How was the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft actually created? This is the ostensible subject of Michael Wildt's new book. The thesis is that widespread, public acts of anti-Semitic violence in which Jews (and “Aryan Jew-lovers”) were marginalized, humiliated, and both morally and physically excluded from local communities were a kind of ritualistic social drama in which the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft created itself. In this fashion, the creation of the Nazi racial community was a kind of “Selbstermächtigung,” or “self-empowerment,” on the part of Nazi activists at the grassroots level. For Wildt, the daily discrimination and exclusion of Jews practiced by National Socialism at the local level fundamentally changed all of Germany society, and did much more than physically drive Jews out. It was the means by which the Nazis broke down and destroyed the society of laws and the liberal democratic order (bürgerliche, rechtsstaatliche Ordnung) to create their own vision of a racial society. For Wildt, public violence was the key to this transformation.

Wildt's expressed goal is to track anti-Semitic violence not from the top down, but rather from the bottom, on the grassroots level. The focus is on close description of local case studies and is not intended to be a total explanation of Nazism. Wildt's research is not quantitative, but is consciously impressionistic and deliberately includes widely disparate parts of Germany. He chooses to concentrate on the provincial Germany of small towns, and not on the big cities, which he rightly feels have been given too much weight in earlier interpretations of National Socialism. He holds that it was in the small towns and villages that anti-Semitic violence was most important and the most central means of destroying the rule of law and creating the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft.

The main focus of the book is clearly on the period between 1933 and 1939. Chapters three through eight look roughly chronologically at the evolution of anti-Semitic violence at the local level once the Nazis came to power and are based on detailed local studies. In a sort of extended introduction, the book begins, however, with a look at the evolution of the term “Volksgemeinschaft” and its use in German political discourse since the late Kaiserreich (chapter one), and then moves on to a brief discussion of anti-Semitic violence before the Nazis came to power (chapter two). Both of the first two chapters are impressionistic exercises in the history of ideas and legal philosophy, and seem rather out of place and even unnecessary compared to the rest of the book.

Wildt bases his study mainly on the local and regional reports of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (CV), the largest Jewish organization in Germany, supplemented with newspaper and other press accounts, documents from the police, Gestapo, local and regional government and other state sources, Nazi Party documents, and even the Sopade reports. Much of Wildt's research successfully reads the CV documents against the reports of state and Nazi Party agencies to describe the process of anti-Semitic violence at the local level and its interpretation by the various actors in it. The systematic use of the CV records, housed since the war in the Moscow “Special Archive” (with microfilm copies now in the Central Archive for the History of the Jewish people in Jerusalem), is one of the greatest strengths of Wildt's book and provides a much different picture of Nazi anti-Semitism than earlier studies that have only used Nazi Party and state records.

Wildt is strongly influenced by Alf Lüdtke and Alltagsgeschichte, and takes the Nazi idea of Volksgemeinschaft very seriously. He is strongest when he looks at the details of local violence and does a good job of showing in very human terms how Jews in small towns were unmercifully excluded from German society, their economic position made untenable and ultimately how they were placed outside the rule of law. He well illustrates the central tension that arose as the Nazi Party, now in control of the state apparatus, tried simultaneously to create and control “spontaneous” violence as a tool for a complete reordering of social life. The numerous reports of local Jews to the CV allows him to show that anti-Semitic violence in small towns continued without pause, even during periods of ostensible calm or when the regime sought to reign it in due to foreign policy or economic considerations. He also shows the deep complicity of state institutions responsible for law and order and their lack of concern for the Jewish individuals under attack. In Wildt's view, there was no disagreement within the state and regime over the need to remove the Jews, only differing views on pace and tactics. Finally, with his emphasis on the ritual nature and symbolic economy of local anti-Semitic violence, he points out that the situation was much more complicated than Hilburg's tripartite distinction between victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. For Wildt, bystanders, even those who may not have supported anti-Semitic violence, played an important and necessary role, for they were the public for acts of public violence and exclusion, which would not have been effective without them.

There are unfortunately some problems with the book. First, it reifies the concept of the Volksgemeinschaft, never clearly defining it, and sometimes making it seem as if were a conscious goal of anti-Semitic violence. In this same fashion, Wildt often treats the breakdown of the liberal rule of law as if it were also a conscious goal of local violence. Paradoxically, while he focuses on grassroots acts and is quite sophisticated in portraying the varied possible motivations held by the participants, he nevertheless tends to treat local violence in his analysis simply as a tool of the Nazi leadership and downplays whatever genuinely spontaneous aspects it may have had. Thus, when he speaks in his title of “Selbstermächtigung,”the “selbst” becomes lost behind the instrumentalization of violence by the Nazi leadership. Moreover, he repeatedly demonstrates that local violence often undercut attempts at the top to control and canalize anti-Semitic measures. Wildt never resolves or fully explains this contradiction, though he tends to elide it by assuming that the local violence was always in the spirit and in the interest of the fundamental goal of separating Jews from “Aryan” German society and was thus tacitly encouraged, even when it went against ostensible policy. Finally, Wildt suggests the presence of older folk standards of justice and social order, and the local anti-Semitic violence he investigates often has what he himself describes as a “medieval” quality (though he is at pains to look for modern, not medieval roots for it). In this light, then, it is a bit surprising that he does not draw even more on the work of other historians on the pre-modern crowd or on folk customs.

Though the ambitious thesis remains unproven, this book makes masterful use of local reports of the CV to paint a chilling picture of the drumbeat of grassroots violence against Jews in small towns all over Germany between 1933 and 1939. It challenges much received wisdom about this violence, and places “bystanders” in a crucial role as the public for ritual acts of public exclusion. For these reasons, and not for its diffuse notions of “Selbstermächtigung,” it is a very important book and merits a wide readership.