Between Heimat and Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871–1935 by Philipp Nielsen. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019. 328pp. $74 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0190930660

Abstract

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...