Gaining resonance from 1918, pacifism joined socialist internationalism and Communists’ novel militancy. The League of Nations drew much of that sentiment, from refugees and humanitarian relief through public health and the ILO to nutritional science and development economics, claiming economic planning, scientific and technological transfer, and humanitarian cooperation for new networked expertise. Self-consciously “Europeanist” initiatives formed, including fascist ideas of a united European “great space” under Mussolini and Hitler. By 1936–1939, imperialist visions of a New Europe made population politics key to international revisionism, exchanging self-determination and minority protections for greater-national expansion and population removal. Brutally radicalized by the Nazis’ Kristallnacht (November 1938), antisemitism became a violent driver. In 1937–1941, anti-Jewish laws reversed earlier emancipation – from Poland and Romania, through Italy and Hungary, to Czecho-Slovakia, Croatia, and Vichy France. That was the ugly backcloth to Hitler’s drive for war. In September 1939, vitally enabled by Franco-British appeasement and the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Hitler invaded Poland.

This chapter considers modernity from the perspective of the self-fashioning subject, stressing both the centrality of Jews to European modernity and their precarity. It pairs two contexts of change: the central-European crucible of Jewish modernity from the 1880s to 1920s; and the influence of psychoanalysis and Freudian-related thought. Torn between assimilation and collective identification against discrimination and antisemitism, many exchanged rural Judaism for emancipated intellectuality and leftwing political action. By the 1920s, a transnationally scaled antagonism pitted cosmopolitanism and this mobile intellectual culture of the highly educated against exclusivist ideas of national belonging. Freud’s life and career exemplified those histories. As a “scientific” approach to the study of mind, consciousness, and emotions, Freudianism reached far beyond the professional therapeutics of psychoanalysis itself. It joined far wider thinking about personhood and the unconscious, including other psychologies, spiritualism, esoteric knowledge, and the occult. It appealed to anyone seeking enlightenment by means of a self-consciously crafted modern self.

After 1917–1923, Europe’s polities varied across democracy and dictatorship. The agrarian east and south passed under dictatorship: Iberia, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, Yugoslavia, then Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, and Greece. Liberal constitutionalism lasted in France, Britain, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. In Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia democratic republics faced polarized political cultures. Italy was fascist; the USSR socialist. Corporatism – government-brokered convergence of organized interests – shaped constitutional states, above all in Scandinavia, with its strong labor movements. Corporatism in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia was inflected by social democracy, but in societies riven by liberal-conservative enmities and religious, regional or ethno-cultural cleavage. Fascism beckoned as an extreme remedy for chronic parliamentary instability, where leftist defense impeded capitalist stabilization. Nazism and its state mapped onto this topography. Via the Belgian Plan de Man, the French Popular Front, and the Spanish Civil War, the polarizing fallout from rightwing radicalization cast western Europe into crisis.

The relevance of ecological ideals in lands occupied by Nazi forces would seem to be completely overshadowed by the ruinous impact of war. The book’s final chapter challenges this view through a thoroughly documented alternative analysis. Hitler’s vision of creating “a garden of Eden in the east” imbued longstanding racial myths with an ecological dimension, a call to restore harmony to the natural world, which in turn provided a crucial opening for environmentalists. The landscape advocates worked closely with German military authorities throughout occupied Europe on “green” programs that combined martial and environmental values. After the 1941 dissolution of the Reich League for Biodynamic Agriculture, leading biodynamic figures found a new institutional home in Himmler’s SS, working on settlement activities in the East and designing idealized rural communities founded on blood and soil precepts. The large biodynamic plantation at the Dachau concentration camp, growing organic products for the SS, served as a training center for environmental renewal as an integral part of occupation policy. Far from being consigned to insignificance, the full panoply of ecological aspirations came into their own in the midst of war. Their realization was prevented not by internal obstruction but by Germany’s defeat.

Two: I assess the parallel history of the saintlike pelican – Christ to the cormorant’s Satan – describing the close interweaving of the symbolic histories of these two birds over time. In the process, I address the tradition of the ‘vulning’ pelican, focusing on the destructive pairing of cormorant and pelican in Richard II and then turning to The Merchant of Venice, in which the mutual loathing of Shylock and Antonio is expressed through their respective implied identities as cormorant and pelican, and I discuss the historic antisemitic association of cormorants. I then reflect on the crucified cormorant in modern writing and culture, briefly discussing also the redemption of the cormorant in contemporary British young adult fiction. I conclude with an account of a recent poem by African-American poet Tiana Clark in which, reversing centuries of racist association with the bird, she finds her own post-Christian identity in the cormorant.

The posthumous reception of the life and works of Felix Mendelssohn differs from that of any other composer of his generation. The unique esteem and admiration he experienced during his lifetime, especially in Germany and England, changed into a more ambivalent or critical evaluation, often tinged with anti-Semitic ressentiments. In a musical culture that valued progress, genius and nationalist narratives, he was increasingly sidelined by music writers and composers because of his stylistic choices, his perceived embodiment of bourgeois values and his cosmopolitanism, despite his continued popularity with performers and audiences. Mendelssohn’s reception reached its nadir when his works were banned in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. Since then, interest in the composer has increased, supported by scholarly editions of his works and letters, and his symphonies, concert overtures and oratorios are performed consistently, although his choral music and piano pieces have suffered from the decline in amateur music-making.

Taking its cue from passages in the Mendelssohn family’s correspondence concerning aspects of Jewish tradition and Christian conversion, and drawing on the work of modern scholars, the chapter considers from a variety of angles the sense of Jewishness with which Fanny Hensel’s and Felix Mendelssohn’s lives were imbued. With reference to a range of literature on Jewish history, the question of the siblings’ Jewish identity is explored in the wider context of German Jewish social and religious life at the time, as well as its implications within the Mendelssohn family’s private circle, for example, inter-generational tensions. Attention is given to the reception history of the family’s Jewish identity in the context of anti-Jewish attitudes, reflected in a range of sources including the remarks of the siblings’ composition tutor, Carl Friedrich Zelter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and the writings of Richard Wagner, while also identifying echoes in modern Mendelssohn scholarship.

Schoenberg claimed to be the successor of Richard Wagner in the tradition of German and Austrian music culture. For this reason, he had to deal with the latter’s antisemitic nationalism throughout his life. For Schoenberg, on the other hand, Wagner was at the centre of his artistic concerns, which always retained its vitality. The chapter shows that Wagner is at the centre of Schoenberg’s compositional experiments in his early work around 1900. In 1910, Schoenberg uses Wagner’s ideas as a starting point to justify his radical expressionism. Around 1920, he takes Wagner to task for introducing the twelve- tone technique; and around 1930 he fights with Wagner for his right to a German culture. In this way, Wagner’s enduring fascination is put at the service of continually changing needs.

The chapter looks at fin-de-siècle Vienna, and reviews its cultural politics, the impact of its city life on writing and artistic expression and, above all, the new attention to language that was absorbed into literature and poetry emanating from French Symbolism. The dangers of lapsing into an aestheticism that denied political reality is discussed, and there is a focus on the importance of the indirect impact such perceived changes in expression and the value of poetic language had on Schoenberg, and indeed on Berg and Webern. Key figures included here include Rilke, Schnitzler and, above, all Hofmannsthal and Stephen George, taken here as writing in crucially different modernist modes, but both directly influential.

Schoenberg’s music has always attracted the avid attention of critics. Some ridiculed his music, especially at first, while others came to respond favourably to its modernist demands. This chapter explores trends in the critical reception of Schoenberg as they have varied across time and place, from his initial entry into the Viennese music world in the early 1900s, through the increasingly harsh, often antisemitic rejections he endured in the 1920s and 1930s, to his re-evaluation in the post-war years, particularly in the United States. In addition, it highlights the composer’s reactions to some of the harsher criticism he received.

Who was God for Schoenberg? And what did Schoenberg believe was the necessary human response? Schoenberg’s spiritual and intellectual path was long and winding, often iconoclastic, shaped by antisemitism and personal losses, and always characterized by a deeply personal quest for a transcendent truth – an Ideal or Idea [Gedanke] – that was at the same time intuitively known but inexpressible by human means. The path ultimately led him to a passionate Zionism, an unshakeable belief in ‘one, eternal, all-powerful, invisible and unrepresentable God’, and a corresponding ascetic spirituality that survived both inward anguish and political persecution.

Arnold Schönberg’s Mödling residence (1918–25) is often referred to as the ‘birthplace of twelve-tone composition’. This influential method, however, was not an invention of the moment, but emerged in a protracted development process, many of the stages of which can be traced back to this place on the outskirts of Vienna. At Schönberg’s longest continuous residence in Europe, the influential Society for Private Musical Performances was founded, numerous students were taught and renowned composer-colleagues were received. Mödling was Schoenberg’s launching point for travels that accompanied his growing international recognition. He left the small town in 1925, when he was appointed professor of a master class in composition at the Academy of Arts in Berlin.

This chapter follows “the long 1960s” in Western Europe. Although the decade began with a transnational “Swastika Epidemic,” it was a pivotal moment for philosemitism in the postwar period. The passing of the first hate-speech laws, the decline of antisemitism in public opinion polls, and the entry of the Holocaust into public culture, reflected this new climate. Students who in 1967–68 imagined themselves as “long-hair ersatz Jews” in West Germany, or chanted “We are all German Jews” in Paris, admittedly distorted the meaning of the Holocaust. In the Federal Republic, the New Left also rebelled against the official philosemitism of the “fascist” Bonn Republic. But “the year of the barricades” had long-lasting consequences for European philosemitism. Although one outcome of the student movement in West Germany was ultra-leftism, another one was memory activism. In France, critical interrogations of the Vichy past soon followed the May events: the path to erinnerungskultur [remembrance culture] and devoir de mémoire [duty of memory] began in 1968.