Blood ties: Weimar Germany's border ports and Anti-Semitism
Abstract:
This article believes that national border ports are concentrated places of xenophobia. The two mechanisms come together to create this pattern. First, when nation-states are under pressure, border ports make transnational differences prominent, creating a perceived link between international forces and socio-economic problems of socially disadvantaged classes. Second, border ports symbolize international threats and attract active nationalist mobilization from radical movements, who see foreign nations as international demons. In this unique spatial landscape, foreign nations become scapegoats for wider social problems among individuals who have lost their social status. I elaborate on my point through my study of the endemic changes in anti-Semitism in Weimar Germany before the Nazi era. Statistical analysis of the scourge of Jewish and in-depth discussion of local anti-Semitism reports reveal how the diversity of Weimar Republic began to erode among the lower and middle class members living on the margins of the country. In the process, I draw attention to the spatial sources of xenophobia and demonstrate that the borders between states activate boundaries within states, bringing new revelations to the complex relationship between pluralism and state formation.
Author profile:
Robert Braun, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
Compilation source:
Braun, Robert. “Bloodlines: National Border Crossings and Antisemitism in Weimar Germany.” American Sociological Review87.2 (2022): 202–236.
Author of this article (from left to right): Robert Braun
Main points of this article
A large number of work on xenophobia have identified the political and economic sources of resentment. The former emphasizes the importance of electoral threats and incitement by movement leaders, while the latter focuses on how the vulnerable social classes who are losing their status use outsiders as scapegoats during times of socio-economic turmoil. This article combines these two branches to create a fear of outsiders by showing whether the economic recession, the existence of vulnerable social groups or the political incitement of social movements gathers together, and provides a spatially contextualized explanation of xenophobia based on the relative position within the country.
This article finds that the national border port, the spatial location connecting the two nation-states, activates the top-down and bottom-up process, and jointly provides a fertile breeding ground for the emergence of racial fear. First, when ethnic differences become prominent by nearby border ports, groups that lose social status are more likely to blame international factors for their decline. Second, the disproportionateness in the border areas attracted radical xenophobia campaigns, who wanted to protect the country from external threats. The first process creates a bottom-up demand for international scapegoats in vulnerable social groups, which meet these needs from the top down by viewing international actors as the source of all evil.
Before discussing the potential strengths and contributions of this project, I would like to briefly emphasize one of its key weaknesses. Although the article convincingly suggests that anti-Semitism villains and events gather near border ports and begin to interpret the socio-economic dynamics behind these clusters, it does not really explain how the latter dynamics can shape the content of children’s stories in the first place. Research on tracking this process is currently underway. Despite such weaknesses, the study found specific interactions between space, class and political mobilization, which are of great significance to the study of national conflict, anti-Semitism, and German history. At the general level, this paper adds more and more work to place intergroup dynamics in a wider fission structure by demonstrating that borders between countries activate boundaries within countries (Braun 2019, 2020). Existing research usually looks at how the relationship between insiders and outsiders affects each other’s resentment, but this paper argues that the intersections within inner groups (i.e., borders between Christian Gentiles) can itself activate hatred for the third group (i.e., Jews) by shaping perceptions of social problems and generating racial mobilization.
These findings also provide a micro-foundation for macrosocio-social theories about the rise of nationalism and ethnic conflict.The transition from empire to nation-state has resulted in an intensification of political exclusion along national lines (Wimmer 2002, 2012). I think this shift is particularly strong in border areas between different ethnic groups. The mechanisms that specifically illustrate how this shift is concrete at the local level suggest that the cognitive and mobilization processes in marginal areas of challenged nations are very important in shaping the possible forms of national exclusion that political centers can take.
Reprint time: September 19, 2022
Editor in charge: Zhiyuanxing
Chief editor: Li Zhixian
© Zhengzhi Academic Express
Frontier tracking/Theoretical methods/Expert comments
ID: ThePoliticalReview
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