On the Basis of Envy, by Götz Aly

27/07/12 Why the Germans? Why the Jews?

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Why the Germans? Why the Jews?

Warum die Deutschen? Warum die Juden? Gleichheit, Neid und Rasenhass 1800-1933 is the title

of the new book by German historian Götz Aly, the author of another controversial recent work,

one which focused on the economic aspects of the Third Reich: Hitler’s beneficiaries: Plunder,

Racial War and the Nazi Welfare State.

The subtitle translates as “Equality, Envy and Racial Hatred from 1800 to 1933” and quite neatly

encapsulates both Götz’s thesis as well as the particular historical period under examination,

which ends with the assumption of power by the Nazis in 1933. The publisher’s webpage, which

can be accessed here, includes a press release with outline summary as well as a downloadable

version of most of the first chapter.

Neither seem to be available in English, so I provide a quick and dirty translation below the fold

(usual disclaimers apply). I would expect that a book dealing with this particular subject matter,

and especially one by an author as internationally controversial and as faithful to the canonical

account as Aly, will have little trouble finding an English-language outlet in due course.

At first sight, Aly’s proposition might appear to simply be a Goldhagenesque retread. However,

in focusing on the time period that he has chosen, Aly effectively discounts the religious anti-

Semitism which had been a salient feature of “German” society since medieval times, and places

the emphasis instead on the racial anti-Semitism which did not take form until the mid-to-late

19th century. If we are to take his thesis as set out, then 20th century German animus towards

Jews arose not from their status as a ‘People Apart’ or as an Antichrist, or from what Goldhagen

described as an “eliminationist antisemitism” which was “the cornerstone of German national

identity” but rather out of a new and completely modern sense of jealousy and envy at the

alacrity with which Jews were able to negotiate the challenges, and profit from the

opportunities, presented by Modernity.

It’s an interesting perspective which bears some serious consideration.

Press Information (12 August 2011) (extract)

Why did Germans murder six million Jews? That’s the question that contemporary

Germans need to answer if they wish to reach an understanding of their own

history.

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Guessedworker commented in

In the 19th century it was a fear of the future that animated most Christian

Germans. With Jews it was different. They came to an understanding that

economic freedom, political liberalisation and the industrial revolution

represented for them a unique opportunity. They charged ahead. They sent their

children to the best schools. By 1900 Jewish pupils were achieving success in the

Abitur at a rate eight times higher than gentiles. Jews streamed into the

professions, into white collar occupations and into entrepreneurial pursuits. The

reaction of the less upwardly mobile Germans was one of envy and jealousy. They

demanded ‘more equality’ and ‘protection for Christians not Jews’, not out of an

imaginary sense of superiority but rather from a lack of education and

entrepreneurial drive. Christian Germans sought refuge in the Collective and

sought to restore their self-esteem through the deprecation of others. Thus arose

the populist anti-Semitic hatred.

Envy flourished in concealment. With envy came as well an unacknowledged

recognition of and shame in their own failure. From 1933 the elevation of anti-

Semitism as an instrument of state policy began to relieve individual Germans of

their personal shame and sense of responsibility. That helps to explain why

although most Germans did not participate directly in the later violence against

Jews, they did consider their disenfranchisement as appropriate. They delegated

their aggression to the State. This afforded the Hitler regime the opportunity to

transform the malice felt by individuals into the impersonal project known as “the

Final Solution to the Jewish Question”.

Aly has also produced a lengthy article for Der Spiegel which elaborates upon his thesis. I have

been unable to track down an existing English version so I have produced a translation. First

though, a short scene-setting extract from the opening chapter of the book itself (available in

the original at the publisher’s link above):

The Question of All Questions

Why the Germans? Why the Jews?

Why did the Germans murder six million men, women and children simply because

they were Jews? How was that possible? How could such a civilised, cultured and

productive people summon up the necessary criminal energy? That remains the

Question of All Questions, the one that Germans must answer if they are to

understand their own history, or when they attempt to explain the therein

embedded stories to themselves and to their children.

Jew who emigrated to Germany from the neighbouring states to the east were

delighted once having crossed the German border. They treasured the security of

being within the Reich, the economic freedom and the educational opportunities

for their children, which after 1812 were offered by Prussia and later the Kaiser’s

Reich. Pogroms which were still a regular occurrence in both eastern and south-

eastern Europe as late as the early 20th century were but a distant memory in

Germany. Despite all their encumbrances Jews, especially in Prussia, had excellent

opportunities to press forward with their own self emancipation. However, and

paradoxically, the additional freedoms that Jews came to be granted simply

fomented more anti-Semitism, and in a novel form. ...

I wrestled for a while with the title of Aly’s Spiegel essay, Auf dem Boden des Neids which

literally translates as “In the soil of envy” but I suspect that it is more likely a play on words

which may be lost on a non-native speaker. Eventually, and after consultation with a native

speaker, I chose to render the title as follows in the hope that this may be closer to author’s

original meaning:



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On the Basis of Envy

by Götz Aly

The more the Germans talk about the Holocaust, the more they come to believe

that it must have been the work of extra-terrestrials.

The question of how the Holocaust came about continues to occupy historians

and commemoration specialists. But instead of providing straightforward

explanations, they indulge themselves in verbal contortions. They talk of

rapturous enthusiasm for a ‘redemptive’ anti-Semitism, or of a coldly impersonal

‘objective’ anti-Semitism or of the paranoid worldview of ‘racial’ anti-Semitism.

I’ve no idea what they’re on about; I for one know of nobody in Germany who

would own up to having such a crazed adherent to any of these for a father or

grandfather. The journalist Inge Jens reports that although her father was in the

SS he was not a national socialist. My doctor’s father told me that as a child he

had played as a soldier-farmer in the black earth region [refers to Southern Russia,

presumably. Ed.] and his father had been in the SD ‘thankfully though in a totally

unimportant department’. Recently I asked two respectable colleagues around my

age “What did your father do back then? Was he involved in the war?”. Both

hesitated and then mumbled “Um, haven’t actually asked him. No, I’ve never

really looked into it.”

The more that Germans speak of the Holocaust, the more it becomes a kind of

alien presence within their collective history. They refer to ‘the culprits’, or to

‘the Nazis’ or to ‘the Nazi State’ as if they were speaking about extra-terrestrials.

Little insight can be gleaned from that. The same with all the theories about

fascism, which trivialise the genocide as a throwback to a prehistoric barbarism,

or put up systemic models as a smokescreen, and attempt to shift the historical

burden onto a distinctly German form of development or onto an ostensibly

definable group of ideologues. Such naked abstractions enable the adherents of

such theories to distance themselves from events and to enjoy the warm feeling

that they would have stood on the better side of history. Goethe mocked the

self-deception of the theoreticians who would rather that “actual phenomena

themselves disappeared, and their place taken by illustrations, concepts and yes,

even just words.”

These days the occasional public personality may still be subject to public

moralising if it should be disclosed that he joined the Nazi party as an 18-year-old

in 1944. However when my neighbour discovered a carefully-packed bust of Hitler

beneath a tree-stump he was removing, nobody seemed to care. But just who

was living there in 1945? It turns out to have been an elderly Protestant clergyman

and his wife. “Charming folks” they were depicted as being, charming would also

seem to have been how they regarded their Führer. The other day after a lecture

a student showed me her diamond-studded gold ring. “Thanks to your book

Hitler’s Beneficiaries I’ve found out where it came from,” she said and then

continued: “Such a ring would never have come from our family. My grandmother,

a very ordinary woman, acquired in 1943 at an auction of Jewish property.”

Shortly before she died my mother came to speak about her friend Annemarie.

Under pressure from her husband, she had given her handicapped baby over to a

Euthanasia Clinic and had suffered for it ever since. My bookcases were built by a

very pleasant, elderly carpenter from East Berlin. About a year ago he asked quite

out of the blue: “What are you actually up to here?” - “I’m writing a book about

German anti-Semitism.” - “Yes, my uncle was involved in all that. First with the

Gestapo in Dessau, then in Russia. In 1942 he told my mother that he had shot

children there. He later settled in West Germany and drank himself to death.”



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The overwhelming majority - hundreds of thousands - of such murderous stories

were never even hinted at, they are buried forever. Nonetheless millions of

German photo albums with their pictures of daily life, weddings and soldiers tell us

more about the social realities of Hitler’s Germany than all of the theorising and

inflated rhetoric about the ‘Nazi regime’. As inhuman as the crimes were from a

moral and legal standpoint, the underlying causes remain all too human, in a literal

sense.

Anyone who simply states that the genocide of six million people is a

consequence of earlier anti-Semitism projects a demonic image on the wall, but

fails to identify the forces which created and nurtured that Demon, and which

allowed it to flourish. Better that one should ask: when and under what

circumstances did the German develop the inclinations that later led them to

actively support, nod approvingly at or passively tolerate the systematic

exclusion, expulsion and murder of Jews and other ‘undesirables’. Prior to 1933

both Christian and Jewish Germans had repeatedly pondered the special nature of

German anti-Semitism. Their conclusions seem rather facile today. Quite rightly

too, since particularly awful crimes require particularly complicated, perhaps even

ultimately unfathomable, causes.

But in this case the causes are not unfathomable. They can be easily discerned in

the 130 years of German history prior to Hitler’s seizure of power. Already by 1831

the Jewish writer Gabriel Reisser was maintaining that straightforward envy was

at the heart of enmity for Jews: “...Of every hundred expressions of annoyance at

Jews, ninety-nine can be traced to this cause.” Heinrich Heine was less worried

about reactionaries than about German democrats, then termed ‘Demagogues’,

like the populist ‘Champions of the Nationality’ such as Ernst Moritz Arndt or

Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. But why was that? It was due to their focus on achieving

unity for the German ‘cultural nation’ at the expense of universal human rights

and sentiments like “...with our victory, a few thousands Jewish heads will roll,

and then only the best.” Friedrich List - revered today for his untiring support for

a German Customs Union and for railway construction - called for political

rationalists to express their animosity towards Jews, according to contemporary

Jewish writer Berthold Auerbach. List feared the rapid advance of the Jews and

wished to protect his Christian compatriots.

Despite such obstacles German Jews were able to drive forward with their self-

emancipation. In 1812 Prussia granted them limited civil rights, including

protection under the law, freedom to trade and open access to well-developed

Gymnasia and universities for their sons, who had long been trained to read and

write. The Christian German population was much slower in its development and

became envious of Jews and their cosmopolitanism, urbanity and intellectual

faculties, as well as their business sense and general upbringing. An 1848 survey of

the situation of the Jewish minority reported that “It is the increasing affluence

and the particular work ethic of the Jews which are coming under attack by those

social classes which are disadvantaged by such activity.” Jews strode ahead,

ascending the social hierarchy at a rate three or four times faster than their often

barely-literate Christian counterparts, hundreds of thousands of whom were

having to leave their villages for the newly industrialising cities.

In 1886 some 46.5% of Jewish pupils achieved a secondary school leaving

certificate, by 1901 this had increased to 56.3%. Over the same period the

proportion of Christian children graduating from secondary school crept up from

6.3 to 7.3%. The same statistics confirm the extent to which Jewish parents were



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concerned that their daughters should also receive a higher education. In Berlin in

1901 11.5 times as many Jewish girls attended higher educational institutions as

Christian girls, taking into account their respective representation in the overall

population. Success at the Gymnasia translated into corresponding success at the

university level. While the Jewish population of Prussia was at the time only

around 1%, about 10% of all university students were Jewish. Jews began their

studies noticeably earlier, studied faster and achieved generally better

examination results. Prussian statisticians noted that “Jewish students seem on

average to be more capable and more diligent than Christians.”

Christian students typically sought out careers in government service, a field from

which Jews were excluded. Consequently Jewish graduates needed to pursue

opportunities in the private sector, often as independent operators. These

endeavours met with astonishing success. According to the historian Shulamit

Volkov, Jews in Frankfurt paid on average four times more tax than Protestants

and eight times more than Catholics. In Berlin tax receipts from Jews accounted

for 30% of municipal income, although Jews constituted only 15% of taxpayers and

barely 5% of the population. Similar situations applied in other cities. The

adversaries of Jews soon came to latch on to these glaring differences, which

were anything but imaginary.

The journalist and politician Wilhelm Marr, who in 1879 first coined the term ‘anti-

Semitism’, railed against the “social predominance of Semitism”. His crudely-

phrased pamphlets often included an observation that the Christians in this city

or that were much less able to provide their fellows with a decent education. In

1848 Marr had been a member of the left-wing faction in the revolutionary

government in Hamburg, but his personal and political aspirations were not

realised. Being the loser that he was, he came to despise those whose own social

success had been so brilliantly visible. He marketed his texts as “Cries of Pain of

the Oppressed”. “We just can’t compete with this alien tribe”, he lamented in

the name of justice and equal opportunity. For him it was a case of agile, nimble

Jews and dim German indolence; the usurious, talented Jews confronting the

ethical seriousness of German Christians.

Marr and dozens of other anti-Semites took on the role of spokesmen for the

slower-witted German majority, who demanded, and received, the protection of

the state against the economically adept and intellectually gifted Jewry. But they

didn’t know what to do with it. More often than not, the protection that was

afforded them only served to expose their own backwardness and incapability,

their failures became even more painful. They lost all sense of self-assurance and

in this fertile ground the seeds of racial theories began to sprout. The primitives

were to be elevated to the intellectual and spiritual peak of humanity. Hopeless

students, hidebound owners and businessmen couldn’t just be allowed to

continue whingeing indefinitely about the superior performance of their Jewish

competitors. That was damaging to one’s own morale, and simply enhanced the

sense of defeatism. What was needed was a transformation of the politics of envy

and anti-Semitism into a functioning framework for racial defamation.

In contrast to the majority of Jews, most Germans were fearful about the

increasing level of political and economic freedom, which represented both risk

and discomfort. Accordingly, many retreated at a quite early stage into the warm

bosom of the Peoples’ Collectivism. No matter where their political affiliations

might lie, reactionaries, conservatives and socialists alike denounced liberalism as

an infernal work of the Jews. In the context of the French Revolution, Egalité

stood for the equality of all citizens before the law. but the Germans

interpretation was one of equality of material outcome, to be guaranteed by the



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State. The cry rang out at every opportunity “Injustice! We demand our own

Place in the Sun!” They basked in their status as the eternally oppressed. Society

was transmuted into State, which they anointed as “Our Father, the State.”

Between 1880 and 1933 various anti-Semitic organisations prominently exploited

this victim mentality, a mentality which is still somewhat in evidence in

contemporary Germany. Demands arose for “Justice” and “Equality” for the

downtrodden. The most prevalent slogan , which originated with the Berlin anti-

Semite and court clergyman Adolf Stoecker, ran “Please, just a little more

Equality!” Their expectation was that the State would shield the common man

from any economic turbulence or crisis, from wage-dumping, foreign competition

and, especially, the Jews. Far from simply stoking up resentments, however, the

anti-Semites also presented the ordinary German with an incentive to pursue his

own happiness, to build his own self-esteem by putting one over on the Jews.

And so came into being the tensed-up, self-inadequate and soon to be hate-filled,

German, a Person without a Core. In the aftermath of war and defeat he charged

hither and thither, drawn to extremist factions by their marching around in

lockstep, their uniforms and their punch-ups, the fluttering standards, the

supreme Leaders and their fellow travellers. Wolfgang Mattheuer immortalised the

character with his 1984 work Jahrhunderschritt (Stride of the Century).

Jahrhundertschritt, Wolfgang Mattheuer (1984)

With his tiny torso and even tinier brain the fellow steps out with a giant’s stride,

the left leg naked, thrust rigidly forward, with the sharply-angled bare foot

forming the stub of a swastika. It’s the leg of someone who can’t afford shoes.

The left arm takes a right-angled hooked form, the fist balled-up in a communist

salute. The other foot, the knee and heel of its oversized leg rigidly posed, is

shod in a hefty soldier’s boot. The Century Strider’s tiny head has shrunk below

the collar of his uniform, as if he doesn’t want to be noticed. His own actions and

motives seem sinister. He seems to be both decisive and yet tremulous at the

same time, thirsting for action, but uncoordinated in his movements - lacking

balance, without equilibrium. It seems unclear whether he, right arm extended

straight up in the Hitler salute, can maintain the tension, whether he will be able

to maintain the giant’s stride, or whether he will, in the next moment, stumble.

He yearns for validation, he demands to be led.

A more optimistic counterpoint to the Century Strider (which Mattheuer later

reproduced several times in different forms [See Note below. Ed.]) is provided by

Marc Chagall’s 1917 work En avant les voyageurs. Colourfully rendered, this depicts

a young Jew, fashionably attired, leaping forward in a most determined fashion,

seemingly about to burst out of the frame of view. He’s leaning strongly forward,

spurning any possibility of retreat, conscious of the direction he wants to travel

and sets about it with great certainty. He’s breathing free, radiating joy, curiosity

and good humour. His giant’s stride leaves the past far behind, under his feet the



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green wooden hovels of the Shtetl are already receding over the horizon.

Le voyageur, en avant!, Marc Chagall (1917)

The future-minded Jew and the weak, disoriented and somewhat mentally erratic

German moved closer and closer towards each other after 1918. War and inflation

led to a collapse of the old social hierarchy. The German majority made up its

educational deficit, accustomed themselves to urban living and became much

more upwardly mobile. The educational policies of the Weimar Republic tripled

the number of Abitur students and, in so doing, unwittingly laid the foundations

of a National Socialist intelligentsia. While Jews comprised 10% of all university

students in 1900, by 1930 this had fallen to merely 4%. In 1914 Jews earned on

average five times more than the average German, by 1928 it was only three times

more, and trending sharply downwards.

The post-war social levelling did not, however, result in any lessening of the

animosity towards Jews. On the contrary, increasingly closer contact exacerbated

anti-Semitism amongst those for whom Jews represented competitors for

professional advancement, economic success or social prestige. Aggressive envy is

often most marked between different groups of similar social standing than it is

between groups with greater material differentiation, social contact between the

latter being rarer. “It was the new-found sense of parity which gave the social

resentment of the Angered its edge,” wrote Max Scheler in 1912. He

characterised it as a ‘spiritual self-poisoning’ which gave rise to an unrequited

yearning for revenge, leading in turn to feelings of ‘hate, anger, envy, resentment

and malice.’

Envy arises out of weakness, timidity, lack of self-esteem, self-inflected feelings

of inferiority and excessive ambition, character flaws which the envious take

pains to conceal. Should the Object of his Envy suffer some diminution in his own

privileges and advantages, if he were in some way to get it in the neck, then the

Envier can enjoy a quiet spell of Schadenfreude. Does the Envied Jew deserve

any aid or even any sympathy? No! He always knew better than anyone else!

Strolled around with his nose in the air! Always opening his big trap! Let him take

care of himself! And thus the Envier satisfies his moral scruples, sticks his hands in

pockets and turns away. If others should then harass the Envied, disenfranchise

him and deport him, the little Envier declares “What’s that to do with me?” His

conscience remains unperturbed, it wasn’t he who did it.

Among the latterly upwardly mobile was my Munich grandfather Friedrich, a warm-

hearted bloke who would be among the last people you’d choose to send off to

fight a war. In 1931, when my mother was eight and pestering him continuously to

let her have a ride on the escalator in the Jewish-owned Uhlfelder department

store, the first in the city, he told her quietly but firmly “We don’t go in there.”

Note: With regard to Mattheuer’s ‘Century Strider’ it is indeed the case that he has developed

its replication in various forms into something of a cottage industry in recent years. He has



1

produced a number of statues on the theme, usually of bronze, which adorn public places across

Germany. I came across this one in Leipzig, at the entrance to the Contemporary History Forum

there.

It’s actually quite a striking piece in this form, much more so in my view than the original

artwork, and probably quite fitting for the location, which is an exhibition focusing on

totalitarianism and extremism in 20th century Germany.

That said, I must say that I concur with sentiments expressed elsewhere concerning the

peculiarly German propensity for ritual self-abasement, which is really what the

Jahrhundertschritt is all about. It seems to me distinctly unhealthy that a modern, functioning

democracy, and one that is today without question the most significant nation-state in Europe,

should continue to feel it necessary to express its mea culpas in quite so dramatic and public a

form.

Posted by Dan Dare on Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 12:49 AM in Books

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Posted by Graham_Lister on October 20, 2011, 04:14 AM | #

You are probably aware of this work (again by a mainstream academic).

“The Jewish Century”

The provocative argument that underlies this idiosyncratic, fascinating and at

times marvelously infuriating study of the evolution of Jewish cultural and

political sensibility is that the 20th century is the Jewish Age because

“modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate,

articulate, intellectually intricate…. Modernization, in other words, is about

everyone becoming Jewish.” A professor of history at UC-Berkeley, Slezkine

plays a delicate game here. Knowing that his grand statements are more

metaphorical than supportable with historical fact, he maps out a new history

of Jewish culture over the past 100 years in four radically diverse but cohesive

chapters. In a history of Jewish group identity and function, Slezkine depicts

Jews as a nomadic tribe that functions as a promoter of urban cultural and

economic change. The book’s last chapter (“Hodel’s Choice”) uses the image

of the daughters of Sholem Aleichem’s famous milkman Tevye to discuss the

three great recent Jewish immigrations—to America in the 1890s, from the

Pale of Settlement to the Russian cities after the revolution and to Palestine

after the birth of Zionism. Through these migrations, Slezkine argues, the

modernism of Jewish culture spread throughout the world. Nearly every page

of Slezkine’s exegesis presents fascinating arguments or facts—e.g., that

“secular American Jewish intellectuals felt compelled” to become more Jewish

when they were allowed into traditional American institutions. While not

On the Basis of Envy, by Götz Aly

Documents

Transcript of On the Basis of Envy, by Götz Aly