In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses
  • Paul Moore
Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses, edited by Francis R. Nicosia and David Scrase (New York: Berghahn, 2010), xv + 245 pp., hardback $60.00, pbk. $29.95.

"There has never been anything quite like it in the history of the world. The physical excesses of 1933 continue. Jews are still murdered in the concentration camps; they are still beaten in the streets." Thus did London's Sunday Express take stock of the plight of Germany's Jews in the aftermath of Nuremberg Laws. The weekly further editorialized: "There is nothing they can do except run round helplessly in circles until they die."1

The seven essays in this volume, penned by some of the preeminent scholars in the field, amply demonstrate that such grim prognoses could be proven wrong [End Page 297] by the persecuted themselves. The volume's broad focus is on the period from Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in 1933 to the onset of the "Final Solution" in late 1941, although the individual papers occasionally deal with later developments as well. Thematically, the essays focus on the everyday lives of ordinary German Jews, and seek to highlight hitherto neglected aspects of that history, in particular the agency Jews were able to exercise to confound, if only temporarily, the murderous aims of their oppressors. This is indeed a welcome emphasis: what Primo Levi described as "the gray zone," an analytical concept commonly used by those who examine the morally ambiguous compromises made inside the camps, remains somewhat neglected with regard to Jewish life on the outside. Recent studies dealing with particularly grim compromises, such as Doris Tausendfreund's monograph on the Jewish "catchers"—who located for the Gestapo Jews living in hiding—are still relatively exceptional.2

In the first chapter, Marion Kaplan addresses Jewish families and their attempts to respond to the challenges posed by the Nazi onslaught. In some respects the female role within the family expanded into traditionally "male" areas; matriarchs replaced their husbands as breadwinners as the latter were increasingly ousted from German economic life. Gender inequality was also manifested in emigrations, with twenty percent more women than men eventually left behind in Germany.

Jürgen Matthäus then examines Jewish agency in relation to the evasion of antisemitic legislation. With "increasing personal risk and decreasing chances of success," Jews attempted to win classification as non-Jews, Mischlinge, or members of otherwise "privileged" groups (p. 49). Focusing on Berlin, Matthäus examines the application of a hitherto under-researched aspect of Nazi racial legislation, namely the April 12, 1938 "Law to Amend and Supplement Family-Related Regulations and to Regulate the Status of Stateless Persons." The aim of this law, somewhat obscured by its unwieldy name, was to establish via the courts the paternity of the individual in question. By means of what Matthäus terms "evasion by compliance," Jews used the law to have themselves reclassified. The risks involved were considerable; a majority of cases ended without "improvement" in the individual's racial status; a minority even found themselves downgraded. Others escaped deportation thanks only to administrative delays in processing their cases. Matthäus shows that roughly half of the 700 Berliners who attempted to use this law to evade persecution opened their cases in 1941 and 1942, the height of the deportations.

Avraham Barkai presents a distillation of his decades of scholarly research on "Jewish self-help" in the prewar years, focusing on the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden (Reich's Deputation of the German Jews) and the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith). Barkai emphasizes the successes enjoyed by these organizations, and the initiative of the Jews themselves, as opposed to their [End Page 298] "co-operation" with the regime per se. This approach is in keeping with his justified dismissal of Hannah Arendt's under-informed polemics on Jewish complicity.

Francis Nicosia's contribution likewise presents a case study of Berlin, this time as a center for the German Zionist movement. At least initially, leading German Zionists saw the Nazi seizure of power as an opportunity to win...

pdf

Share