7 - Toward a Comparative History of Racism and Xenophobia in the United States and Germany, 1865-1933

Summary

The past decade has witnessed the revival of ethnic and religious conflict in eastern Europe, a disastrous civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and the rise of right-wing movements and extremist violence against minority groups in Austria, France, Germany, and Italy. In the United States there has been a growing hostility toward immigrants from Haiti, Mexico, and Southeast Asia and increasing evidence of racism and violence against African Americans and Jews. Studies purporting to prove blacks mentally inferior no longer are dismissed out of hand, as was once the case, and to some degree it has become intellectually and politically respectable in America to support immigration restriction based on openly racial criteria.

In light of these events, it is imperative that we revisit the history of xenophobia and racial intolerance to gain a better understanding of the causes and consequences of the hostile and sometimes violent conflict between natives and newcomers, majority and minority. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a historical perspective on this phenomenon by comparing and contrasting the response of two societies – the United States and Germany – to the ethnic and racial minorities in their midst in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a period of economic change and intensified racism that has much in common with our own time.