The Waning of Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary

2. The Creation of a Usable Past

54 2 The Creation of a Usable Past The turn toward Jewish history in the first years of the Nazi regime was reflected not just in the programmatic writings of rabbis and public spokespeople such as Joachim Prinz, Bruno Weil, Fritz Friedländer, and Simon Schwab. Their attempts to identify certain regularities in Jewish history and to link them to contemporary issues were part of a much wider endeavor of German Jewish writers in the 1930s. By delineating an overall structure to the course of Jewish history, they were attempting to create a usable past that could help their readers come to terms with the challenges of the time. This trend had additional, more specific, aspects: German Jewish professional historians and historically minded writers reinterpreted the significance of a variety of major events and figures in the German Jewish past. By the eve of the Nazi rise to power, professional historians, some of them active scholars and lecturers in central Jewish institutions, were already using popular writing in order to advance their public agenda. In the summer of 1932, Ismar Elbogen, the rector of the Berlin liberal Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (high school for Jewish studies) and from 1929 also the editor of the historical journal Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, published an article titled “Jewish Research in Times of Trouble.” Historical scholarship for its own sake, Elbogen claimed, is a vital need for every society, but at the same time research is also a necessary tool for preserving the freshness of Judaism. To abandon history, Elbogen suggested, was akin to committing spiritual suicide.1 In 1933 Elbogen became a central member of the new Reichsvertre- 55 The Creation of a Usable Past tung der deutschen Juden (Reich Representation of German Jews). He was to emerge as one of several Jewish professional historians who turned to popular writing and to the creation and development of a usable Jewish past.2 Thus, for example, he took part in composing a series of seven articles about the history of the Jews in Germany from the Roman era to the age of emancipation. These were published in the spring and summer of 1934 in the Central Verein Zeitung.3 Then in 1935 Elbogen published a book on German Jewish history, the first comprehensive research work in the field.4 In Michael Meyer’s view, “this work is written with passion and a maximum of engagement” in a style that resembles that of Heinrich Graetz. Meyer suggests that Elbogen’s work can be read as a Greek tragedy that struggles to deal with the question of Jewish survival.5 Elbogen left Germany for the United States in 1938. Academic historians such as Elbogen tended to focus on certain periods rather than others and from time to time would address theoretical issues that linked the present and the past.6 However, the Jewish public’s growing interest in its own history had more to do with a desire to embrace it in order to invest the present with meaning. Such attempts were articulated in the Jewish communal journals not only by historians but also by community activists and educators. German Jewish spokespeople—professional historians and communal publicists alike—made efforts to create a usable past in a variety of ways. They responded to various anniversaries marked during the 1930s (the most prominent of which was the 900th anniversary of the establishment of the Worms synagogue) and dealt with various historical figures from the Jewish and German Jewish pantheon of heroes. Looking to the past for answers to the agonies of the present and to the challenges of the future motivated them also primarily in the second half of the 1930s to discuss the meaning of emigration and of exile throughout Jewish history. Anniversaries and Places of Memory One of the ways in which the Jewish press in Germany related to the past was the marking of anniversaries. Such events, termed les lieux de mémoire (“places of memory”) by Pierre Nora, are not necessarily located in any physical space but can be found on the annual calendar.7 During the years 1933–34, the German Jewish press commemorated a variety of events that concerned the history of the emancipation. In June 1933 the journal Israelitisches Familienblatt marked the 100th anniversary of the Prussian Emancipation Edict in Posen, emphasizing the opportuni- 56 C...