Alan Steinweis
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One of the most fundamental–and vexing–questions in all of modern history is whether cultures make governments or governments make cultures. Tocqueville, who was right about almost everything, thought the former: he said that American culture made American government democratic. Neocon theorists, who have been wrong about most things, believe the opposite: that democratic governments can make cultures democratic. Under this theory, we should be able to impose liberal democracy on, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, and thereby make their cultures liberal democratic.
The culture-government question is also central to modern German historiography. It usually takes this form: did German culture produce the Nazis or did Nazis produce German (or rather “Nazi”) culture. In his eye-opening book Kristallnacht 1938 (Harvard, 2009), Alan Steinweis succeeds in shedding new light on this subject by carefully studying an old topic–the Nazi pogrom against the Jews in 1938, aka, “Kristallnacht.” He shows that it is difficult to argue that the Nazis alone prosecuted the attack. It would be much more reasonable to say that they “provoked” it or, even better, “unleashed” it. Steinweis points out that what might be called “spontaneous” (or at least not party-directed) assaults on Jews had been occurring with some frequency over the years preceding the Kristallnacht. The Nazis my have facilitated these spasms, but they did not create the paranoia that drove them–that, it seems, was a element of German culture. Importantly, the Nazi leaders–and above all Hitler and Goebbels–knew that all they needed to do was give the word and the anti-Semetic pressure building up within the German public would be released. In November 1936, Herschel Grynspan’s assassination of a low-level German diplomat gave them the pretext they needed to give that word. They did, and the floodgates of Judophobia opened.
The Nazis didn’t create violent German anti-Semitism; they reflected it and took advantage of it. As H.L. Menchen might have said, the Germans got the government they wanted and deserved to get it good and hard.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
This is gross oversimplification. How do you define ‘culture’? By many standards Germany preceding the war was far more culturally advanced than the US at the time. Did the US begin to annihilate their population in this fashion? (they did in other fashions of course). In fact, I was just reading this the other day, that Hitler saw the eastern eurupe much as the US saw North America-he saw the ethnic inhabitants as the ‘indians’ of North America who would simply be pushed out of the way and marginalized.
As any historian should know, when Hitler was elected it was in a minority government. Hitler’s policies didn’t have mass support. In particular, he had to work with communists, whom he loathed. It was hardly ‘democratic’ the way he in effect shut down government and became a tyrant. Its not like germans VOTED for a mass pogrom. If they HAD, then perhaps this theory would make some sense.
The big lie here is that ‘countries’ are ‘democratic’. A ‘culture’ can of course exist completely separate from a government-there is a HUGE human rights ‘culture’, it simply has no POWER. It has no democratic outlet. We see this now in the states, with Fox and tons of ‘angry white men’ patrolling blogs with vitriol, even moderate voices are simply scared to speak out, let alone get more politically active. Once Hitler gave the orders for the ‘angry white men’ -who were mostly a specific clique within the nazi party and associates, everybody else became terrified.
In short, human beings are capable of anything, and those that have POWER can control those responses. In other words, governments CONTROL ‘culture’. That doesn’t mean other cultures don’t exist (I’m sure plenty of germans fled, tried to help jews, etc).
I dont know wether this abstract gives a fair account of Steinweis’ book, which I haven’t read myself. Therefore my comment will refer to what is said in above summary.
I think it will be very difficult to maintain that Anti-Semitism in Germany before the 1930ies was in any way more virulent than in any other European country of that time. What may be different is the fact that Germany had lost a war which, together with the economic crisis had washed away old elites and thrown social order into turmoil at a time when the unexperienced parliamentary democracy was widely disregarded and perceived incable of restoring order.
Hitler was eventually elected as the most hawkish politician available after all other parties had failed, not because of his Anti-Semitic extremism but despite of it.
By the time kristallnacht took place the Nazis had been able to take ideological and political control of nearly all aspects of public everyday life, from media over education to sports clubs. What can be considered a specific cultural trait is not the content of Nazi ideology but German obedience to authority, be it Prussian militarism, Nazism or Communism as in East Germany after 1945. The ideological content does not really matter.
The second paragraph contains an error, Grynszpan shot Ernst vom Rath in November of 1938.