Hybrid Hate

Author(s):  
Tudor Parfitt

The study of Western racism has tended to concentrate on either the hatred and murder of Jews or the hatred and enslavement of black people. As chief objects of racism Jews and blacks have been linked together for centuries, peoples apart from the general run of humanity. In medieval Europe Jews were often perceived as blacks, and the conflation of Jews and blacks continued throughout the period of the Enlightenment. With the discovery of a community of black Jews in Loango in west Africa in 1777, and later of black Jews in India, the Middle East, and other parts of Africa, the figure of the hybrid black Jew was thrust into the maelstrom of evolving theories about race hierarchies and taxonomies. The new hybrid played a particular role in the great battle between monogenists and polygenists as they sought to establish the unitary or disparate origins of humankind. From the mid-nineteenth century to the period of the Third Reich, Jews and blacks were increasingly conflated in a racist discourse that combined the two fundamental racial hatreds of the West. While Hitler considered Jews “Negroid parasites,” in Nazi Germany as in Fascist Italy, through texts, laws, and cartoons, Jews and blacks were combined in the figure of the black/Jew, the mortal foe of the Aryan race.

1999 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 291-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Cooper

‘Reactionary modernism’ is a term happily coined by the historian and sociologist Jeffrey Herf to refer to a current of German thought during the interwar years. It indicates the attempt to ‘reconcil[e] the antimodernist, romantic and irrationalist ideas present in German nationalism’ with that ‘most obvious manifestation of means–ends rationality … modern technology’. Herf's paradigm examples of this current of thought are two best-selling writers of the period: Oswald Spengler, author of the massive domesday scenario The Decline of the West in 1917 and, fifteen years later, of Man and Technics, and Ernst Jünger, the now centenarian chronicler of the war in which he was a much-decorated hero, whose main theoretical work was Der Arbeiter in 1932. The label is also applied by Herf to such intellectual luminaries as the legal theorist and apologist for the Third Reich, Carl Schmitt, and more contentiously Martin Heidegger. At a less elevated level, reactionary modernism also permeated the writings of countless, now forgotten engineers, who were inspired at once by the new technology, Nietzschean images of Promethean Übermenschen, and an ethos of völkisch nationalism


2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-269
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Herf

In his global bestseller, Inside the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler's former architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, cited the German dictator's view that if the Arabs had won the Battle of Tours in the eighth century, “the world would be Mohammedan today.” That was the case, he continued, because “theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to their faith. The Germanic people would have become heirs to that religion. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.” Yet, because of what Hitler called Arabs' “racial inferiority” and inability to handle the harsher climate, “they could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire.” Hitler concluded, “It's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”


Author(s):  
Emily Richmond Pollock

This chapter explores the historical and institutional basis for the West German renewal of opera in the postwar period. The chapter presents narratives of individuals involved in the creation of opera to contextualize opera’s restoration after 1945. Significant personnel continuity in the operatic ecosystem before, during, and after the Third Reich meant that the postwar opera industry was populated by men and women whose recent experiences included National Socialist ideology, military service, Allied bombing, the loss of family members, displacement, hunger, forced labor, imprisonment, and denazification. The chapter also sketches the institutional basis of contemporary opera, discussing seven opera companies and surveying the position of new and recent works within the postwar repertoire. From this survey, we see how the production of new operas enhanced companies’ prestige and was motivated by a perceived duty to promote modern composers, to challenge audiences, and to advance opera as a living art form.


Author(s):  
Steven Michael Press

In recognizing more than just hyperbole in their critical studies of National Socialist language, post-war philologists Viktor Klemperer (1946) and Eugen Seidel (1961) credit persuasive words and syntax with the expansion of Hitler's ideology among the German people. This popular explanation is being revisited by contemporary philologists, however, as new historical argument holds the functioning of the Third Reich to be anything but monolithic. An emerging scholarly consensus on the presence of more chaos than coherence in Nazi discourse suggests a new imperative for research. After reviewing the foundational works of Mein Kampf (1925) and Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), the author confirms Klemperer and Seidel’s claim for linguistic manipulation in the rise of the National Socialist Party. Most importantly, this article provides a detailed explanation of how party leaders employed rhetorical language to promote fascist ideology without an underlying basis of logical argumentation.


2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Brothers

The rise of neo-Nazism in the capital of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was not inspired by a desire to recreate Hitler's Reich, but by youthful rebellion against the political and social culture of the GDR's Communist regime. This is detailed in Fuehrer-Ex: Memoirs of a Former Neo-Naxi by Ingo Hasselbach with Tom Reiss (Random House, New York, 1996). This movement, however, eventually worked towards returning Germany to its former 'glory' under the Third Reich under the guidance of 'professional' Nazis.


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