The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity after the Holocaust [Hardcover]

In the wake of the Holocaust, Austrians, Germans, and others often turned to a figural Antisemite to come to terms with their altered political, economic, and cultural circumstances and to shape new national and moral self-understandings. This spectral figure of the Antisemite came into being after Nazi atrocities made explicit expressions of antisemitism socially taboo in Europe and the United States. AsThe Postwar Antisemiteexplains, the damaging effects of the figural Antisemite, set in motion in Central Europe immediately after the Second World War, spread far beyond Europe's borders and continue to this day.In his influentialAnti-Semite and Jew, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him. In doing so he articulated the figure of an Antisemite responsible for imagining the Jew in a formulation that has lasted for decades. This figure became an indispensable trope in the period immediately after the war. It enabled Germans and Austrians to navigate a radically changed political and cultural landscape and reestablish lives upended by war by denying complicity in perpetuating antisemitic ideology. The deeply ingrained cultural practices that formed the basis for age-old prejudices against Jews persisted via coded references, taking new forms, and providing fertile ground for explicit eruptions. Decades before the Nazi persecution of the Jews would emerge as a master moral paradigm of evil in popular culture, the constructed Antisemite became part of a forceful narrative structure that allowed stereotypes about Jews to persist, even as explicit antisemitism became taboo.Lisa Silverman examines the crucial development and implications of the figural Antisemite in a range of trials, films, and texts during the first years after the end of the Second World War. She argues that, in their economically shattered, emotionally exhausted, and culturally impoverished postwar world, Austrians, Ger