Requiring members to prove non-Jewish descent manufactured felt inclusion in Nazi Germany

Evidence

This esoteric principle seems to be entirely inappropriate for mass organizations; yet the Nazis gave their members at least the psychological equivalent for the initiation ritual of secret societies when, instead of simply excluding Jews, from membership, they demanded proof of non-Jewish descent from their members and set up a complicated machine to shed light on the dark ancestry of some 80 million Germans. It was of course a comedy, and even an expensive one, when 80 million Germans set out to look for Jewish grandfathers; yet everybody came out of the examination with the feeling that he belonged to a group of included which stood against an imaginary multitude of ineligibles. The same principle is confirmed in the Bolshevik movement through repeated party purges which inspire in everybody who is not excluded a reaffirmation of his inclusion. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 870

Categorization

• SEED: The genealogy-verification bureaucracy as an instrument for producing in-group feeling is an angle worth an essay on how identity documentation manufactures belonging.
• XREF: Speaks directly to the reader’s biopolitics/genealogy toolkit — racialized ancestry as administrative technology of inclusion/exclusion. — connects to: Assimilation erases the Jewish difference Nazis then must bureaucratically reconstruct — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 164; To be deemed a Jew was a legal exclusion, not a self-ascription. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1496; German respondents denied knowledge of Nazi crimes to preserve collective identification — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2028 (+1 more)