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

APPENDIX Racism in Historical Discourse
With the rise of Hitler to power in Germany in 1933,
the centrality of antisemitism to “the doctrine of races” or
“racialism” in the modern world became fully apparent for
the first time. It was Magnus Hirschfeld, prominent German
sexologist of the Weimar era and early champion of
homosexual rights, who first gave real currency to the term
“racism” by making it the title of a book. Hirschfeld, an
assimilated Jew, had the good sense to flee when the Nazis
took power, and he finished his critique of Nazi ethnological
theories as an exile in Nice, where he died in 1935, leaving
the work unpublished. The manuscript entitled “Rassismus”
was subsequently translated into English and
published as Racism in 1938. 16 As might be expected, the
book is primarily a history, analysis, and refutation of the
racial doctrines that the Nazis brought with them and put
into practice when they gained control of Germany. As a
scientist who was ahead of his time, Hirschfeld had found
little of value or substance in the concept of race: “If it were
practicable, we should certainly do well to eradicate the
term ‘race’ as far as subdivisions of the human species are
concerned.” 17 Hirschfeld, who thought of himself as an objective
scholar and a cosmopolitan rather than an ethnic
loyalist, could make analogies between Germans and Jews,
which, in light of the Holocaust, would now seem offensive.
“Both peoples regard themselves as elect or chosen,
and both are very strongly disliked by everyone else.” 18 But
he perceptively described the psychosocial sources of racism
when he explained the ascendancy of German antisemitism
as a reaction to the loss of the First World War and
the difficulties that followed. Racism, he wrote, serves as a
safety valve against a sense of catastrophe. It seems “to pro-
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