1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910464201903321

Autore

Confino Alon

Titolo

A world without Jews : the Nazi imagination from persecution to genocide / / Alon Confino

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Haven, Connecticut : , : Yale University Press, , 2014

©2014

ISBN

0-300-19046-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (304 pages)

Disciplina

940.53/18

Soggetti

Jews - Germany - History - 1933-1945

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) - Germany

Jews - Persecutions - Germany

Electronic books.

Germany History 1933-1945

Germany Politics and government 1933-1945

Germany Ethnic relations History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- One. A New Beginning by Burning Books -- Two. Origins, Eternal and Local -- Three. Imagining the Jews as Everywhere and Already Gone -- Four. Burning the Book of Books -- Five. The Coming of the Flood -- Six. Imagining a Genesis -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Illustration Credits -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Why exactly did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible everywhere in Germany on November 9, 1938? The perplexing event has not been adequately accounted for by historians in their large-scale assessments of how and why the Holocaust occurred. In this gripping new analysis, Alon Confino draws on an array of archives across three continents to propose a penetrating new assessment of one of the central moral problems of the twentieth century. To a surprising extent, Confino demonstrates, the mass murder of Jews during the war years was powerfully anticipated in the culture of the prewar years.   The author shifts his focus away from the debates over what the Germans did or



did not know about the Holocaust and explores instead how Germans came to conceive of the idea of a Germany without Jews. He traces the stories the Nazis told themselves-where they came from and where they were heading-and how those stories led to the conclusion that Jews must be eradicated in order for the new Nazi civilization to arise. The creation of this new empire required that Jews and Judaism be erased from Christian history, and this was the inspiration-and justification-for Kristallnacht. As Germans imagined a future world without Jews, persecution and extermination became imaginable, and even justifiable.