Product Description

Klaus Fischer charts the tortured history of German-Jewish relations over a millennium, from migration and ghettoization in the Middle Ages to enlightenment and emancipation in the eighteenth century to varieties of anti-Jewish prejudices in the Second Reich to the rise of pathological Judeophobia in the years 1918 to 1933. The aim of the book is to provide a historical explanation for this change in consciousness that began with a religious prejudice, moved to social and political discrimination, and ended up in annihilatory rage.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1882829 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 544 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The release of Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners on the role of ordinary Germans in the Nazi extermination of the Jews stirred up a furious round of attacks and counterattacks. This book will probably not soothe the bitter wrangling, but it ought to. It is a detailed, well-written, sober and analytic study that deserves the widest possible circulation. Fischer starts not with Bismarck or with WWI, but with the 11th century, and his descriptions of the role of emancipation, the rise of nationalism and the so-called scientific racism in the late 19th century are thorough and cogent, showing the reader the steps by which the unspeakable was accomplished. Although the rise of Nazism has been told many times, Fischer makes a clearly reasoned, well-researched attempt to put a horrible crime and a horrid epoch into an appropriately complex historical context. As Fisher says of Goldhagen, "the dark logic of cruelty is not illuminated by a monocausal explanation that rejects all other cultural or psychological reasons.... Goldhagen reveals himself as one of Jakob Burckhardt's terrible simplificateurs by attributing 'eliminationist anti-Semitism' to the average German citizen, thus draining the real meaning out of both 'anti-Semitism' and 'ordinary German.'" The responses of Jews to the Nazi regime are detailed here, as are the responses of clergymen, industrialists, the military leaders, academics and civil servants. Now that eyewitnesses are passing from the scene, the field is being left to historians. Fischer's book should serve them as an indispensable guide.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In his follow-up to Nazi Germany: A New History (LJ 9/15/95), Fischer traces the long history of Judeophobia in German culture from the Middle Ages to the present, including its Christian, xenophobic, social, and biological-racial strains. Despite the country's authoritarian institutions, the author refuses to indict the German people as a whole, persuasively arguing that Nazism was not inevitable in Germany and that there was no direct chain from Luther to Hitler, a thesis contrary to that recently promoted by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (LJ 3/15/96) and John Weiss's Ideology of Death (Ivan R. Dee, 1996). Fischer writes with a clear mastery of both primary and secondary sources, synthesizing a wide spectrum of literature into a fine, scholarly work. Highly recommended for all libraries. [For another look at German anti-Semitism, see W. Michael Blumental's The Invisible Wall, reviewed above.?Ed.]?John A. Drobnicki, York Coll. Lib., CUN.
-?John A. Drobnicki, York Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Fischer defines judeophobia as an irrational fear of, prejudice against, and hatred toward Jews. He sets out to answer two apparently inexplicable questions: How could such evil have erupted in the midst of what many regarded as a progressive Western culture, and why did the Germans stoop to a level of bestiality no sane person could have predicted in 1900? Fischer discusses the relationship between Germans and Jews from 1700 to 1939, highlighting what he calls the rise of pathological judeophobia from 1918 to 1933 and the period from 1933 to 1939. He follows with an analysis of what he poignantly terms the harvest of judeophobia, the Holocaust. He submits that Hitler may have been the devil incarnate, but the German people gave him unconditional support to the very end. "All too many Germans lent a willing hand to mass murder." This is truly a significant work, for Fischer gives a balanced account of a complex subject, making it painfully clear just how Germany became capable of genocide. George Cohen