Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923

7. STRANGE ENCOUNTER: Germany, World War I, and the Ostjuden

STRANGE ENCOUNTER zyxwvutsrqponm Germany, World War I and the Ostjuden THE Ostjudenfrage underwent a metamorphosis during World War I, acquiring a significance and political urgency that were new and ominous. The war raged in the most heavily populated Eastern Jewish areas—Congress Poland, Calicia, and much of the Pale of Settlement. Germany's occupation of Poland in 1915 provided a radically new context for an old problem. Instead of the ghetto coming to Germany, Germany came to the ghetto. Prussian soldiers, impoverished inhabitants of countless shtetls, and middle-class German Jews were flung together—an unprecedented situation. Physical contact now personalized what for many had been an academic matter. The war became the testing ground for the validity of the various prewar German images of the Ostjude. At the same time, opposing forces vied with one another to influence the way in which the Ostjude would be treated and perceived. Eastern Jews figured prominently in a political problem of national importance, as an integral part of the question of Germany's Ostpolitik. For the war reopened the Polish question, which since 1864 had lain dormant. Russia, Austria, and Germany alike attempted to woo the Poles by promising them fulfillment of their national aspirations. The large Jewish population of Poland made Jews an essential ingredient in any solution. Moreover, with the occupation of the Baltic States and large parts of Belorussia and the Ukraine in addition to Congress Poland, Germany was now in control of the zyxwvutsrqp 7 139 German officers entering the Jewish quarter of Mlawa, 129 kilometers north Kuhlewindt, Konigsberg, Prussia / postcard: Kunstanstalt J. Themal, Po Institute for Jewish Research. STRANGE ENCOUNTER zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJI 141 German soldiers looking for lodging in a Jewish home. Unidentified newspaper clipping / Gustav Eisner Collection, Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. bulk of European Jewry. The Germans were quite aware that the Jews could not be left out of their plans for the postwar European order under German hegemony and accordingly set up a special department of Jewish affairs in the Foreign Office.1 German Jews were forced to confront the problem. Their responses to the challenge not only mirrored their changing feelings and attitudes towards the Ostjuden but also provided a sensitive measure of their own self-conceptions, their understanding of the relation between Deutschtum and Judentum, between being German and being Jewish. By the war's end German Jewry had undergone transformation—defeat and radical anti-Semitism made this almost inevitable.2 STRANGE ENCOUNTER zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJ 142 zyxwvutsrqp Few German Jews were troubled when war was declared in 1914, however. Most shared in the collective euphoria.3 Even radical Zionists like Kurt Blumenfeld, Martin Buber, and Moses Calvary breathlessly participated in the nationalist enthusiasm.4 Of course, Jews could endorse the war with an easy conscience because the enemy was Russian absolutism; at last the despotic anti-Semitic heritage would be brought to account. Barbaric "half-Asia" would be defeated and with that defeat, finally, would come Jewish emancipation. This conviction was shared by liberal,5 Orthodox,6 and Zionist7 alike. At least at the outset, it seemed to be a war in which German and Jewish interests were identical. Hermann Cohen 's 1915 rendering of the harmonious relationship between Deutschtum and Judentum was merely the philosophical systematization of a popular Jewish perception.8 These hopes, the assumptions of an identity of interests, were quickly put to the test. German soldiers advancing to the East suddenly faced the reality of the Jewish masses in the Eastern ghettoes. An occupying German power now administered the lives and hopes of the Ostjuden. What only a minority of German Jews were prepared to admit before the war was now thrust upon their consciousness: for both Jews and non-Jews the connection between Eastern European and German Jewry seemed undeniable. The recognition of this interdependence, the realization of its possibilities as well as an acute sense of its dangers, politicized German Jewry as no question had done before. Liberals, Zionists, and Orthodox Jews all attempted to influence public opinion and shape German policy vis-a-vis the Ostjuden. Their actions were not prompted by benevolence alone, for as the war unfolded it became evident that the Eastern Jew increasingly symbolized the greater, more general Jewish question. German Jewish responses to this problem varied according to political and ideological predilections, but all were formulated within a common context. The war placed German Jews directly in...