Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion

Holocaust historian Michael Wildt (modern German history, Humboldt University, Berlin, DE) writes about the social normalization of exclusion and violence in Germany in the years leading up to the rise of Hitler. Looking at German archival records between 1919 and 1939, Wildt uncovers systematic exclusion and harassment of Jews, as well as patterns of refusal to enforce laws that protected German citizens and human beings when the people in question were Jews. He argues that Hitler and his cabinet could not have created a huge social transformation within a few years without pre-existing systems of exclusion and threat that broke down the rule of law. According to Wildt, years of public exclusion and violence had already taught German Jews that they were disposable and had no effective recourse. The book's philosophy depends on the idea of audience as performer; since social tactics like group exclusion, public violence, and public humiliation require an audience in order to work, the public is always a participant when these techniques are used. By removing the idea that any audience can be a non-participant, Wildt focuses attention away from the question of whether the German public was implicated in the tactics of racial hate, and toward the question of how people responded to their use. In social situations, as Wildt points out, to do nothing in public is to do something very specific in public. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Michael Wildt studied history, cultural studies, and theology at the University of Hamburg. From 1993 to 2009, he was a Research Fellow at the Research Centre for Contemporary History in Hamburg, the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, and The International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. Since 2009, he has been Professor of Modern German History at Humboldt University in Berlin.