BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

land sought as a refuge by Ostjuden refugees fleeing deadly Russian pogroms in 1881 would,
under Nazi rule, resurrect a far more lethal modern version of the medieval pogrom. 64
Despite the Nazi regime’s decisive break with past official policies, Helmut Walser Smith
has found in German antisemitism a “long, if thin line of continuity” linking histories of local
violence to the broader conception of a racialized nation. 65 Smith regards the 1870s as a
watershed marking the transition from a bourgeois constitutionalist “official” nationalism to a
post-unification radical nationalism that subordinated interests of state to exclusionary religion,
social Darwinist racialism and revived Fichtean notions of German originality and destiny—all
of which targeted Jews as well as Catholics, Poles and socialists. 66 Smith seems to be arguing
that exclusionary cultural nationalism, specifically related to questions of identity, did warp
German politics and enabled the apparent discontinuity of Nazi state-sponsored violence. 67 If the
64 On the ritualistic nature of nineteenth-century German exclusionary violence compared
with more lethal institutionalized pogroms see Helmut Walser Smith, “Konitz, 1900: Ritual
Murder and Antisemitic Violence,” 96, Werner Bergmann, “Exclusionary Riots: Some
Theoretical considerations,” 179-80, and the introductory essay by Bergmann, Hoffmann and
Smith, 9-11, 14-15, all in Exclusionary Violence.
65 Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race
across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 215, 220.
66 Ibid., 221-22.
67 This conclusion accords with Gellner’s thesis that both politics and culture became
distorted in the vortex of nationalism and national identity. William Sheridan Allen’s The Nazi
Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1930-1935 (1965; repr., New York:
New Viewpoints, 1973), 209-10, 215, 225-26, also revealed the inadequacy of a simple cultural
explanation for antisemitism. Nazi success in Northeim (named Thalburg in the book’s first
edition) depended less on residual antisemitism than on political divisiveness, a weak democratic
tradition, violent rhetoric, displays of force and the promise of national unity under authoritarian
rule. The exclusion of Jews in Northeim, Allen argued, proceeded not by unleashing popular
antisemitism but through conformity or acquiescence to a political ideology and strategy of social
atomization that brought all formerly independent organizations and groups under Nazi
96