Marr was a minor character in the intellectual history of
19th-century Germany, best known for inventing the word
"anti-Semitism" and championing its cause. This well-crafted
scholarly biography does not claim undue influence for Marr, but
instead takes his example, both intellectually and personally, as
typical or at least symptomatic of the prejudice that became the
Holocaust. Marr was a writer and journalist of intermittent
success, His dogmatism and fanaticism often alienated friends and
colleagues, and he often found himself on the outside of his own
causes. He began political life as a revolutionary, viewing the
turmoil of 1848 with great hope, then with great frustration. His
basic view, formed early and maintained with some consistency, was
that society must be freed of all chains, civil, economic, secular
and religious. Unlike Christian Jew-haters, his was a racist spite.
Though there was a hard logic to his thinking, many of Marr's ideas
and acts were strange: he married three different Jewish or half.
Jewish women and defended the Confederacy in the American Civil War
on racist grounds. At the root of his prejudice were personal
frustrations, rejections, disappointment; his insistent pessimism
and paranoia were almost accidentally directed at the Jews. Samples
of Mart's works are included in the appendix. The longest is an
essay called "The Testament of an Anti-Semite' in which the aging
man recants his life's work, lifting blame for the social problems
of his century from the Jews and putting it upon industrialization
and modernization. It is a fascinating document, and provides a
fitting end for Marr's life story. For even as he saw how misguided
his ideas were, he would never have fathomed their monstrous
potential. (Kirkus Reviews)
The creation of the term "anti-Semitism" a century ago signalled a
turning point in the history of Jew-hatred, marking the division
between the classical, Christian hatred of Jews and the modern,
politically-rooted racist attitudes. This is the first biography of
radical writer and politician Wilhelm Marr, the man who introduced
the term "anti-Semitism" into politics and founded the first
"Anti-Semitic League." Marr (1819-1904) began his political career
as a democrat and revolutionary, fighting for the emancipation of
all oppressed groups including the Jews. But when he became
disillusioned with contemporary politics, Jews became the focus of
his attack. Drawing on Marr's published and unpublished works, as
well as on previously unexamined journals and voluminous
correspondence, Zimmermann sets out to discover why an intellectual
radical like Marr would become a virulent anti-Semite. As
Zimmermann follows Marr's profound influence in the political,
literary, and artistic circles of his day and his collaborations
with Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, and other radical founders of
modern anti-Semitism, he reveals the diverse ways that
anti-Semitism came to permeate German thought and illuminates
critical moments in the emergence of the German Reich. The book
also includes Marr's surprising, never-before-published "Testament
of an Anti-Semite," written at the end of his life when he finally
turned his back on the movement he helped to create. This is the
first volume in a new Oxford series, Studies in Jewish History. The
General Editor for the series is Jehuda Reinharz of Brandeis
University.
General
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