February 15, 2014
An insightful new study that develops the theme of Jewish annihilation as necessary to the Nazi myth of genesis. Using a wealth of standard historical sources, such as anti-Jewish propaganda, as well as evidence considered unique in the history of genocide, such as the Nazis' burning of the Bible, Confino (History/Univ. of Virginia; Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding, 2011, etc.) pursues the chilling buildup to the Holocaust, from 1933 onward, in Germany as emotional, messianic and not at all secretive. The Nazi message from the beginning was to purge Germany of the evil (namely, Jews) responsible for "every phenomenon of the modern world objectionable to the Nazis," from bolshevism to liberalism to democracy (the list is a long one and nearly laughable). The burning of the Torah and other texts, conducted like a national festival, seems puzzling outside of sheer Nazi hooliganism, but it was an act posited by Confino as a deliberate, public consolidation of Nazi intention and legitimacy. Everyone would participate in the purge of "contaminated" books, and these symbolic "acts of purification," repeated and rehearsed in subsequent anti-Jewish laws on both the local and national level, goaded regular Germans into an emotional response "that claimed to link the individual to the collectivity based on anti-Jewish sentiments." The destruction of synagogues, for example, was a way to destroy history, severing any connection between Jews and Christians in order to make way for a new German national myth of genesis. Desecrating the Hebrew Bible was an intimate act of violence, requiring all five senses, as Confino hauntingly portrays, and it allowed the Nazis to supersede the Jews as a chosen people, to extinguish Jewish authority over the past--and claim history and time itself. A thoughtful study that represents Nazism less as a "banality of evil" and more as an "intimate brutality."
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March 15, 2014
Confino (history, Univ. of Virginia; Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding) focuses on a less examined part of Kristallnacht. Why, on November 9, 1938, did Christian Germans, in synergy with the Nazi Party, celebrate the burning of the Hebrew Bible that night throughout Germany? By 1938 the Jews were largely removed, both physically and economically, from most of German life, yet they loomed large in the Nazi imagination. Confino sees the burning of the Hebrew Bible as part of a process whereby the Nazis, considering the Jews as the source of all evil in the world, moved logically to an effort to create a new version of Aryan history that severed Christianity from its Jewish origins. Hence the Bible burning. Thereafter, the Jews' very existence needed to be destroyed in order to assure a racial utopia. The popularity of Nazi ideology among the general population meant that while the idea of Auschwitz did not exist in the 1930s, its purpose was easily accepted when it was created. VERDICT Well written and with a provocative thesis, this book will interest Holocaust scholars as well as students of modern genocides.--Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati Clermont Coll.
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