A Prussian bureaucrat committed to expanding Germandom in the East; an organization promoting a return to agricultural settlement and connection with the soil; military rabbis hopeful about the interreligious "community of the trenches" of World War I-three examples of German Jewish involvement in projects of the Right portrayed in Philipp Nielsen's Between Heimat and Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, . The book provides a novel and engaging look at the political involvement of right-of-center German Jews. It traces the increasing tension between their Jewish and their political identities leading up to the Nazi regime.The book comprises five core empirical chapters, organized chronologically, beginning with the German Empire and ending with the first two years of Nazi rule. The analysis is primarily built around the experiences of about ten German Jews on the political Right. The Right is understood in broad terms, including mostly anyone opposed to democratic politics involving general franchisemonarchists, right liberals, and conservatives. By defining the Right in this way rather than by shared antisemitism, as others have done, Nielsen argues that it should not be surprising to find bourgeois German Jews on the Right. Rather, he examines how the involvement of Jews in projects of the Right was just one choice among many, and asks at what point tensions between their Jewish and their political identities became untenable. Nielsen does that and much more by allowing the reader to see the evolution of the political Right in the sixty years leading up to the Nazi regime from a new and uniquely fruitful perspective.Nielsen's analysis speaks to four broader topics that make the book one of interest not only to fellow historians but to a wide range of social scientists and humanities scholars. First are the issues of conditional whiteness, respectability politics, and the limits of inclusion in political spaces marked by racism and white supremacy (see Higginbotham 2003;Schraub 2019). Several of the main characters portrayed in Between Heimat and Hatred attempted to demonstrate their loyalty to nation and state and highlight their German identity in an effort to be included in increasingly racialized spaces on the political Right. While at least partially successful through WWI and early Weimar, the increasing rallying of the Right around the idea of the Volk thwarted their efforts and showed the incompatibility of their Jewish and political identities. In addition, the analysis includes classic instances of minorities being stereotyped and their loyalties questioned, such as Hindenburg's response to concerns about intensifying antisemitism against Jewish WWI veterans raised by a decorated military rabbi. Hindenburg, referring to Jews on the Left, shifts the blame away from the military and to Jews themselves, writing, "See to it that your decent co-religionists distance themselves from these ills… Then one will stop blaming an entire race…" (Nielsen 2019, 127).A second topic is the geopolitics of race and rac...

Does public remembrance of past atrocities lead to decreased support for far-right parties today? Initiatives commemorating past atrocities aim to make visible the victims and crimes committed against them. This runs counter to revisionist actors who attempt to downplay or deny atrocities and victims. Memorials for victims might complicate such attempts and reduce support for revisionist actors. Yet, little empirical evidence exists on whether that happens. In this study, we examine whether exposure to local memorials that commemorate victims of atrocities reduces support for a revisionist far-right party. Our empirical case is the Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”) memorial in Berlin, Germany. It commemorates victims and survivors of Nazi persecution in front of their last freely chosen place of residence. We employ time-series cross-sectional analyses and a discontinuity design using a panel dataset that matches the location and date of placement of new Stolpersteine with the election results from seven elections (2013 to 2021) at the level of polling station areas. We find that, on average, the presence of Stolpersteine is associated with a 0.96%-point decrease in the far-right vote share in the following election. Our study suggests that local memorials that make past atrocities visible have implications for political behavior in the present.