The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory by Tim Grady (review)

In November 1947 Gerhard Ritter, a senior German historian and former member of the conservative resistance to Adolf Hitler, wrote to his British colleague, George Peabody Gooch, explaining the motives behind his 1936 study of Frederick the Great: “[It] was penned as a protest against the infamous ‘Day of Potsdam’ in March 1933 . . . and as an appeal to that ‘invisible community of bearers of the true front spirit in the realm of German science,’ to whom the book was dedicated. . . . I was thinking here of those colleagues who, like myself, fought in World War I, were steeped in old Prussian army traditions, and were therefore horrified by the contamination of the new Reichswehr with Hitlerian ideas. . . . We stood together in the conviction that any further dissolution of this ‘true front spirit’ would necessarily lead to Germany’s ruin” (Klaus Schwabe and Rolf Reichardt, eds., Gerhard Ritter: Ein politischer Historiker in seinen Briefen [Boppard am Rhein, 1984], 444).

Ritter’s letter has a direct bearing on Tim Grady’s fascinating new book on German-Jewish soldiers who fought in World War I because, in effect, they both argue the same point: namely, that the period 1914–1933 saw the development of a distinctive, non-Hitlerian, and yet highly patriotic set of “positive” myths about the German war experience that was not entirely obliterated or superseded after the Nazi rise to power. Rather, these “more inclusive conservative narratives of the war” (122) survived the Third Reich largely unscathed, to become dominant in the political culture of West Germany during the early Cold War period. Grady’s important contribution is to integrate German-Jewish veterans into this story. In so doing, he also challenges the mainstream post-Holocaust view that there was an unbridgeable gulf between the experiences and war memories of Gentile and Jewish Germans, beginning at the latest with the notorious Judenzählung conducted by the German army in November 1916 and continuing with the formation of a separate Jewish war veterans’ league, the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten (RjF), in 1919.

For Grady, the years 1916, 1918–1919, and even 1933 represented less of a radical break in the ability of Jewish ex-servicemen to influence mainstream German memory culture than other scholars have assumed. He argues this in three different ways. First, following Jay Winter (Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History [Cambridge, 1995]), he reminds us that the phenomenon of war memory does not exist just at the official and institutional level but also encompasses small-scale, communal, and private forms of mourning and grief. There was plenty of scope here for overlapping patterns of commemoration, which allowed German Jews to be brought into the “front community” and to make their mark on “shared modes of remembrance” (14) before and after 1918. Indeed, German-Jewish soldiers were frequently buried on the front under the sign of the cross, which itself came to symbolize romantic and individual (rather than specifically Christian) ideas of sacrifice for the nation. On the home front, “communities of mourning” often came together in “work and social places that crossed ethnic, confessional and cultural boundaries” (48). Grady mentions, for example, the role that the Siemens works in Berlin played in December 1916 in commemorating the life and accomplishments of one of its Jewish employees who had fallen in battle. This included sending a company delegation to take part in his funeral at the Jewish cemetery in Hanover.

Second, the book examines the role of German Jews in commemoration practices during Weimar, noting that not all right-wing or antirepublican veterans’ associations excluded them. This could be seen especially at the local level, where “remembrance schemes were driven by a national conservative understanding of wartime sacrifice” and where “the belief persisted that all of the dead had earned the right to be honoured together” (97–98)—in spite...