Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

man cultural life and were indomitably hostile to it. A reactionary
romantic nationalism—fostered by Wagnerian
music dramas set in the pre-Christian Teutonic past, the
folktales of the Brothers Grimm, and histories of the Germans
that portrayed them as an ancient, brave, and virtuous
race—prepared the way for the belief in an eternal
Volksgeist that could not be acquired through acculturation,
especially by Jews, whose innate characteristics were considered
the absolute antithesis of those possessed by Germans.
Germans were spiritual, Jews materialist; Germans
were intuitive and poetic, Jews hyperrational; Germans
were honest and honorable, Jews unscrupulous and untrustworthy.
Völkisch nationalism, more than evolutionary
biology, was at the core of the racist antisemitism that
emerged in the 1870s and crystallized by the turn of the
century. 70 It would take the Nazis to synthesize effectively
the kind of scientific racism that had not previously focused
on the Jews in particular with the mainstream German antisemitism
associated with völkisch antimodernism. It was the
latter, as articulated by thinkers like Houston Stewart
Chamberlain, that did most of the damage prior to the
1920s. 71 It portrayed Jews as the symbols and agents of unwanted
changes and thus created a powerful hostility toward
them, at least on the part of many who felt overwhelmed,
disoriented, or displaced by the extraordinarily
rapid transformation of Germany from a loose association
of predominantly rural and agricultural principalities into
an urban and industrial nation. The process took less than
half a century, and it was not made more palatable by the
ascendancy of the kind of liberal ideology that, in countries
like Great Britain and the United States, heralded such
89