Germany had been something of an anomaly in Europe for more than a century before Hitler came to power. The Germans did not form a compact group in Europe like the French or the English, nor did they create a nation state; and they failed to find adequate outlets beyond Europe for their power, talents and ambitions. For both these reasons they were the more disposed towards expansion and conquest in Europe.
Modern Europe is a patchwork of conscious nationalisms expressed or seeking expression in statehood. Some of these have been recognizable entities for centuries but the bursting time of European nationalism came with the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. At this period the dynast, an individual with hereditary right and a personal demesne (his kingdom), came to seem old fashioned. Two changes, the one domestic and the other international, were involved: a shift of political power within the state and a redefinition of the boundaries of the state. The first of these favoured ‘the people’ at the expense of the dynast; the second was based on the idea of ‘the nation’, as opposed to history or geography or power, as the criterion for deciding where one state stopped and the next one should begin. The new ideas were most effective in western Europe, where the making of Italy was their outstanding advertisement; they were least effective in eastern Europe, where polyglot autocracies continued until well into the twentieth century. In the centre of Europe Germany looked as though it had developed into a nation state but the appearance was deceptive.
German nationalism was promoted by reaction against French cultural and military hegemony. It asserted that Germans had a separate identity and the right to mind their own affairs instead of being part of Napoleon’s empire and of a French-dominated cosmopolitan culture. It aimed not only to liberate Germans but also to unite them and so helped to produce a powerful and efficient state out of an agglomeration of feeble ones. But if German nationalism looked at this stage very much like other European nationalisms, it diverged as the Germans both began to think of themselves as not only distinct but superior and at the same time failed to achieve a nation state to focus and absorb their national energies.
German writers and thinkers made much of the nation state and provided the most famous of the state’s champions in the nineteenth century: the Reich created in 1870 was designed by Bismarck and regarded by almost everybody as the German nation’s state. But Bismarck’s Germany was incomplete. It was a federation of German-speaking states dominated by Prussia and excluding not only Austria, which was only partly German, but also numerous Germans scattered about eastern Europe; the Germans were too dispersed and too intermingled with other peoples to constitute a nation state. Bismarck’s Germany was not a national gathering together, like Cavour’s Italy. It was an extension of Prussian power, achieved by defeating Austria and France, and a consolidation of class power, achieved by blanketing German liberalism and passing enough social legislation to take the wind out of the German socialists’ sails. It was therefore incomplete not only in the sense that many Germans were left outside it but also because whole classes of Germans within the state were excluded from effective political activity and remained subordinated to the socially superior ruling classes: it was a nation state neither in its geographical extent nor in its social cohesion. It was unstable and tense both within and at its borders. Unlike Italy, it was not even a geographical expression. If anything, it was a linguistic aspiration seeking political form and traversed by social rifts. Since it was also the most central of European states and became the most powerful, its malaise dominated European affairs for a century.
German nationalism foiled of what was, in nineteenth-century terms, its natural outcome turned to racialism. Germanism materialized as Reich and Volk, a pair of politically disruptive and often mystical concepts. A Reich is a claim to dominion; a Volk is a people linked not by habitat but by race. Reich and Volk combined imply racial dominion. (When, later, the Nazis chanted: Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer, they were acclaiming the political activation of this dual concept.) At the same time the desire to establish a separate identity for Germans was replaced by the idea that Germans were not only distinct but superior. The line between pride and arrogance is a thin one and the assertion of an independent personality passes very easily into a claim to superiority. The Germans were neither alone nor unusual in thinking themselves better than other people, but from early in the nineteenth century Germans began to make extraordinary claims for Germanism as the embodiment of superior virtues deposited by God in people who spoke the German language. Racialists see history as a conflict between races – an alternative to Karl Marx’s explanation of history as a conflict between classes – and racialists conscious of their own superiority see a world in which they are bound to do battle with other races and win. Nineteenth-century German racialist ideology postulated an Aryan race of purer, ideal human beings, the founders and custodians of all human culture. History and science were invoked to prove these unhistorical and unscientific postulates, and ancient racial gods were resuscitated to give spiritual support to this denial of the essential equality of man which had been preached for centuries in the tradition of Stoics and Christians. The pseudo-science of phrenology, which enjoyed a curious vogue in an age avid for anything which might be called scientific, measured the differences between Aryan and other skulls and when these outward signs of distinction proved disappointingly trivial, racialists fell back on inner measurements of souls which, though they were more difficult to demonstrate, were also more difficult to deny. Darwin’s theories were also used. The world of men (The Origin of Species dealt with plants and animals) was divided into the fit and the unfit, and the survival of the fittest was taken to justify and even require the extermination of the unfit. Conflict, in any case inevitable, was the means for the improvement of the race and therefore also noble. There was no such thing as a right to live – let alone a right to liberty or the pursuit of happiness. Human rights were replaced by strife as the path of progress.
German racialism, having evolved from German nationalism, took a further step and became imperialist. Where a race and a state do not coincide the racialist may achieve his aims either by the migration of outlying members of the race into the fatherland or by the extension of the rule of the race to all parts of the world inhabited by the race or needed by it. German minorities in foreign countries were, by definition, superior people living under the rule of their inferiors. Either they must be repatriated or German rule must be extended to cover these areas. The second solution was the more appealing. Hence the notion of a Greater Germany, a German Reich extending to areas well beyond any normally accepted confines of Germany but where Germany ought to rule because some members of the German Volk lived there. Towards the end of the nineteenth century various Pan-German groups emerged, both in Vienna with its windows on the east and in Berlin with its consciousness of superabundant power, to advocate what was in effect a German empire in Europe. They were not inspired solely by ideology. Unlike the other great powers of Europe Germany had found no worlds to conquer outside Europe. While the western European nations conquered overseas and the Russians conquered in Asia, the Germans – partly because they were too late – conquered nowhere. Bismarck was indifferent to colonies and Germany’s interest in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century was half-hearted as well as belated. So Germany’s field of conquest became eastern or middle (Mittel) Europe. Bismarck himself preferred that Germany should live in a state of equilibrium with the Russian and Habsburg empires to the east of it, but the German-ness of the Habsburg empire was a standing invitation to call Germans to go east, to regard the Slavs as their Red Indians or ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’, to embark on one of the great movements of European expansion and colonization – only this time within Europe itself and at the expense of peoples whose systems were neither so alien nor so technically backward as the Asian and African societies which other Europeans subjugated. Like all imperialists the Germans easily convinced themselves that they were benefiting inferior peoples by interfering with them – until eventually the Nazis dispensed with the idea of benefiting anybody but themselves.
These racial and imperial strands in the modern German experience were picked up by the Nazis. Nazism was a product of elements in German history and elements in European history. Its peculiarly evil character was a consequence of amalgamating the worst in German public life with the worst in European public life. It was the German version of European Fascism, combining special German features with the general characteristics of the wider, European genus to which it belonged. Its outstanding special features were the demand for Lebensraum, which was a euphemism for imperial conquest, and its anti-semitism. Its special victims therefore were the Jews and the Slavs. These two elements were not unconnected, for the Pan-Germans of the late nineteenth century who pointed Germany towards an imperial destiny not in the sense of Bismarck’s compact central European Reich but as a vast overlordship over Slav peoples and lands beyond the strictly German horizon, were also markedly anti-semitic.
During most of the nineteenth century Germans, with some reservations in regard to Austrian Germans, were not pre-eminently anti-semitic. Nor is anti-semitism a necessary ingredient of Fascism, although it has been a common one; the Italian fascists, for example, were comparatively free of anti-semitism until they imported it by a process of reverse Lend-Lease from Germany in the closing phase of the fascismo. German anti-semitism seems to have been mainly an indigenous growth coinciding with the growth of German political consciousness. Pan-German anti-semitism was an expression of resentment against people who insisted on being different and who refused to be assimilated to Gentile society and full participation in the German dream. (Hitler’s original contribution to anti-semitism was to abandon this demand that Jews become Germans, to insist on the contrary that they could never be Germans and to emphasize the unbridgeable gap by marking each Jew with the star of David.) Although many Jews – not least in Germany in the 1920s – were assimilated into Gentile society when they themselves wished to take this course and when the surrounding circumstances favoured it, they remained liable to be singled out and attacked whenever the Gentile society had a grievance to be vented somewhere. In the latter part of the nineteenth century they were used by conservatives to pin unpopular ideas on: liberal ideas feared by the privileged classes were characterized as Jewish in order to make these classes revile the Jews. This use of racial prejudice for political purposes was begun by Bismarck and adopted and magnified by Alexander III in Russia, where anti-semitism has continued to be exploited in this way ever since. The appearance of the Jews is often markedly recognizable (though it has been embarrassingly discovered that a number of Jews have blue eyes and fair hair). They have a religion and a language which they share with nobody else. In Europe they have performed a function as useful as it is often unpopular – that of the capitalist who provides money for other people’s enterprises or follies – but in the nineteenth century they preserved more of their unpopularity than their usefulness as Europe’s growing Gentile bourgeoisie began to supplant them as the providers of money. The state found them less useful as it turned to financing its needs more by taxation and less by loans. Moreover, the Jews lacked two characteristics which seemed natural to everybody else: the Jew had no state and, in the state in which he lived, counted as a Jew rather than as a member of an economic or social class. In a society of classes and in a polity of nation states he was a misfit; the fact of his belonging to something which was neither state nor class fostered suspiciousness of exclusive racial loyalties and the myth of machinations behind the scenes; and his exclusion from the class structure helped his defamers to represent him as an enemy of all social structures. In the heyday of his usefulness the Jew had often been close to power and when his usefulness declined his power was thought to have become covert rather than diminished.
Racism endangered the Jews because they were the pre-eminent example of a self-chosen race. Any other self-chosen race was bound to clash with them and hate them. The Germans did so more than most and ascribed to them all the vices which were the counterparts of Aryan virtues. The German master race arraigned the Jews and the Nazi party became the principal instrument for destroying them. Again, Hitler did not invent anti-semitism; he gave it a special twist and he provided the tools and the opportunities for satisfying it. And the Nazi state did not protect these people within its borders because in the Nazi scheme of things the state was not an instrument for preserving public order or securing the rights of men but an instrument for furthering the destiny of the German Volk. The SA sang:
Erst müssen Juden bluten,
Erst dann sind wir befreit.
(First must Jewish blood be shed,
Only then will we be free.)