kristallnacht in 1938
appear a völkisch phenomenon. 60 Exclusionary violence, rather, depended upon a perceived
Jewish threat to national identity and well-being, combined with some level of organized
antisemitic agitation and an assumption of legitimacy amongst the rioters, whether in complicity
58 Brustein, 40-43, 345-46, specifically refers to Daniel J. Goldhagen’s Hitler's Willing
Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996), John Weiss’s
Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany (Chicago: I.R. Dee, 1996) and Jay
Y. Gonen’s The Roots of Nazi Psychology: Hitler's Utopian Barbarism {Lexington, KY:
University Press of Kentucky, 2000) as works that find in German political culture virulent antisemitism
beyond a general failure to oppose laws relegating Jews to second-class citizenship.
59 Brustein, 43, 45-48, 341-44. Increased Jewish immigration and decline in gross
domestic product emerge as the most powerful, independent factors associated with antisemitic
acts, leftist politics less so, despite the amount of rhetoric targeting it.
60 Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, eds., Exclusionary
Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern Germany (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,
2002) deals with important continuities between the 1819 so-called Hep Hep riots in Wurzburg
and subsequent episodic violence throughout German territories during the years 1830, 1848-9,
1881 and 1900.
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