Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (review)

Atina Grossman has written an exceptionally fascinating book about the first days, weeks, and months following the liberation of Germany and the Jews at the end of world war II. By examining hitherto little known but extremely valuable original sources in amazing detail, she sheds light on a period when Jews, non-Jewish Germans, and Allied forces often had to share quite limited spaces. She reconstructs the ways in which different people lived through the liberation of Germany: everything from the varied reactions to the mass rape of German women by the Red Army to the first days spent by Jews who had newly emerged from hiding or recently repatriated survivors liberated from the Nazis' forced labor, concentration, and death camps. She is especially intent on refuting the widely held belief that Jews inhabited a self-enclosed collectivity, separate from that of the Germans.

One should probably think of her argument in a methodological sense as well. The book is concerned not only with the specific groups themselves, but also with the content of their concrete encounters. By juxtaposing them, Grossman can also lay bare the paradoxes and contradictions of the post-war era. So, for example, she contrasts the high birth rates of Jewish women with the high abortion rates for non-Jewish German women (regardless of whether pregnancy among the latter had resulted from rape or not). The erstwhile pride of German women had yielded, Grossman claims, to confusion, depression, and victimization. For Jewish women, by contrast, giving birth to a child not only signified the effort to re-establish stable family relationships, but also underscored their pride, strength, and courage to go on living. Grossman likewise considers the baby boom among Jewish displaced persons as an act of resistance and revenge against the Germans. In this way the one-time agents had become victims, while the latter, whose status as subjects had until recently been almost completely obliterated, now became agents, regaining control over their own lives. The rapid establishment of new families among the Jews was a sign of renewed hope, the exact opposite of what it had been under the Nazi regime. Then, pregnancy and small children meant a virtual death sentence for most Jewish women. But now, in the postwar era, childbirth and children signified life. Just as the topics of pregnancy and birth suggest how everything had been turned upside down in the aftermath of National Socialism, so too—as Grossman shows—it had suddenly become a privilege to belong to the Jewish people where once it had been a stigma. She examines the extraordinarily interesting and illuminating petitions directed at the Jewish community, which had to decide who would be counted a member of it and who not. By now membership in the community, which had been abandoned by many converts to Christianity in the 1930s, offered a kind of refuge, since it often entailed better living conditions. In short, Grossman's accounts make it abundantly clear that the postwar era in Germany was characterized by radical reversals, sudden and extreme shifts in values, and historical caesuras. That is one of the two reasons why specialists and lay readers alike who are interested in the immediate postwar years should find this book well worth reading.

The other reason comes to light in the stories the author tells about what happened when Jews and non-Jewish Germans met after the war. Atina Grossman describes encounters that sometimes went beyond what one would expect: a general and thoroughly understandable mistrust on the part of the Jews toward the German population and the latter's indifference, contempt, and deep-seated hatred toward the Jewish survivors. There were occasionally minor reconciliations, gradual rapprochements, and instances of mutual respect. For example, Jewish displaced persons sometimes requested to employ German women as nannies, household help, or maids. In a few cases good working relationships developed. Jewish women began to trust their German counterparts enough to want...