Modern Europe
der was feasible, and showed that the German elites
would cooperate.
Although Aly's book is a valuable contribution to
our understanding of the origins of the Holocaust, it
remains a work in progress; he concludes that many
questions remain open (pp. 387-88). Aly presents his
research results, as the book's format shows: interspersed with the text are chronologies and quotes from
documents-a total of 107 pages-to substantiate the
author's arguments. This is Aly's strength; he is a
superb archival researcher who has combed through
previously unused collections and discovered many
new documents. The work is designed for experts;
non-specialists will find it extremely difficult to read.
Based on his wide-ranging documentation, Aly presents an imaginative interpretation of events, but many
of his conclusions remain questionable.
Aly presents three distinct strands of his story in one
chronologically arranged work. One strand traces the
interconnection between the plans to alter the ethnic
composition of Eastern Europe and the plans to solve
the so-called Jewish Question. This portion represents
Aly's major contribution: he demonstrates that Heinrich Himinler's representatives attempted to combine
the repatriation of ethnic Germans with the deportation of the Jews. The two projects were interdependent, and as they collided and thus could not be
completed, the frustrated resettlement experts
searched for ever more grandiose and brutal solutions.
This produced what Hans Mommsen has described as
"cumulative radicalization" (p. 398). One might add
that the decision to assign both tasks to the same
men-Reinhard Heydrich and his agents-made frustration inevitable.
In another strand of his story, Aly describes in detail
the various plans to deport the Jews. He shows that as
one plan collapsed, another, larger plan took its place.
The Lublin reservation plan failed because the space
was needed for repatriated ethnic Germans; one might
argue, however, that an attempt to resettle millions of
Jews inside densely populated Europe was doomed
even without the arrival of ethnic Germans. The
Madagascar plan failed because any deportation overseas required German world supremacy. The last
plan-to deport the Jews to the far reaches of Russia-emerged as Germany prepared to invade the
Soviet Union. This plan had to be shelved when
Germany failed to defeat the Soviets.
AIy argues convincingly that "defeat" in the east
produced the decision to murder the European Jews,
and also Gypsies (p. 382) in newly constructed killing
centers (p. 393). According to AIy, this shift occurred
during October and November 1941. Here Aly enters
the debate about specific dates. Christopher Browning's argument (in German Studies Review 17 [1994])
that the shift came in the summer during the "euphoria
of victory" is equally convincing. Possibly both interpretations are partly true: the shift occurred in the
summer but both deportation and killing overlapped
until the decision could be fully implemented.
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547
The final strand in Aly's story is his discussion of
decision making. This is the most problematic aspect
of his work. First, he does not distinguish sufficiently
between a decision and its implementation, and he
therefore tends to ascribe causation where none existed. A good example is his argument that, in the fall
of 1940, the housing needs of expatriated ethnic
Germans led to the murder of handicapped patients by
T4 along the German-Polish border (pp. 114-26,
187-95). No doubt, various agencies profited from
mass murder, but one did not cause the other, even if
the perpetrators then and later pointed to "rational
objectives" (p. 55) to justify their actions. But as Hitler
had already authorized the murder of the handicapped, those killings only involved forms of implementation.
Second, Aly portrays an uninvolved Fiihrer who
issued no order, whose decision was not required, and
who did not wish to be informed about details (pp.
389-90, 395). This is not credible. Whether we call it
an "order" or something else, his paladins would never
have embarked on what Aly agrees was a singular and
unprecedented crime (pp. 393-94) without Hitler's
authorization. But Hitler was not uninvolved. For
example, Aly does not mention that Karl Brandt
testified at Nuremberg that, at the start of Operation
T4, the Fiihrer personally made the decision to use gas
as the killing agent.
HENRY FRIEDLANDER
Brooklyn College,
City University of New York
MICHAEL P. CARROLL. Veiled Threats: The Logic of
Popular Catholicism in Italy. Baltimore: 10hns Hopkins
University Press. 1996. Pp. xiii, 275. $39.95.
Continuing along the lines of his 1992 book, Madonnas
that Maim, Michael P. Carroll sets out to elucidate the
world of popular Catholicism in Italy from the late
Middle Ages to the present. As he notes, this book is
not based on original archival research but rather
utilizes material published over the past couple of
decades by Italian scholars. Indeed, one of the goals of
the book is to make the findings of such studies known
to the non-Italian-reading scholarly community.
Carroll focuses on a series of beliefs and practices
associated with Catholicism that in some important
ways conflict with official church doctrine. These include cults surrounding Madonna figures and the
worship of sacred images, sacred relics, and the skeletal remains of saints. Carroll's central thesis is that,
far from being the product of the Catholic Church,
these aspects of Italian popular Catholicism arose
among the masses and conditioned the church hierarchy. Italians, in his view, are "predisposed ... to invest
sacred images with supernatural power" (p. 57).
Church officials have had to adapt to this popular
demand or risk losing the allegiance of their flock.
An example is provided by the cults surrounding
images of the Madonna. Carroll agrees with the many
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other scholars who have noted that worship of the
Madonna has deeper popular roots in Italy than
devotion to any Christ figure. While others have
referred to this as marian worship, however, Carroll
finds such terminology misleading. Official church
rationalizations to the contrary notwithstanding, he
asserts, Italians viewed each separate image of the
Madonna as an independent, powerful, supernatural
force and not merely as a representation of the one
Mary. Accordingly, Carron refers to this as madonnine
worship, and he chronicles its multitudinous expressions in Italy.
For Carron, the history of Catholicism in Italy is the
history of a continuous tension between an official
church, with its theology and ritual system, and a
populace having its own, deeply rooted views of the
supernatural realm. It is a struggle in which, in his
view, the illiterate masses long enjoyed the upper
hand. As Carroll sees it, the Catholic Church in Italy
was a major beneficiary of these folk beliefs at the time
of the Reformation, for at the center of the new
Protestant orthodoxy was the rejection of sacred images and all that went with them. By coopting relic
cults and madonnine devotion, the Catholic Church
was able to present itself as the embodiment of
popular religiosity in Italy and turned the population
against the Protestant threat.
How does Carron explain the Italian propensity
toward religious practices of this sort? He does so first
by positing an Italian "national character," one element of which is the tendency not to draw a sharp line
between the natural and the supernatural. This, in
proper psychoanalytic fashion, he links to childrearing
experiences in Italy through which the child is impeded
from distinguishing clearly between the self and the
external world. From this, Carroll concludes that the
tendency to blur the line between the natural and the
supernatural "derives from strong unconscious oral
erotic desires that predispose Italians toward modes of
thinking that emphasize incorporation" (p. 233).
Along the way, he uses the argument to account for the
great popularity in Italy of representations of the
Madonna con bambino, the mother with her nursing
child.
What evidence does Carron produce to support this
oral fixation of Italians? He points to the practice of
sending newborns out to paid wetnurses in fifteenthcentury Florence and to infant abandonment, both
presumably resulting in babies who suffered from poor
milk. Yet among the peasant masses-the very population who in Carron's account were the originators of
popular Catholicism in Italy-sending children to paid
wetnurses was never common. Moreover, infant abandonment, while common enough in Italian rural areas,
was probably no less common in countries such as
France. How could it explain the peculiarities of
Italian national character?
This book provides a readable and useful summary
of the results of recent Italian studies of popular
religion in Italy and argues provocatively for the
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
primacy of folk religion over the religion of the church
hierarchy in explaining major aspects of popular participation in religious practices. Carroll's attempts to
explain the peculiarities of Italian popular religion, on
the other hand, remain less than convincing.
DAVID I. KERTZER
Brown University
MARTA PETRUSEWICZ. Latifundium: Moral Economy
and Material Life in a European Periphery. Translated
by JUDITH C. GREEN. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1996. Pp. xviii, 289. $52.50.
From the late 1700s to the late 1800s, Italian agricultural writers concentrated on the great land properties
(latifundia), seeing them as efficient and economical in
contrast to small-scale farms, which were viewed as
inefficient, uneconomical, and moving toward extinction. After the economic depression of the 1880s and
1890s, these views were reconsidered; many argued the
merits of a peasant agriculture, although others continued to see rationality in the latifundia.
Agriculture in general suffered from the economic
depression at the end of the nineteenth century, and
latifundism became associated with the environmental,
agricultural, and social ills of southern Italy. Specifically, inefficient monoculturalism, social injustice, polarization of social classes, and the degradation of the
physical and social environment were viewed as reactionary by-products of latifundism. The latifundia were
perceived to be disinterested in innovation while striving to preserve domination.
This is the context within which Marta Petrusewicz
sets her thesis that the latifundium was not a rigid,
uniform, reactionary, monocultural system. She argues
that there were a variety of contractual agreements
and judicial institutions, much crop diversification, and
production for the market as well as for direct consumption. Petrusewicz examines the "golden age" of
the latifundium, when it was a well utilized, stable
system maintained by efficiency and justice. Its decline
came just as the "Southern Question" arose. The
method of exposition is by a case study of the Barracco
estate, the largest in Calabria. Petrusewicz insists that
her case study is not intended to be a general representation of latifUlldism in southern Italy, nor to draw
conclusions about latifundism in general. Rather, it is
intended as a "reconstruction" of the economic and
social processes that were used in the latifundist
system. While tracing the development of the estate,
Petrusewicz keeps a larger question in mind: what role
did latifundism play in the transition from feudalism to
capitalism?
The formation of the Barracco estate through purchases of former feudal estates and expropriated
lands, foreclosed properties and the settling of other
debts, and encroachment is described in much detail.
This particular estate, and latifundism in general,
remained a stable system through the 1860s. According
to Petrusewicz, the stability of the system was espe-
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