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Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany. Edited by Devin O. Pendas, Mark Roseman, and Richard F. Wetzell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xii + 534. Paper $34.99. ISBN 978-1316616994.
For the past three decades, Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wipperman's The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (1991) has provided a valuable explanatory framework for the racial and biopolitical nature of Nazi genocidal programs, and it has served as the go-to book for readers interested in Nazism's mosaic of victims. The authors used the concept of the racial state to illustrate the diverse interconnections between racial science and social programs in the Third Reich and to argue for the uniqueness of the regime, especially in the face of scholarship in the 1980s, which increasingly situated Nazi crimes as products of modernization. The editors of the present ambitious volume seek to update this paradigm by bringing together prominent scholars to discuss the multifaceted nature of Nazi racism. Their motivation lies in the concern that the racial state has become a convenient but often imprecise descriptor, one that incorrectly assumes a strict coherence among ideology, practice, and experience.
The editors state that they “seek to question the consensus over the power and coherence of Nazi racial ideology that established itself in the book's [The Racial State] wake in order to tackle many of the kinds of questions about science, rationality, and more generic features of the modern world that exercised the earlier volume from a different angle” (5). They recommend that scholars shift attention away from racial knowledge and toward racial discourse, to illuminate the unstable, often contradictory nature of persecutory policies. The volume's nineteen chapters, organized into five sections, take up this challenge in myriad, fascinating ways.
The first four chapters present comparative and historical perspectives. Mark Roseman suggests that “racial state” is not an inaccurate phrase—it just suggests that Nazi race thinking was more coherent and homogenous than it actually was. Roseman then takes a longer view to differentiate between “socially stratifying” and “nationally demarcating” racisms (48), arguing that genocide is more likely to come from nationalist than biological racism. Donald Bloxham traces the genealogy of Nazi...