“Lately, Almost Constantly, Everything Seems Small to Me”: The Lived Space of German Jews under the Nazi Regime

Focusing predominantly on middle-aged, middle-class urban men, this article analyzes the spatial experiences of German Jews in Nazi Germany, dealing with their exclusion from different kinds of public spaces, their turn to closed Jewish spaces, and their withdrawal into private spaces. This process had a major impact on the bourgeois Jewish habitus that developed during the emancipation era. In the spirit of the spatial turn in social studies (following Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau), the article demonstrates how the shrinking of lived physical space yielded parallel mental processes. The discussion is based on close reading of diaries, predominantly those of Victor Klemperer and Willy Cohn, along with additional primary sources.