Review: The Fatherland and the Jews

Alfred Wiener is best known as the founder of the London-based Wiener Holocaust Library. A versatile, German-Jewish intellectual born in 1885, he contemplated becoming a rabbi, went on to study Arabic literature and, good patriot that he was, fought in the German army during the Great War. In 1933, an early refugee from Nazism, Wiener fled to Amsterdam and then London, where he died in 1964, leaving a large collection of material documenting the increasingly barbarous antisemitism of Nazi – and pre-Nazi – Central Europe.

The two early pamphlets published under the heading, The Fatherland and the Jews are translated by Ben Barkow, former Director of the Wiener Library, with an informative introduction by the historian Michael Berkowitz, and a foreword by Wiener’s grandson, Daniel Finkelstein. They remind us that brutal antisemitism was already rife in Germany during and after the nation’s ignominious defeat in 1918, well before Hitler came to power.

The first, Prelude to Pogroms? dates from 1919. Deeply aware of the pogroms in Eastern Europe a few years earlier and fearing their re-emergence in post-war Germany, Wiener identifies some of the authors and organisations busily circulating virulent antisemitic “information” to the military, factory workers and others across the country. The Jews were not völkisch this material proclaimed, not true Germans, but aliens who had betrayed the Fatherland during the war and helped to bring about its downfall. Jews, it stated, were capitalists plotting to rule the world — while also communists in control of Germany’s great enemy to the east, Russia.

The second pamphlet is the text of a lecture delivered in January 1924 to a Jewish audience in Dessau, in which Wiener sought to present German Jewry in its wider context. Throughout history, not only Jews but other groups, too, had been the butt of politically-loaded accusations. Wiener cites the early Church Fathers, for example, to show how accusations levelled by the Romans against emergent Christianity were similar to those being applied to Jews in the 1920s, while as recently as the 1870s Bismarck’s Germany had resorted to the crude anti-Catholicism of the Kulturkampf.

As for Germany’s enemies in the Great War, they had sometimes liked to claim that “Germans” were a culturally and anthropologically inferior race striving for world domination — precisely the kind of lies that were once again being directed towards the nation’s Jews.

This short and disturbing book is a lesson for our own times. Writing from a deep love for both Germany and Judaism, Wiener relies on demonstrable facts and cool logic to highlight the growing dangers of the antisemitic rhetoric of his day. Without Alfred Wiener, and the library he went on to create, our knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust and its origins would be considerably poorer. 



Daniel Snowman is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research (University of London)