ON THE SOCIOLOGY OF GERMAN ANTI-SEMITISM:
NORBERT ELIAS EMBARKS ON THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE
Klaudia Meyer
Universität Hamburg
As reported in Figurations 8,
an early article by Norbert Elias has recently come to light. It is entitled
`Zur Soziologie des deutschen Antisemitismus', and it appeared in the 13
December 1929 (11 Kislev 5690) issue of the Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt:
Offizielles Organ der israelitischen Gemeinden Mannheim und Ludwigshafen,
No.12, pp. 36.
The very title of the 1929 article showed the way Elias would go. He did not
want to provide yet another essay locating anti-Semitism in politicalideological
terms, but rather a sociological explanation of the origin and popularisation of
anti-Semitic attitudes running through the whole history of the German
population. Thus Elias turned anti-Semitism into a socially relevant problem
which not only touched upon the interests of a social minority the German Jews,
but was interwoven with the genesis of present state of bourgeois society.
Under the influence of Karl Mannheim, especially his 1927 essay on `Conservative
Thought' (in Essays in Sociology and Social Psychology, London, Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1953, pp. 74164), Elias analysed the origins of anti-Semitism
in the `changing fronts on which the German bourgeoisie has had to fight over
the last 100 years', the causes of which he located predominantly in the `diminishing
economic scope' resulting from war.
In the initial phase of capitalism, the liberal sections of the German
bourgeoisie spoke up for emancipation, because in the Jews they saw `welcome
allies in building the German economy' and in the struggle against the
`traditional restrictions on freedom under the established order'. But, says
Elias, `the support for Jewish emancipation by all liberal elements at that time
was not the expression of any special liking for the Jews among the Christian
bourgeoisie, but rather a necessary consequence of the specific location and
objectives of this liberal bourgeoisie. ... Today [at the end of the 1920s],
this struggle has been finally played out. The nobility no longer has any
special political privileges.'
The bourgeoisie now had to turn towards a front no longer on the right `but on
the left, against the rising proletarian stratum'. So now the bourgeoisie was
defending the established order against the new stratum. It had itself become a
`preserving' stratum. The opposition between conservatism and liberalism had
thus been largely dissolved.
And what about the Jews? Elias saw their position as characterised by two lines
of conflict. Economically belonging largely to the bourgeois strata, socially
they now constituted a second-rank society within the bourgeoisie, and fell
between the lines of the working class and the increasingly conservative
bourgeoisie. Against the background of the economically tense situation in
post-war Germany, this constellation was the `source of many conflicts'.
The function of competition had changed. It was no longer just the motor of
progress, but now also gave rise to conflicts within the declining bourgeois
camp. With examples from various economic fields, Elias illustrated how the
social and cultural isolation of the Jewish population had become instrumental
for the German bourgeoisie in their construction of Jewish people as different,
as guilty, as enemies. Jews appeared in the German public sphere only as
stereotyped clichés Elias speaks of social masks as peddlers, money-lenders,
and crafty, cunning Jews. The German bourgeoisie `drove them [the Jews] into
social segregation, sometimes by brutal and sometimes by cultivated means, with
this or that ideological justification. They pursued this battle as a struggle
closely based on social and ideological interests, just as they pursued the
struggle against the rising proletarian stratum.
What prospects does this diagnosis open up? None! For the author, anti-Semitism
is the `function of economic and social development which no group of German
Jews can change or even influence in any way'. For anyone who wants neither to
fight nor to go to Palestine, `there remains resignation'. Elias's answer is
further adaptation to the social stratum which he has just exposed as the bearer
of anti-Semitism: `One answer to anti-Semitism is always still possible for the
German Jews: to adopt an unobtrusive, resolute and self-conscious attitude to
life, which is the only one appropriate to their situation.' This already
heralds the outsider position to which Elias's later work gave a
theoretically-grounded hallmark, and of which politics were to give terrible and
fatal proof.
from: Figurations. Newsletter of the
Norbert Elias Foundation
Issue No. 9 June 1998
http://www.usyd.edu.au/su/social/elias/fig/issue_9.htm