Marr, Wilhelm. Der Sieg des Judenthums uber das Germanenthum, Vom Nicht Confessionellen Standpunkt Aus Betrachtet [”The Victory of Judaism over Germanism.”]

(ANTISEMITICA).

Rudolph Costenoble

Bern

1879

This important pamphlet became “the first anti-Semitic bestseller” and was received enthusiastically by the German public - it went through twelve editions in its first year of publication. Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904) introduced the idea that Germans and Jews were locked in a long-standing conflict, the origins of which he attributed to race - and that the Jews were winning. He argued that Jewish emancipation resulting from German liberalism had allowed the Jews to control German finance and industry. Furthermore, since this conflict was based on the genetic incompatibility of the Jewish and German races, it could not be resolved even by the total assimilation of the Jewish population. According to him, the struggle between Jews and Germans would only be resolved by the victory of one and the ultimate death of the other. A Jewish victory, he concluded, would result in finis Germaniae (the end of the German people). To prevent this from happening, in 1879 Marr founded the League of Antisemites (Antisemiten-Liga), the first German organization committed specifically to combating the alleged threat to Germany posed by the Jews and advocating their forced removal from the country. See M. Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr, the Patriarch of Anti-Semitism (1986).