Götz Aly, a prominent (and often controversial) historian of Nazi Germany, has written a new book attempting to understand the underlying motivations for German anti-Semitism. In Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race, Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust, Aly addresses the basic question that has so often been obscured by recent Holocaust scholarship: why did Jews become the target of such intense and murderous hatred in Germany? His book contains many insights on German anti-Semitism, and he draws on his own family archive in a way that few Germans today would be comfortable doing. (His grandparents were rabid Jew-haters.) But, writes Daniel Johnson, Aly’s simplistic conclusion that envy was the source of all this animus is woefully unsatisfying, and undermines his purported goals:
Aly himself quite rightly criticizes the German tendency to identify with the Jewish victims—“We tend to cast the perpetrators as bizarre, almost alien figures”—and to hide behind abstractions that keep Germans at a safe distance from radical evil. By exposing his own Nazi family to scrutiny, Aly may hope to encourage others to rattle the skeletons in their own closets. But he is blind to the fact that his explanatory framework is bound to have the opposite effect. By making Nazis seem just like everybody else, motivated by the everyday emotion of envy, Aly risks making the extraordinary seem ordinary. It is no accident that his book’s underlying message is a more scholarly version of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis.
Read more on Commentary: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/it-was-more-than-envy/