Laboratory for World Destruction: Germans and Jews in Central Europe

by Robert S. Wistrich

Published and distributed for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism

During the sixty years between the founding of Bismarck’s German Empire and Hitler’s rise to power, German-speaking Jews left a profound mark on Central Europe and on twentieth-century culture as a whole. How would the modern world look today without Einstein, Freud, or Marx? Without Mahler, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, or Kafka? Without a whole galaxy of other outstanding Jewish scientists, poets, playwrights, composers, critics, historians, sociologists, psychoanalysts, jurists, and philosophers? How was it possible that this vibrant period in Central European cultural history collapsed into the horror and mass murder of the Nazi Holocaust? Was there some connection between the dazzling achievements of these Jews and the ferocity of the German backlash? Robert S. Wistrich’s Laboratory for World Destruction is a bold and penetrating study of the fateful symbiosis between Germans and Jews in Central Europe, which culminated in the tragic denouement of the Holocaust. Wistrich shows that the seeds of the catastrophe were already sown in the Hapsburg Empire, which would become, in Karl Kraus’s words, “an experimental station in the destruction of the world.” Featured are incisive chapters on Freud, Herzl, Lueger, Kraus, Nordau, Nietzsche, and Hitler, along with a sweeping panorama of the golden age of Central European Jewry before the lights went out in Europe.

410 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2007

About the author

See Robert Wistrich

Robert Solomon Wistrich (Hebrew: רוברט ויסטריך) was a scholar of antisemitism, considered one of the world's foremost authorities on antisemitism.

The Erich Neuberger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he was also the head of the university's Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA). Wistrich considered antisemitism "the longest hatred" and viewed anti-Zionism as its latest incarnation.

Robert Wistrich was born in Lenger, in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic on April 7, 1945. His parents were leftist Polish Jews who had moved to Lviv in 1940 in order to escape from the Germans; however, they discovered that Soviet-style totalitarianism was little better than Nazism. In 1942 they moved to Kazakhstan, where Wistrich's father was imprisoned twice by the NKVD. After World War II, the Wistrichs returned to Poland. Later, finding the post-war environment in Poland to be dangerously anti-Semitic, the family moved to France and then to England. Wistrich grew up in England, where he went to Kilburn Grammar School, where in Wistrich's words, he was taught by "Walter Isaacson, a refugee from Nazi Germany who first taught me how to think independently" His parents later returned to Poland under a repatriation agreement between Stalin and the Polish government-in-exile.

In December 1962, aged 17, Wistrich won an Open Scholarship to study history at Queens' College, Cambridge. In 1966 he graduated with a BA (Hons) from the University of Cambridge, which was raised to a MA degree in 1969. At Cambridge, he founded Circuit, a literary and arts magazine that he co-edited between 1966 and 1969. Between 1969 and 1970, during a study year in Israel, he became the youngest ever literary editor of New Outlook, a left-wing monthly in Tel Aviv, founded by Martin Buber. Wistrich received his Ph.D. from the University of London in 1974.