GRGR Re: German sadism

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

Millison:

> At 3:48 PM +0200 4/11/00, Lorentzen / Nicklaus wrote:
> >when you take a look at the
> >     labor market data, you'll see that there was probably less structural
> >     discrimination against jews in germany than in the usa or in gb. that's
> >     also true for academia.

> I'm not sure I know what point this serves. It remains true that the U.S.
> and the U.K. did not move from discrimination against Jews to a Final
> Solution as Germany did.


   since this has caused misunderstanding also among more sensitive people, i 
   may clarify a thing or two. in this paragraph i was explicitly refering to 
   goldhagen's thesis of an especially evil form of antisemitism which he thinks 
   to be seated inside the german people for many centuries. i think this is 
   bullshit. & i brought some sociological arguments against it. refering to the 
   decades  b e f o r e  the holocaust and  b e f o r e  the nürnberger gesetze. 
   the frankfurter institut für sozialforschung started to look at the    
   relation of the racialist politics of the nazis and the degree of 
   antisemitism among the german population already in the 30s and came to the 
   conclusion that there is no tight coupling. if goldhagen's thesis would be 
   true, one would have to find this elimination wish  b e f o r e  1933 in some 
   social forms, be that spontaneous pogroms like in russia or a sharply 
   polarizing state affair (- read proust on it!) like in france or a 
   significantly higher degree of labor market exclusion like in the anglo-saxon 
   countries. but you won't find this in german history. so what about this 
   catchy thesis?! in a way goldhagen's book - i still can't believe that he got 
   a harvard professorship for that - fullfilled an "ideological" function. new 
   orientation after the decline of the second world. the german reunification 
   as a cracked mirror of contemporary world history. it's the germans and their 
   oh so "very particular" national culture ... for some time this worked as a 
   consolation for the western functional elites, not knowing (- who does?) how 
   to deal with all this turn of the millenium problems and their "facist" 
   potentials: massive migration, bio-technology & the coming wars in asia.
   of course i did not compare simple antisemitism to the final solution. 

               kfl