10 - The Abyss

Summary

The chapter begins with a description of the multiple discriminatory legislation against the Jews enacted soon after the Nazi takeover in 1933. It then considers the ambivalent situation of the Jews in the following years, as told in the autobiography of the historian Peter Gay (Fröhlich), by then a high-school pupil in Berlin. While he and his family were only marginally affected by the Nazi acts of discrimination, most other Jews greatly suffered under this policy, as well as from the social exclusion associated with it and finally from the general economic hardship at the time. In fact, by the November (1938) Pogrom, Jews could no longer be seen as Germans. Could they still reflect German history – as they did throughout previous periods, according to this book? The chapter tries to handle this question by first briefly describing the history of the Holocaust and then dealing more fully with the historiography of this period, written since the end of the war till today.