Used Car Salesmen

There's some history to this 'leaders doing automobile advertisements' ritual...

Anyway, as I mentioned in a post the other day, one of the dangers of mining '1930s Germany' for gotcha parallels is that most of the really unpleasant trends in that society had established themselves quite visibly some 35 years before the Nazis came to power. And we need to factor that understanding into any comparisons we now choose to make.

At the beginning of the twentieth century fringe groups and parties in Germany — particularly those suffering from antisemitic paranoia — had, according to Richard J. Evans "introduced a new rabble-rousing demagogic style of politics that had freed itself of the customary restraints of political decorum".

The Third Reich's most noted contemporary historian in English goes on to say that it had thus "become possible to utter in Parliamentary sessions and electoral meetings hatreds and prejudices that in the mid-nineteenth century would have been deemed utterly inappropriate in public discourse."

And as a consequence of the way German political system was set up, these fringe ideas and the alarming improprieties which attended them percolated upwards into the mainstream.

Between 1900 and WWI it might have been possible to suggest that European Jews had it far worse in say France or Russia, but in Germany antisemitism was mutating in ways that augured very badly.

Early in his career Wagner had been a 'cultural antisemite', an attitude which compares somewhat to the speech crime we now refer to as Islamophobia. He took issue with Jewish culture and thought the problem would go away if Jews were properly assimilated.

But following his marriage to Liszt's daughter Cosima he seemingly shifted towards a more overtly racist conception of the situation, as did many other bigots in Germany, who could no longer keep up the cultural or religious disguise for their biases quite so effectively in the midst of rapid Jewish acculturation, conversion and intermarriage. It seems that Wagner came to believe that instead of assimilation, the only way forward for Germany would be to exclude Jews entirely from national life.

When it comes to lamentable British interactions with the Nazis one name often springs to mind: Chamberlain. Yet it was another individual of that name whose contribution was arguably even worse than our dithering late 30s PM.

This shift to racist antisemitism needed just one more component to make it truly toxic and this was, regrettably, provided by an English writer called Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who married one of Wagner's daughters and whose book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1900, was the first to explicitly combine antisemitism with Social Darwinism, retaining the old religious notion of the cosmic threat posed by a specific religious minority and adding to it the concept of a deadly ongoing struggle in the name of species improvement.

Another one of this Chamberlain's key obsessions was the denial of Jesus' Jewishness and the claiming of Christian culture and values for the Germanic peoples.