The Turn of the Screw : NAZI GERMANY AND THE JEWS: The Years of Persecution, Volume 1.<i> By Saul Friedlander</i> . <i> HarperCollins: 436 pp, $30</i>

On Nazism and the Jews a great deal has been written--personal accounts and learned monographs--but there are very few full-scale, general works and, as far as the prewar period is concerned, Saul Friedlander’s work (the first of two volumes) is not just a fine book, it is the only one we have so far. He covers the period from Hitler’s rise to power to the outbreak of World War II, and he describes both how decisions were taken by the Nazi top leadership to solve the “Jewish question” and how the Jews of Germany (and later also Austria) reacted.

The author belongs to the generation of historians born on the eve of the Nazi era, and he spent his early years in Nazi-occupied Europe. He now teaches at UCLA and at Tel Aviv University and is well known as an advocate of various innovative approaches, such as psychohistory and the whole complex of “history and memory.”

At a certain stage in his professional career, he became prominently involved in a dispute among historians that has raged for almost a quarter of a century, the debate between “functionalists” and “intentionalists.”

The argument of the functionalists in briefest outline (to paraphrase the author) is that Nazism was driven by the chaotic clash of competing bureaucratic and party fiefdoms and that the planning of its anti-Jewish policy was mainly left to the cost / benefit calculations of technocrats.

In other words, ideology was of relatively little importance, Hitler was basically a weak dictator and the Holocaust happened at least partly by accident: One thing led to another; having killed some Jews, the bureaucrats had to also kill the rest. Most of the functionalists are German, but there are also some in England and America. They do not deny that mass murder took place, but they certainly deny its uniqueness--mass murder, after all, did take place at various times throughout history.

The intentionalists, on the other hand, emphasize the crucial importance of anti-Semitism in Nazi ideology and the leading role of Hitler in the whole process. While Hitler was not omnipotent, he made all important decisions (or at least could have made had he wanted); while he did not have a blueprint as to how exactly to exterminate the Jews from the beginning and while he considered a variety of schemes over the years--to deport, shoot or poison them--his central aim, his basic intention, never changed.

Friedlander is an intentionalist, though he stresses from time to time that he does not wish to return to the simplistic early interpretations with their emphasis on the role and sole responsibility of the Fuhrer. Such assurances make sense in the context of academic polemics in order to secure one’s flanks in academic battle, but I am not sure whether they are really necessary. For even the most primitive intentionalist is infinitely closer to historical truth than the functionalists, preoccupied with their outlandish constructions.

If Hitler had been assassinated in 1936, chances are that World War II would not have broken out and that millions of Jews would not have been killed. Hitler, needless to say, was not the only person in Germany dreaming about territorial expansion nor the only rabid anti-Semite. But no other Nazi leader had the total self-assurance, the willingness to gamble, the authority, the single-mindedness and the evil genius of Hitler.

There still would have been conflicts between Germany and her neighbors, and it is doubtful whether there would have been much of a future for the Jews in Germany. In brief, history, in all likelihood, would have taken another turn, and Daniel Goldhagen would have written a pioneering bestseller about Romanian anti-Semitism. Of course, Hitler did survive, and hence the disasters that followed.

There is but little doubt that we owe this work to the author’s involvement in a debate that should never have taken place but which, given the historians’ restlessness, boredom with traditional approaches and other academic deformations, was probably inevitable.

About half a million Jews lived in Germany when Hitler came to power, and Friedlander describes what happened to them in the years thereafter. This is an old-fashioned book and very readable, mercifully free of fashionable professional jargon. The material is presented in chronological order with a great deal of illuminating anecdote, mainly concerning the strange fate of individuals.

The author expresses fears in the very beginning that his approach, being both analytic and evocative, leads him into difficulties that cannot be resolved. He should not have worried: It is the only possible approach, and it succeeds admirably. Perhaps the only discordant note is the use of a new term invented by the author--”redemptive anti-Semitism”--that obfuscates more than it enlightens the reader and in any case does not add to our knowledge; unfortunately, the use of neologisms of this kind has spread from political science to history.

The harassment of the Jews and the persecutions began almost immediately after Hitler’s seizure of power. They were gradually deprived of their civic rights and ultimately put outside the law. If they were state employees, they were dismissed; professionals were forbidden to practice; businessmen were deprived of their livelihood. They were not allowed to attend the theater and concerts, to sit down on benches in a park, to swim in a public pool. Eventually they were not permitted to own a telephone, a radio or a car or use public transport.

However, these measures were imposed gradually over the years, partly because Hitler was at first apprehensive about foreign reactions, partly because the Nazis did not find it easy to adopt a precise legal definition of a Jew. There had been a great deal of intermarriage over several generations, and there were tens of thousands of Mischlinge--those with one, two or three Jewish grandparents. Each category was differently treated and even the Nuremberg laws of 1935, which were to provide the legal underpinning to the systematic persecutions, left a great deal to interpretation. Highly placed Nazi leaders could transform a Jew into a Mischling and a Mischling into an Aryan. As Goering put it: “I am deciding who is a Jew. . . .” A few distinguished or well-connected people survived as a result.

Some years were better than others; during 1936, the Nazis were on their best behavior trying to show the world during that year of the Berlin Olympic Games that the new Germany was not only a proudly successful but also a humane country. The year after, the persecutions were intensified. 1938 was a turning point; even before Kristallnacht, the pogrom of Nov. 9 and 10, new and more severe measures were prepared to make life for the Jews impossible.

Seen in retrospect, it is a great pity that the full severity of Nazi policy was not felt from the very beginning, as it was in Austria after the German invasion in 1938. For if the persecutions starting in 1933 had been more concentrated, less gradual, had been even more traumatic, it stands to reason that the German Jews would have tried even harder to emigrate. As it was, a somewhat higher percentage of Jews left Austria in one year than left Germany in six.

Like other authors before him, Friedlander seems a little shocked by the small number of Jews who emigrated from Germany, and he gives the figures more than once--37,000 in 1933, 21,000 to 25,000 each year thereafter.

How could the Jews be so shortsighted as to not see the writing on the wall? It is perfectly true that a considerable number of them hoped, at least in the beginning, that the Nazi regime would not last long or, at least, would moderate its policies. Friedlander blames, in fact, the Jewish leadership, including even the Zionists, for not having shown a sense of urgency.

This is, broadly speaking, correct, but it is the kind of judgment making full use of the benefits of hindsight: In 1933 or 1934, no more than a handful of experienced observers anywhere in the world had reached the conclusion that Hitler’s policy would lead to a world war involving, among other things, the destruction of European Jewry.

Nazism, with its unbridled aggression and radicalism, was a new political phenomenon, not just another traditional right-wing dictatorship. It took years for this insight to percolate. More important yet, there were many in Nazi Germany desperately eager to leave, but no one wanted to have them. America had closed its gates, Britain took a few thousand children and domestic servants (but only during the last year before the war started). In France, as Friedlander relates, even Jewish leaders showed no willingness to absorb some of their unfortunate coreligionists from beyond the Rhine. It was the same everywhere, even in Palestine, which Britain was administering to develop a Jewish national home. But immigration to Palestine had never been quite free, and in 1936, as the result of Arab riots, it was cut to a mere trickle.

In the end only Shanghai remained, Manchukuo (a Japanese puppet state in Manchuria) and some of the smaller South American and Central American countries, but only for people with certain qualifications and at least some money. Unfortunately, many German Jews could not afford the ticket to Shanghai or Latin America.

If the German Jewish leaders had sounded the tocsin as loudly as they possibly could, a few thousand more would probably have been saved. But for the majority, there was no escape. No author can feel equally at home dealing with the many aspects of this wide subject. He has to rely on secondary literature; he cannot check every fact and figure, and thus inevitably mistakes have crept into this magisterial work. To give but a few examples: Albert Ballin, the founder of Germany’s biggest shipping concern, was no more its owner than Lee Iacocca was the owner of Chrysler. While the German Communists had purged most Jews from their parliamentary faction by 1932, it is not true, as Friedlander writes, that none were left. The writer Carl von Ossietzky, the Nobel Prize winner, was detained in a concentration camp but did not die there, and to argue that many Nazi practitioners of mass murder in the East took their cue from a book written by an obscure academic (Peter Heinz Seraphim) seems incredible; there is no evidence that even one of them read it or even heard of it.

There is a certain tendency in this book to lump together organizations and individuals who have little in common. There was a major German Jewish association of war veterans (RJF) and a tiny ultra-conservative fringe group of Jewish superpatriots that no one took very seriously. Yet Friedlander makes it appear as if the latter owned the former, which was quite untrue. He brackets a right-wing Catholic thinker such as Georges Bernanos (who later became a staunch anti-Nazi) or some conventional establishment figures like Paul Morand and Jean Giraudoux with the most fanatic and vicious pamphleteers, like Celine. He mentions Gerhart Hauptmann, Germany’s most famous playwright at one time, and relates that of the five distinguished critics attending the first performance of one of his plays, two did not like it and that these two were not Jewish. But since Hauptmann was not a Jew either, nor anyone else of those mentioned (except one who had converted), and since the play was weak in any case, it is not easy to understand what point the author wanted to make that could be of relevance to Nazi policy and the Jews.

These are cosmetic shortcomings.

The merits of this work are many; it is easily the best book of a distinguished historian. It is based on a great variety of sources, published and unpublished, and the judgment of the author cannot be faulted on any major issue. It is a much-needed book at a time when this specific field has been subjected to a considerable amount of charlatanism, uninformed and wholly subjective writing.

This is a very good, very important book. It needed to be written before the last historians disappear who, because of the date and place of their birth and their personal experience, know certain things in their bones about the period of the Holocaust. These are matters that will demand in future generations an enormous amount of empathy that I suspect only a few will have.

In principle, history can, of course, be written by anyone about any period, however distant, and quite often distance in time will provide a certain detachment that may be all to the good. But this is true, by and large, with regard to “normal periods,” be it ages of peace or war.

The Holocaust was not a normal event; in modern times, it is so remote from the life experience of historians belonging to a later generation that understanding becomes very difficult indeed. It is even now much easier for a young historian to understand the Emperor Augustus than Adolf Hitler or the reactions of his victims.

A survivor of the Holocaust, Friedlander--with his training as a historian, his knowledge of sources and languages and his moving and forceful literary style--was in a unique position to write what is likely to be the definitive work.