Europe: Early Modern and Modern
were Jews or partly Jews by Nazi definition. Aleksandar-Sasa Vuletic's book is part of this development.
The fact that Nazi ideology and policy forced people
into a particular group does not mean they shared any
real common identity before that. This is certainly true
for "non-Aryan" Christians, who beside their Jewish
ancestry did not have anything in common before the
racial policies of 1933. The only collective history they
shared was the outcome of Nazi persecution. This
artificial creation of a group by the Nazis and the
reaction of its forced members is the main topic of
Vuletic's bonk.
Vuletic largely reconstructs their experience by extrapolating from the "non-Aryan" Christians' official
organization. His book follows this organization
through three different stages, from its foundation in
1933 until its forced liquidation in 1939. At its greatest
extent, out of 300,000-400,000 potential candidates,
less than 6,000 opted for membership. This and other
factors raise questions about the organization's representativeness. However, the organization does provide
an opportunity to study the paradoxes inherent in Nazi
racial policies.
The organization was founded in Berlin in July 1933.
It first took form as the "Federal Organization of
Christian German Citizens of Non-Aryan or Not Entirely Pure Aryan Decent." As a result of the Nuremberg Laws, "half Aryans" and people of pure Jewish
descent lost their German citizenship. In consequence,
the organization had to be renamed. In September
1936, it became the "St. Paul's Brotherhood and Union
of Non-Aryan Christians" (or the Paulus Bund for
short). It thereby gave up its initial emphasis on
Germanness, patriotism, and national pride. A third
renaming of the union was to follow in July 1937, after
the forced retirement from the group of the members
with "pure" Jewish backgrounds.
The organization's potential candidates were found
among four different categories defined by the Nuremberg Laws: racially "pure Jews," racially "half Jews,"
racially "quarter Jews," and "full Aryan" relatives of
the other three categories. Vuletic shows how this
categorization immediately created the main obstacle
for developing solidarity within the newly established
organization—which was of course part of its purpose.
For the organization to have maximum potential influence, it would be preferable for its members and
officers to come mostly from the least Jewish category,
that of "quarter Jews." But it was precisely these
candidates who had the least interest in joining. They
had a chance of "passing" and a strong interest in
doing so. Joining the organization would make that
impossible, since membership was proofed by the
Gestapo. The "pure Jewish" members were less desirable on account of their weaker legal status and lower
respectability under the Nazi regime; they were also by
and large the most wealthy members.
Most of the contradictions that faced the group
stemmed from the impossibility of being a "non-Aryan
Christian" in Nazi Germany. Jews had long had an
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1893
organized tradition of aid and welfare that was almost
untouched by the widespread process of assimilation.
Baptized Jews did not. From the point of view of many
Christians, the organization was completely artificial
because it was compounded of both Protestants and
Catholics. This alienated it from both Christian establishments and diminished its chances of getting aid
from these quarters. In addition, the Protestant
Church actively began to put distance between itself
and its "racially" Jewish members as it feil under the
influence of the official National Socialist church
organization (Deutsche Christen). So even if the Paulus Bund had been wholly Protestant (and it was
mostly so), the church would not have been disposed to
provide much help.
The rest of the group's problems arose from members' profound misconception of German polities.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, their reaction
was to try to strive to please the authorities. This plan
of action reflected a naïve belief in the reasonability of
those authorities and a complete ignorance of the real
relations of power between the National Socialist Party
and the German state. In regard to its two main
goals—improving the chances of its members to get
jobs and improving their chances to emigrate—the
organization achieved virtually nothing. In light of this
failure, its only real draw was the joys of sociability,
which, as an artificial group, it was also ill suited to
provide.
The book does not go into the biographical details of
the organization's leading members in any detail and
consigns what information it does have to the footnotes. In some ways that seems a shame. Members'
dilemmas must have had an impact on their private
lives, and a fuller consideration of those dilemmas
might have enriched this book's organizational history
with some social history.
YFAAT WEISS
University of Haifa
From Monuments to Traces: Arttfacts of
German Memory, 1870-1990. (Weimar and New: GerRuny KOSHAR.
man Cultural Criticism, number 24.) Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press. 2000. Pp. xvi,
352. $45.00.
Rudy Koshar's new study of Germany's "memory
landscape" from 1870 to 1990 provides a persuasive
and very un-Nietzschean vindication for Friedrich
Nietzsche's claim that Germans suffered from a "consuming fever of history" that "stifled cultural innovation"—from an "excess of memory and history" in
Koshar's own "impertinent" phrase (pp. 6-7). In a
balanced combination of synthesis, analysis, and wellchosen anecdote, Koshar takes the reader from the
Kaiserreich's monument and museum frenzy through
the interwar period's dark "forecast of ruin," the
Nazis' fulfillment of it, the reconstructions, recastings,
and recollectings of the postwar decades, and the
scattered processes of "rememoration" that marked
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1894
Reviews of Books
the last decades of the twentieth century. He shows
decisively that never since the German nation-state
began has there been a period of silence about the past
or indeed anything less than deep and widespread
absorption in its lessons and artifacts. Even though he
accounts for an astonishingly diverse array of activities
under the rubric of memory work, he holds his narrative together both by maintaining a brisk chronological
pace and by attending consistently throughout to the
"three-cornered relationship" among the things or
objects of memory, the groups and individuals who
undertook to memorialize the past, and the "framing
devices" by which they made sense of their world (pp.
10-11). Koshar relies particularly on the concept of
framing strategies or devices, which amount to the
consistent themes of German history, the meanings
that imbued this particular group of people with the
significance and continuity of an ethnic community.
This community—or ethnie, as Koshar sometimes calls
it, following the practice of the theorist of nationalism
Anthony Smith, who evidently decided some years ago
that he ton needed to coin a term to distinguish his
own ideas about nationalism from those of others—
"has remembered itself not so much as an invention or
product of the imagination" (thus is Benedict Ander500 rebuked), "but as an enduring and tangible community capable of enormous societal success as well as
fierce human trauma" (p. 14).
As a synthesis of considerable scope and power,
Koshar's work provides an accessible and reliable
guide through the vast array of writings now available
on monuments, memorials, tombstones, museums, reconstructed old buildings, historians' squabbles, and
everything else that attests to the presence of history in
the present. He has performed a great service to
students of both German and European history, for his
account is generous with comparative perspectives,
balanced judgments, and well-told stores. He has the
ease of a practiced master of German cultural and
social history, having written extensively already about
historical preservation (Germany 's Transient Pasts:
Preservation and National Memmy in the Twentieth
Centuty [1998]), communal solidarities and organizations (Social Life, Local Pol itics, and Nazism: Marburg,
1880-1935 [1986]), and tourism (German Travel Cultures [2000]). What comes through clearly in this
culminating work of several decades of research on
related issues is Koshar's own vision of German distinctiveness as something that we can find in the
Germans' constant struggle to maintain a sense of
continuity across great ruptures in the social and
political fabric of German life. There is plenty of room
in his narrative for alternate visions and abandoned
paths, for "persistence as well as slow but palpable
innovation," "acceptance as well as rejection" of traditions. Yet he comes back throughout to assert the
existence of a broad process by which "memories and
myths" were "etched in" and thus worked "to solidify
a sense of shared being" (pp. 289-91).
By undertaking such a work of synthesis and broad
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
chronological sweep, Koshar does run the risk of
blandness. There are times when the book presents so
balanced a view of German memory work that generalizations about the spirit of any particular age fall
away in the face of his determination to be completely
fair and even-handed. Thus the chapter titles, moving
in chronological succession from "Monuments," "Ruins," "Reconstructions," to "Traces," might each have
served almost as well for any of them, since elements
of these phenomena appear in every chapter. What all
this reveals is that memory work itself is just a
reflection, albeit a complicated and fascinating one, of
the actual stuff of history. It moves nothing forward; it
constitutes no engine of change; it is, in short, not in
itself innovative, no matter how revolutionary the
design of a particular memorial or the argument of a
particular historian. And important though such studies are to our understanding of European culture in
these modern times, it is impossible, from moment to
moment, not to wonder if Nietzsche was, after all,
right.
CELIA APPLEGATE
University of Rochester
MARK CORNWALL. The Undermining of Austria-Hungaty: The Battle for Hearts and Minds. New York: St.
Martin's. 2000. Pp. xvi, 485. $69.95.
Propaganda bas become an established element of
modern warfare, yet owing to its very nature, its
contribution in determining the outcome of wars remains open to speculation and debate. His title notwithstanding, Mark Cornwall investigates the role of
Austria-Hungary not only as a victim of wartime
propaganda, but as a producer of it. His account begins
in earnest early in 1917, when, after thirty months of
generally inconclusive fighting, most of the belligerents
of World War I were reassessing their strategies. At
that stage, the Central Powers opted to employ subversive means against Russia in order to force it out of
the war, then did so with great effect, from the German
decision to send V. I. Lenin home via the "sealed
train" in April 1917 to the German and AustroHungarian use of front propaganda prior to their
eastern-front offensive that July. Austria-Hungary subsequently made extensive use of front propaganda
before the Central Powers' offensive against Italy in
October 1917, which resulted in the breakthrough at
Caporetto. According to Cornwall, the collapse of
Russia, coinciding with the near-collapse of Italy after
Caporetto, caused the Allies to take their own propaganda efforts more seriously. Under the direction of
bodies such as Lord Northcliffe's Enemy Propaganda
Department in Britain, Allied propaganda became
increasingly sophisticated, culminating in the campaign against Austria-Hungary directed by the Padua
Commission in Italy during the last six months of the
war.
Russia's demise also left the remaining belligerents
aware of the need for "defensive propaganda" aimed
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