Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (37 page)

Most Jewish historians did not deal with possible reactions to the new situation, but were interested rather in analyzing the roots of mod-ern German-Jewish history and its dilemmas. The age of emancipation, once hailed as the beginning of a new and glorious period in Jewish history, was now viewed rather critically. The two most important works published on this topic in Nazi Germany were Jacob katz’s 1934 Frankfurt dissertation “Die entstehung der Judenassimilation in Deutschland und deren Ideologie,” and Max wiener’s 1933 dissertation “Jüdische Religion im Zeitalter der emanzipation.” katz came to Frankfurt from his native Hungary as a student at the orthodox Breuer Yeshiva. At the university, he studied with the sociologist karl Mannheim who, as a Jew, could teach him but was no longer in the position

to evaluate him. katz was left alone with professors unfamiliar with his topic, which was the origins of assimilation of German Jews. Professor Georg küntzel, a German nationalist who took over from Mannheim, only insisted, according to katz “that I write a preface to the effect that my scholarly treatment of the subject did not imply that the author regarded assimilation as the solution to the Jewish question.” küntzel did not have to fear that katz’s work would advocate assimilation. As katz further recalls: “I grasped his point totally and immediately and merely remarked that anyone who read the work would see that my conclusions were scarcely a recommendation for assimilation.”
¹⁶
Indeed, the preface of katz’s dissertation reads:

The study arose from the need to pursue the causes of a historical process whose effects clearly extended into the present, effects which the author condemned from a non-scholarly point of view. The historical shift of 1933 subsequently lent a larger significance to the scholarly inquiry of the study, not only because the subject gained an unforeseen degree of relevance for our time, but also because the shift brought about the visible conclusion of the epoch whose origins the study sought to examine, thus allowing questions to be posed with much greater sharpness.
¹⁷

Reflecting the spirit of the times in which he was living, katz concludes his dissertation with a rather pessimistic tone. He explicitly refers to the resistance to assimilation: “Thus a new age was born that no longer wished to see assimilation as a certain solution to the basic dilemma that had driven it.”
¹⁸
As a Zionist, katz’s skepticism toward assimilation is not surprising. He did not merely respond to the renewed ghettoization of German Jewry, but reflected a national Jewish spirit that had existed well before 1933.

More surprising perhaps was the growing estrangement of liberal Jewish thinkers from their traditional values of individualism and rational thought. A clear push away from rationalism was visible already in the weimar period, for example, in the speeches held at the annual rabbinical associations by leading representatives such as Rabbis Max Dienemann and Max wiener. wiener, who once served as assistant rab-bi to Leo Baeck in Düsseldorf, and after a short stay in Stettin became his colleague as Gemeinderabbiner of Berlin, published his magnum opus
Jüdische Religion im Zeitalter der Emanzipation
in 1933.
¹⁹
while Leo Baeck was still wavering between the more traditional rationalism of liberal Judaism and the adoption of non-rational elements, wiener’s

break with nineteenth-century liberal traditions was complete. In his programmatic speech at the convention of liberal German rabbis in Berlin in January 1922, wiener charged the transformation of Judaism into a rational
Weltanschauung
during the nineteenth century with the responsibility for the poor condition of modern Jewish religiosity. He demanded a religious renewal based on the integration of non-rational elements into modern Judaism: the “feeling” of belonging to the Jewish people and the self-consciousness of the particularity of the Jews as a chosen people. As wiener’s biographer, Robert S. Schine, has observed, wiener’s “historical-metaphysical irrationalism” constituted an assimilation of romantic
völkisch
ideas into liberal Judaism. For wiener, religious acts based on revealed law, and not on rational doctrines, were the basis of Judaism. wiener’s critical position toward the development of German Judaism in the nineteenth century was also reflected in his book
Jüdische Religion im Zeitalter der Emanzipation
^.

This preoccupation with the emancipation period was also evident in the contributions to the ZGJD after 1933. Numerous articles discussed representatives and contemporaries of the Berlin Haskalah, from Moses Mendelssohn to David Friedländer and Saul Ascher. The Heidelberg Rabbi Fritz Pinkuss, who wrote about Ascher, clearly expressed skepticism about liberal ideas. Referring to such ideas presented in wiener’s book, and referring to Ascher himself, Pinkuss wrote:

Today especially both the struggle for rights and the apologetic will again have to take new paths, if they are to be understood. with the end of the liberal vision of the state in Germany, and perhaps in the entire world, they will have to redefine the proper sociological place of the Jews in the new [German] state. They will have to portray the Jewish cultural heritage in a way that corresponds to its essential content, and do it better than the generation of Saul Ascher and his subsequent followers could.
²⁰

The ZGJD was also a forum for one of the dirtiest attacks on Jewish historiography after 1933. while non-Jewish scholars mainly ignored Jewish historiography in the weimar Republic, the Third Reich now began to develop a new interest in “research on the Jewish Question.” Several research institutions were founded to advance a clearly anti-Semitic perspective toward Jewish history. The main protagonist of such a view was a young historian at the Munich Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des Neuen Deutschlands, wilhelm Grau. In his dissertation, he dealt with the medieval Jewish community of Regensburg, and

thus built on (some say he plagiarized) the work of the Jewish historian, Raphael Straus, the former editor of the ZGJD and cousin of its publisher, Ludwig Feuchtwanger. obviously, the Nazi Grau came to quite different conclusions than did his Jewish colleague Straus. This is not the place to describe in detail the conflict between the two, which has been done by Christhard Hoffmann and Patricia von Papen in their work on the subject. It should suffice here to recall that in 1935 it was still possible for a Jewish historian who had emigrated from Germany to Palestine to publish very harsh words of criticism of the rising star of the Nazi historiography of the “Jewish Question.” Thus, Straus writes about Grau: “The reasons why Grau’s dissertation falls so completely on its face have already been suggested above. The young author, a doctoral student at the University of Munich, lamentably bit off more than he could chew.”
²¹
Grau, in his reply, insists that Jewish historians do not possess the necessary objectivity to approach Jewish history. To use Grau’s own words, which were published in the ZGJD in 1935:

Jewish historical scholarship must come to terms with the fact that also German scholars will, in the future, systematically research and write about the Jewish problem, and will do so in the context of German National history. In Jewish circles, one will first and foremost have to face the fact that we Germans wish to write not about the history of the Jews or of Judaism, but rather the history of the Jewish Question. Moreover, we will accomplish this task with Ger-man scientific methods and German thoroughness, moved by our conscience.
²²

In the years that followed, German “thoroughness” was to characterize other tragic aspects of German-Jewish relations, aspects that included discrimination, persecution, and finally extermination. However, the scholarship around the “Jewish Question” would not stop. Historians in different parts of Germany were busy writing essays, dissertations, and source editions on the Jewish presence in Germany and other countries. Jews, however, were no longer among them.

In conclusion, we must ask ourselves what the meaning of this last breath of German Jewry means to historians of modern Germany and of German Jewry. First of all, we have to realize that some of the most remarkable publications on German-Jewish history, from the
Germania Judaica
to Max wiener’s
Jüdische Religion im Zeitalter der Emanzipation
to Ismar elbogen’s
Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland
, although often conceived before, were published in the years following 1933, as

were dissertations on various Jewish topics and scholarly Jewish journals. Second, and perhaps more interesting, is the spirit of some of those works, a spirit that was already perceptible in the last years of the weimar Republic and within an increasing climate of intolerance and exclusion. Criticism of enlightenment and individual emancipation, and a new interest in autonomist ideas, reflected an awareness of the crisis facing Jews in Germany as expressed in scholarly terms. Thus, those historical writings produced in Nazi Germany are unique documents of both history and historiography. Their scholarship stood in the tradition of
Wissenschaft des Judentums
, both reflecting and expanding on its new expression during the weimar years; but it also began to pose the questions that occupied historians who would write about Jewish topics after 1945: why and how did emancipation and assimilation fail in the context of modern German-Jewish history?

Notes

1. The Viennese actor and director Fritz wisten (1890–1962), engaged at the württemberg Theater in Stuttgart, was dismissed in March 1933. He was summoned to Berlin by Julius Bab and given the position of director of theater at the kubu, thus becoming one of the first members of the Berlin branch. Like almost all Jew-ish males of his age, he was summarily imprisoned following
   Kristallnacht
   , but later released. By dint of his marriage to a non-Jew, he survived the war in Berlin (partly in hiding), and then after the war was active in east Berlin, where, in 1946, he directed
   Nathan der Weise.
   See Martin Goldsmith,
   The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany
   (New York: John wiley & Sons, 2000), 292.
   
2. Quoted in Chana C. Schütz, “Max Liebermann in eretz Jisrael,” in
   Was vom Leben übrig bleibt, sind Bilder und Geschichten
   .
   Max Liebermann zum 150. Geburtstag
   , ed. Hermann Simon (Berlin: Centrum Judaicum, 1997), 137.
   
3. This is especially true about the theater. See for example the two edited works which appeared in connection with the kulturbund exhibit in Berlin in 1992: wal-ter Jens, ed.,
   Geschlossene Vorstellung: Der jüdische Kulturbund 1933–1941
   (Berlin: edition Hentrich, 1992), and Henryk M. Broder and eike Geisel, eds.,
   Premiere und Pogrom: Der jüdische Kulturbund 1933–1941, Texte und Bilder
   (Berlin: Siedler, 1992). See also the more recent works by Rebecca Rovit, such as her edited volume
   Theatrical Performance during the Holocaust: Texts, Documents, Memoirs
   (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1999). Among the older standard works are Herbert Freeden,
   Jüdisches Theater in Nazideutschland
   (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1964) and
   Die jüdische Presse im Dritten Reich
   (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag bei Athenäum, 1987), and ernst Simon,
   Aufbau im Untergang: Jüdische Erwachsenenbildung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland als geistiger Widerstand
   (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck,
   

   1959). on publishing activities see Volker Dahm,
   Das jüdische Buch im Dritten Reich
   (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1993).
   

4. Quoted in Rebecca Rovit, “An Artistic Mission in Nazi Berlin: The Jewish kulturbund Theatre as Sanctuary,”
   Theater Survey
   (November 1994): 6–17, here: 6.
   

5. Ibid., 13.

1. Quoted in Volker kühn, “‘Zores haben wir genug ...’ Gelächter am Abgrund,” in Jens,
   Geschlossene Vorstellung
   , 95–112, here: 102.
   
2. See eike Geisel’s introduction to
   Premiere und Pogrom
   , 15.
   
3. on the latest chapters of the two Berlin institutions, see Christhard Hoffmann and Daniel R. Schwartz, “early but opposed—Supported but Late: Two Berlin Seminaries which Attempted to Move Abroad,”
   Leo Baeck Institute Year Book
   36 (1991): 267–304.
   
4. on the last case of a Jewish student submitting a doctoral dissertation in Cologne, see Frank Golczewski,
   Kölner Universitätslehrer und die Nationalsozialisten
   (Cologne: Böhlau, 1988), 347–349.
   
5. Ismar elbogen, Aron Freimann, and Chaim Tykocinski, eds.,
   Germania Judaica
   

   (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1963), 14–15.
   

6. Robert weltsch, “Vorbemerkung zur zweiten Auflage,” in
   Juden im deutschen Kulturbereich
   , ed. Siegmund katznelson (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1959), 16.
   
7. Ismar elbogen,
   Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland
   (Berlin: Jüdische Buch-Vereini- gung, 1931), 314.
   
8. karl Lieblich,
   Was geschieht mit den Juden? Öffentliche Frage an Adolf Hitler
   (Stuttgart: Im Zonen Verlag, 1932). Here, Lieblich appealed to Hitler: “Nur von Ihrer Seite auch kann ich mir eine ernstliche und innerlich beteiligte Förderung meines Gedankens vorstellen, da Sie es unternommen haben, Neues und von Grund auf erneuerndes zu versuchen. So lege ich denn diese Schrift und die Beantwortung ihrer Frage mit Vertrauen in Ihre Hände.” (“I can envisage a serious and engaged advancement of my ideas coming only from you, because you have attempted to achieve something entirely new. Thus, with trust I put this booklet and the response to its question in your hands.”), Ibid., 88. For more details, see my article “Zurück ins Ghetto? Jüdische Autonomiekonzepte in der weimarer Republik,”
   Trumah: Jahrbuch der Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg
   3 (1992): 101–127.
   
9. See for example Fritz Friedländer, “Grenzen der kulturautonomie,”
   Der Morgen
   ,
   

   February 1935, 492–497, and “Der Jude im wandel der Reichsidee,”
   Der Morgen
   , August 1935, 197–202; and Rudolf Levy, “Der Stand des Minderheitenrechts,”
   Der Morgen
   , August 1935, 203–207.
   

10. Selma Sara Täubler-Stern, “Der literarische kampf um die emanzipation in den Jahren 1816–1819,”
    Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums
    83 (1939): 661.
    
11. Jacob katz,
    With My Own Eyes. The Autobiography of an Historian
    (Hanover: University Press of New england, 1995), 93.
    
12. Jacob katz, “Die entstehung der Judenassimilation und deren Ideologie,” in
    Zur Assimilation und Emanzipation der Juden. Ausgewählte Schriften
    , ed. Jacob katz (Darmstadt: wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982), 3.