Kristallnacht 2025
It’s been over a week since we commemorated Kristallnacht, but it left a deeper imprint than before. It came with all the traditional reminders that time is passing quickly for survivors, that many are in their late eighties and nineties, and first-hand testimony will soon be gone. My in-laws, Rose and Daniel Blue, live on in their stories, their photographs, and our memories, but it is no replacement for their living presence. My own death will likely coincide with the final disappearance of child survivors born immediately before or during the war. After that, it will all be over.
The other reason is echoes and parallels. As many historians have pointed out, Kristallnacht was a kind of stress test. How much violence would German citizens tolerate when it came to the elimination of their Jewish neighbors? Would they rise up in anger and reject deportation and genocide, or comply with authorities and cheer the destruction.
They did a little of the first and whole lot of the second. The riots of Kristallnacht, the beatings, and the vandalism were not a spontaneous demonstration of civilian will. In fact, they were shaped by nazi decision-makers, with robust support from the instruments of power. But German civilians were generally tolerant of the abuse and, in many cases, participated themselves. The important thing is that nobody doused the flames. Germans gathered in the streets before burning synagogues to mark the end of German Jewish civilization. They walked through the glass littering the streets and sidewalks with no special show of sorrow or alarm.
We are, of course, in the middle of such a test. Beatings, roundups, rough-edged policing. The instruments of state are being used against individuals who have brought irritation and peril to those in power. The Administration is workshopping new definitions of citizenship. That means a shift from the idea of voluntary covenant, of legal naturalization and the ingathering of the oppressed to the blood-and-soil qualification of generational rootedness. Who is an American? Ask J.D. Vance. He will tell you it’s someone whose distant English-speaking ancestors cultivated this land way back in the day.
We have told ourselves for decades that the Sho’ah (Holocaust) is sui generis, and that we should be careful not to reduce its power by comparing it to lesser evils. I respectfully argue that a new period is upon us, when comparisons feel legitimate, worrisome, and prescient.