Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (36 page)

In many respects, 1933 was also a decisive turning point in German-Jewish scholarship, although it did not mark the end of cultural creativity of German Jewry. The first scholars of
Wissenschaft des Judentums
(Judaic Studies) had already left Germany well before 1933, either because they were Zionists or because they could not get or continue to hold a position at a German university. For example, Fritz Isaac Baer and Gershom Scholem went to Jerusalem, while eugen Täubler moved to Switzerland and lived there for several years. In 1930, Ismar elbogen rejected an attractive offer from Columbia University to become the first incumbent of the first chair of Jewish History at a western university. After 1933, Jewish academic institutions such as the Hochschule für die wissenschaft des Judentums and, to a lesser extent, the orthodox Hildesheimer Rabbinerseminar in Berlin, as well as the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, not only lost but also gained faculty members. while some of their own faculty emigrated, others were drawn into those institutions after they had to quit their previous university positions. Thus, teaching continued at both institutions well into the Nazi period.
⁸

Moreover, some of the first fruits of the modern Jewish research institutions were harvested in the years after 1933. The first volume of the
Germania Judaica
, which presented the earliest records of Jewish life in many parts of Germany in the Middle Ages, was completed at a time (in 1934) when attempts were underway to systematically eliminate Jews from Ger-man society. Just as Lessing’s
Nathan the Wise
could be performed only on a Jewish stage in Germany after 1933, and the only critical media were the remaining Jewish newspapers, unbiased research on Jewish topics continued in the cultural ghetto of Jewish teaching and research institutions. In contrast to the two other areas, however, the university remained open to Jewish students, especially of non-German citizenship, until 1937.
⁹

while the Jewish teaching institutions in this period have been covered by recent scholarship, less is known about those works of scholarship that were produced outside the “cultural ghetto,” be it at German universities or in publicly accessible journals. I also will turn to the other side of scholarship on the Jews in this period, namely, that of the newly institutionalized research on the so-called Jewish Question, which was advanced at a few places in Germany after Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933.

one year after Hitler’s rise to power, three substantial volumes were completed that served as a unique epitaph of the German Jewish legacy. one of these volumes was the second and final part of volume one of the
Germania Judaica
, one of the most ambitious projects ever in German-Jewish scholarship. It records in meticulous detail the presence of Jews in

Germany from “the earliest beginnings until 1250.” Reflecting the uncertainties for all German Jews at the time, as well as its own uncertain status, the preface concluded in a sober spirit: “It is, at the moment, too early to speak of continuing this work. we hope, in more auspicious times, to be able to resume our task, a task that, at present, exceeds the capacities of our society.”
¹⁰

while the
Germania Judaica
showed the deep roots of Jews in the

German-speaking lands, the second of the three works concentrated on the Jewish contributions to German culture and society in the mod-ern period. edited by the publisher of the Jüdische Verlag, Siegmund katznelson, it bore the title
Juden im deutschen Kulturbereich
. In fifty essays that covered more than a thousand pages, this study depicts Jew-ish involvement in almost all areas of life, from theater and film to geo-physics and botany. There was even a separate essay on German Jews and chess. In 1934, however, the correct title for such an essay, as for all others in a similar vein, would have been “Jews in German Chess.”

To remind Germans of what the Jews contributed to German culture was certainly not in the interest of state and party officials in 1934. Thus, it is not surprising that official institutions prevented the printing and circulation of the volume after the State Police (Staatspolizeiamt für den Landespolizeibezirk) in Berlin declared: “Upon reading the work, the unprejudiced reader will receive the impression that, until the National-Socialist revolution, the whole of German culture was carried by Jews alone.”
¹¹
Both volumes reached their readers only in postwar reprints:
Juden im deutschen Kulturbereich
in 1959, and the
Germania Judaica
in 1963.

The third book was Ismar elbogen’s
Die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland
, first published in 1935, and republished in a different form

after world war II by eleonore Sterling. Although elbogen did not or could not analyze the current situation of German Jewry, he offered enough hints that enabled his readers to understand what was happening. As Michael Meyer has pointed out recently, elbogen’s concentration on antiSemitism in Imperial Germany could hardly be understood out of the context of the time in which it was written. one might add, however, that even Martin Philippson’s
Modern History of the Jews
, written two decades earlier, viewed the Jewish experience in the
Kaiserreich
to a large degree as the history of antiSemitism. Thus, there may have been this larger intent present in elbogen’s book. Be that as it may, elbogen ended his book with a remark clear to any reader: “The upwards-spiraling welfare budgets of the Jewish communities bear witness to the desperate

material situation of those who have remained in their homeland . . . not to mention their spiritual suffering!”
¹²

Those important works were only three among quite a few publications on Jewish history and culture appearing in Germany during the years af-ter 1933. Dissertation topics ranged from biblical times through to the Middle Ages to modern regional and local Jewish and Polish, or Russian-Jewish, economic and political history. In some works, the influence of the
Zeitgeist
was apparent. A few authors of dissertations and scholarly articles were occupied with the specific status and protection of Jewish minorities in twentieth-century europe. Thus, willy weichselbaum’s 1935 dissertation was titled “Der Rechtsschutz der Juden in Deutsch-oberschlesien nach dem Genfer Abkommen von 1922” (The Protection of the Rights of the Jews in German Upper Silesia after the Treaty of Ge-neva of 1922), while kurt Stillschweig dedicated numerous articles in the journals
Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland
(hereafter ZGJD) and
Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums
(hereafter MGwJ) to the question of Jewish minority status.

This particular question, the status of Jews in Germany, was not a totally new one for German Jews, although it obviously gained new practical relevance in the years following world war I. with the revolution of 1918 and the end of the old order, the question of whether Jews should gain national minority status was discussed in the Reichstag, where it found a prominent advocate in the Social Democratic and Zionist deputy, oskar Cohn. It was dismissed, however, by the vast majority of German Jews at the time and was never seriously considered. only in the last years of the weimar Republic were ideas of national autonomy, which had been implemented in eastern europe, taken up again in the German context. In 1932, the Stuttgart lawyer and writer karl Lieblich published a “public question to Adolf Hitler” in a book with the title
Was geschieht mit den Juden?
(
What Shall Be Done with the Jews?
), in which he tried to convince the Nazis, still an opposition party, to help establish a Jewish autonomy in Germany. Before this public appeal to Adolf Hitler,
¹³
Lieblich had published three lectures between 1928 and 1930 advocating the same idea, and he was not alone among German-Jewish intellectuals. The Social Democratic district attorney in Heidelberg, Hugo Marx, released a similar book in the same year, 1932:
Was wird werden? Das Schicksal der deutschen Juden in der sozialen Krise
(
What Will Be? The Fate of German Jews in the Social Crisis
)
.
Following Carl Schmitt’s thesis of the “total state,” Marx predicted an authoritarian state with a new social and economic order, in which the old liberal principles of individual emancipation would lose

f
Igure
7.1.:
Martin Buber speaking at the “Jüdisches Lehrhaus,” Berlin, 17 January 1935. Photograph by Abraham Pisarek.
Courtesy
: Bildarchiv Preussischer kulturbesitz, Berlin, and Art Resource, New York.

their relevance. Instead, he predicted the Jews would be able to survive only as an autonomous group with corporate rights.

The idea of Jewish autonomy was already being discussed among Jews on the eve of the Nazi rise to power, and it continued to occupy some Jewish historians in the years after 1933. The intellectual journal
Der Morgen
was occupied specifically with the discussion about cultural autonomy.
¹⁴
Moreover, Jewish intellectuals reacted to some Nazi ideologues such as ernst krieck (
Volk im Werden
1/1, 1933), who suggested that German Jews build their own educational and cultural system within German society while at the same time retreating from the larger German institutions. Liberal commentators such as Fritz Friedländer rejected this ghettoization, but at the same time took it as an occasion to write about historical developments of minority rights. In a series of articles in the MGwJ, kurt Stillschweig dealt with this question, which, from a variety of perspectives, now constituted a potential response to a dramatically changed situation. He analyzed emancipation in the context of the French definition of “nation,” the non-recognition of nation-status for the Jews in the Habsburg monar-chy, and the development of autonomy in the new states founded after world war I. when these articles were published in 1937 and 1938

respectively, the retreat to the idea of national autonomy for the Jews was already a rather optimistic vision for the future of German Jewry. In his last article, “on the Modern History of the Jewish Autonomy,” Stillschweig had to include Israel as part of his name.

The 1939 volume of the MGwJ was the last endeavor of collective cultural creativity among the Jews in Nazi Germany; it was destroyed soon after it appeared. one article prepared for this volume was Selma Stern-Täubler’s essay “on the Literary Struggle for emancipation in the Years 1816–1819,” an article that had special relevance for German Jews in 1939. Selma Stern-Täubler was mainly concerned with Jewish reactions to the resistance to Jewish emancipation, and, between the lines, German Jews could read arguments of a surprising and alarming actuality. She emphasized the dual world in which most German Jews lived: their rootedness both in Jewish and German culture and society, and the “unrequited love” of this “self-torturing and suffering” group that “endured the great Jewish grief” (
Judenschmerz
). In addition, she recalled the group of converts who became accepted in Christian society, and who—like Friedrich Julius Stahl—even became spokesmen for the Christian state. She also mentioned those representatives of
Wissenschaft des Judentums
who tried to advance Jewish emancipation by means of scholarship. Selma Stern-Täubler concluded her contribution with a sentence that expressed both the hope of those early generations and the disappointment of her own, when she spoke of the “time when, together with the demise of the Romantic movement and the victory of the Liberal idea, even the anti-Jewish feeling dwindled and one could believe that the end of the suffering had finally come.”
¹⁵
German-Jewish readers, however, were not able to share her thoughts. This article, signed by Selma “Sara” Stern-Täubler, fell victim to censorship.