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In this, the toddler age of psychohistory, it is a pleasure to find a small, but significant study of excellent quality. Bolkosky shows that during the years of the Weimar Republic, German Jews were obsessed with the memories of the German literary and philosophical leaders of the Age of Enlightenment. Their lives were dominated by the myth that the German philosophers and writers of the Age
of Enlightenment, especially Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing, represented the true spirit of the German people. These writers, particularly Lessing in Nathan the Wise, symbolized for them the embracing of the biblical spirit and a merging of it with the German "Geist." This created the illusion that the more they preserved their Jewish identity, the more German they were, provided they embraced all the "German" virtues such as fervent patriotism.
Taking refuge in this fantasy view of themselves resulted in a paradox for German Jews. The greater the anti-Semitism, the greater the rejection of the Jews by the Germans, the greater was the pressure to take refuge in this mythological construction and to disavow the current reality as merely a temporary aberration held by a minority of misguided people. The extremes to which German Jews went to deny the threat to themselves, is, of course, well documented. Yet the scope of the denial induces disbelief. Professor Bolkosky shows that even after Hitler took over the government of Germany and proclaimed the "Ayran paragraphs," Jews maintained the myth that the Fuehrer only used anti-Semitic rhetoric to gain power and that he would mellow and change his attitudes. The article of faith to which they clung as they were drowning was that Germans could not do anything unfair to the Jews since they were united by the national and cultural identity.
Having established this historical background, Bolkosky goes on to a psychohistorical study of this phenomenon. Using psychoanalytic theories of myth and illusion, he demonstrates that the m