History of an Obsession: German Judeophobia and the Holocaust - Softcover

Fischer, Klaus P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826413277 ISBN 13: 9780826413277

Publisher: Continuum, 2001

Synopsis

Klaus Fischer charts the tortured history of German-Jewish relations over a millennium, from migration and ghettoization in the Middle Ages to enlightenment and emancipation in the eighteenth century to varieties of anti-Jewish prejudices in the Second Reich to the rise of pathological Judeophobia in the years 1918 to 1933. The aim of the book is to provide a historical explanation for this change in consciousness that began with a religious prejudice, moved to social and political discrimination, and ended up in annihilatory rage.

About this title

About the Author:

Klaus Fischer is a cultural historian of Modern Europe with expertise in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Born in Germany in 1942, he arrived in the United States in 1959 as a 17-year-old emigrant. He attended Arizona State University and then the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he received his PhD in 1972. He is the author of Nazi Germany: A New History and The History of an Obsession: German Judeophobia and the Holocaust.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A strikingand potentially explosivecombination of history and psychology. Perhaps no subject lends itself more to the temptation of psychologizing than Hitler and the Holocaust. For the past 50 years, the ``Final Solution'' and its creator have been subjected to every school of psychoanalysis by experts and charlatans alike. This is dangerous terrain. Critics of psychohistory point out the obviousthat the analysand is no longer around to analyze. Defenderssuch as historian Peter Gayinsist that the field can yield new insights if properly controlled. This new contribution to the literature is by the author of the highly praised Nazi Germany: A New History (not reviewed). Fischer attempts to psychoanalyze an entire culture over the last 900 years of its history. He traces the roots of German Judeophobia back as early as the First Crusade in 1096, with the pendulum swinging between periods of relative toleration and bestial brutality. Fischer points out that the Nazis did not invent the notion of the Jew as spiritually perverse (credit goes to St. Paul and the early Church), nor the idea of biological racism (the first grand inquisitor, Torquemada, already was speaking of mala sangre in the 15th century). Throughout, Fischer uses the more clinical word ``Judeophobia'' and the descriptive ``Jew-hatred'' rather than the more common anti-Semitism, thus ``shifting the onus of responsibility to where it really belongs . . . removing doubts as to its destructive potential.'' Equally central to his argument is that the ideological motivation for the Holocaust can be found in ``human delusion'' and the demons it inspires, such as ``fear, paranoia, projection, scapegoating, and aggression.'' As to the question of how many Germans shared the Nazis murderous impulses, Fischer concludes that this cannot be conclusively answered, but in describing the Holocaust as the ``harvest of Judeophobic hatred,'' he is clearly drawing the many strands of German anti-Semitism together in a final conflagration. An important contributon, sure to fan the flames of controversy. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Continuum
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0826413277
• ISBN 13: 9780826413277
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 544