Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation (review)

In 2000, the Centrum Judaicum, housed in the wreck of the great New Synagogue located in what had been to 1989 East Berlin, presented an exhibit on the lives and times of Berlin Jews from 1938 to 1945. As some of the events and many of the people whose lives were rpdetold in this exhibit had inhabited the walls of this space and that the scholars who mounted this exhibit were representatives of Berlin life, East and West, Jews and non-Jewish, this exhibit had exemplary value at the beginning of the millennium. The further fact that the exhibit was brilliantly composed and staggeringly honest further enhanced the value of the experience of visiting the exhibit as I did that year.

The University of Chicago Press, in conjunction with the Franz Rosenzweig Center for German Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, has now produced an English-language version of the catalogue of that exhibit. More than an exhibition catalogue, this volume can serve as a model of collaborative work on German Jewish history, especially the history of the Jews in the Third Reich. Why is it exemplary? Because it reflects in detail and in overview the complex experience of both collectives (Zionists [in the essay by Chana Schütz], children [Karin Wieckhorst], "Mischlinge" [Diana Schulle]) and of individuals. It reconstructs on the lives and experiences of those who perished, such as the opera singer Therese Rothauser [Alexandra von Pfuhlstein], as well as those who survived, such as the Frankenstein family [Barbara Schier]. It tells the stories of "famous" post-war Jews, such as Hans Rosenthal [Michael Scha¨bitz], the TV celebrity, who survived through the help of working class, non-Jews as well as the tale of "normal" post-war survivors such as Ruth Schwersenz [Karin Wieckhorst], whose prewar school autograph album serves as a sort of directory of the dead and the living among her Jewish classmates. All of these are framed by essays on the seizure of family businesses, such as the Garbáty cigarette company [Beate Meyer], forced labor [Diana Schulle], the Jewish media under the Nazis [Clemens Maier], and the deportations [Beate Meyer] as well as the process of emigration [Michael Scha¨bitz]. Many of these essays are self-consciously overviews that frame the individual stories in ways that make the volume a readable and comprehensive presentation of the experience of Nazi Berlin, of the Jews who survived, of the Jews who were murdered, and of the non-Jews involved in both.

Yet, this would not make the volume as perceptive and as unsettling as it truly is. For there are two essays that are striking in their originality and their necessity. The first, by Diana Schulle, is on the Rosenstrasse protest of 1943. The story has come to be well known: how male Jews, married to "Aryan" women, and therefore seemingly protected from deportation, were seized in a wave of raids, taken to a building in the Rosenstrasse, in front of which their wives silently demonstrated day and night until their spouses were released. This tale has been used as a model for passive resistance in the Third Reich, with the argument, that if the German populace had undertaken such a resistance, the deportation of German Jews would have not taken place. The historical analogy is to the vocal opposition to the euthanasia program by Cardinal Galen who through his words, at least publically, ended that horror. Schulle presents the "facts" of the case in a readable format, including tracing the lives of those men already deported from the Rosenstrasse to Auschwitz and their rescue. But she ends the essay on a rather sobering note: that the public resistance of the wives had had little impact on Nazi policy; that the Berlin authorities were about to release the men in any case, and that the real bravery of their spouses had had as little impact on the events as would have a wider resistance to...