Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim

Notes

281 Notes Introduction: New Manners 1. Kaplan 1998: ch. 5; Rosenstrauch 1988: 76. 2. G/157b R/150, G/159a R/200. These abbreviations refer to the tape, side, and cycle number on which the excerpt can be found on the relevant audio cassettes. Here, G/157b R/150 refers to cassette number 157, side b, of this research project on conviviality (Geselligkeit; SAH Best. 904–2) at approximately 150 out of 420 cycles into the tape. Although I typed transcripts for these interviews, I refer to cycles on the tapes, rather than pages from the transcripts, because the latter can never be as accurate as the former and the former is the actual source. Copies of tapes and transcriptions are available from the author, though the masters reside at the Hildesheim town archives and are under the administration of its director. Typically references will appear in the text. For archival documents, I provide the institution and collection number where the source can be found (e.g., SAH 102/3019). I describe the document itself directly in the text. The collection title can be found in the bibliography. For newspaper or journal articles, I provide the issue or volume number and the page (e.g., 142: 5). I mention the year and topic in the text. The title of the newspaper or journal could appear in either location. Unless otherwise noted, images refer to my personal collection of reproductions of images belonging to my interview partners: D/345 would refer to slide (Dia) 345. To protect their anonymity, I do not credit these individuals. 3. G/94b R/135. 4. Bauman 1989; Kaplan 1998; Reed and Fischer 1989; Rosenstrauch 1988. 5. Schmid 2002; Schneider 1998: III. 2; cf. Addicks 1988; Jan 1968a and 1968b, 1988; Hein 1988; Teich 1979. 6. Fritzsche 1998; Rosenstrauch 1988. 7. Herbert 1983; cf. Goldhagen 1996. 8. Broszat 1981; Kaplan 1998; Petropolous 1998; Schoenbaum 1966. 9. Cf. Arendt 1951; Passerini 1992. 10. I have already described the role of the mass media in the Nazi revolution from the perspective of everyday life: for daily papers and the radio see Bergerson 1997 and 2001 respectively. This book will not address several other arenas for conviviality that are closely related to normalcy and the Third Reich: public festivals , art, architecture, film, local characters, the visits of national statesmen to Hildesheim as well as some of the earlier history of exchange relations and migrant populations. These issues are inextricably imbedded in the broader history of Alt- 282 Notes to pages 10–87 Hildesheim, the imagined community (B. Anderson 1983) with which almost all of my interview partners strongly identified, and which will be the subject of a forthcoming book. 11. Browning 1998; Gellately 2001. 12. Lüdtke 1995: 5, his emphasis. 1. Civility 1. Even cross-dressing had become one of the options for women in Hildesheim . Thekla Mestmacher claimed that both girls and boys wore school caps: only the girls did not have caps with peaks (Schirm; D/908; G/13a R/180). But later, she showed me a photo from her youth in which she wore a boy’s cap and man’s tie. She judged herself “totally ugly.” Clearly, the attitudes of her parents’ generation still remained strong in her memory. Moreover, gender was still evident for those who were cross-dressing. When Georg Brzezinski showed me a photo of his sister’s first day at school, it was obvious that she was a girl in spite of the school cap. Still, he explained that girls did not actually wear school caps: his sister must have borrowed his (cf. D/1294, G/192a R/300). Though she had broken the rules of headdress, George could dismiss his sister’s behavior as so much eigensinn. 2. Niveau 1. All of my interview partners agreed that Catholics and Protestants were uniformly distributed around town: both on its streets and in its buildings. This conclusion is confirmed by the few existing archival records of parishioners: “Strassenverzeichnis der St. Bernwardsgemeinde und Seelenzahl, 1937–8” in the unnumbered file, St. Bernward in Hildesheim: Allgemeine Angelegenheiten insbes. die kirchliche Statistik, 1909–55 at the BAH as well as the more detailed “Kirchenvorstandwählerliste , St. Godehardi-Gemeinde, Hildesheim, 1911 and 1937” at the Pfarrarchiv St. Godehard, also not numbered. 3. The Stroll 1. Though many of my oldest interview partners (those born before 1914) did not remember this custom at all or remembered it unclearly, these events stand at the very brink of...