ABSTRACT
In the concluding chapter, National Socialist antisemitism is revisited. It is shown how even this most obsessive and inscrutable of phobias can be vitally illuminated when “the Jew” is considered as part of the mass problematic. Indeed, in the Nazi imaginary, the Jew—“from Moses to Lenin,” as Dietrich Eckart put it—was regarded as the very wire-puller of the mass revolt, the leader of the uprising slaves, infecting the lower orders with discontent and turning them against their social superiors and national brothers. The goal is not to provide the definitive answer to the riddle of the Shoah, whose enormity is surely bound to defy all efforts of final signification, but to claim that no possible answer can afford to overlook the centrality of this conspiracy theory.
