Toward The Final Solution

Plot

Racism incorporated the important ideas and movements of the 19th-20th centuries and promised to solve the problems created by modernization. Traces the development of racism from the Enlightenment attitude towards Blacks and the beginnings of anthropology in the early 19th century. Organic nationalism and "völkisch" nationalism in Germany denied that Jews could become part of the nation or speak its language. Eugenics, which developed in England from social Darwinism, was not necessarily racist, but spread the fear of "degeneration" and of hereditary depravity, which was then identified with Jewishness. Discusses also the occult or mystical element of racism. Surveys the rise of political antisemitism in France and Germany from the 1870s, the effects of World War I and the Russian Revolution, Nazism and the Holocaust.