Second Reich: misfits into the mainstream

The 1930s in Germany are very much back in fashion again, so I thought I would take the oft repeated advice of the tankies and educate myself...even if I have long been possessed by the prejudice that the vast majority of all those Hitler books are not really intended for serious historians. 

This, the first volume in the acclaimed Evans trilogy, does however cast its eye back into the slightly deeper history, the so-called Second Reich established by Bismarck — and thus provides some very interesting insights into how the bizarre scapegoating of the Jewish population hypertrophied, having first flourished as a rogue and opportunistic response to forces buffeting Germany from outside, thereafter creeping into the mainstream.

​In the period between unification and WWI, there were approximately 600,000 Jews in Germany —  just 1% of the total population —  heavily concentrated in the larger cities, with a quarter of the total in Berlin. 

They had long been excluded from landholding and discrimination continued to deny them positions in the establishment (army, civil service, universities etc.) but, beyond finance, they were well represented in medicine, law, science, teaching, journalism and the arts in general. New forms of retailing, like department stores, were an area of economic specialisation and politically they tended to cluster around the centre and the left, with a pronounced devotion towards German nationalism, as the Jewish minority had strongly favoured the formation of a unified nation state.

Explicitly antisemitic political platforms started to emerge at the end of the century. These agitators had responded to a rather nasty global recession caused by American capitalist excess, as usual (failed US railway investments in the main on this occasion), which led to widespread bankruptcies and business failures in Europe.

They found it particularly easy to stir up resentment of the Jews in areas where there were almost none, deploying the age-old trope of accusing a distant and somewhat obscure religious minority of conspiracies against both the nation and the economic wellbeing of 'traditional' farming communities. 

In this way Jews became an emblem for everything a specific, pretty unsuccessful demographic in Germany had come to detest about their changing world, particularly its most modern and progressive trends in the cultural, social and financial spheres. 

The German Conservative party soon started to see this motley crew of antisemitic demagogues as a significant electoral threat to their hegemony in the countryside and thus developed their own copycat programme, which demanded an end to the 'widely obtruding and decomposing Jewish influence on our popular life'.

A clear example of how misfits, amoral reprobates, crazies and all round losers — nearly always held back by their own internal conflicts — somehow manage to pollute the political mainstream, even if that ultimately spells doom for their own relevance.