The Hare with the Amber Eyes

By Edmund De Waal

I’m on a quest to understand the roots of antisemitism. Reading The Hare with Amber Eyes, the history of a family of secular Jewish bankers in Vienna, showed me how integrated, needed, and influential they were, yet how they were always kept a little separated because they were Jews.

The rise of the Nazi party destroyed them. Some escaped, while others died by genocide, malnutrition, or suicide. To the family, the Nazis arrived by surprise, like a tsunami.

A few main takeaways I want to remember:

The family members who survived were the ones who left Vienna before the war started. Some destructive forces can’t be stopped from the inside. Sometimes the lesson is to get out of the way.

The Nazi state weaponized its civil service to systematically isolate and target people, even amid internal administrative chaos. Modern politics feels chaotic, but there is some comfort that today’s power structures lack that unified, weaponized momentum.