Our understandings of culture and of the catastrophe unleashed by National Socialism have always been regarded as interrelated. For all its brutality, Nazism always spoke in the name of the great German tradition, often using such high culture to justify atrocities committed. Were not such actions necessary for the defense of classical cultural values and ideal images against the polluted, degenerate groups who sought to sully and defile them? Ironically, some of National Socialism's victims confronted and interpreted their experiences precisely through this prism of culture and catastrophe. Many of these victims had traditionally regarded Germany as a major civilizing force. In fact, from the late eighteenth century on, German Jews had constructed themselves in German culture's image. Many of the German-speaking Jewish intellectuals who became victims of National Socialism had been raised and completely absorbed in the German humanistic tradition. Steven E. Aschheim here engages the multiple aspects of German and German-Jewish cultural history which touch upon the intricate interplay between culture and catastrophe, providing insights into the relationship between German culture and the origins, dispositions, and aftermath of National Socialism. He analyzes the designation of Nazism as part of the West's cultural code representing an absolute standard of evil, and sheds light on the problematics of current German, Jewish, and Israeli inscriptions of Nazism and its atrocities.
Steven E. Ascheim is Associate Professor of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the author of Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 and The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990. Currently he is on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University.
"[This book] ranges from the most general reflections (on the relationship between "culture" and Nazism) to the intellectual-historical (on the myth of "Judaization" in Germany, on Nazism and Nietzsche, and on the Weimar-era Jewish revolt against rationalism) to historiographical critique (on recent Holocaust literature with special attention to racial thought). Throughout the book, Aschheim is interested to provide his reader with a summary of the various ways that Nazism and the Holocaust have been treated in philosophical and historical literature, in national polemic an public commemoration." -Tikkun
