Süssen Is Now Free of Jews: World War II, The Holocaust, and Rural Judaism by Gilya Gerda Schmidt (review)

Biographies were at all times an important part of historical writings, but their recent flood show a remarkable change of subjects: in most of them, common people took the place of the great public figures in the political, cultural, or military fields in earlier works of the genre. The book under review reflects this tendency in the historiography of the Holocaust. After half a century of intensive research, resulting in a huge body of general analyses of the system, the perpetrators, and the victims, micro-history tries to fill the lacunae in our understanding by probing the ground "from below upwards," from the particular individual to general events and developments. In a lively and readable style, Gilya G. Schmidt tells the history of the only two Jewish families that lived in Suessen, a small city in Wurttemberg. This is a detailed report of what she describes as a decade-long "adventurous treasure hunt" (297) in archives and personal interviews in various parts of the globe. Its results were many hundreds of primary sources, which are fully or partly quoted at length. Together with the harvest from a host of contemporary and later publications, their list fills twelve dense pages of the bibliography.

The introduction offers us a short glimpse of the environment, the geological makeup, climate, archeology, and history of the district Goeppingen to which Suessen belongs. In the historiography of Jews in Germany, this area is extensively described, as aptly summarized in forty pages of this book (Ch. 10, 242ff.). The Jewish communities of Goeppingen and Jebenhausen were destroyed during the pogroms of the Black Death in 1348-49 and Jews settled there again only 500 years later. (242) These two communities are often mentioned as prototypes for the life and development of rural Jews from the eighteenth century on. But only after 1902 did two Jewish families, Lang and Ottenheimer, move from there to nearby Suessen. At that time the villages were still separated by administration and religion as Klein-Suesen (Catholic) and Gross-Suessen (Protestant), and were united only in 1933. It seems that they and some relatives and/or personnel of their business and households remained the only Jews there until 1939-40. At that time some relatives moved in to seek shelter and two families were "evacuated" to Suessen from the frontier region of the Rhineland. The Jewish population of Suessen rose to thirteen persons. (123f.). Most of them were deported to their death in 1941-42 (165ff) when Suessen became "judenfrei."

The author spent a short part of her childhood with one of these families. It seems that this is the sole reason that this history of a small Jewish settlement was written. The narrative starts with the first chapter, entitled "Post-Nazi Suessen: An Attempt of Reconciliation." It records a visit of survivors of the Lang family, invited by the mayor, in May 1989. (16ff) Indeed, a very late "attempt," compared with many other German cities. The following chapters do not justify the claim of the city's Stadtarchivar in his Foreword that the "clean vest of Suessen (in the Nazi period)" was less "spotted" than that of other places, where violence or even physical attacks on Jewish fellow citizens occurred, but this did not happen in Suessen. Rather when the need of the local Jews was greatest, they were secretly supported by a number of Suessen citizens, through groceries that were secretly left on their doorsteps, for example. Most of the repressive measures against the Jews were brought into the village from outside." (vii)

Throughout the book the author reports many cases of the friendly and helpful behavior of non-Jewish Suesseners but emphasizes their exceptional character. We can find such exceptions described in almost every local-historic study of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. But her story does not prove...