Living space
The Holocaust Encyclopedia on Lebensraum:
The concept of Lebensraum—or “living space”—served as a critical component in the Nazi worldview that drove both its military conquests and racial policy.
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Long before the Nazi period, many Germans looked to eastern Europe as the natural source of their Lebensraum. Beginning in the Middle Ages, the social and economic pressures of over-population in the German states had led to a steady colonization of Germanic peoples in eastern Europe. Increasingly by the twentieth century, however, scholars and the public alike began to view the East as a region whose vast natural resources were wasted on racially “inferior” peoples like Slavs and Jews. A biological view of Lebensraum resonated with an inaccurate historical view of the German role in the East during the ancient and medieval periods. Expansionists clung to this mythic German “history” in eastern Europe, arguing that these regions were actually lost German lands. As one German publication stated in 1916, “we Germanic people build up—create—the Slav broods and dreams—like his earth.”
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In the Nazi state, Lebensraum became not just a romantic yearning for a return to the East but a vital strategic component of its imperial and racist visions. For the Germans, eastern Europe represented their “Manifest Destiny.” Hitler and other Nazi thinkers drew direct comparisons to American expansion in the West. During one of his famous “table talks,” Hitler decreed that “there’s only one duty: to Germanize this country [Russia] by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as Redskins.”
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The concept of Lebensraum was not solely responsible for the Holocaust, but powerfully connected a variety of imperialist, nationalist, and racist currents that would contribute to the murder of the Jews of Europe.
Not a word to deploy lightly.
This seems a pretty clear-cut case for why I use Lebensraum. I did not do it lightly, I chose it deliberately because there is no better word to describe the Nakba and its fall out.
I’d readily call any comparison between Israelis and Nazis anti-Semitic, but you’re not seeing some parallels with the Israeli settler movement? Definitely doesn’t map on 1:1, but it’s like the apartheid thing: not the same as apartheid but with some significant commonalities. Conflating the settler movement with “lebensraum” isn’t like conflating trans shit with gay rights; not sure exactly what it is (beyond what I said about the anti-Semitism).
Maybe it’s just better to go back to the Book of Joshua, ‘cuz right wing Israelis themselves are fans of that book… Or am I being unfair to them?
The Israeli settler movement is horrible, but I think using Nazi language to say that is also horrible.
The thing about Lebensraum is that it was a mad delusion; as the article touches upon, Germans had already established — well before the idea of Lebensraum was first articulated — communities and entire settlements across Eastern Europe for centuries, from the Sudetenland to the Volga, from Karelia to the Caucasus, eventually summing up to some millions of German-speaking peoples whose great grandparents might have once come from lands officially recognised as Germany or Austria. There are even some comparisons between the urban enclaves of Germans and the successful Jewish communities in those same places (members of which tended to speak Yiddish, which at its root is a dialect of West Germanic and thus a sibling of German, though the further east one goes the more Polish and Russian influence it naturally has) — though that is somewhat beyond the scope of this discussion.
In any case, by the time Hitler came along and turned the Lebensraum idea from a vague myth of a Germanic Manifest Destiny into a program of systemic annihilation for the Slavs, there were already many Germans living in that space; reality itself contradicted the myth. The whole enterprise was, in a sense, based upon a deep misunderstanding of the geopolitics of the day and the history which had brought them about. (For one thing, the Promised Land for Germans who could not scrape together a decent life in the Germany of the 18th and 19th centuries was the United States, where to this day German is the single largest ethnic group, or would be if most of the descendants of German migrants didn’t think of themselves as unambiguously American.)
What people tend to forget about the myth, though, is what it cost the Germans in the end. Fourteen million people were resettled into a Germany that many of them had never seen, and virtually every single ethnic German in Eastern Europe was ejected from their ancestral homeland, with a destination either to a territorially reduced Germany under occupation or to a gulag in Siberia. It was the utter inversion of the Nazi dream.
And it must be said that, as horrible as it was, this genocide turned out to be perfectly fine for the country in the long run. The Germany of today is territorially significantly smaller than the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm or Adolf Hitler, with over twenty million more inhabitants, and — despite some significant problems caused by well-meaning but poorly-executed policy — is still one of the most prosperous and orderly and safest countries in the history of the world.
So not only were the causes of the myth of Lebensraum born of a deep confusion, the effects of same turned out diametrically opposed to the theory. History has thus proven that the Lebensraum idea, aside from being a monstrous and nightmarish fantasy, was utterly unnecessary.
The situations of Germany in the early 20th century and Israel in the early 21st are somewhat comparable, but an allusion to Lebensraum is somewhat far off the mark as a metaphor for the illegal settler colonialism occurring in the West Bank. For one thing, though the Israeli government seems to comprise a bunch of religious-ethnic nationalists, they *do* consider the settlements illegal. In the fairly recent past Israel has even de-Judaised Gaza, very much against the will of the Jewish settlers there. And Israel is not committing genocide against the Palestinians in a war of annihilation to clear the land for Jewish settlement — or if they are, they’ve been doing a pisspoor job at it, given the continual population growth of Palestinians.
The situation in the Levant is sui generis, and so every comparison is apt to fail, but the Lebensraum comparison is particularly ineffective for giving a true idea of the scope of the issue. At its worst, it obscures the actual history of the Lebensraum idea and the disastrous consequences of that, incidentally giving cover to neonazis who would love to point toward Israel as an excuse for reviving their terrible ideas.
The comparison only works as a rhetorical cudgel against Jews, because of their suffering at the hands of the Nazis. Perhaps this attack can even be well meaning, a sort of ‘you have become what you most feared’ intervention. But I doubt the people who wield it with the most alacrity have thought about it nearly so much.
I have seriously conflicted feelings about the plights of both Jews and Palestinians.
I had a Jewish friend for many years; she once complained to me that Palestinians should just assimilate in the other Arabic/Islamic states, territories, and societies to which they had been removed, and not claim some kind of right of return. I was rather surprised by this, because Jews in the European diaspora, for example, were discriminated against and viewed suspiciously precisely because they kept themselves and their traditions apart, and did not simply and fully assimilate in the places where they were. This separation enabled the Jews to preserve their religious and cultural traditions, although there have been schisms among the Jewish traditions themselves: Judaism is not a monolith; it is not just one homogeneous thing. In any case, my friend’s inability to apprehend the irony of her comment was particularly striking to me.
In general, I do not favor theocracy as a form of government. I think it was a mistake to establish one on purpose, even though the motivations for the establishment of Israel were understandable at an emotional level in response to the Holocaust.
I have no particular solutions to the intractable problems of Middle East geopolitics and religio-politics, given the current situation on the ground.
My 2¢ probably isn’t even worth 2¢.
Maddog, I have conflicted feelings, too. They are difficult to articulate at times, because I do sincerely believe that the Jews need a homeland, and Israel is the logical place. The disheartening thing is that I often hear Likud and Likud supporters referring to Palestinians as vermin, forgetting the reason that they themselves moved to and settled in Palestine. The hatred for people based on their ethnic background is a severely compounding factor in making a peaceful solution difficult to imagine. The events of October 7, and the continued holding of Jewish women and children as hostages, certainly cemented my feelings of support for the Zionist position; while at the same time seeing the immense hardship this puts Palestinian civilians under is also tugging at my humanity strings.
That being said, the world’s failure to denounce Hamas for its brutal rapes and murders of Jewish women is reprehensible, and calls for ceasefire that don’t recognize the need to punish Hamas for those horrific crimes don’t inspire me.
I think part of the problem is the degree of misinformation out there. Because the West Bank settlements are officially illegal, it seems to be quite difficult to find data on migration figures.
The closest I can find is Al Mayadeen in December saying that nearly half a million Jews have left Palestine following 7/10.
https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/nearly-half-a-million-israelis-left-occupied-palestine-since
I’m not sure if I’m misinterpreting the report though, because I’m not sure what they mean by “Palestine”. Still it does make me wonder about the claim that there is this vast demand for land from European Jews.
Even as the Likud government is building more homes there.
It certainly doesn’t make sense to me that there would be this surge of people wanting to live in what could potentially be the next front in a war zone. It just doesn’t seem to me to be adding up.
True, words like that should not be deployed lightly. Rev DB used the word when commenting on a post that hilariously painted activists opposed to the ongoing hundred dead children per day (x a hundred days so far) as being silly young people (PIMPLESL – ho ho!) focused on themselves and who support terrorism. It is seriously *hurtful* to use that kind of terminology for those who are gung ho about the one-dead-kid-per-quarter-hour Gaza operation. I wouldn’t use the word. But still.
The children didn’t rape or kidnap. Most of their parents didn’t either. Yep, that’s how war goes. Collateral damage happens, and I’m pretty sure the army, in general, wasn’t trying to kill them. But they haven’t made a great effort to avoid it either.
The Houthi are opportunistic and very sincere in their righteousness and on a hiding to nothing in their enforcement of UN sanctions against Israel. Iran probably won’t escalate, but they’re infested with religious nonsense, so who knows.
Netanyahu is opportunistic and very sincere in his righteousness in killing a child every 15 minutes for the last one hundred days. Gazans are not team-Hamas. They are occupied people and more sinned against than sinning.