Germans into Jews: Remaking the German Social Body in Weimar Republic - Couverture rigide

Gillerman, Sharon

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0804757119 ISBN 13 : 9780804757119

Editeur : Stanford University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Germans into Jews turns to an often overlooked and misunderstood period of German and Jewish history—the years between the world wars. It has been assumed that the Jewish community in Germany was in decline during the Weimar Republic. But, Sharon Gillerman demonstrates that Weimar Jews sought to rejuvenate and reconfigure their community as a means both of strengthening the German nation and of creating a more expansive and autonomous Jewish entity within the German state. These ambitious projects to increase fertility, expand welfare, and strengthen the family transcended the ideological and religious divisions that have traditionally characterized Jewish communal life. Integrating Jewish history, German history, gender history, and social history, this book highlights the experimental and contingent nature of efforts by Weimar Jews to reassert a new Jewish particularism while simultaneously reinforcing their commitment to Germanness.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Sharon Gillerman is Associate Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles and adjunct Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern California.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Germans into Jews

Remaking the Jewish Social Body in the Weimar RepublicBy Sharon Gillerman

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5711-9

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................................................................viiIntroduction.....................................................................................................................11. "As the Family Goes, So Goes the Nation"......................................................................................172. Constructing a Jewish Body Politic: Declining Fertility and the Development of a Jewish Population Policy.....................533. "A Little State Within a Larger One": The Expansion of Jewish Welfare During the Weimar Republic..............................784. Rescuing "Endangered Youth": Youth Welfare and the Project of Bourgeois Social Reform.........................................1075. Trauma and Transference: War Orphans Shape a New Jewish Nation................................................................136Conclusion.......................................................................................................................163List of Abbreviations............................................................................................................173Notes............................................................................................................................175Select Bibliography..............................................................................................................211Index............................................................................................................................227

Chapter One

"As the Family Goes, So Goes the Nation"

In 1925, Thomas Mann described the perspective of one of his protagonists, Thomas Buddenbrook, as entailing a "return to the orgiastic freedom of individualism." A second-generation patriarch in Mann's chronicle of three generations of a bourgeois family, Buddenbrooks, Thomas abandons the dream of a vicarious immortality in his own posterity as "blind, childish folly!" and throws off the mantle of fatherhood to revel in an indulgent egoism:

What can my son do for me-what need have I of a son? Where shall I be when I am dead? Ah, it is so brilliantly clear, so overwhelmingly simple! I shall be in all those who have ever, do ever, or ever shall say "I"-especially, however, in all those who say it most fully, potently, and gladly!

In this arresting assertion of a new order of social affiliation, Mann brilliantly illuminates the conceptual changes that were transforming Weimar society. Rather than the traditional emphasis on family or blood relations, Thomas Buddenbrook finds meaning and vitality in an assertion of a sort of collective individualism with the result that the past, present, and future collection of "I's" becomes his new family and the ultimate basis for his or any legacy. Through Thomas Buddenbrook's transitional position as the middle figure in the three-generation chronicle, and the one perched on the edge of a profound reevaluation of the value and bases of kinship, Mann captures perfectly the sense of exuberant potential and concomitant anxiety that at turns animated and haunted the contemporary imagination of the Weimar family.

Many observers and critics of Weimar social life echoed sentiments similar to those of Mann. A seemingly indiscriminate discarding of accepted social norms, coupled with a growing sense of individual autonomy, had "made middle-class marriage appear more than ever a questionable institution," according to another literary chronicler of middle-class German life, Jakob Wassermann. Observers interpreted the inability of individuals to sustain a commitment to anything larger than themselves, to place the collective interest above the fulfillment of individual desire, as a malignant growth within the German social body, an underlying cause of its threatened disintegration.

In tones still more ominous than Mann's and Wassermann's, Oswald Spengler predicted in The Decline of the West that the selfishness of urbanites in limiting their offspring would lead not only to their quantitative decline but ultimately to their extinction. Spengler's conviction that urban man had forsaken the instinct to perpetuate himself through the institutions of family and race was indeed quite reminiscent of Mann's. For both Spengler and Mann, urban civilization represented an "essentially metaphysical turn towards death."

The notion that the institution of the family was being undermined by the destructive spirit of modernity was part of a larger perception of decline accompanying social transformations that began in the nineteenth century. At the very heart of the interrelated set of social problems and cultural changes that social scientists, welfare experts, and religious leaders identified as the Weimar crisis of the family was the sense that the family failed to carry out many of its traditional social functions. The central transformations of modern society, social changes ensuing from industrialization, changing labor patterns, and the increasing role of the state to intervene in family life were factors that together contributed to the long-term changes in the role and functions of the family. More immediately, the social destabilization that took place in the wake of World War I further served to disrupt traditional patterns of family formation. During the war, 1.6 million men were lost, leaving nearly 2 million unmarriageable women to be counted among Weimar's "surplus women" (Frauenberschuss). The addition of 600,000 war widows to this situation rendered an ever-clearer verdict for Germans of all stripes that the family and its reputed ill health were in severe crisis and jeopardized the health of the nation.

But there was no single Weimar crisis of the family any more than there was one Volksgemeinschaft. Catholics, Protestants, Socialists, and feminists rendered distinct though often overlapping diagnoses and prescribed various treatments for healing the German social body. The particularly Jewish version of the German crisis of the family represented a response to a similar set of social, cultural, economic, and political changes that were faced by other middle-class Germans. Jews, therefore, experienced, lived through, and perceived what they called the crisis of the family in a manner that reflected larger German middle-class concerns. But at the same time, Weimar Jews elaborated a particularly concentrated and discrete version of the crisis, one that joined many strands of the current debate with modern Jewish communal traditions concerning the Jewish family. Indeed, as Jewish historians have now established, the family had assumed a new significance for modern Jews: as a gendered means of embourgeoisement, as a defense against anti-Semitic charges of Jewish moral degeneracy, and as a potential source of attachment to Judaism or Jewishness that existed apart from formal participation in organized Jewish life. During the bourgeois nineteenth century, when the family had become the object of fascination and idealization for middleclass Germans, Jews' preoccupation with the family laid the groundwork for the emergence of a post-religious Jewish identity.

By the time of the Weimar Republic, the family and its purported crisis had become at once a symptom and symbol of the crisis of modern Jewry. Although the perception of crisis was undoubtedly a function of the real social distress experienced by Jewish families, an analysis of the collective reflections of Weimar's Jewish communal leadership on the family suggests that, even beyond the social dislocations of the 1920s, there emerged a strong emphasis on the family and family ideal as a means of safeguarding Jewish group distinctiveness in the face of German-Jewish integration. If the internal crisis of Weimar Jewry was based on the idea that modernization and assimilation were leading to the disappearance of Jewish group difference, the crisis of the Jewish family debate served as an opportunity to accentuate and frame in new terms the uniqueness of the Jews. Paradoxically, perhaps, this ideology of Jewish uniqueness grew in significance precisely at a time when the fear of losing group distinctiveness was greatest. But what is perhaps most instructive about the sense of the crisis of the family for Weimar Jewry is how the categories of analysis were formed primarily by the non-Jewish world. Indeed, this ideology of the family illustrates particularly well what Katharina von Ankum has described as an important part of the overall Weimar Jewish project that was, in her words, to "construct a discourse of Jewish difference that would not contradict dominant German culture." Weimar Jews argued that the family was unique precisely for its embodiment of contemporary German middleclass values. Thus, in addition to its almost universally resonant symbolic function as an object of nostalgic longing, the family represented for Jews one of the final markers of Jewish difference within the larger society, one of the last remaining areas of Jewish group distinctiveness. For Jews who had relinquished attachment to Judaism as a religious system, the family had become a proud standard-bearer for Jewish ethnic values. In a new age of nationalism, the family was becoming something of a homeland for the modern Jew.

Looking at the interrelationship between the German and German-Jewish notions of family crises constitutes a perfect starting point for considering the tensions between assimilation and dissimilation in Weimar and the ways in which these connect with the broader reinterpretation of national and communal affinities. Exploring the ways in which Jews within the Jewish community experienced and responded to the perceived crisis of the family in a manner that at turns paralleled and diverged from the broader German experience shows how the struggle between communal and individual identities played out in multiple overlapping dimensions. Middle-class Germans linked their concern about the German family to the future strength and viability of the German nation. For their part, many Jews affirmed, even celebrated, their place within this new, more inclusive German nation while they simultaneously reserved their greatest concern for the crucial role the Jewish family would play in renewing German Jewry both in numbers and in the vitality of Jewish tradition.

The Jewish Population in the Weimar Republic

Like much that has characterized the history and culture of the Weimar Republic, Jews' entrance into the new state was accompanied by a contradictory set of developments. At one level, Germany's first true democracy promised greater opportunities for the cultural and social integration of Jews than ever before and propelled Jews into the center of Weimar culture and politics. Indeed, in the Republic, where "outsiders" became "insiders," as Peter Gay formulated it, Jews were highly represented, though not dominant, in theater, music, modern art, literature, and cultural criticism. The granting of legal and fiscal equality to the Jewish community was a further legal indicator of Weimar's promise. As we will see, German Jewry's national welfare organization also became integrated into the infrastructure of the state and assumed equal footing with other nonsectarian and confessional organizations.

But the potential and actual achievements of Weimar democracy were simultaneously called into question by the renewal of anti-Semitic activity that began in wartime and became even more entrenched during the early years of the Republic. With the prolongation of the war, the promise of acceptance that came from the Kaiser's famous call for national unity that had given Jews hopes for genuine integration with the war effort quickly proved hollow. Beginning with the second year of the war, Jews were increasingly depicted as economic exploiters and profiteers, betraying the sacrifices of German men at war by amassing profit and enriching themselves on the home front. Recent research has added to this picture by tracing how such accusations extended to Jews' purported exploitation of women and children on the domestic front as well. Belinda Davis has shown how Jews were blamed for food shortages on the home front and, in particular, Galician Jews for holding back valued food products from the rest of the population. The infamous Jewish census of 1916 symbolized the strong anti-Semitic sentiment being resurrected in German society that had permeated high government offices as well. Before and during the revolutionary period of 1918-1919 and in its aftermath, characterizations of the Jew as destructive revolutionary bent on destroying German society from within helped dampen many of the hopes Jews initially had at the outset of the war. Jews continued to be seen as the bearers of a decadent and threatening modern culture, and the "flood" of unwanted east European Jewish immigrants (Ostjudengefahr) was blamed for creating the conditions of Germany's postwar poverty, unemployment, and crime. Thus, while anti-Semitism lost its force as a political and organized movement as it was during the imperial period, it became a potent social and cultural force during the Weimar years and there was a marked increase in anti-Semitic outlooks in broader sectors of the population. Two years into the Republic's existence, the popular novelist Jakob Wassermann captured the painful predicament of the acculturated German Jew: "The unfortunate fact is that the Jew today is outlawed. If not in the juridical sense, at least in the popular mind."

If Weimar Jews had sufficient reason to be concerned about their social and economic position as the result of renewed anti-Semitism, Jews within the community entered the Republic with an already developed sense of crisis in relation to both declining population size and the potential for long-term communal sustainability. In 1918, the relative size of the Jewish population within the overall population of Germany had declined, reflecting a long-term downward trend in growth that had preceded the Weimar Republic but that would only be heightened in the ensuing fourteen years. At the beginning of the Republic, the Jewish population numbered approximately 550,000, roughly 0.9 percent of the population. While social scientists had begun to trace the decline in family size and the birthrates among Jews in the late nineteenth century, the most pronounced changes had taken place in the two decades prior to the Republic. Although we will see in the next chapter how Jewish leaders often attributed this decline to the moral and physical degeneration of the Jewish population, these changes must first be analyzed in relation to Jews' status as a distinctive population subgroup consisting of overwhelmingly middle-class urban dwellers. The unique demographic and occupational group profile of the Jews meant that the Jewish population experienced many of the social changes associated with modernization earlier and with greater intensity than the rest of German society. Jews became the preeminent exemplars of excessive or hypermodernity, with their demographic contraction, high degree of mobility and urbanization, early use of birth control, altering of birth patterns, and embrace of urban values. By 1933, over half of the Jewish population lived in ten large cities of over 100,000 inhabitants, with nearly a third living in Berlin.

One of the chief causes of this overall demographic contraction was the decrease in the birthrates of Jews, a change that had been set in motion in the previous century. Since the early 1880s, the Jewish population registered annual birthrates that were significantly lower than those of the rest of the population. In the 1880s, there were 27.9 births per thousand Jews, while the national birthrate in Germany overall was 37.1 per thousand. The period 1910-1913 saw a drop in the Jewish rate to 15 births per thousand, and this rate continued to obtain between 1920 and 1925. During the peak crisis period in 1930-1931, the Jewish birthrate plummeted to 7.2 per thousand, versus 16.2 in the general population.

In contrast to the impact of these developments on the size and structure of the Jewish population, the impact of conversion to Christianity and the withdrawal of dissident Jews (Austritte) from the Gemeinde was relatively marginal during the years of the Weimar Republic. In 1921, for example, while 259 Jews converted out, 162 non-Jews, most of whom were women, converted to Judaism, rendering a net loss of 117 per year. The prime motivations for conversion by Jewish women appear to have been for the sake of entering a marriage with a non-Jew; for Jewish men, the reasons appear more varied: marrying out was sometimes a motive, but so were career advancement and a desire to avoid paying taxes to the community.

Far more significant than conversion or Austritte for overall potential losses to the Jewish population during the Republic were interconfessional marriages. As opposed to anti-Semitism, which threatened, and to some degree succeeded, to roll back the hard-won achievements of Jewish integration, intermarriage symbolized its opposite: the loving embrace of Jews by non-Jews. The problem of intermarriage thus came to stand for the inherent contradiction faced by the predominant group of native-born acculturated and liberal Jews in Germany. Reflecting the successful social integration of the individual, intermarriage was a success that threatened to diminish the overall strength and integrity of an endogamously based Jewish collective existence.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Germans into Jewsby Sharon Gillerman Copyright © 2009 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Stanford University Press
• Date d'édition: 2009
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0804757119
• ISBN 13: 9780804757119
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 238
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Pays-Bas