Toward the end of the 1920s, and with much greater vehemence following Hitler’s nomination as chancellor in 1933, increasing numbers of Germans began to identify the Jews as their most pernicious domestic foe. And precisely because the Jews were the elusive enemy by definition they served as a metaphor for all other domestic and foreign opponents of the nation (and the regime that claimed to represent it), making it appear possible to wipe out political opposition without casting doubt on the inherent unity of the Volk.Hence the image of “the Jew” as constructed by the regime played an important role in consolidating the Nazi state and preparing it for the existential struggle for which Hitler had always striven.
While a consensus over the identity of the enemy was being reached, however, his elusive nature, as presented by the regime, meant that he might lurk everywhere, not only in one’s social environment but even as a constant threat to each individual’s alleged Aryan purity. Paradoxically, just as the Reich was declared progressively judenrein (Jew-free), the specter of Jewish presence seemed to haunt people’s imagination all the more. It was as if the Jews had simply gone underground or had merged into the innocent Aryan population so well that they might be discovered even among Hitler’s most obedient followers. At the same time, “the Jew” came to represent also the entirety of Germany’s foreign foes, serving as the incarnation of Bolshevism and plutocracy just as much as the cause of the “stab in the back” and all the misfortunes that followed it. Hence individual psychological anxiety, domestic social threats, and foreign military opponents were all merged into the image of that elusive yet all-powerful enemy, “the Jew.”
The image of “the Jew” as the state’s most insidious enemy by dint of being both distinctly and irreversibly alien and capable of such mental and physical dissimulation that made him appear “just like us” was a legacy of late-nineteenth-century political and racial antisemitism. The rapid transformation of European society in the wake of the industrial revolution, whose immediate outcome for much of the population was often poverty, disorientation, and fear, created the need to isolate and identify the evil forces lurking behind such an unprecedented upheaval. Simultaneously, the emancipation of the Jews, which, along with industrialization, accompanied the creation of the new nation-state, while providing the Jews with new opportunities, created unease and animosity within a gentile population still permeated by anti-Jewish prejudices. And since the Jews appeared to be the main beneficiaries of the process, they quickly came to be identified as the instigators of the suffering it caused. Thus, especially among the threatened old middle class of small shopkeepers and artisans, the argument could be made that by putting the Jews “back in their place” all the confounding and wretched realities of modernization would go away and the good old order would return.
If the new economic forces were anonymous and faceless, Jewish emancipation and assimilation created a new kind of Jew who could no longer be identified as such with the same ease as in the past. Seemingly indistinguishable from his gentile neighbors, “the Jew” as an identifiable “other” was disappearing, at the same time as his power, according to the antisemitic logic, was expanding immeasurably. Modernity and the Jews thus shared the same elusive qualities and could be presented as inextricably linked. To be sure, a rather significant leap of the imagination was needed in order to conclude that an international Jewish conspiracy was at work, where “real” Jews, stripped of their modern, emancipated garb, were plotting in the dark to take over the world. But in both popular and elite circles, the idea was gaining ground that behind the mask of the new Jew lurked the “Asiatic” features of the proverbial Jew of medieval lore and Christian imagery. And, as in all nightmares, this elusive enemy generated much greater anxiety than the easily identifiable one. The notion that the enemy is among us yet cannot be unmasked has always been the stuff of fear and paranoia and the cause of destructive imaginings and violent eruptions.
Modernity brought with it also a belief in science and progress, accompanied by fears of physical and mental degeneration. Scientific racism soon asserted that humanity was divided into higher and lower species, thereby positing racial purity as a goal and miscegenation as racial pollution. According to the skewed logic of racial hygiene, the Jews were both the lowest and most insidious race and the most zealous guardians of their own racial purity, even as they threatened to contaminate the higher races with inferior blood. Yet the same scientists who claimed to have identified the different strands of the human race were haunted by the protean nature of “the Jew” and his ability to defeat scientific diagnoses. This implied that every individual was potentially a carrier of precisely those Jewish qualities one was striving to eliminate, that is, that everyone was suspect of belonging to the enemy’s camp without even being aware of it. Indeed, antisemitism was imbued with this fear of “the Jew within,” just as the glorification of masculinity was undercut by anxieties regarding one’s feminine predilections. The most nightmarish vision of the elusive enemy was to discover that he was none other than oneself.
World War I strengthened the state’s ability to identify, control, and supervise its population to an unprecedented degree; it thereby also greatly contributed to the spread of anxiety about the presence of a seemingly inexhaustible number of elusive enemies in society’s midst. The modern surveillance techniques developed in that period were designed to acquire knowledge about the population, influence it in ways deemed necessary by the regime, and eradicate domestic enemies. This does not mean, of course, that such techniques and policies were employed in the same manner everywhere, and there is a vast difference in the development of surveillance in the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and subsequently Nazi Germany versus interwar France and Britain. Yet the potential was definitely there, expressed, for instance, in postal control, mass public opinion surveys, lists of political suspects to be arrested at a time of emergency, and even the proliferation of popular fiction and film on spies, treason, and infiltration of the state by foreigners disguised as patriots. Indeed, by acknowledging the difficulty of identifying the enemy within, the emerging surveillance state, which reached its fully fledged form in the Third Reich and Stalinist Russia, asserted that anyone was a potential foe, however well integrated and assimilated he or she seemed to be. A society of doppelgangers, where each individual might discover in himself an unknown Mr. Hyde or be metamorphosed overnight into a repulsive insect was also one being prepared to apply the most powerful insecticides to rid itself of its perceived monstrous traits.