[Education for Murder: The Concept of Anti-Semitism in the Work of Wolfgang Heise and in the Context of the Debate on National Socialism]

The historiographical verdict on the study of National Socialism in the GDR is damning: it is reductionist, thematically narrow, and blind to the specific nature of the Shoah. This lecture seeks to qualify this assessment by drawing on the work of the philosopher Wolfgang Heise (1925–1987). In the early 1960s, Heise developed a concept of anti-Semitism that integrates both intellectual-historical and socio-psychological aspects and describes the function of anti-Semitism as an instrument of domination in various historical contexts. Central to this is his thesis that Nazi terror fulfilled a deliberate function of corruption. It conditioned people to murder by binding them to the regime through participation in exclusion and violence. Heise’s texts thus prove to be a hitherto little-noticed contribution to fascism theory that extends beyond the context of the GDR.