Making the Stranger the Enemy: Gertrud Kolmar's Eine jüdische Mutter

The search for satisfactory explanations of how the German population supported mass marginalization, deportation, and extermination of Jewish and other undesirable fellow citizens is not likely to end soon. This essay strives, nonetheless, to contribute to our understanding of the complex processes that allowed Germans to consider a neighbor a stranger, this stranger an enemy, the enemy a target, by closely reading a text of the Weimar Republic that illustrates one such scenario. Gertrud Kolmar's short novel, Eine jüdische Mutter (A Jewish Mother), is particularly apt for such an investigation, both because its plot concerns the marginalization of an individual just when she appears to become assimilated, and because the way the story is told creates gaps that allow readers insight into the false and unjust logic that supports the process. (IK)