The Joy of Pain (26 page)

As he perceived their disproportional influence, he also transformed his view of Jews from one based on religious distinctions to one of race and, furthermore, a race having vile and pernicious characteristics. He encountered Jews in their distinctive caftans and side locks and began sensing something foreign rather than native. He would wonder: “Is this a German?” He still claimed to be troubled by the anti-Semitic pamphlets and their atrocious accusations. They seemed so unscientific and shameful, and he feared that he would be committing an injustice to believe them. But the Jews' essential and degenerate separateness took complete hold on his perceptions:

Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity.
¹²

Having separated Jews from other people, Germans most importantly, he bristled at the notion that Jews could label themselves the “Chosen People.” He recognized their powerful influence, a fact incompatible with inferiority and likely to spur envy. However, he focused on those perceived attributes of Jews that inspired his contempt and would have clouded recognition of his envy. Jews were parasitic, immoral Zionists. Any outward condemning of Zionism by a Jew was a back-stabbing smoke screen for a favoring of Jewish rather than German interests. All their activities, whether “in the press, art, literature, and the theatre” exuded an outward and inward repulsiveness; they were “germ-carriers of the worse sort.”
¹³
And there was no aspect of cultural life without the degenerate influence of Jews.
¹⁴

The transformation into a committed anti-Semite completed itself when Hitler linked Jews with political causes having Marxist elements. Here as well, he perceived their
disproportionate
influence. But, once again, he seemed to blunt the invidious effects implicit in this perception by focusing on the seditious threat these Jews posed to Germany. This threat was especially true in the press, which he saw as dominated by disloyal, treacherous Jews. Here is a characteristic sample of Hitler's thinking:

I gradually became aware that the Social Democratic press was directed predominantly by Jews … there was not one paper with Jews working on it which could have been regarded as truly national, according to my education and way of thinking.

… I took all the Social Democratic pamphlets I could lay my hands on and sought the names of their authors: Jews. I noted the names of the leaders: by far the greatest part were likewise members of the “chosen people,” whether they were representatives of the Reichsrat or trade-union secretaries, the heads of organizations or street agitators. It was always the same gruesome picture. The names of the Austerlitzses, Davids, Adlers, Ellenbogens, etc. will remain forever graven in my memory. One thing had grown clear to me: The party with whose petty representatives I had been carrying on the most violent struggle for months was, as to leadership, almost exclusively in the hands of a foreign people; for, to my deep and joyful satisfaction, I had at last come to the conclusion that the Jew was no German.
¹⁵

Hitler detailed his futile attempts to persuade the Jewish members of the party of the “madness of their doctrine.”
¹⁶
But he eventually concluded that they had no interest in whether their beliefs were good for the future of Germany. And just when he thought he had them persuaded, they would turn around and spout the “same old nonsense as though nothing at all had happened, and, if indignantly challenged, affected amazement.”
¹⁷
Hitler was intensely frustrated by these interactions with Jews, marveling at the “agility” of their persuasive language and the “virtuosity” of their deceit.
¹⁸
There was a clear, invidious residue produced by his being outwitted, but the plain result was that he hated Jews with a ferocious passion.

Decades later, when Albert Speer, Hitler's top architect, was asked why Hitler was anti-Semitic, he gave three reasons. One was Hitler's pathological desire to destroy. Another was that he blamed the Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I, thus denying him the opportunity to achieve his dream of becoming an architect. But a third reason, probably related to his frustrated dreams as well as to a desire to destroy, was that he “secretly admired and envied the Jews.”
¹⁹

Speer knew Hitler about as well as anyone, and I think that Speer was right on the mark. It is likely that a part of Hitler's “struggle” was with his envy. Initially, he had claimed to be appalled by the way Jews had been treated in previous centuries and was concerned that hating Jews would be an injustice. He had seen envy as an explanation for the anti-Semitic pamphlets,
and so he could see this motive in others.
But it may be that as his own envy grew, his subsequent “struggle” was to find a way to hate the Jews without attributing his motives to the ugly, humiliating emotion of envy. He may have envied and hated the Jews earlier than he claimed, as his friend during his late teens, August Kubizek, believed. Once they walked past a synagogue in Linz, and Hitler said to him, “This shouldn't be here.”
²⁰
Even Kubizek admitted, however, that Hitler's experiences in Vienna “might have deepened” his anti-Semitism.
²¹
Arguably, envy found a way to transmute itself into disgust, and then into righteous, justified, “deserved” hatred. As clever as these so-called chosen people might be, they were morally corrupt and traitorous in their motives. Perhaps at some earlier point, the idea of the Jews as the chosen people would have accentuated only the invidious implications of their disproportionate influence for Hitler.
²²
However, now, he seized on it as evidence for Jewish arrogance, adding further justification for his disgust and hatred.

Historian John Toland, in his biography of Hitler, notes a revealing statement made by Hitler in 1941 to Walther Hewel, an early member of the Nazi Party and one of Hitler's few friends. It was a few weeks before the invasion of the Soviet Union and during a period in which Hitler set in motion preparations for the liquidation of the Jews. By Hewel's account, Hitler likened himself to a medical scientist who had “found the bacillus” and had therefore discovered a way to deal with the problem of the Jews. And in words suggesting the invidious roots of his hatred, he said, “one thing I have proven is that a state can live without Jews: that economy, art, culture, etc., can exist even better without Jews, which is the worst blow I could give the Jews.”
²³
This statement fits with the envious mind set, although Hitler would not have acknowledged it, of course. By the time he wrote his memoirs, he had long convinced himself that by achieving the annihilation of the Jews he would be an avenger for God, so justified did he believe his hatred.
²⁴
Hitler probably envied the Jews, but this seemed fully hidden from his awareness.

Does Hitler's path to hating the Jews generalize in some respects to other Germans who also hated the Jews? Could envy help explain not only the Holocaust, but anti-Semitism going back centuries? Many respected thinkers have argued so, from Mark Twain to Friedrich Nietzsche.
²⁵
More recently, Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, in their analysis of anti-Semitism,
Why the Jews? The Reasons for Antisemitism
, make the more general point this way:

In nearly every society in which the Jews have lived for the past two thousand years, they have been better educated, more sober, more charitable with one another, committed far fewer violent crimes, and have had a more stable family life than their non-Jewish neighbors.
These characteristics of Jewish life have been independent of Jews' affluence or poverty. …
Of course, it is impossible to measure precisely to what extent the higher quality of Jews' lives has been a major cause of antisemitism. Few antisemites list the Jews' good qualities as reasons for
attacking them. But it is human nature for individuals and groups perceived as living better lives, however that may be understood, to elicit jealousy and resentment.
²⁶

Prager and Telushkin's analysis is especially useful because they suggest that it is not just the obvious markers of wealth, power, and influence that may have created envy. The more subtle but evident cultural strengths usually present in Jewish communities could also be a trigger.
²⁷

Social psychologist Peter Glick has addressed the question of envy and Nazi anti-Semitism within the Stereotype Content Model, an innovative theory of prejudice proposed by him and fellow psychologists Susan Fiske and Amy Cuddy.
²⁸
Traditional theories cast prejudice as a generic negative feeling toward another group. Glick, Fiske, and Cuddy argue that this way of thinking about prejudice is too general, and, for example, overlooks that groups vary in terms of their perceived status or competence. Prejudice against poor Hispanics is very different from prejudice against successful Jews (or, Asians, etc.). Both feelings can be “negative,” but only one is likely to also contain envy—namely, toward groups enjoying stereotypically high status and competence. Traditional views of prejudice also tend to neglect another important dimension in which other groups differ: whether or not they are perceived as a threat. This is the “warmth” dimension of the Stereotype Content Model. Members of highly competent groups might simply be admired (a high warm feeling) rather than envied (a low warm feeling) if, for example, there is no concern that they will take away jobs from one's own group. These two fundamental dimensions inherent in our perceptions of other groups (warmth and competence) are crucial to take into account. They address two adaptive questions we should ask about members of other groups: first, are they friends or foes? And, second, are they weak or powerful? Will they like us, and will they hurt us if they can? Not surprisingly, groups with stereotypically higher status (e.g., economic advantages) are perceived as more competent and, if they are perceived to be in competition with us, are also seen as low in warmth and therefore threatening. And this combination of high status and low warmth in another group encourages in us feelings of envious prejudice, as empirical work has confirmed.
²⁹

Glick stresses that the remarkable successes of Jews would have been of little consequence, psychologically, for those inclined to dislike the Jews—if it were not for Jews also being perceived as a competitive threat. The Nazis, capitalizing especially on the willingness of people to believe bogus anti-Semitic documents, such as
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, claimed that Jews represented a kind of conspiracy aimed at accruing power and favoring only their own interests.
³⁰
As we have seen, a constant theme in Hitler's statements, as well as in propaganda spewed out by other Nazi leaders, was that this sense of threat was reinforced by the belief that many Jews were in leadership positions in the communist movement and its spread. And as we have also seen pulse through Hitler's own writings, many Germans—and most Nazis—blamed Jews for Germany's humiliation in World War I and its economic problems following the war and believed the Jews were in bed with the Communists.

In relating his theories of stereotyping and prejudice to anti-Semitism, Glick applies the idea of
scapegoating
to this type of prejudice. In scapegoating, we see ingroup members, particularly when feeling threatened by, for example, economic circumstances, lash out against a vulnerable outgroup, usually one that is perceived as inferior.
³¹
But Glick points out that this partially fits the history of anti-Semitism. True, stereotypes about Jews had long included negative features suggesting the kind of “inferiority” (e.g., dirty, greedy) so persistently claimed in Hitler's writings. Indeed, the Nazis did their best to promulgate these beliefs.
³²
However, other stereotypes of Jews imply a kind of power and superiority (e.g., clever, cunning). Glick argues that viewing the Jews as “inferior”
as well as
powerful created a particularly malicious form of scapegoating, an intense, envy-tinged blaming of Jews for Germany's economic woes.
³³

The wide assimilation of Jews into German culture might have worked to reduce this sense of separateness. But Glick notes that this blending was seen as false. The Nazis, entranced by ideas of race, saw group identity in blood rather than in beliefs. What's more, Jews' efforts to fit in could be taken as evidence of conspiratorial motives, as Hitler claimed. Again, as a distinct racial group, Jews were considered both powerful and threatening. Victims of their own success, they were held to be manipulative, powerful threats. The reward for being so perceived was to suffer even more surely from a particularly virulent, unrelenting form of envious prejudice.

The persistence of envious prejudice, particularly in the case of Nazi Germany, can be explained by a number of factors. Like Epstein and other scholars, Glick also emphasizes that Jews
were
overrepresented in many important aspects of professional and cultural life and that the talents and drive suggested by such success would have been hard to dismiss. The Nazis exaggerated and distorted the prevalence of Jews in powerful positions, claiming that these influential Jews represented a coordinated, monolithic entity bent on domination, but there was just enough surface evidence to justify the sense of power and threat. When economic conditions are poor, it is not surprising that people, in their collective frustration, will search for plausible causes for the hardships they are suffering. Blaming these hardships on another group—one perceived to be different, as well as competent, manipulative, and out for themselves—has a certain plausibility to it. Moreover, Jews who were able to lend money in tough economic times could be construed as making money off the misery of Germans.
³⁴
Had economic and political conditions in Germany been different, Glick suggests that Jews might have been tolerated, even seen as useful. But stressful economic times call for explanations for why things are going so poorly. Ideological movements, such as the National Socialism endorsed by the Nazi Party, supplied plausible and well-packaged propaganda that could be used to blame the Jews. Explanations fueled by envious stereotypes took firm hold.