A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War by Tim Grady (review)

Tim Grady has established himself as one of the foremost authorities on the history of German Jewry during World War I with the publication of his path-breaking 2011 study, The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory, which exposed how relations between Jews and other Germans did not abruptly end after 1918, but persisted into the Weimar Republic and the early Nazi years, by way of a shared memory culture of World War I. Building on this work, Grady has now produced a comprehensive history of German Jews during World War I, and in doing so, he has made a vital contribution to the field, and not just in the English-language historiography.

The last decade alone has witnessed an outpouring of literature on Jewish experiences during World War I, and historians are right to ask whether there is anything substantially new to be gained from yet another study. Not surprisingly, Grady's answer to the question is: yes. Although new and innovative scholarship has challenged the notion of a singular Jewish wartime experience and disputed the watershed nature of wartime antisemitism, many scholars continue to write this history in the shadow of the Holocaust, through the lens of the destruction of Jewish life under Hitler. Whether consciously or not, they portray Jews as victims, feeding the perception that for them, antisemitism was the defining experience of the war, and the "Jew count" the decisive moment when German Jewish relations unraveled. Such an approach, Grady argues, overlooks the fact that there was actually nothing exceptional about the way German Jews experienced World War I; the majority experienced the war much as other Germans did. It also ignores Jews' role as active participants in Germany's war and in creating, alongside other Germans, a wartime culture whose legacies would have severe consequences for the postwar world. The author's overarching aim, therefore, is to "write Jews back into the wider history of Germany's First World War" and consider the 1914–1918 experience within its own context, rather than in hindsight from 1933 (2).

The book comprises nine thematic chapters, and each examines seven crucial facets of the German effort, such as war enthusiasm, total war, annexationist policy, and the stab-in-the-back legend, to name but a few, and Jews' "coconstitutive" role, alongside other Germans, in shaping these developments. We learn that the Jewish community played prominent roles as war enthusiasts and propagandists in fanning public enthusiasm for the war, which led to the "Spirit of 1914," that brief, imagined moment when Germans of all classes and religions supposedly stood united against a common threat. Jewish writers such as Ernst Lissauer supported the German cause by penning his infamous "Hymn of Hate against England" (1914), while the artwork of Max Liebermann adorned the covers of patriotic newspapers and periodicals. Industrialists like Walther Rathenau, who was appointed head of the War Raw Materials Section of the German War Ministry, dedicated themselves to putting the German economy on a secure wartime footing, while scientists such as the renowned chemist Fritz Haber, perfected a weaponized form of chlorine gas for the German army. Jewish women, not content with fulfilling traditional gendered roles of caregivers or homemakers, formed their own organizations and actively supported the war through fundraising, charity, and propaganda. As late as October 1918, Grady tells us, the Union of German Women's Associations initiated a letter-writing campaign to boost the army's morale, urging the troops to keep fighting, even as it became clear that the war was already lost. Such examples challenge a common misconception that Jewish Germans were overwhelmingly attracted to the liberal political spectrum, and thus in fundamental opposition to German nationalism. This presumption has obscured the fact that the Jewish community played a decisive part in shaping a war driven by nationalist ideology, an unconditional conflict whose only possible outcomes were victory...