[In the following review, Fenton examines the issues surrounding internalized anti-Semitism among German-Jews that are discussed in Freud, Jews, and Other Germans.]

One of the errors of the Whig interpretation of history, according to Butterfield, was a kind of retrospective modernisation of its subjects: Luther, for instance, was seen as the founder of the modern secular state—a development which Luther himself would have regarded with horror. It was the task of the historian, Butterfield argued, to show rather what divided Luther from our time, what made his assumptions and beliefs entirely different from those of later generations. This may be hard enough with Luther, but how much harder is it with a subject such as the Jews in 19th-century Germany. There the force of hindsight really does make us lose sight of the complexity of the processes at work. If we look to German history for clues to the holocaust, lo and behold, we find them in abundance—sometimes in the form of prophetic writings too. But if we search German history only for clues to the holocaust, we are yielding to a notion of predestination which most of us would never allow to infect our view of the present. We denature history, by the glib exclusion of all possibilities other than the one which was actually realised.

Peter Gay has an attractive cast of mind. On the one hand [in Freud, Jews, and Other Germans,] he rejects the thesis that the Nazi period is a mere aberration, an ‘alien import’ or a ‘grotesque interlude, with no substantial ties to the German past.’ On the other hand, he turns his back on that ‘false determinism, amounting to fatalism, which draws strength from the plausible but circular arguments that what happened is proof that it had to happen because, after all, it happened.’ The work of contingency is ubiquitous, often subterranean.

Most events are the vectors of competing, irreconcilable forces which might well have issued in other, far different consequences, or in no consequences at all. History is the actualisation of the potential. Compared to the mass of possibilities inherent in any situation, the number of possibilities realised is small. … In this sense, history is an implacable Darwinian battle, in which few aspirants succeed in fighting their way into the permanent record.

So, while the possibilities confronting Germany in the early Thirties were dramatically reduced, while an authoritarian regime seemed inevitable, the Nazi regime itself remained until 1932, in Gay's view, only one of several prominent possibilities.

If one adopts this kind of approach, and if one recognises hindsight to be a real problem, one is in a better position to examine the history of the German-Jewish question in all its complexity. For while it may be said of contemporary anti-Semitism that it knows what it is about (with the exception, I suppose, of the child who calls a stingy friend a Jew), the same cannot generally be said of the 19th-century varieties. There were many of them, and they were about quite different things. Most pathetic, perhaps, was the anti-Semitism of the established Jew who considered himself a good German, and who looked with a mixture of contempt and embarrassment at the new wave of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe. His attitude represented an attempt to deflect the dislike. (It has a parallel in contemporary Germany in the attitude of the Italian migrant worker, who considers himself to be a civilised man, a European, as opposed to these unspeakable Turks, who are ‘the problem.’) A part of assimilation into German-ness, it turned out, had to be the assimilation of anti-Semitism.

Such a Jewish German might, quite naturally, be a fervent supporter of his adopted traditions, and might never know how ill his support was received. When the novelist Theodor Fontane reached his 75th birthday, he found that the Prussian aristocracy appeared to have forgotten the event. Instead he received hundreds of letters of congratulation from Jews. He was surprised, and in a way pleased that he had such a devoted audience of ancient, if exotic, nobility. He even composed a poem on the subject. Yet a short while afterwards we find him writing to a friend that the Jews have failed the ‘test’ of emancipation:

They are irritants everywhere (much more than they used to be earlier), they mess up everything, obstruct the contemplation of every problem for its own sake. Even the most optimistic have had to convince themselves that baptismal water is not enough. Despite all its gifts, it is a horrible people, not a ‘sour dough’ yielding vitality and freshness but a leaven in which uglier forms of fermentation abound—a people afflicted from its very origins with a kind of conceited vulgarity, which the Aryan world cannot get along with. What a difference between the Christian and the Jewish criminal world! And all of this, ineradicable.

That kind of talk is both familiar and foreign—what does Fontane mean by the charge that they ‘obstruct the contemplation of every problem for its own sake’? And what does he have in mind as to the difference between the Jewish and Christian criminal world? The answer seems to be: nothing. He goes on: ‘I say all this (must say it), even though I have had, in my own person, nothing but good from Jews right down to this day.’

These were the private sentiments of a man known publicly for his cordial relations with Jews. They go much further than the whacky anti-Semitism of the cartoonists of the period (which, incidentally, had a parallel in England), but they could hardly be said to have reached Wagnerian proportions. It is when Gay gets anywhere near Wagner that he seems most ready for a fight. There is here a spirited defence of Eduard Hanslick, the influential music critic whom Wagner pilloried as Beckmesser in the Meistersinger, and, perhaps the best essay in this excellent collection, an account of Wagner's Parsifal conductor, Hermann Levi.

This is a classic study of Jewish self-hate. Levi was a great conductor, and a man of catholic musical tastes, who found himself forced to make the choice between Wagner and his former friends (including Brahms). He chose Wagner, and became a passionate worshipper of the Cause. He persuaded himself, and did his best to persuade his rabbi father, that Wagner's hatred of ‘Jewry’ in music and modern literature sprang from ‘the noblest of motives,’ that Wagner was wholly free of ‘petty Jew-hatred’ (presumably Jew-hatred was more excusable on a grand scale). He took it on the chin when Wagner, after hearing him conduct Lohengrin and having noted dozens of false tempi, read him a lecture on the racial origin of these errors, and continued, for good measure, with a discussion on ‘the depressing, destructive influence of Jewry on our public affairs,’ against which he warned Levi ‘emphatically.’

Life with the Wagners seems to have been like this all the time. The anguish of Levi over whether he should convert provided them with a fascinating theme—of course, Cosima Wagner told him not long before his death that while he could become a Christian, he could never become a Teuton. Naturally, she lied, she preferred the Christian to the Teuton. As it happened, Levi was necessary to the Wagners—whether because he was the only one who could conduct Parsifal, or whether because their viciousness needed victims, is unclear.

The viciousness certainly brought them admirers. As Houston Stewart Chamberlain wrote to Cosima Wagner: ‘A marvellous testimonial to your vitality, hochverehrte Meisterin, is the way you have of chastising someone, when he deserves to be chastised.’ On the one occasion when Levi, after Wagner's cruelty had pushed him to the limit, decided to leave, he was cajoled into returning, with a promise that there would now be a possibility for him really to get to know the Wagners properly. He took little persuading, and, although the Master indicated to others that there was something sinister in having the Jew around, he was honoured on his return. Eventually he received the greatest honour of all—he was a pallbearer at Wagner's funeral. As Gay writes: ‘He left the best part of himself in that grave. But the Cause lived on, and so did Hermann Levi—to serve it.’