Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933–1946 offers a new perspective on Holocaust history by presenting documentation that describes the manifestations and meanings of Nazi Germany's "Final Solution" from the Jewish perspective. This first volume, taking us from Hitler's rise to power through the aftermath of Kristallnacht, vividly reveals the increasing devastation and confusion wrought in Jewish communities in and beyond Germany at the time. Numerous period photos, documents, and annotations make this unique series an invaluable research and teaching tool.
Jürgen Matthäus is research director at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.Mark Roseman is professor in the Department of History and Pat M. Glazier Chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University Bloomington.
Table of Contents
Volume Introduction: Jews and Other Germans before and after 1933Part I: The Battles of 1933Chapter 1: Confronting the Nazi RevolutionChapter 2: Exclusion and IntrospectionChapter 3: Strategies for SurvivalPart II: Feeling One's Way: January 1934 to August 1935Chapter 4: Stretching the Limits of InfluenceChapter 5: Everyday Life in an Era of UncertaintyChapter 6: Segregation and Exclusion: Spring and Summer 1935Part III: Subjects Under Siege: September 1935 to December 1937Chapter 7: The Nuremberg Laws and Their ImpactChapter 8: Bonds and Breaks with GermanyChapter 9: Jewish Questions after NurembergPart IV: Dispossession and Disappearance: 1938Chapter 10: "Model Austria" and Its RamificationsChapter 11: Évian and the Emigration ImpasseChapter 12: "Kristallnacht" and Its ConsequencesList of DocumentsBibliographyGlossaryChronology
For many years, the bulk of the research that has been done on the Holocaust focused on the actions of the perpetrators: what did they do and how did they do it? In recent years scholars have begun to redress this imbalance. Now their efforts will have a critically important resource on which to draw: the five volume series Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933–1946.
Drawing on diaries, letters, organizational archives, and a host of other sources it gives the victims a voice that, in too many other works, has been denied to them. While this first volume stands on its own as a book well worth reading, it also promises to become an invaluable aide to scholars, teachers, students, and all others who want to know more about 'the six million.' It is long overdue.
David Cesarani
I have read Jewish Responses to Persecution Volume 1 from cover to cover, and I think it is a magnificent achievement. The selection of documents is astonishing in terms of the breadth and particular insight they offer. But the authors have also managed to select several times from the same sources, giving the reader a growing sense of familiarity—and empathy—with the authors. Combined with the wonderfully clear introductory pieces and linking commentary, this gives the volume the feel of an integrated history and even the quality of a novel. The reader begins to care about the witnesses and wonder what will happen to them next. It is truly a masterpiece.
Christopher R. Browning
One of the great challenges facing historians of any event or epoch is to recover the perceptions and uncertainties of people for whom what we know as the past was still an unknown and open-ended future. The singular achievement of this volume edited by Jürgen Matthäus and Mark Roseman is to place in the hands of historians, students, and general readers an extraordinary collection of documents that opens up the world of the 1930s as German Jews experienced it in all its urgency, confusion, disorientation, hope, and despair, not as we now make sense of it with the advantage of hindsight.