Interest in the politics of anti-semitism tends to be retrospective. Had one been asked in the 1890s where it was likely to triumph in its most totalitarian and destructive form, one would not necessarily have forecast Germany. Compared with the uproar caused by the Dreyfus Affair, or the pogroms in Tsarist Russia or the election of Karl Lueger to the mayoralty of Vienna, small-time demagogues like Adolf Stoecker or Hermann Ahlwardt must have seemed insignificant. Even in the interwar years, at least until 1933, Jewish-Gentile conflicts in Hungary, Romania and Poland attracted as much attention as those in Germany. If we seek to justify the immense amount of research that has gone into antisemitic and racialist ideas and organisation in pre-1918 Germany, we must point to that diseased child of the fin-de-siécle, Adolf Hitler, who did not invent them, or even add anything to their stock of ideas, but who realised their potential as others had only dreamt of them. To put it another way round: Hitler and the Nazis could not have succeeded, had not a stock of attitudes and prejudices, and a core of potential followers, already existed.

One of the first to appreciate the need to explain this particular aspect of the present by this particular part of the past was the German-born scholar Paul Massing. A graduate of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research and the Nazi concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, a member of the antiN azi Resistance whose brief flirtation with Communism was ended by the Stalin purges, he taught, after his emigration to the USA at the New School of Social Research in New York and then at Rutgers University. It was while he was at the Institute that he participated in a series of theoretical and empirical studies of anti-semitism, of which the present work was one of the products. It was first published in English in 1949 under the title of Rehearsal for Destruction. The edition under review is a reprint of the German translation of 1958.

The title betrays the book's strength and weakness. Massing's somewhat heterodox Marxism led him to seek structural causes for German anti-semitism in the social and economic transformation of the late nineteenth century.