Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (4 page)

Finally, Michael Brenner follows, to some extent, konrad kwiet’s theme of a “ghetto without walls” that increasingly characterized Jew-ish life in Germany after January 1933. In his essay “Jewish Culture in a Modern Ghetto: Theater and Scholarship among the Jews of Nazi Germany,” Brenner’s focus is the cultural ghettoization of German Jews that was a consequence of the spate of anti-Jewish legislation dur-ing the 1930s. while this was evident in a variety of areas, such as

Jewish adult education programs, youth movements, and Jewish publishing and media enterprises, it was most apparent in activities of the kulturbund der deutschen Juden (Cultural League of German Jews), established just weeks after the Nazi assumption of power. Brenner refers to the debates surrounding the kulturbund, with the positive assessment that it represented a spiritual resistance to ghettoization and the despair it would inevitably induce; and the negative conclusion that it represented compliance with the destructive intentions behind the cultural ghettoization of the Jews. Brenner also considers the work of Jewish historians who, after 1933, produced some of the most brilliant scholarship on German-Jewish history. These historians would raise questions about the efficacy of enlightenment philosophy and Jewish emancipation, and pose questions about the failure of Jewish emancipation in German-Jewish history that have engaged historians since the end of world war II and the Holocaust.

It is hoped that these essays, along with the Appendixes at the end of this volume, will contribute to a better understanding of the tragedy of that historic failure. That German Jews at times faced paralyzing dilemmas in responding to Nazi persecution was in part the result of the nature of Nazi cruelty and brutality; but these dilemmas also stemmed from a general understanding among most German Jews of their history and rightful place in Germany, the promise of Jewish emancipation, and the meaning for most of “assimilation.” The imposed separation of German Jews from the larger society and culture of their native Germany, their consequent humiliation and suffering, and the Nazi state’s denial of their German nationality and national self-identity, was a bitter blow that most found agonizingly difficult to accept. That one could be both German and Jewish, regardless of the criteria used to define “Jewishness,” had been a basic premise of Jewish emancipation, one that ultimately proved untenable in modern Germany between 1871 and 1945.

Notes

1. Central Zionist Archives (CZA), Jerusalem: S7–902, Central Bureau for the Settlement of German Jews in Palestine, Georg Landauer, Berlin to Arthur Ruppin, Jerusalem, 17 February 1939.
   
2. Haganah Archives (HA), Tel Aviv: 1/23/private/12: Private Documents of Pino Ginzburg (Ha’apala Project, Tel Aviv University), Pino Ginzburg (Vienna) to Ber-yl, 5 June 1939.
   
3. See Marion A. kaplan,
   Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany
   

   (New York: oxford University Press, 1998).
   

4. See Saul Friedländer,
   Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939
   (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 2. See also his
   The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945
   (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 4ff.
   
5. Primo Levi,
   Survival in Auschwitz
   (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 87.
   
6. karl Dietrich Bracher,
   The German Dictatorship
   , trans. Jean Steinberg (New York: Holt, Rinehart & winston, 1970), 191–214.
   
7. karl Schleunes,
   The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933–1939
   (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 62–91.
   
8. Donald Niewyk,
   The Jews in Weimar Germany
   (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 11–42.
   
9. Schleunes, chap. 4.
   
10. See Appendix A.
    
11. See Appendix e.
    
12. See Appendix D.
    
13. Avraham Barkai,
    From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933–1943
    (Hanover: University Press of New england, 1989), 39–47.
    
14. See Uwe-Dietrich Adam,
    Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich
    (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1972), 172–203. See also Barkai,
    From Boycott
    , 54–85.
    
15. See most recently Jeffrey Herf,
    The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust
    (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), especially chap. 3.
    
16. See Appendix I.
    
17. See Sybil Milton, “The expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany: october 1938 to July 1939—A Documentation,”
    Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook
    xxIx (1984), 169–
    

    199. See also Schleunes,
    The Twisted Road
    , 236–239.
    

18. See most recently Alan Steinweis,
    Kristallnacht 1938
    (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
    
19. See Appendix H.
    
20. See Appendix k.
    
21. Schleunes,
    The Twisted Road
    , 195.
    
22. See Bruce Pauley,
    From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Antisemitism
    

    (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 284–286.
    

23. See Appendix J.
    
24. Between Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor in 1933 and the onset of the “final solution” at the end of 1941, some 300,000 Jews were able to emigrate from the
    Altreich
    , or Germany, in its pre–1938 borders. A high percentage of those emigrating were young people, leaving behind an increasingly aging population with diminishing means in the face of accelerating hardship. Between 1933 and 1939, the number of Jews in Germany between the ages of sixteen and thirty-nine decreased by about 80 percent; the number of those sixty and over decreased by only 27 percent. About 16 percent of Jews in Germany in 1933 were sixty years of age and over, while that percentage increased to almost 37 percent of the remaining Jewish population by the summer of 1941. See Herbert A. Strauss, “Jewish emigration from Germany—Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses I,”
    Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook
    xxV (1980): 318.
    
25. By far, the largest Jewish organization in Germany when the Nazis assumed power in January 1933 was the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith). Founded in 1893 in an environment of increasingly virulent antiSemitism in Germany, the Centralverein engaged in the struggle to maintain the civic equality and economic freedom of German Jews. Its membership reflected the overwhelmingly secular, assimilated, and German character and identity of the majority of Jews in Germany, who believed that one could be both German and Jewish at the same time.
    
26. estimates on the number of German Jews who perished in the Holocaust vary. See among others Raul Hilberg,
    The Destruction of the European Jews
    , vol. 3 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 1220; and wolfgang Benz,
    Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus
    (Munich: oldenbourg, 1991). More than 60,000 Jews from Austria and about 78,000 from Bohemia and Moravia also perished.
    

    Chapter One
    

1. C
   hanGinG
   r
   oLes in
   J
   ew ish
   f
   amiLies
   

   R
   

   Marion Kaplan
   

   Having acquired full citizenship and middle-class status in the latter part of the nineteenth century, most of Germany’s Jews felt comfortable and safe enough to consider Germany their
   Heimat
   , or home. They married, or intermarried, in Germany, built their businesses or careers there, sent their children to its excellent public schools, and planned their families’ futures in Germany. The Nazi onslaught against their rights, their livelihoods, and their social interactions with other Germans staggered them. Their normal lives and expectations overturned, Jewish families embarked on new paths and embraced new strategies that they would never have entertained in ordinary times. For women, this meant new roles as partner, as breadwinner, as family protector, and as defender of their businesses or practices, roles that were often strange to them, but ones that they had to assume if they were to save their families and property. For children, this included growing up fast—too fast for many—in order to run the gauntlet of Nazifi (Germans used the term
   Gleichschaltung
   ) schools and to mini-mize the strains on their already anxious parents. Finally, the men’s world as they had known it changed at a dizzying pace as they lost jobs and could no longer adequately or even barely protect or support their families or even themselves. This essay will look at several ways in which families, and the individuals in them, adjusted to extraordinary times.
   

   Family as Haven?
   

   Jews had, since the late nineteenth century, limited the size of their families, but they quickly reacted to their deteriorating political and
   

   financial situations by lowering their birthrate even more drastically
   .
   ¹
   women underwent private and highly illegal abortions, fearful of endangering themselves and their doctors.
   ²
   This seems to be a clear indication that Jews no longer saw a future for their children in Germany and also that, despite early hopes that the Nazi regime might fall, some planned to emigrate, waiting, perhaps, to give birth to children in places of refuge. The birth rate also tells us that the attempts of Jewish communal leaders
   ³
   to foster a “return to the family” in this era, whether through the press, sermons, or reprints of Moritz oppenheim’s “Pictures of old Jewish Family Life,”
   ⁴
   did not resonate among harassed couples.
   

   The family as “haven in a heartless world”
   ⁵
   simply could not hold up. A teacher noted: “It would be wrong to say that the parental homes disintegrated, but in many cases home life was cheerless and full of troubles.”
   ⁶
   This was, perhaps, inevitable; their world was shrinking and Jews spent more and more time at home mulling over their situation
   ⁷
   and getting on each other’s nerves.
   ⁸
   Under these circumstances, Jewish women were to take on the old/new role of what feminists have called “emotional housework,” that is, making the household a more pleasant environment. Leaders urged women to preserve the “moral strength to survive” and held up Biblical heroines as role models.
   ⁹
   No longer focused on Victorian notions of making the home an “island of serenity” for the bourgeois husband, spokesmen and women urged housewives to exert a calming influence on the entire family, since: “the tension that we have all been living under . . . has made people irritable; the constant struggle against attacks makes them aggressive, intolerant, impatient.”
   ¹⁰
   

   The Jewish press also gave mothers the job of making their children proud of being Jews, a task that proved particularly difficult among children who simply wanted to fit in with their peers.
   ¹¹
   Finally, parents still tried to protect their children from worries and, accordingly, often grew silent when younger ones were in the vicin-ity. one woman wrote: “we knew too little. I grew up in a time when the world of children was clearly separated from that of the adults . . . Parents did not talk to children, especially not about their plans and worries.”
   ¹²
   Parental attempts to shelter their children may have met with only modest success. even little Ruth kluger knew what was going on as she pretended to sleep on the sofa in the living room: “Their secret was death, not sex. That’s what the grown ups were talking about.”
   ¹³
   

   The Job Situation for Men, Women, and Youth
   

   As the Nazi government implemented its anti-Semitic legislation, Jew-ish men, in particular, lost their jobs and businesses, some as early as the “April Laws” of 1933. Suddenly, and despite limited options on the job market, many Jewish women who had never worked for pay needed employment. Some did not have to look far afield for jobs.
   ¹⁴
   Much like their grandmothers decades earlier, they worked for husbands or fathers who had to let paid help go. By 1938, a columnist noted: “we find relatively few families in which the wife does not work in some way to earn a living.”
   ¹⁵
   In fact, as early as 1934, the Jewish feminist organization, the League of Jewish women, noticed: “Today the woman is not only the spiritual, but, unfortunately, often the material support of the family.”
   ¹⁶
   By 1938, Hannah karminski, an officer of the League of Jewish women, remarked: “The picture of a woman who supports her family’s basic sustenance is typical.”
   ¹⁷
   Moreover, large numbers of women and men retrained for the kinds of jobs still available in Germany or in countries of refuge, mostly in agriculture, crafts, home economics, and nursing.
   ¹⁸
   

   Did this massive change in economic conditions affect roles within the family? Yes, ever so slightly. The League of Jewish women, for example, still regarded married women’s employment as a last resort, acceptable only in times of crisis.
   ¹⁹
   working mothers still needed to wake their children and tuck them into bed: “The first and last look of the day must re-fuse the mother-child unit.”
   ²⁰
   Despite new jobs and less household help, wives carried the lion’s share of household work. Jewish newspapers advised housewives to consider vegetarian menus because they were cheaper, healthier, and avoided, for some, the kosher meat problem. Although meat might be easier and more time-efficient to prepare, columnists advised women that their “good will [was] an important assistant in a vegetarian kitchen,”
   ²¹
   and newspapers printed vegetarian menus and recipes.
   ²²
   After the Nuremberg Race Laws of September 1935, when many Jews lost any household help they might still have retained, the
   CV-Zeitung
   ran articles entitled “everyone learns to cook” and “even Peter cooks. . .”
   ²³
   Husbands were requested to be less demanding and children, especially daughters,
   ²⁴
   were asked to help out. During this particularly stressful time, writers did frown upon authoritarian behavior, even that by the “head of the family.” one writer asserted that such behavior stemmed from a time when “men and fathers were overvalued in comparison to women
   

   and wives.”
   ²⁵
   In an era when Nazi ideology shrilly reaffirmed male privilege, with women relegated to “children, kitchen, and church,” (
   Kinder, Küche, Kirche
   ), it was being called into question—but not overtly challenged—in Jewish circles. Thus, gender roles and privileges within the family were barely modulated. why this was so is not difficult to explain.
   ²⁶
   By proclaiming the crisis nature of women’s new position, Jews, both male and female, could hope for better times and ignore the deeply unsettling challenges to traditional gender roles in the midst of turmoil.
   

   Children and teens, too, had to reconsider the kinds of jobs they might have in the future and some had to drop out of school to assist their families. one boy dropped out of school a year before his
   Abitur
   in 1937. The teachers had made life miserable for him, and his family’s financial problems did not allow him to continue either.
   ²⁷
   Forced to re-evaluate their options, that is, to cut back on their former hopes and plans, many Jewish teens suffered the accompanying pain and disappointment that that caused. Moreover, family dissension grew when parents and children clashed regarding the vision each had of the child’s future. This seems particularly to have been the case between girls and their parents. one school survey in 1935 indicated that girls preferred jobs in offices or with children (such as a kindergarten teacher), whereas parents thought they should become seamstresses or work in some form of household setting. Parents were more likely to go along with boys’ choices of crafts or agricultural training, useful, for example, in Palestine. This tension must have been greater among girls who had high school educations than those who, only attending
   Volksschule
   , had lower expectations from the start.
   ²⁸
   Moreover, if one excludes housework, the choices available to girls were far more limited—and hence, more frustrating—than those open to boys. welfare organizations suggested sewing-related jobs, such as knitting, tailoring, or making clothing decorations, whereas boys could consider many more options, including becoming painters, billboard designers, upholsterers, shoe makers, dyers, tailors, or skilled industrial or agricultural workers.
   ²⁹
   To make matters worse, parents seem to have preferred keeping girls home altogether, either to shelter them from unpleasant work or to have them help out around the house as paid help was let go.
   ³⁰
   ezra Ben Gershom described a concrete example of this kind of decision-making. with his oldest sister married, his father decided that he and his two brothers should receive vocational training and that their other sister should help their mother with housework.
   ³¹
   

   Women Represent the Family
   

   whether women had to work or not, they soon took part in public life far more than they had ever before. Increasingly, women found themselves representing or defending their men, whether husbands, fathers, or brothers. Many tales have been recorded of women who saved family members from the arbitrary demands of the state or from the secret police (the Gestapo). In these cases, it was always assumed that the Nazis would not break gender norms: they might arrest or torture Jewish men, but would not harm women. Thus women took on a more assertive public role than ever before.
   ³²
   Some actually took responsibility for the entire family’s safety, a reversal of previous roles with their husbands. Liselotte Mueller traveled to Palestine to assess the situation there. Her husband, who could not leave his medical practice, simply told her: “If you decide you would like to live in Palestine, I will like it too.” She chose Greece. Her husband, older and more educated than she, would in other circumstances have been the decision-maker, but he agreed.
   ³³
   Ann Lewis’ mother went to england to negotiate her fam-ily’s emigration with British officials and her medical colleagues. This decision was based on her fluency in english, her desire to meet members of her psychoanalytic profession, and her husband’s profession; as a medical doctor, he was not welcome in Britain, but she was. She, who had always been “reserved with strangers,” and for whom asking favors “did not come easily,” had to ask for letters of recommendation from British psychiatrists, and to apply to the Home office for residence and work permits.
   ³⁴
   

   women had to call upon assertiveness they often did not know they possessed. After traveling to the United States to convince reluctant and distant relatives to give her family an affidavit, one woman had to confront the US embassy in Stuttgart, which insisted that there was no record of her. She showed her receipts, but the secretary just shrugged. At closing time, she refused to leave, insisting that her mother’s, husband’s, and children’s lives depended on their chance to go to the US. She would spend as many days and nights in the waiting room as necessary until they found her documents. After much discussion, the consul ordered a search of the files and the documents were discovered. Today, her daughter refers to her mother’s actions as the “first sit-in.”
   ³⁵
   often facing danger and dramatic situations, women were required