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A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide . By Alon Confino. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 284. Cloth $30.00. ISBN 978-0300188547.
"Why?" is always the question that comes up in the face of Auschwitz. Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel warned historians of the arrogance behind any attempt to answer that question. Wiesel is afraid that answering the question "why?" silences all questioning and thus contradicts remembrance. For the historian, this admonition means looking for answers that do not suppress questions but instead generate new ones. In his book A World without Jews, historian Alon Confino begins with a Jewish joke told during World War II: "A group of Nazis surrounded an elderly Berlin Jew and demanded of him, 'Tell us, Jew, who caused the war?' The little Jew was no fool. 'The Jews,' he answered, then added, 'and the bicycle riders.' The Nazis were puzzled. 'Why the bicycle riders?' 'Why the Jews?' answered the little old man" (vi).
Confino tries to tackle this question. He takes a new route, going beyond the debate between functionalists and intentionalists. His hypothesis: "The Nazis perpetrated the Holocaust in the name of culture" (242). In the debate over the extermination of the Jews, there has been a kind of cultural forgetfulness. In the astonishment over how a people of poets and thinkers could stray into such...