Title: A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to GenocideAlon Confino
Abstract: Alon Confino's extended essay tries to develop new ways of thinking about Nazi antisemitism. Why did the Nazis want to murder all the Jews in the world? His answer: “Jews represented time, symbolizing evil historical origins that had to be eradicated for Nazi civilization to arise” (p. 14). Confino drew this conclusion by asking, “Why did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible?” (p. 3). That dramatic question opened for Confino a new way of thinking: historians should examine not only racial ideology, but imagination and fantasy. Confino's work contributes to a new trend in Holocaust scholarship that tries to understand the cultural fabric, and not only the actions that people took. The problem is that Confino's book does not provide sufficient evidence for his conclusions, which remain gossamer conjectures. While most historians focus on racism when trying to understand Nazi antisemitism, Confino explores “the Nazi imagination” and “the history of emotions and imagination of Germans during the Third Reich” (p. 6). Studies of emotions often illuminate a historical era. Best known is Klaus Theweleit's study of the fantasies of members of the post-World War I Freikorps. Distinguishing Theweleit's work are his sources: the autobiographies and novels of Freikorps members. With Confino, however, fantasies and emotions are based on conjecture because he does not cite primary sources of the very people whose motivations he claims to know.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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