The Theology of Nazi Anti-Semitism in William Styron's Sophie's Choice

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

For discussions of Stingo's untrustworthiness, see the essays of Law, Carolyn A. Durham, and Lisa Carstens. In this essay, I offer new arguments to cast doubt on certain portions of Stingo's narration.

For an excellent discussion of the loss of human rights in relation to the principle of statelessness, see Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (267–302).

Rubenstein obviously has Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies in mind, a book that advocates burning down synagogues and schools (268), razing Jewish houses (269), and driving Jews from the country (288). There is even a passage that justifies killing large numbers of Jews (292).

There have been, to be sure, many writers who have noted the role Christianity has played in making the Holocaust possible. For instance, in a moment of clear frustration, Wiesel fumes in a 1977 lecture: “If I want to understand, and never will, why my people turned into victims, into perfect victims, somebody will have to understand or try to understand why all the killers were Christians, bad Christians surely, but Christians” (17). In The Destruction of the European Jews, Raul Hilberg begins his study by comparing and contrasting important Christian documents and Nazi anti-Jewish measures (1-17). Recent scholars such as Doris L. Bergen, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Richard Steigmann-Gall, Philippe Burrin, and Susannah Heschel, to name only a notable few, have made important contributions to our understanding of the extensive role Christianity played in creating the conditions for the Holocaust to occur.

There has been much confusion when discussing Hitler's and the Nazis' Christian conception of the political, which derives mainly from the tendency to treat Christianity as an ahistorical transcendental signifier. For instance, Burrin rightly notes that the Nazis' “German nationalism has been infused by Christian religiosity” (33), but he later refers to the Nazis' Christianity as a “pseudo-Christian religiosity” (38). The problem is this: Hitler claims that what distinguishes National Socialism is its commitment to “true Christianity,” as I will discuss later in this essay. As a scholar, instead of claiming that I have epistemological access to true Christianity, and then assessing Hitler's and the Nazis' Christianity in relation to that true concept, I argue that we, as scholars, should resist the impulse to analyze Hitler and the Nazis in relation to a transcendental signifier such as true Christianity, and instead, we should define Christianity as Hitler and the Nazis understood it. In my estimation, Christian idealism best articulates the version of Christianity that Hitler and many Nazis take as a given.

Chamberlain wrote a 900-page book on Kant. For the most extensive analysis of Kant's influence on Chamberlain's thinking, see Field's Evangelist of Race (278–316) and Stackelberg's Idealism Debased (132–44).

Chamberlain derives this model from Kant's “What is Enlightenment?” essay. For Kant, most people act only according to “[s]tatutes and formulas, those mechanical tools of the rational employment” (35), which is why they never get beyond their own self-incurred tutelage. In other words, the most they can do is to obey what others say and imitate what they do. To rise above obedience and imitation, moral freedom and independent thought are necessary, but these are the things that Jews lack, according to Chamberlain.

That Kant exerted considerable influence on the Nazis is clear from Adolf Eichmann's remarks during a police examination before his 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann “declared with great emphasis that he had lived his whole life according to Kant's moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty” (Arendt, Eichmann 135–36). Eichmann was no anomaly, for as Rosenberg claims: “Kant's words” about “the starry heavens above us and the moral law within us” (an allusion to the conclusion of Critique of Practical Reason [169]) are so popular among Germans that they are in danger of being “reduced to triviality” (Myth 197). It is Kant's extensive influence on the Nazis that has led Charles W. Mills to conclude: “the embarrassing fact for the white West (which doubtless explains its concealment) is that their most important moral theorist [Kant] of the past three hundred years is also the foundational theorist in the modern period of the division between Herrenvolk and Untermenschen, persons and subpersons, upon which Nazi theory would later draw” (72). For an analysis of Kant's role in the making of Hitler and the Nazis, see Berel Lang's Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (165–206).

For an insightful analysis of these two movements, see Helmut Walser Smith's German Nationalism and Religious Conflict.

There has been some confusion regarding the relationship between the Nazis and the churches. For instance, in Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief, Theodore Ziolkowski focuses on the secular and therefore anti-Christian origins of totalitarianism. To support his primary assertions, he analyzes Alfred Rosenberg's 1930 book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, a work, he argues, that significantly contributed to the Nazis' “‘intention in their dictatorial state to replace Christianity'” (164). What Ziolkowski fails to mention about the book, however, is noteworthy. Rosenberg is critical of the churches, but he ultimately embraces Christ: “For this reason Jesus, in spite of all Christian churches, signifies a pivotal point in our history. He became the God of the Europeans; although, up to the present, he appeared in a repellent distortion” (249). Rosenberg distrusts the churches because, instead of leading people to Christ, they have led them to a “repellent distortion” of Christ. But for Rosenberg, he wants to return to Christ, for he is “seeking ideas in harmony with the teaching of Jesus” (249). The Resurrection image in Streicher's journal perfectly embodies Rosenberg's Christ-centered instead of Church-centered approach to Christianity.

For a useful discussion of the anti-Semitic road from Kant to Wagner, see Michael Mack's German Idealism and the Jew.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Lackey

An associate professor at the University of Minnesota—Morris, Michael Lackey is the author of African American Atheists and Political Liberation: A Study of the Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Faith, which was named a “Choice Outstanding Academic Title” for 2007. He has published articles in numerous journals, including Callaloo, African American Review, Philosophy and Literature, Journal of the History of Ideas, and Modern Fiction Studies. His book, The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis' Christian Reich, is forthcoming with Continuum in early 2012.