LEADER 08572cam a22003734a 4500
008
030501s2003 mauab b 001 0 eng
a| 0674011724 (alk. paper)
a| DLC
c| DLC
d| DLC
d| hubpceuo
b| eng
a| DD256.5
b| .K6185 2003
a| Koonz, Claudia,
d| 1940-
a| The Nazi conscience /
c| Claudia Koonz.
a| Cambridge, Mass. :
b| Belknap Press,
c| 2003.
a| 362 p. :
b| ill., map ;
c| 25 cm.
a| Includes bibliographical references (p. 277-342) and index.
a| This book works well on several levels. It offers a well-supported and interesting argument that will be of interest to specialists in the period, about the redefinition between 1933 and 1939 of German national identity, and the meaning of moral obligation to others in the community. At the same time, it is engaging, well-illustrated, and written in such a way that makes it accessible to a broad audience: this is a balancing act that we all aspire to, of course, and Koonz pulls it off adroitly. It also would work well read in tandem with much recent work on the Holocaust after 1939, particularly Christopher Browning's recent The Origins of the Final Solution (2004), since Koonz is offering a persuasive "prehistory" of changes in public and political culture before 1939, which were preconditions for the radicalization of Nazi policy after 1939 that resulted in the Final Solution.
Conscience, as Koonz notes, tells us not only what we should or should not do, but upon whom we may commit these actions. It defines our obligations to others, but also excludes some people from the group that we owe obligations to, who have rights vis-a-vis us. Conscience, in other words, "is bounded by community": the group that we owe consideration to, and from whom we can expect reciprocity (p. 5). The creation of the Nazi conscience entailed the redefinition of Germans' community of moral obligation, in which ethnic Germans were told that they owed moral consideration only to members of their own ethnic group. The regime rejected any universal morality, and instead "extolled the well-being of the ethnic German community as the benchmark for moral reasoning" (p. 3). Koonz aptly characterizes this mentality, which celebrated one's own ethnic group and saw its welfare as the ultimate moral good, as "ethnic fundamentalism."
Koonz discusses the articulation and promotion of this ethnic fundamentalism using a very broad lens. She examines its diffusion in the academy, within popular culture and the media, in public education and youth groups, and among both government and Party bureaucrats. Ethnic fundamentalism built up (and worked in synergy with) nationalist currents. Koonz notes that ethnic fundamentalism was apparently much more socially acceptable than violent anti-Semitism, and was more readily accepted by large segments of the German public. It was an easier sell than antisemitism, in part because it could be framed in positive terms, and was not associated with violence, the lawless destruction of Jewish property, or street hooliganism. The regime therefore promoted ethnic fundamentalism enthusiastically, while soft-pedaling for several years (particularly in Hitler's own public pronouncements) explicitly antisemitic statements.
This book is more about the creation of a public culture of ethnic fundamentalism, rather than its private reception. Koonz makes use of memoirs and the "public mood" reports generated by both the SPD and the SS. But the real focus of her book is on the generation and popularization of ethnic fundamentalism, and how this shared political consensus provided a framework for the development and application of racist government policies. Koonz is particularly adept at tracing the spread of an ethnic fundamentalist and antisemitic consensus among government agencies and within academia. For both realms, she offers a close reading of the growth of networks of consensus and alliances among bureaucrats and academics, interspersed with short biographical sketches of the careers of key mid-level players in this process. She also offers longer intellectual biographies of three of the most prominent academics who were converted to ethnic fundamentalism: Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Gerhard Kittel.
One of the biggest obstacles to the creation of an antisemitic consensus among both bureaucrats and academics, Koonz found, was that it proved almost impossible in the natural sciences to pin down any verifiable biological differences, to document the racial taxonomy that Nazi ideology insisted must exist. Instead, racial revisionism really took root in the humanities and social sciences. Along with anthropology and ethnology, Koonz notes that "history came into its own as the queen of the racial sciences" (p. 203), generating a flood of bibliographies, archival reports, monographs, and articles to underwrite both ethnic fundamentalism and antisemitism.
Koonz traces the trajectories of some of these scholars and also shows how their work was translated into more popular publications, including coffee table books, magazine articles, school textbooks, and films that contained a coherent array of "facts" to buttress a new, rational, and scholarly antisemitism. The backdrop of this emerging scholarly consensus "habituated bureaucrats and Nazi Party functionaries to what they took to be an empirically sound racial outlook," and as this research was incorporated into popular culture, "gradually, the idea took hold that although Jews did not deserve physical mistreatment, their participation in civil society ought to be curtailed" (p. 218). Koonz argues that this shift in political and popular culture facilitated ordinary Germans' passive acceptance of discriminatory Nazi policies, and also their active compliance with the exclusion of Jews from the body politic, and thus from the community of reciprocal moral obligations. Koonz thus builds a persuasive argument that links the promotion of ethnic fundamentalism in the academy and government bureaucracy to changes in popular culture, and in the daily behavioral norms of "ordinary Germans," as the German public was prepared to accept the social isolation and legal erasure of German Jews' civil existence.
The final section of the book focuses on the racist institutional culture of the SA and SS, and discusses how the indoctrination and training of these organizations' members was only an intensified version of the moral reconditioning that was happening in the public sphere as a whole. Koonz examines a spectrum of publications read by these men, and on the broader dynamics of the internal culture of the SS and SA. This group culture, Koonz concludes, prepared their members to become activists in the machinery of genocide after 1939.
The Nazi Conscience is a contribution to the field on several levels. It is accessibly written, with short synthetic "back histories" of important developments, so that one could easily assign it to upper-division undergraduate courses or recommend it to a non-specialist. It is well-written, so that authors writing on the subject will want to quote from it far too many times. And yet it also functions well on the most specialized level, as an indispensable supplement and prehistory to the functionalist vs. intentionalist debate, by demonstrating how, even before the decision to escalate to genocide was taken in the early phases of the war, the state and party bureaucracies, popular culture, many social institutions (including the academy), and large parts of the German public had been prepared for the process. Their sense of moral obligation---their consciences---had been so reshaped that (in many cases) they could not even see a moral wrong, in what was unfolding in front of them.
a| The Roger Griffin ComFas Collection
a| National socialism
x| Psychological aspects.
a| Political culture
z| Germany.
a| Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
a| Germany
x| Historiography.
0| 0
1| 0
2| ddc
4| 0
6| 943_086000000000000_01_9_KOO
7| 0
8| GEN
9| 161035
a| OSA
b| OSA
d| 2022-11-30
e| ComFas
l| 0
o| 943.086/01/9 KOO
r| 2022-11-30
w| 2022-11-30
y| BK
c| General Stacks
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