Redemptive Anti-Semitism (Part E) 
 Source: Saul Friedlaender, Chapter 3 in: Nazi Germany and the Jews , Vol. I - The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, (New York 1997), p. 73-112. 
 In the 1928 Reichstag election, the Nazis received only 2.6 percent of the vote (6.1 percent in Bavaria, 10.7 percent in Munich): The breakthrough was yet to come. Anti-Jewish agitation continued. We see,' Hitler exclaimed in his speech of August 31, 1928, that in Germany, Judaisation progresses in literature, the theatre, music, and film; that our medical world is Judaised, and the world of our lawyers too; that in our universities ever more Jews come to the fore. I am not astonished when a proletarian says: What do I care?' But it is astonishing that in the national bourgeois camp there are people who say: This is of no interest to us, we don't understand this anti-Semitism.' They will understand it when their children toil under the whip of Jewish overseers. [italics in the original]' 121 
 After the stunning success of the NSDAP in the September 1930 elections, and during the almost two and a half years that followed until Hitler acceded to the chancellorship, the Jewish theme indeed became less frequent in his rhetoric, but it did not disappear. And when Hitler did refer to the Jews, as, for example, in a speech on June 25, 1931, the reference carried all the dire predictions of former years. In the first part of that speech, Hitler described how the Jews had destroyed the Germanic leadership in Russia and taken control of the country. In other nations the same process was developing under the cover of democracy. But the finale was more direct and more threatening: The parties of the middle say: everything is collapsing; we declare: what you see as collapse is the beginning of a new era. There is but one question about this new era: will it come from the German people...or will this era sink toward another people? Will the Jew really become the master of the world, will he organise its life, will he in the future dominate the nations? This is the great question that will be decided, one way or the other.' 122 
 For external consumption Hitler sounded far less apocalyptic, far more moderate. In an interview given to the London Times in mid-October 1930, he assured the correspondent that he was not to be linked to any pogroms. He merely wanted “Germany for the Germans”; his party did not object to “decent Jews,” but if the Jews identified with Bolshevism - and many unfortunately were inclined to do so - he would consider them enemies 123 . Incidentally, in articles published at the same time, Hitler expressed his conviction that recurring reports about the growth of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and interpretations of the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky as a struggle between an anti-Semite and a Jew were unfounded and farcical: Stalin does not have to be circumcised, but nine-tenths of his associates are authentic Hebrews. His actions only continue the complete uprooting of the Russian people with the aim of its total subjugation to the Jewish dictatorship.' 124 
 Whatever Hitler may have been writing about the Jewish dictatorship in the Soviet Union, in Germany some people were taken in by the apparent ideological change expressed in the Times interview. On October 18, 1930, Arthur Mahraun, himself no philo-Semite and the leader of the conservative Jungdeutscher Orden, the youth movement of the newly formed Deutsche Staatspartei (German State Party), wrote in his organisation's periodical: Adolf Hitler has abandoned anti-Semitism; this much one can now say with certainty. But officially [he has done so] for the moment only vis-a-vis foreign representatives and above all for the consumption of the jobbers in the City and Wall Street. At home, however, National Socialist supporters continue to be taken for a ride with anti-Semitic slogans.' 125 Was Mahraun really fooled by Hitler's tactical pronouncements? 
 Hitler's partial restraint at this time was more than made up for by his subordinates 126 . The prime example was the new Berlin Gauleiter, Joseph Goebbels, and his weekly (later daily), Der Angriff (The Attack), a paper certainly worthy of its name: it was ruthless and relentless against its main target, the Jew. As the symbol of the Jews' evil machinations and misuse of power, Goebbels chose Dr. Bernhard Weiss, vice president of the Berlin police, whom the Gauleiter dubbed “Isidor.” Dozens of anti-Isidor articles appeared from May 1927 (when the police temporarily banned the Nazi Party in Berlin) to the eve of the seizure of power; the articles were given extra punch by Hans Schweitzer's (pen name: “Mjoelnir”) cartoons. A book of the earliest of these articles by Goebbels, along with the cartoons, was published in 1928 as Das Buch Isidor (The Isidor book) 127 . 
 On April 15, 1929, Der Angriff turned its attention to a young boy's unexplained death in the vicinity of Bamberg. Goebbels' paper stated that a conclusion could be reached if one were to ask which existing religious community in Germany has already been under suspicion for hundreds of years for containing fanatics who use the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes.' 128 A Berlin court dismissed the slander charge that was brought against Der Angriff by arguing that Goebbels' paper had not stated that the Jewish community as such encouraged murder and that putting quotation marks around “religious community” meant merely that the author of the article was not certain that the Jews was a religious community 129 . Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda continued without respite throughout the decisive months preceding Hitler's accession to power 130 . 
 
 
 VI 
 On November 19, 1930, the Hebrew-language theatre Habimah presented S. Anski's The Dybbuk in the Wuerzburg municipal theater. A group of Nazis in the crowd tried, without success, to stop the performance. As it was leaving the theatre the predominantly Jewish audience was attacked by the Nazis and several Jews were seriously wounded. When the assailants were taken to court, the judge dismissed the charges, arguing that the demonstrators did not act from base motives.' 131 The Wuerzburg mayor explained that the police had not intervened because they were certain that the demonstration had “merely” aimed at preventing a show 132 . Although physical assaults of this kind were infrequent during the Weimar years, a pogrom-like anti-Jewish rampage that started in Berlin's Scheunenviertel district on November 5, 1923 went on for several days 133 . 
 
 
 Although there is no straight line between these developments and the events that followed 1933, the trends described here are part of a historically relevant background. Nonetheless, this focus on anti-Semitism should not lead to a skewed perception of the German scene - and particularly of the situation of the Jews in Germany - before 1933. The Jewish influenced perceived by the anti-Semites was mythical, but for the great majority of Jews in Germany the Weimar Republic opened the way to social advancement and, indeed, to a greater role in German life. The growth of anti-Semitism was real, but so - for a time at least - was a powerful renaissance of Jewish culture in Germany 134 and, until the onset of the crisis in 1929-30, a wide acceptance of Jews among the liberal and left-wing sectors of German society. On the right, however, anti-Semitism spread unabated, and during the final phase of the republic, it caught on beyond the reaches of the radical, and even the traditional, Right. 
 
 
 No political group shared the rabid anti-Jewish positions of the Nazis, but even during the years of stabilisation, between 1924 and 1929, extreme anti-Semitic themes were not uncommon in the political propaganda of the nationalist camp, particularly in that of the German National People's Party (DNVP), whose voelkisch wing was particularly vehement. At the end of 1922, the most extreme of the anti-Semitic DNVP Reichstag members, Wilhelm Henning, Reinhold Wulle, and Albrecht von Graefe, left the party to establish their own political organisation. But during the debates surrounding this secession, Oskar Hergt,of the leaders of the DNVP and the former finance minister of Prussia, nonetheless reaffirmed that anti-Semitism remained a fundamental political commitment of the party 135 . For the French journalist Henri Beraud, who himself was to become an extreme anti-Semite in the 1930s, the German right's Jew-hatred seemed completely out of control. We have no idea in France,' Beraud wrote in a report from Berlin in 1926, of what the anti-Semitism of German reactionaries can be. It is neither an opinion nor a feeling, nor even a physical reaction. It is a passion, a real obsession of addicts, which can go as far as crime.' 136 
 In 1924, the bankruptcy of the brothers Heinrich and Julius Barmat, two Polish Jews who had settled in Germany in 1918, led to a full-scale right-wing anti-Semitic and anti-Republic onslaught. The Barmat brothers were accused of having received loans from the state-sponsored postal savings bank in return for various financial favours to Social Democratic politicians. Given the political ramifications of the affair, the right-wing parties succeeded in setting up an investigation committee that led to the resignation and indictment of several ministers and Reichstag members. But the main target of the right-wing campaign was President Friedrich Ebert, who was accused of having helped the Barmats to obtain a permanent residence permit and even of having dabbled in their food import transactions during the immediate post war years 137 . There was a similar situation, on a smaller scale, in 1929, with the bankruptcy of the Sklarek brothers 138 . The main casualty this time was the mayor of Berlin, and the political consequence a contribution to the Nazi Party's strong showing in that year's local election 139 . 
 Political parties soon limited the number of their Jewish Reichstag members - with the exception of the Social Democrats, who retained approximately 10 percent Jewish membership on their Reichstag list to the very end. A telling illustration of the change of mood is to be found in the German Communist Party: In 1924 there were still six Jews among the party's sixty-four Reichstag members; in 1932 not a single one remained 140 . The Communists did not hesitate to use anti-Semitic slogans when such slogans were deemed effective among potential voters 141 . 
 The most significant political expression of the general climate of opinion was the transformation of the German Democratic Party (DDP), which had often been dubbed the “Jewish Party” because of the prominence of Jews among its founders, the large number of Jews among its voters, and, for a while at least, its espousal of themes identified with the position of the “Jewish press.” 142 In the January 1919 elections, the DDP obtained 18.5 percent of the vote, which made it the most successful of the middle-class liberal parties 143 . That success did not last. Gustav Stresemann's DVP kept attacking the competing DDP as “Jewish,” and, as a result, the DDP steadily declined. Within the party itself, personalities associated with the “liberal” right were openly critical of the party's identification with Jewish voters and influence 144 . In 1930 the DDP as such disappeared, to be replaced by the Deutsche Staatspartei (German State Party). This group's leadership became mostly Protestant and some of its components, such as the youth movement Jungdeutscher Orden, did not admit Jews. The DDP's voters had been the pro-Weimar liberal middle classes; the change in party name and policy reflect what were perceived, within these middle-class liberal circles, as electorally useful attitudes regarding the “Jewish problem.” 
 However, neither the “de-Judaisation” represented by the Staatspartei nor the hostility of the DVP was of any avail to these parties. Whereas in the elections of 1928 the DDP obtained twenty-five seats and the DVP forty-five, and in those of 1930 the DDP still gained twenty seats and the DVP thirty, in the elections of July 1932, the DDP was reduced to four seats and the DVP to seven 145 . The decline of the liberal parties during the Weimar Republic had been thoroughly analysed, and the social transformation that underlay it starkly defined 146 . In terms of the changing situation of the Jews in German, it meant that their main political basis (apart from the Social Democrats) had simply disappeared. 
 
 
 The “pernicious” influence of Jews on German culture was the most common theme of Weimar anti-Semitism. On this terrain, the conservative German bourgeoisie, the traditional academic world, the majority of opinion in the provinces - in short, all those who “felt German” - came together with the more radical anti-Semites. 
 The role of Jews in Weimar culture - in modern German culture in general - has been most extensively discussed, and, as we have seen, this theme was not only on the minds of anti-Semites, but often a source of pre-occupation for Jews themselves, at least for some of them. In his first book on the subject, the historian Peter Gay showed what role the former “outsider” (mainly the Jew) played in the German culture of the 1920s 147 ; later he reversed his position, arguing that, objectively, there was nothing to distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish contributions to German culture and that, as far as cultural modernism in particular is concerned, the Jews were neither more nor less “modern” than their German environment 148 . 
 Such downplaying of the Jewish dimension may well miss part of the context that provided the anti-Semitic ranters of the twenties with their ammunition 149 . The situation described, for example, in Istvan Deak's study of “Weimar's left-wing intellectuals” seems closer both to reality and to what the general perception was. After surveying the dominant influence of Jews in the press, book publishing, theatre, and film, Deak turns to art and literature: Many of Germany's best composers, musicians, artists, sculptors and architects were Jews. Their participation in literary criticism and in literature was enormous: practically all the great critics and many novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists of Weimar Germany were Jews. A recent American study has shown that thirty-one of the sixty-five leading German expressionists' and neo-objectivists' were Jews.' 150 Deak's presentation in turn demands some nuancing, as, after all, the cultural scene in the twenties was dominated by such figures as Thomas Mann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Bertolt Brecht, Richard Strauss, Walter Gropius; but undoubtedly, in the minds of the middle-class public, be it of the extreme or the moderate right, anything “daring,” “modern,” or “shocking” was identified with the Jews. Thus, when shortly after (the entirely non-Jewish) Frank Wedekind's death, his “sexually explicit” Schloss Wetterstein was staged in Munich (December 1919), the political right did not hesitate to call it Jewish garbage. The police warned that performance of the play would lead to a pogrom 151 , and, sure enough, during the last performance Jews and people who “looked Jewish” in the audience were beaten up 152 . As a police report put it: One can easily understand that a German who still feels German to some degree and who is not morally and ethically perverted looks with greatest disgust upon the public enjoyment of Wedekind plays.' 153 Jewish writers and artists may not have been any more extreme modernists than their non-Jewish colleagues, but modernism as such flourished in a culture in which the Jews played a central role. For those who considered modernism the rejection of all hallowed values and norms, the Jews were the carriers of a massive threat. 
 
 
 References: 
 121 Ibid., vol. 3, Zwischen den Reichstagswahlen Juli 1928–September 1930 , ed. Baerbel Dusik and Klaus A. Lankheit, part 1: Juli 1928–Februar 1929 (Munich, 1994), p. 43. 
 
 122 Ibid., vol. 4, Von der Reichstagswahl bis zur Reichspraesidentenwahl, Oktober 1930–Maerz 1932 , part 1, Oktober 1930–Juni 1931 , ed. Constantin Goschler (Munich, 1994), pp. 421–30. 
 123 Ibid., pp. 22–23. 
 124 Article of January 11, 1930 ( Illustrierter Beobachter ). This article and previous texts in the same vein are quoted in Rainer Zitelmann, Hitler: Selbsteines Revolutionaers (Stuttgart, 1990), pp. 476ff. 
 125 Martin Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany (New York, 1987), p. 125. In his private conversations Hitler showed no restraint in his anti-Jewish fury. A telling illustration is to be found in the notes covering the years 1929–1932 and written down in 1946 by Otto Wagener, interim chief of staff of the SA and then head of the economic division of the party. Wagener remained a true believer even after the war, and thus it would have been in his interest to tone down Hitler's remarks about the “Jewish question.” As they are–toned down or not–Wagener's recollections reflect the same themes and the same unbounded hatred that we know from Hitler's earlier speeches and texts. For Wagener's text see the critical edition of his notes published by Henry A. Turner, Otto Wagener, Hitler aus naechster Naehe: Aufzeichnungen eines Vertrauten 1929–1932 (Frankfurt am Main, 1978). For the anti-Jewish tirades see in particular pp. 144ff. and 172ff. 
 126 For the inner core of the Nazi leadership, anti-Semitism was an essential part of their world view from very early on. This early anti-Semitism was particularly extreme in the case of Rosenberg, Streicher, Ley, Hess, and Darré. Himmler and Goebbels also became anti-Semites before joining the Nazi Party. (The notable exceptions were Goering and the brothers Strasser.) On this issue I do not share Michael Marrus's evaluation regarding the absence of anti-Semitism among party leaders before 1925. See Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover, N. H., 1987), pp. 11–12. For a discussion of the apocalyptic dimension of the anti-Jewish creed among the Nazi elite, see Erich Goldhagen, “Weltanschauung und Endloesung: Zum Antisemitismus der nationalsozialistischen Fuehrungsschicht,” VfZ 24, no 4 (1976): 379ff. The marginal importance of anti-Semitism among the SA has been well documented by Theodor Abel. See the reworking and reinterpretation of Abel's questionnaires in Peter Merkl, Political Violence Under the Swastika: 581 Early Nazis (Princeton, N. J., 1975). The same cannot be said, however, of the middle-class future members of the SD, who often belonged to extreme right-wing anti-Semitic organisations from the early post war years onward. See Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien. 
 127 Russel Lemmons, Goebbels and “Der Angriff,” (Lexington, Ky., 1994), particularly pp. 111ff. 
 128 Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels (Munich, 1990), p. 200. 
 129 Ibid. 
 130 In 1932 the Nazis launched a vicious anti-Semitic attack against the DNVP candidate for the presidency, Theodor Duesterberg (one of the two leaders of the right-wing veterans' organisation, the Stahlhelm), harping on the Jewish origins of his grandfather, a physician who had converted to Protestantism in 1818. For this entire episode see Volker R. Berghahn, Der Stahlhelm: Bund der Frontsoldaten 1918–1935 (Duesseldorf, 1966), pp. 239ff. 
 131 Roland Flade, Die Wuerzburger Juden: Ihre Geschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Wuerzburg, 1987), p. 149. 
 132 Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1918–1933 (Hamburg, 1986), p. 346. 
 133 Ibid., p. 329ff. 
 134 Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, Conn., 1996). 
 135 Heinrich-August Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933: Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (Munich, 1993), p. 180. 
 136 Henri Béraud, “Ce que j'ai vu à Berlin,” Le Journal , October 1926. Quoted in Frédéric Monier, “Les Od'Henri Béraud,” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d'Histoire (Oct.–Dec. 1993): 67. 
 137 On this whole affair see Erich Eyck, Geschichte der Weimarer Republik , vol. 1 (Erlenbach, 1962), pp. 433ff. (For some reason Eyck refers only to Julius Barmat.) 
 138 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 316ff. See also Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933 , p. 356. 
 139 Ibid. For the Barmat and Sklarek scandals see also Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland , pp. 141ff. 
 140 See Maurer, “Die Juden in der Weimarer Republik,” in Dirk Blasius and Dan Diner, eds., Zerbrochene Geschichte: Leben und Selbstverstaendnis der Juden in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), p. 110. 
 141 Knuetter, Die Juden und die Deutsche Linke , pp. 174ff. 
 142 For an analysis of the “Jewish problem” in the DDP see Bruce B. Frye, “The German Democratic Party and the Jewish Problem' in the Weimar Republic,” LBIY 21 ([London] 1976), pp. 143ff. 
 143 Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933 , p. 69. 
 144 Frye, “The German Democratic Party,” pp. 145–47. 
 145 Berghahn, Modern Germany , p. 284. 
 146 Larry E. Jones, German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System 1918–1933 (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1988). 
 147 Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York, 1968). 
 148 Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York, 1978). 
 149 The same minimisation of the Jewish factor appears in Carl Schorske's otherwise magnificent study of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980). For criticism on this issue see Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews , pp. 5ff. 
 150 Istvan Deak, WeimarGermany's Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbuehne and Its Circle (Berkeley, Calif., 1968), p. 28. 
 151 Peter Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting and Performance, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 537–39. 
 152 Ibid., p. 302. 
 153 Ibid., p. 304.