Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust: A Jewish Family’s Untold Story (review)

“All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” What Leo Tolstoy famously tells us at the beginning of Anna Karenina about families in general applies with particular poignancy to German-Jewish family life during the Third Reich. Those Jewish families were all, of course, profoundly “unhappy” during the Hitler years, but the manner in which they responded to the common catastrophe that befell them, while inevitably displaying some overarching similarities, also betrayed subtle but significant differentiation—that uniqueness we call human. The volume under review is by no means the first study to chart the travails of a single German-Jewish family during the Nazi era, but the idiosyncratic nature of family misery, combined with the authors’ sharp eye for detail, means that this book is anything but redundant. It will deliver a powerful emotional gut-punch even to those readers who, having read a fair share of literature on the Holocaust, thought they had plumbed the depths of the Nazi-era horror.

Rebecca Boehling and Uta Larkey’s Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust is the collective biography of the Ruhr-based Steinberg-Kaufmann clan, a rather ordinary German-Jewish family. The portrait is framed against the larger backdrop of German-Jewish experiences from the promise of mid-nineteenth-century Jewish emancipation through the terrors of the Holocaust. In the book we follow the fate of three generations of Steinberg-Kaufmanns as they rejoiced in the new freedoms of emancipation; joined in the patriotic frenzy surrounding World War I; shared in the “perils of prominence” for Jews during the ill-fated Weimar Republic; agonized over Hitler’s accession to power; endured the wave of prewar persecutions culminating in the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) pogrom in November 1938; and finally fell victim to the Holocaust as it evolved, step by insidious step, over the course of World War II.

The Steinberg-Kaufmann story encompasses a number of thematic elements that will be familiar to students of German Jewish life in the modern era. With various members of this extended clan as our primary points of reference, we plunge into thorny debates over identity and belonging (how did one’s Jewishness affect one’s Germanness, and vice versa?); we examine gender roles (in the Steinberg-Kaufmann case, the authors argue, women played an unusually forceful role); we witness the heavy toll on individual lives and intra-familial relations exacted by Nazi persecution; and above all we agonize over that existential question—stay or leave? (If the answer is to leave, the question becomes: To where? Palestine? South America? Great Britain? Or perhaps the United States of America?)

Some of the younger members of the clan opted to leave Germany, and the heart of Life and Loss is the analysis of what it meant to come to this decision—and then, more protractedly, what it meant to carry it out. Again, this story has been told before, but the authors endow their particular version of the saga with depth and nuance by quoting extensively from a rich collection of primary materials, mainly family correspondence and diaries. Collections of this sort are not unique, but the one used here is unusually large and far-ranging.

While noting, quite rightly, that until the outbreak of World War II the Nazi government’s anti-Jewish persecution aimed primarily at forcing Jews to leave their country, Boehling and Larkey emphasize how difficult such an exodus was given the array of impediments to departure. For example, since the Nazis’ goal was to plunder the Jews’ material assets before they could leave, the government imposed ever-higher financial penalties on those who emigrated. Originally set at 25 percent of total assets, the so-called Reichsfluchtsteuer climbed to 96 percent at the outbreak of war. But of course, as the authors duly...