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Reviews of Books
Weimar Republic. Tirpitz opposed the republic and
rejected the Treaty of Versailles. His political activities
aimed at the destruction of Weimar democracy and its
replacement by an authoritarian state. "Through personal contacts with leaders and through intrigues
involving politicians, industrialists, and military chiefs,
he wanted to coordinate existing organizations and
mastermind a plot against the Republic" (p. 87). His
method was "quasi-legai putschism" combining the
activities of the rightist paramilitary leagues in conjunction with the political right in the parliament and
"top-level" intrigues. Scheck illuminates Tirpitz's connections with nationalist circles in Bavaria and his
various attempts to coordinate anti-republican efforts
with rightist politicians like Prime Minister Kahr of
Bavaria and Erich Ludendorff. To be sure, Tirpitz
mistrusted Adolf Hitler as unpredictable and rejected
his anti-Semitism; nevertheless, he hoped to use Hitler
to mobilize support for an antirepublican agenda.
However, the fiasco of Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch and
the unwillingness of General Seeckt to cooperate with
the right in overthrowing the republic caused Tirpitz to
seek other ways of changing the political system. It
was, Scheck writes, "disillusionment with putschist
alternatives" rather than a "conversion to democracy"
that led Tirpitz into parliamentary polities (p. 144).
Elected to the parliament as a deputy of the rightist
German National People's Party, Tirpitz was nominated as the party's candidate for chancellor. His
candidacy foundered on the opposition of Gustav
Stresemann and the centrist parties. Tirpitz devoted
his remaining years to attacking Stresemann's policies
of reconciliation with the Western powers, attempting
to infiuence Paul von Hindenburg (elected president in
April 1925) to pursue a rightist agenda, and trying to
realize the elusive goal of unifying Germany's divided
nationalists. He died in 1930.
Scheck concludes his book by suggesting that Tirpitz's career in the Weimar Republic represented the
swan song of an older style of polities, one based on
the "polities of notables" (Honoratiorenpolitik). His
backroom intrigues, manipulation of public opinion
through the press, and emphasis on leaders ultimately
proved ineffective in creating the basis for a successful
antirepublican mass movement. Instead, the Nazi
Party provided the "radically new political alternative"
(p. 218) capable of mobilizing the antidemocratic
potential within German society. Scheck's excellent
book, while focusing on the figure of Tirpitz, demonstrates more generally the nearsightedness and folly of
German right-wing polities following the collapse of
imperial Germany.
BENJAMIN LAPP
Montclair State University
RICHARD R. WETZELL. Inventing the Criminal: A History
of German Criminology, 1880-1945. (Studies in Legal
History.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press. 2000. Pp. xiv, 348. $39.95.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Over the past thirty years or so, historians have been
especially effective in probing and illuminating the
realities of German society during Adolf Hitler's Third
Reich. In place of the solidaristic lock-step of Allied
and Nazi propaganda or the innocent sleepwalkers
hijacked by criminals of exculpatory postwar German
accounts, social dynamics under National Socialism
have been shown to be a complicated mixture of
continuities and discontinuities with preceding and
succeeding traditions and trends within German society across classes, professions, and regions. Questions
of guilt and responsibility have been recast to take
account of a range of culpability for Nazi crimes
carried out in the name, and with the acquiescence as
well as the assistance, of the German people. Almost
all historians of Nazi Germany have therefore rejected
the thesis of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing
Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(1996), finding its monocausal assertion of a longstanding German "exterminationist" attitude toward
the Jews an insufficient model for understanding either
the history of modern Germany before 1933 or the
history of the Nazi Final Solution.
Richard F. Wetzell has added to this new historical
literature on particular realms of German life under
Nazism with a book that investigates the history of the
discipline of criminology from the late nineteenth
century to the end of World War II. Unlike most of the
recent works on the history of academie disciplines,
however, Wetzell bas written on "intellectual history
and the history of science, rather than social, legalinstitutional, or political history" (p. 2). Wetzell bas
followed the lead of Michel Foucault's Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1978) in his emphasis
on the importance of science to modern structures of
justice, but he focuses on the debates among criminologists rather than on the functions of social control
central to Foucault's purpose. Wetzell finds that "criminology was inherently ambivalent in its political implications" (p. 11), a tension, he argues, that prevented
the full Nazification of criminology between 1933 and
1945. Wetzell's conclusions are thus in line with the
most recent work on the history of society in general
and the professions in particular under National Socialism: "the genetic determinism and racism characteristie of much of the Nazi regime failed to supplant
a more complex discourse on the etiology of crime in
a significant portion of criminological research" (p.
303). And since his book is not restricted to the Nazi
period, he succeeds—while also avoiding teleology—in
placing criminological thought during the Nazi period
into the context of longer-term developments in the
modern history of Germany.
Wetzell approvingly cites Robert Proctor's The Nazi
War on Cancer (1999), among other works, on the
complexity as well as the complicity of science in Nazi
Germany. Bot his approach does not allow for the
same emphasis that Proctor and others place on the
failure of the practitioners of good science to resist the
use of their work for the functional support of the
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Europe: Early Modern and Modern
general operations of the Nazi state. While Wetzell
demonstrates that most criminologists did not agree
with Nazi racist and anti-Semitic views on crime, his
focus on academie discourse and disagreement allows
him to avoid confronting fully the failure of German
criminologists, as members of the country's intellectual
and professional elite, to take a more critical stance on
ethical grounds against a regime that systematically
destroyed the lives of millions of people. As it is, he
argues that the fact that "mainstream criminological
research" was not in line with Nazi racism shows that
"normal science" (p. 205) was widely practiced in the
Third Reich. This is true, and Wetzell also rightly
observes at the end of his book that the practice of
"normal science" in Nazi Germany is a warning about
the dangers of modern science. But Wetzell confines
his criticism to those criminologists such as Arthur
GUtt, Ernst Rdin, and Robert Ritter who collaborated extensively with brutal Nazi programs to eliminate "racial undesirables." Unlike Proctor, Ulfried
Geuter, and others who have written on the history of
professions in Nazi Germany in institutional as well as
intellectual terms, Wetzell does not also criticize the
mainstream criminologists whom he holds up as a
model to their opportunistic and racist colleagues, for
their own indirect support of the regime, confining
himself to praising "the sophistication of psychiatrie
and criminological research [that] gave rise to serious
objections to the sterilization of criminals on the basis
of criminal behavior" (p. 305). Wetzell's book is solidly
researched and clearly organized and written. A
broader institutional focus, however, would allow for a
closer examination of the degrees to which scholarly
disagreement with Nazi attitudes and polities toward
criminals might—but also might not—have prompted
action against the regime and on behalf of at least
some of its victims.
GEOFFREY COCKS
Albion College
MICHAEL A. MEYER, editor. German-Jewish History in
Modern Times, Volume 4, Renewal and Destruction:
1918-1945. New York: Columbia University Press.
1998. Pp. ix, 479. $50.00.
The fourth and final volume of German-Jewish History
in Modern Times traces German Jewry from its highest
achievements of equality and acculturation in the
Weimar Republic to its destruction by the Nazis. Two
respected Israeli scholars, Avraham Barkai and Paul
Mendes-Flohr, synthesize more than fifty years of
research by dozens of scholars working in several
languages. The result is a clearly organized and lucidly
written summary that is accessible to all, including
those approaching the subject for the first time.
Throughout, the authors compare the Jewish communities in Germany proper with those in Austria and the
Czech lands, further enhancing the volume's usefulness. A succinct epilogue by Steven M. Lowenstein on
the German Jewish diaspora documents the emigrante'
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1487
preservation of the German language and German
cultural habits in various corners of the world for a
generation after the Holocaust.
Although the authors show that the reality of Nazi
rule came as a terrific shock to the German Jews, they
argue that developments during the republican period
to some degree prepared Jewry for the ensuing onslaught of discrimination and persecution. The chapters devoted to cultural issues, all by Mendes-Flohr,
argue that in the 1920s there was a deepening of
Jewish identities in reaction to anti-Semitism, Zionism, and contacts with Eastern European Jews. A
process of dissimilation was evident in renewed interest in Jewish studies, scholarly and popular publications, art and music, and theology. This renaissance of
Jewish culture prepared Jews to engage in spiritual
resistance after 1933 and enabled them to develop a
new sense of solidarity as their cultural life was
ghettoized by the German state. The argument is
plausible, but it is difficult to know how widely any
cultural rebirth was feit before 1933. In fact, its
greatest impact probably came later, when Jews sought
refuge from the storm in their religious communities.
It might be added that the very success of Jewish
culture in shielding the victims from the worst effects
of Nazi racism contributed to the ambivalente many of
them feit about the wisdom of emigrating. As the
authors point out, the Jews' illusory hopes for the
future were just as important as restrictions on immigration in slowing departure from Germany.
Barkai, who treats most of the other topics covered
in the volume, credits Weimar Jewry with elaborating
a system of communal institutions that proved invaluable during the dark years that followed. This was
particularly true of the Jewish schools and charitable
organizations established by local Jewish communities.
These at first enabled the Jews to cope with unfavorable economie trends and with anti-Semitism, which
Barkai (but not Mendes-Flohr) portrays as endemie
throughout the Weimar and Nazi periods. Less successfui is Barkai's analysis of the political culture of
the organized Jewish community that gave rise to these
institutions during the Weimar Republic. Although the
author clearly delineates the complex factionalism
within the various secular and religious groupings, he
glosses over ideological strife and privileges the position of the Zionists in his reconstruction of events.
From Barkai, one would never learn that German
Zionism strove militantly and consistently to alienate
Germany's Jews from their liberal and patriotic traditions. This both handed ammunition to the antiSemites and undermined self-defense programs, driving the liberal Jewish majority to distraction and
tearing German Jewry apart. In reducing this ideological confrontation to a chiefly political one between a
stodgy establishment and youthful progressives for
control of local community budgets and institutions,
Barkai drains much of the lifeblood from the interval
history of German Jewry during the Weimar years.
Under Adolf Hitler, political convergence among the
OCTOBER 2001