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

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