In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918-1933
272
In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918-1933
272eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
The history of Jews in interwar Germany and Austria is often viewed either as the culmination of tremendous success in the economic and cultural realms and of individual assimilation and acculturation, or as the beginning of the road that led to Auschwitz. By contrast, this volume demonstrates a re-emerging sense of community within the German-speaking Jewish population of these two countries in the two decades after World War I. The fresh research presented here shows that while Jews may have experienced a deepening sense of impending crisis and economic decline, a renewal of Jewish communal life took place during these years, as new groupings sprang up, including organizations for youth, for rural Jews, and for political groups such as Zionists and Bundists. Several chapters consider the impact of economic and political crises on German-Jewish family life. Together, these essays form a complex mosaic of German Jewry on the eve of its demise.
“An excellent collection . . . well written and cogently argued.” —David N. Myers
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253000576 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 768 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
In Search of Jewish Community
Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918â"1933
By Michael Brenner, Derek J. Penslar
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1998 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00057-6
CHAPTER 1
German Jews between Fulfillment & Disillusion
The Individual and the Community
SHULAMIT VOLKOV
Some fifteen years ago my father, a German Jew if ever there was one, suffered a severe brain hemorrhage and a temporary loss of memory. Otto Rudolf Heinsheimer was born in 1908 in the elegant resort town of Baden-Baden in southern Germany, to what was then considered a fully assimilated Jewish family of that proverbial milieu of private bankers, medical doctors, and lawyers — great and small. I was present when the young hospital physician at my father's bedside was trying to assess the damage. The patient was not sure about his whereabouts. He could not give his birth date or any other personal information. Then he was casually asked when he had immigrated to Israel. "1933," came the answer, crystal clear and as quick as lightning. He would never have admitted it — and perhaps it was only a coincidence — but this memory was apparently anchored very, very deeply in his mind.
Despite much scholarly debate, 1933 represented for many German Jews a genuine earthquake. It produced a deep psychic shock, and its reverberations required fundamental reassessment of the most comprehensive type. The presumably secure life-long expectations of these men and women were now totally shattered. No less meaningfully, all accepted views of their near and remote past seemed to have been demolished. A basic reshuffling of all values was now required: a comprehensive reconsideration of all human ties, all professional assumptions, all social and economic prospects. The Jewish collectivity in all its facets — despite its many undertakings, rapid initiatives, and various important supportive functions — could not do much to diminish the pain. In a letter from Berlin, written by the twenty-five-year-old Rudi Heinsheimer on April 25, 1933, we find a description of his visit to the Jewish Gemeinde: "There rages an enormous business of mediation and information exchange, organized in emergency but already divided into departments (physicians, lawyers, emigrants, etc.)." He writes, "unimaginably big crowd, a completely full house." But beyond and besides all that "action," things looked worse than ever. The night before, he recounts, he had decided, apparently on the spur of the moment and despite his dark mood, to go to the opera: "In the intermission — foyer: public of the new Germany: completely uniform. Income between 250.- and 1000.- marks per month. Social position: between chief clerk and government counselor, not more than 1 percent Jews. I was so dumbfounded and beaten as I have not been for a long time: about the complete change, about the unheard of uniformity, about the unique contrast to the experience of that previous morning in the Jewish community" (no. 4). Later he has a similar experience at the University of Berlin. Listening to "an extremely weak speech" by the new rector, the "anthropologist and race scientist" Professor Fischer, Heinsheimer notes without further comment that it became clear to him that "in this new university there was no room for us Jews. No. No room...." Then he adds, "Do you remember how I always went to the university and how I used to come back?" (no. 9). How he must have loved the university! How he loved the opera!
In confronting all this, Heinsheimer, naturally enough, found it difficult to write: "No thoughts are being formed," he complains, "nor any words. Only a dark, powerful, strangely effective working is in me, an unrest and quiet simmering." The common words repeated in the letters of these days are "darkness," "uncertain darkness," "wilderness," "wilderness without a way out ..." (no. 3). "Inside it is completely dark," he writes to his beloved, "and thoughts, sensations, desires, feelings, and everything else rush in ghostlike confusion. Everything is still like a play of shadows upon a half-lit wall, the people who display it cannot be recognized, cannot be grasped." "Not yet," he then adds with a sudden gust of youthful hope, "but soon it will be all right" (no. 4).
The depth of despair of this man can only be appreciated when one reads his letter following Hitler's speech of May 1 at Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin — a letter full of exultation and uncontrolled excitement vis-à-vis the slightest, the farthest, the soon to be proven absurd chance of still, after all, despite everything, being able to join Germany again. The personal context makes his reactions all the more revealing. Heinsheimer's Berlin friends included a number of hardcore Zionists. His girlfriend, my future mother, was then (as always) unusually clear-sighted. She grew up in a family of Hebrew-speaking Zionists in White Russia and arrived in Germany from the sands of nascent Tel Aviv to study physics and then medicine in Heidelberg and Berlin; by mid-April 1933 she had already left Germany. The letters I am quoting from were written to her — surely not one who would have appreciated Heinsheimer's German nationalist enthusiasm at the time. Here was a man just one step away from a decision to break away from his past forever and for good. He must then have been, as he always was, a self-contained, introverted person, normally strictly rational, and — I can surely vouch for it — very hard to impress. The speech took place only one month after Hitler's announcement of the boycott on April 1, 1933, and followed immediately on the introduction of laws excluding non-Aryans from the civil service, thus practically closing off his own professional future in Germany. But Hitler's speech apparently had an unparalleled effect. It was clearly not only the speech itself — though this was mighty enough. It was the rekindling of hope, irrational to be sure, the reemergence of possibilities already considered lost, that must have made the deepest impression; and then, immediately afterwards, a new wave of confusion, paralyzing indecision, and finally "darkness" once again.
Listening to the speech on the radio, even if it was in "a partially cold and negative milieu," as Heinsheimer reports, must have been an overwhelming experience: "That really was the shattering, crushing, yet still uplifting [aspect] of this speech ... not the surely important details of the program; not the elegant, organic structure, the rounded flawlessness," runs his explanation, "but the fact that it was an elementary expression of a gigantic natural force, a brilliant testimony of an unshakable faith, the straightforward communication of a visionary, and the thunderous call of a colossal personality" (no. 8). Heinsheimer is then engulfed by new doubts and ever more pressing questions: "What and how much ties you to this place?" he asks himself. "What and how much do you expect here?" And then he raises what is apparently the main point: "Is there really no possibility for a Jew to take part in this thing here? Or if there isn't now, when would it be possible again? Can one wait through this transition time? Should one? ... What do you give up here? What do you expect outside? Where do you belong? How and where can you set yourself up? What do you look for, after all? What is important for you? Where lie your principles, your capacities, your aims, your ideals? Where, who, how, what? ... Sometimes it seems to me," he despairingly comments, "as if I could neither live nor die" (no. 8).
There is surely a measure of general, aimless, youthful agony in all this. Nevertheless, this is the voice of one man, of a single Jew reacting to the first signs of what, for him, was a personal, deeply personal catastrophe. He himself was then young and energetic, so that within a couple of months he did finally decide to leave for Palestine. "As much as it seems — theoretically — attractive, to participate in this new and beautiful and great [project] that is apparently being built here ...," he writes somewhat later, "so inexorably is it — practically — proven that our cooperation is rejected, prohibited, and despised; so inevitable is the conclusion to turn one's back upon this country" (no. 9). His friends, as so often and in this case, too, mainly Jews, reacted in a variety of ways. Robert was just then marrying a non-Jewish woman and moved to Hamburg before he finally found himself a home on the Pacific coast of California. Fritz was eager to leave for England and had no use for reservations or sentimentality. Edgar was determined to stay. He even finally joined the Verband Nationaldeutscher Juden; but he too finally managed to leave before it was too late. All of them were in their mid to late twenties, relatively well-off, dynamic and resourceful despite that temporary "lethargy" that had seized them all at first, as Heinsheimer reported. But how difficult it must have been! One had to be freed, he explains in yet another letter, from so many "unshakable and unquestionable things," that is, "from the country and your belonging to it, that were till now self-evident; from the language and the culture, that were till now your natural foundations; from the profession of German legal teaching"— and here he refers to his own special case —"in which I grew up till now as if in my inherited air"; also "from that never-doubted urban milieu of Central Europe; from the life habits and lifestyle of an intellectual petit bourgeois; from the climate and seasons of the temperate zone, etc." (no. 12). After all, he writes elsewhere, one should not forget or underestimate "that self-evident certainty with which I was a German — even if it were a thousand times an error" (no. 15).
The depth of disillusionment cannot be denied. It was a personal tragedy. Moreover, it must be seen in conjunction with that sense of fulfillment and pride in success, likewise personal, that had inspired so many German Jews before. Jacob Toury has recently reminded us of the persistent complacency of most Jewish organizations as well, even as late as 1929. But here I wish to stress neither the story of the leadership nor of the rank and file; I would like to ignore for a moment both organizational and communal activities and concentrate instead on the individual, private Jew. I wish to call to mind the catastrophe of that urban middle-class group of so-called assimilated men and women who felt — "even if it were a thousand times an error" — completely and entirely a part of their non-Jewish environment; men and women who, despite signs of danger, seemed to feel comfortable and secure — that is, as comfortable and secure as anyone could feel in those times of political, social, and economic upheaval in Germany and Austria during the interwar years. The search for Jewish community, it seems to me, cannot be considered apart from or outside this perspective. After all, the process of emancipation had always been directed — primarily and fundamentally — at the individual Jew. And its collapse was therefore most forcefully experienced by the single individual. Assimilation was above all a personal process, one that was crowned, in the most positive cases, with more or less personal success. It is only natural that its abrupt end touched the core of the individual's life — practically, of course, but also in terms of an inner life, sense of self-identity and belonging, and with regard to one's "center of gravity."
In his controversial but highly suggestive book, Modernity and Ambivalence, Zygmunt Bauman gives new contours to the eminently individual character of the process of assimilation. The initial principle of emancipation, formulated at the time of the French Revolution, was, after all: "Everything to the Jew as individual; nothing to Jews as a group." And this principle, it has often been argued, was intrinsic to the new social and political order. It was intrinsic to the new type of state, which had been emerging since the late eighteenth century; and it is in fact further intrinsic, according to Bauman, to the Weltanschauung of modernity as a whole. Its implications were apparent soon enough. First of all, general, non-Jewish society issued an offer to individual Jews to join in — though this was, to be sure, an offer with a series of conditions attached. Second, that same non-Jewish society, especially its ruling, dominant stratum, insisted on the simultaneous dismemberment of the Jewish community structure, decidedly refusing to integrate it within its own multilayered, far from unified milieu. After all, Bauman's argument notwithstanding, the modern state, while indeed attempting to destroy all corporate arrangements in the area under its jurisdiction, never managed to do that. Instead, it has always allowed a parallel structure of associations to flourish within its boundaries. In Germany, in particular, this network of Vereine was very powerful, despite state supervision and occasional police intervention. Still, Jewish communal organizations of whatever type or character were never deemed acceptable within that network. They were neither state supported, nor were they allowed to evolve freely as independent social institutions. The authorities, especially in Prussia, were hostile toward all efforts by Jews to organize beyond the local level of the congregation so that the overall process of Jewish emancipation was often accomplished outside, if not always explicitly against, traditional Jewish community organizations. Furthermore, it was accomplished against, and usually outside, Jewish community life in general and, most emphatically, against Jewish communal identity.
The opposition to emancipation of Jews who saw themselves as spokesmen for organized Jewish life is well known. They openly expressed their fears for the future of that life. It is surely no mere coincidence that early plans for emancipation, both on the part of existing regimes, as in the Austria of Joseph II, and on the part of some private initiators, Jews and non-Jews alike, were given a powerful push at a time when contemporary Jewish communal leadership suffered a severe crisis of legitimation. At this low point of inner-communal cohesion, the campaign against the community, if one agrees to think of it this way, turned out to be particularly effective: not immediately or everywhere, of course, but soon and to an ever-increasing degree throughout the so-called German-speaking world. It is interesting to recall in this context the revealing disagreement between Moses Mendelssohn and Christian Wilhelm von Dohm with regard to the future role of the Jewish community. Dohm, the author of the pathbreaking book Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (1781), was presumably a spokesman for the strict statist orientation of late Prussian absolutism. He was nevertheless ready, even willing, to leave at least some measure of authority in the hands of the Jewish community. Mendelssohn, in contrast, as one modern interpreter has approvingly commented, immediately realized that the safeguarding of communal autonomy, "though it may seem so tolerant and well-meaning, could only strengthen the special status [of Jews]," and that its consequences could finally only be "regressive." The link between full individual equality and the undermining of group authority was inherent in the process and evident, even then and there, to all who truly wished to comprehend its nature.
Bauman gives his formulation a still sharper edge. According to him it was not — or perhaps not only — legal, formal emancipation — endowment with equal civil rights — that was bound to destroy the community. The real threat was inherent in what he sees as the "trap of assimilation." Jews, he comments, and Jews in Germany most particularly, fell into this trap "with enthusiasm and abandon." By definition, inaugurating an era of tolerance vis-à-vis the individual meant mtolerance vis-à-vis the group. "Tolerant treatment of individuals," he summarizes, "was inextricably linked to intolerance aimed at collectivities, their way of life, their values and, above all, their value-legitimating powers." The stigma of being different — and of course inferior as well — was attached to the collectivity, he explains, while "the offer of escaping" the stigma was "extended to individuals qua individuals." It included an invitation "to the individual members of the stigmatized community," as he puts it, "to desist loyalty to all groups of origin," in fact "to revolt against their power and to renounce communal loyalty."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In Search of Jewish Community by Michael Brenner, Derek J. Penslar. Copyright © 1998 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction by Michael Brenner and Derek J. Penslar
1. German Jews between Fulfillment and Disillusion: The Individual and the Community Shulamit Volkov
2. Gemeinschaft within Gemeinde: Religious Ferment in Weimar Liberal Judaism Michael A. Meyer
3. Visions of Gemeindeorthodoxie in Weimar Germany: The Approaches of Nehemiah Anton Nobel and Isak Unna David Ellenson
4. Turning Inward: Jewish Youth in Weimar Germany Michael Brenner
5. Between Deutschtum and Judentum: Ideological Controversies Inside the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (CV), 1919-1933 Avraham Barkai
6. "Verjudung des Judentums": Was there a Zionist Subculture in Western Germany during the Weimar Period? Jacob Borut
7. Written out of History: Bundists in Vienna and the Varieties of Jewish Experience in the Austrian First Republic Jack Jacobs
8. Jewish Ethnicity in a New Nation-State: The Crisis of Identity in the Austrian Republic Marsha L. Rozenblit
9. Gender, Identity, and Community: Jewish University Women in Germany and Austria Harriet Pass Freidenreich
10. The Crisis of the Jewish Family in Weimar Germany: Social Conditions and Cultural Representations Sharon Gillerman
11. "Youth in Need": Correctional Education (Fürsorgeerziehung) and Family Breakdown in German-Jewish Families Claudia Prestel
12. Decline and Survival of Rurual Jewish Communities Steven M. Lowenstein
Contributors
Index