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Antisemitism in the German Military Community and the Jewish Response, 1914–1938 by Brian E. Crim (review)

Antisemitism in the German Military Community and the Jewish Response, 1914–1938, Brian E. Crim (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 236 pp., hardcover $85.00, electronic edition available. Eleven million Germans served in World War I, and that service redefined the nature and attitude of the veterans’ community, from the eighteenth century onward one of the pillars of the Prussian state and of the German Empire. As many as forty percent of World War I soldiers joined veterans’ organizations, which were also open to males who had been too young for the war but were engaged by its ideals. After earlier wars, veterans readjusted to civil society. They processed the Great War, however, as a transformative experience: a Bildungserlebnis, a world-historical event understandable only to those who had “been there” (or aspired to acolyte status). In sharp contrast to their French and British counterparts, a significant portion of Germany’s veterans committed themselves not merely to commemorating their sacrifice and the comradeship forged in battle, but to revitalizing a defeated society and building a dynamic new order reflecting the values of the trenches—as defined by the men who had survived them. The “Jewish Question” played a crucial role in this process, as it had in German military experience since the anti-Napoleonic Wars of Liberation. Uses of the “Question” were ideologically-based, depicting “the Jew” as not merely a permanent alien, but also as a cipher symbolizing industrialism, urbanism, capitalism, sexual license, or anything else that detracted from Germany as it ought to be and might become. In the aftermath of the Great War this “cultural code” was processed to present “the Jew” as a coward at the front, a shirker in the rear, a transmitter of defeatism and Bolshevism—comprehensively responsible for sabotaging Germany’s efforts and structuring Germany’s defeat. With these matrices, antisemitism became a touchstone for admission and survival in the rabid factional conflicts of the Weimar Right. Crim persuasively argues that the abstract, constructed, nature of this antisemitism made it a common denominator—indeed the only common denominator—of a cultural and political community that devoted more energy to internal feuds than to either making a revolution on its own or mobilizing general support for one. Ideological antisemitism depended neither on verifiable behaviors nor on actual Jews. That, Crim argues, made it easy for right-wing veterans’ organizations to practice what he calls “situational anti-Semitism”: