Ethnic Minorities in 19th and 20th Century Germany

Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Turks and Others

Panikos Panayi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317889755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

This is the first book to trace the history of all ethnic minorities in Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. It argues that all of the different types of states in Germany since 1800 have displayed some level of hostility towards ethnic minorities. While this reached its peak under the Nazis, the book suggests a continuity of intolerance towards ethnic minorities from 1800 that continued into the Federal Republic.

During this long period German states were home to three different types of ethnic minorities in the form of- dispersed Jews and Gypsies; localised minorities such as Serbs, Poles and Danes; and immigrants from the 1880s. Taking a chronological approach that runs into the new Millennium, the author traces the history of all of these ethnic groups, illustrating their relationship with the German government and with the rest of the German populace. He demonstrates that Germany provides a perfect testing ground for examining how different forms of rule deal with minorities, including monarchy, liberal democracy, fascism and communism.

CHAPTER 1

Majorities and Minorities in German History

During the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the core German-speaking areas of Europe underwent a series of transformations. The predominantly agrarian small states under the control of local rulers unified to create the leading economic and political power in continental Europe by the end of the nineteenth century. During the course of the following hundred years the new state would attempt to take over the whole of Europe on two occasions and face humiliating defeat, to emerge, once more, from the 1950s, as the powerhouse of Europe. The dramatic trans-formations of German Europe over the course of the past two hundred years, typical of much of the rest of the continent, depended upon underlying economic, social, political and intellectual developments. The main victims and beneficiaries of the above developments consisted of the people who lived in the areas controlled by the various German states which have existed. All ethnic groups, whether German or minority, experienced both losses and benefits from the upheavals of recent German history.

However, the German nation state which emerged from the smaller units existing at the start of the nineteenth century, would, by the 1940s, perfect racial intolerance, so that the function of the Nazi state consisted, above all, of eliminating racial enemies for the benefit of those regarded as ethnically perfect. Nazism represented the central period in the history of modern German persecution, as the events of the Second World War had to have very deep roots, as well as a legacy. This certainly does not mean that Nazism was an inevitability in 1800, or that it still influences Germany. But it casts a shadow across both modern German and modern European history.

The present book tackles the Nazi period as just one in the history of modern Germany, although, in view of the above observations, it represents a central period. The volume is the first to examine the history of all types of German minorities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For those interested in the history of ethnic groups, Germany since 1800 represents the perfect case study. During this period the different German regimes have controlled and imported all types of minorities¹ within their borders. Germany has also progressed through all types of government which have existed in Europe during the past two centuries in the form of monarchy, autocracy, fascism, communism and liberal democracy. Consequently, the country represents the perfect testing ground to examine how the position of differing types of ethnic minorities fluctuates from one type of regime to another. The book will demonstrate that, while the levels of intolerance have varied from one system of government to another, ethnic minorities have always remained outsiders in the German body politic.

Nationalism, racism, immigration and ethnicity

Before progressing any further, we need to clear up the jargon used through-out this book to avoid future confusion. Underlying all other developments which have taken place in German, European and world history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been the emergence of the ideology of nationalism and its political construct the nation state. Once again, Germany represents the classic example of this process, as the unified state of 1871 emerged from the 39 different German units which existed after the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.

However, while Germany (along with Italy) may have represented the perfect example of nation state creation during the nineteenth century, nationalism is clearly not in itself bound up with Germany, but with transformations which took place in Europe from the eighteenth century. In medieval Europe the concept of nationalism may have existed, but it remained essentially confined to elites rather than to uneducated peasants, whose main form of faith and consciousness consisted of their belief in their God. This would have remained the case under the all-embracing Catholic ideology before the rise of Protestant religions and despite, in the German case, the existence of the Holy Roman Empire, which contained both German and other minorities within its borders.

The Reformation certainly made a difference, especially in German-speaking Europe, because of the translation of the Bible from Latin into the vernacular. Nevertheless, this did not prevent Germans from killing each other during the Thirty Years War (1618–48), where the driving ideology consisted of religion rather than nation. The only country in which nationalism may have emerged during the seventeenth century was England, where the people became sovereign during the English Revolution.

However, the concept of the sovereign populace essentially takes off during the French Revolution, the real starting-point for nationalism. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, moving eastward, took with them the concept of liberation from autocratic monarchy and the divine right of kings. In its place would come rule by the people, linked together by a common bond, in the case of the Germans their language. Nationalism infected German-speaking Europe almost instantly and, like a disease, the whole continent had caught it by the end of the nineteenth century.

The ideology of nationalism encouraged the educated middle classes of Europe, increasing in numbers against the background of industrialization, to eliminate their rulers, usually through some form of revolutionary activity, reaching a peak in the events of 1848, which, however, proved universally unsuccessful. Nevertheless, the genie had escaped and, over the following eighty years, nation states replaced the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires which dominated central and eastern Europe in 1848. In many cases, notably Germany, the ruling elites survived and adopted nationalism to perpetuate their existence, while allowing members of the rising middle classes into government, and introducing universal manhood suffrage.²

However, while nationalism may represent a unifying force for those with the correct ethnic credentials, it automatically excludes those who do not possess them. Nation states which have dominated European political organization since the end of the nineteenth century inevitably operate, like all state structures, on the principle of insiders and outsiders. The German nation state, like all others, has therefore practised exclusion and persecution of minorities in all of its varying guises, although, as we shall see, the methods vary from autocracy to liberal democracy. Persecution of minorities does not originate with the nation state as Jews and Gypsies endured extreme hostility throughout their years of residence in both Germany and the whole of Europe. Nevertheless, the nation state guarantees exclusion on ethnic grounds and even creates new minorities within national borders where they had not previously existed.

Nationalism in itself has resulted in some of the most intolerant acts of the twentieth century, above all in the form of ethnic cleansing, essentially born with the Armenian genocide of 1915 and continuing until the close of the twentieth century in Kosovo.³ In the German case, the manifestations of persecution as a result of nationalism working upon its own have remained relatively mild. However, when racism superimposed itself upon the already existing exclusionary structures under the Nazis, this resulted in the worst acts of ethnic persecution during the twentieth century. Outside the years 1933–45, Germany may therefore be said to represent a fairly ‘normal’ nation state in terms of the relationship between ethnic minorities and majorities. This poses the question of whether we should distinguish between nationalism and racism, because, like all ideologies, both are essentially exclusionary.

Nationalism springs from a favoured group called the nation, bound together by one or more of the factors of similar appearance and a shared language and/or religion. From these raw materials evolve cultures and state structures. Those with the most perfect ethnic credentials receive the most favoured treatment. In late nineteenth-century Germany, such a person would consist of a Protestant (as against a Catholic or a Jewish) ethnic German (in opposition to a Pole or a Jew, for instance). Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ethnic Germans have received the greatest privileges.

Defining and explaining race and racism proves difficult. For the Nazis, the above characteristics of their favoured group (the Germans) represented the basis of a race (the Aryans). The concept of racism in English usage has, by the end of the twentieth century, come essentially to refer to the practice of discrimination by a dominant ethnic grouping against minorities living in the same nation state.

The idea of race circulated in Europe from the medieval period⁴ and had entered the German language by the seventeenth century.⁵ Immanuel Kant distinguished between different races of people, although he did not think that a hierarchy existed.⁶ Racial theories circulated in both Europe and North America during the early nineteenth century, but a change of direction occurred following the publication of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of the Species by Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Although Darwin had nothing to do with the application of his ideas to human beings, there emerged the concept of Social Darwinism, which applied his ideas of natural selection of species of animals to natural selection of races of human beings, developing into a hierarchy of different races. The encounter of Europeans with Africa and its inhabitants as a consequence of imperial expansion appeared to reinforce ideas of a hierarchy of races.⁷ Concepts of racial superiority also focused upon the differences between European peoples. As we shall see, by the start of the twentieth century extreme German nationalists looked eastward towards lands which they wanted the newly created German state to annex and where there lived, what they viewed as, inferior Slavic races.

These expansionist Pan-Germans displayed just as much concern for Jews, which meant that, during the course of the late nineteenth century the traditional medieval Christian hostility towards this minority developed into a racial ideology, which began to view Jews as an unassimilable part of the body politic in the new German nation state. In essence antisemitism, which took off throughout late nineteenth-century Europe, emerged and found legitimation in Germany from the newly created German nation state. Against the background of the racial theories circulating after 1860 the Jews became, in the German case, the main racial enemy for extreme ideologues, including, before 1914, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Lanz von Liebenfels, both of whom influenced Adolf Hitler. Man Kampf, first published in 1924, brought together the German racist ideas which had emerged over the previous century, distinguishing between German Aryans, Slavs and Jews, in terms of their descending order of importance in his racial hierarchy, which his Nazi party implemented upon coming to power and intensified after the out-break of the racial Second World War.

Nazi Germany, while remaining a nation state, also became a racial state because of the overt way in which the Nazis practised their belief in racial difference. Post-war Germany offers an example of a state in which ethnic origin determines success and failure, but to describe it as racist proves problematic because of the heavily weighted meaning of the word in view of the brutal practices of the Nazis. While academic and popular discourse in Britain and America has relatively few problems in using the phrase racism to apply to most forms of ethnic discrimination, especially against Black people, a reluctance exists to use the term in Germany. This is not only because of the experience of Nazism, but also because the majority of post-war immigrants have consisted of Europeans. In Britain racism essentially relates to discrimination faced by Blacks and Asians, rather than the largest immigrant group, the Iri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Themes in Modern German History Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• Glossary and Abbreviations
• 1. Majorities and Minorities in German History
• 2. The Emergence of the German Nation State and the Position of Ethnic Minorities, c. 1800–70
• 3. The Kaiserreich, 1871–1918: Prejudice, Exploitation and Full Emancipation
• 4. A Liberal Interlude? The Weimar Republic, 1919–33
• 5. The Triumph of the Racists: Nazism and Its Consequences
• 6. The A ge of Mass Migration: Germanies after 1945
• 7. The New Germany and its Minorities
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index