Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses Read Online Free PDF Page A

responsibility, a high degree of self-confidence, and irresistible Nazi coercion explained the motivations and actions of German-Jewish leaders. Meyer uses the example of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland and its leadership, which was established in February 1939 as a body representing all Jews remaining in Germany and through which the regime might better force Jews to do what it expected of them. Since many of those leaders were professionals who held high positions in the German bureaucracy before 1933, they followed a more traditional style of governing with rules that they believed “would act as a counterweight to arbitrariness, violence, and murder.” It did not occur to them, Meyer argues, that such methods not only would not preclude mass murder, but might in fact enhance its implementation. She concludes that preserving a Jewish administration in the Reichsvereinigung that followed the old rules “proved to be a pitifully helpless strategy for averting what Dan Diner has termed the ‘rupture of civilization.’”
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
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.
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.
See Marion A.