For the moment, let us put aside murderous acts of antisemitism of the sort that Garry Wills has called “too grotesque for credence.” If, instead, we consider the mundane, we are struck by the superfluous regulatory and everyday humiliation inflicted on German Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, notably in Frankfurt, where a ghetto was maintained. Indeed it was reinstated after the Napoleonic period, although after 1816 Jews were not obliged to live in it. Yet there was a wide range of wholly gratuitous and astonishingly detailed regulations as to where Jews were allowed to walk (they would have to get off the pavement if a Gentile approached) and how they were to defer to and humble themselves in the presence of non-Jews and so on. What on earth was the point of all this? It could surely not have been to keep the Jews in order out of fear of some kind of uprising, as would be the case with a large population of helots or slaves. That was never a possibility, and anyway Jews numbered less than 2 percent of the German population. And if there were to be riots it would be on the part of Christians attacking Jews in a seemingly random fashion, as in the notorious “Hep Hep Riots” that broke out all over Germany in 1819. Synagogues were attacked, Jews murdered, etc., although in Berlin, which had the largest number of Jews of any German city, there was no trouble. But none of the quotidian humiliations to which Jews were subjected served any practical civic purpose whatsoever … but for the role they might have filled in bonding non-Jews together, in “love,” that is to say, in the fashion noted above by Freud.

Therefore, in attempting to come to terms with an event (the Holocaust) toward which the conflicting strands of German Jewish, German Gentile histories intertwine, two possible but discrete and even disharmonious frameworks can be identified: the psychological and the administrative or social.