Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (review)

Holocaust historians have never relied exclusively on perpetrator-created sources to narrate and analyze the genocide of European Jewry, but the fact that so many sources were German-language documents written for Nazi audiences might sometimes lead one to think otherwise. While perpetrators' perspectives are certainly crucial components of Holocaust narratives, the scholarly focus on body counts and grisly details of the mechanisms of annihilation has ominous collateral effects. In Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-day Ukraine (2007), Omer Bartov criticized this scholarly fixation on Jewish death as echoing the perpetrator's mindset because it "[brings the Jews] into history for the sole purpose of depicting their extermination." The challenge is to reinscribe the Holocaust into a broader narrative not just of European history but of Jewish history and Jewish identity.

Francis R. Nicosia's and David Scrase's edited volume Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses is one example of the fruits of a new scholarly focus intended as a corrective to such "perpetrator source fetishism." This reorientation has benefitted from new institutional initiatives, notably the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's (USHMM) source edition project "Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933-1946." This concerted effort to acquire and preserve archival materials created by Jewish individuals and organizations before, during, and after the Holocaust is helping open the way for new approaches to the topic. Nicosia's and Scrase's volume of scholarly essays is the conference proceedings of a similarly titled 2006 Symposium at the University of Vermont's Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies that approached Holocaust history from victims' perspectives. The symposium brought together a group of prominent Holocaust scholars to examine questions about German Jewish identity in Germany in the 1930s from the perspectives of the persecuted Jews themselves. What did it mean to belong to a loyal, patriotic, and economically important minority group when the government deemed it a threat and systematically suffocated it?

In his introduction, Nicosia recognizes that these questions are not entirely unexplored ones. To frame them, he briefly surveys the legal basis of German persecution in the 1930s and cites earlier research on the subject, some of it by the volume's own contributors. He shows how the volume does not simply rehash old territory, even if the outlines of the history of Germany's discriminatory legislation in the 1930s are well known. Although Nicosia does not explicitly say so, what follows is a tightly focused set of essays that wisely strive for depth and close analysis of selected topics, rather than an encyclopedic coverage of the daily experiences of Jewish life in Germany in the 1930s. Central themes are Jewish institutions and spaces: Konrad Kwiet writes on the de facto ghettoization enforced through the creation of Judensiedlungen (Jewish Settlements) and Judenhäuser (Jews' Houses); Beate Meyer considers the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Representation of Jews in Germany); and Michael Brenner discusses theater and the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Cultural League.) Aside from his introduction, Nicosia also contributes an essay about Zionism in Nazi Berlin.

Though all of the essays are of high quality, several merit special comment for their focus on the Alltagsgeschichte (everyday history) of Jewish life and identity in 1930s Germany. Developing further her widely respected work on the subject, for instance, Marion Kaplan examines changes in family dynamics. Kaplan influentially characterized German Jewish experiences as suspended "between dignity and despair" in her 1998 work of the same name. Families that might not ever have identified themselves as Jewish found themselves categorized as such and subject to new pressures. The extent to which the notion that the family is always a "haven in a heartless world" was a useful fiction became increasingly obvious. (16) The many new economic, social, and psychological pressures that Jewish families faced created a situation in which "their world was shrinking and Jews spent more and more...