Jewish Women in Nazi Germany before Emigration (Part A)
Source: Marion Kaplan, ΓÇ£Jewish Women in Nazi Germany before EmigrationΓÇ¥ in: S. Quack, (ed.), Between Sorrow and Strength, Women Refugees of the Nazi Period , (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 11 - 48.
Introduction
"We were so German," "we were so assimilated," "we were so middle class" - these are the remains one reads over and over again in the memoirs of German Jews who try to explain to us (and to themselves) what their lives were Eke before Nazi barbarism overpowered them. They stress how normal their lives were, how bourgeois their habits and attitudes. German Jews - a predominantly middle-class group comprising less than 1 percent of the German population - had welcomed their legal emancipation in the second half of the nineteenth century and lived in a relatively comfortable, secure environment until 1933. Between 1933 and 1939, however, they saw their economic livelihoods imperilled and their social integration dissolved. Inexorably, they were engulfed in the maelstrom that led to the Holocaust: impoverishment and ostracism for most; emigration for many; hiding for a handful; and ghettoisation, forced labour, and extermination for the rest 1 .
The calamity that hit German Jews affected them as Jews first, but Jewish women had gender-specific experiences as well. In addition to suffering the persecution that afflicted all Jews, Jewish women also had the burden of keeping their households and communities together. A gender analysis of the situation of Jews in Germany suggests that racism and persecution as well as survival strategies meant something different for women than for men - in both practical and psychological terms.
This essay explores the increasingly difficult daily lives of Jewish middle- class women and the work of their main organisation, the League of Jewish Women ( Juedischer Frauenbund , or JFB), in pre-war Nazi Germany. By focusing on the 1930s, we can locate the intensification of persecution and its effects on women and their families in a time when few dreamed that developments would end in anything like Auschwitz. In fact, this period is often neglected; either the earlier, more hopeful era of the Weimar Republic (1918-33) or the later, shocking years of genocide are more usually emphasised. But the intermediate era - the fascistisation of daily life, when victims had to learn to cope while others looked on (or past), when even relationships among ordinary Germans were coarsened - is often far more instructive politically. Moreover, exploring the daily lives of Jews challenges the myths of political innocence with which so many Germans today surround their accounts of "daily hoe in Nazi Germany." 2 Most important for our purpose, gender specificity can be illustrated more clearly for these years than for later ones. Gender differences are also apparent in the desire to emigrate and in actual emigration patterns, another topic of concern here. Finally, a brief look at Jewish women's organisations shows how women responded collectively to increasing persecution.
The focus is on housewives and mothers, largely because they are the ones who left the most memoirs. Still, they made up a large portion of the female community. In their twenties, thirties, and forties, these women had embarked upon marriage, created families, and, sometimes, started careen. Like the vast majority of Jews, they experienced the impending catastrophe from their situation as ethnically or religiously Jewish and politically liberal citizens, increasingly shocked by the abrogation of the rights and liberties they once had taken for granted. Other women receive less attention here: rarely did those who intermarried, who remained in Germany after the war broke out, or who died leave memoirs behind, at least memoirs that are accessible today. Of those who managed to escape, single women and the elderly are underrepresented in memoir collections 3 . Finally, memoirs, collections are often found in Jewish libraries and archives. Hence, writers who were more self-consciously Jewish might have deposited them there, possibly creating a sample of Jews who were slightly less integrated into German society than the actual range of women's situations 4 .
Overview of German-Jewish Community
In 1933, 500,000 people were registered as Jews in Germany (excluding those who had officially left Judaism), or about 0.77 percent of the population. Seventy percent lived in large cities with populations over 100,000 (whereas half of non-Jews lived in places with under 10,000 inhabitants), and a third (144,000) lived in Berlin, where they made up close to 4 percent of the population. Like every minority, the Jewish minority had a career profile that differed significantly from that of the general population. Historically prohibited from a variety of economic endeavours, almost 62 percent of Jews (compared with 18 percent of non-Jews) worked in business and commerce. They were underrepresented in agricultural careen, where less than 2 percent of Jews (but 29 percent of other Germans) were employed. The employment of Jewish women had gradually increased to 27 percent by 1933, but it was still less than that of non-Jewish women (34 percent). Of those who worked, over one-third were salaried employees; about one-fifth were assistants in family enterprises (mithelfende Familienangehoerige); another one-fifth were self-employed (this could include a large business or a tiny one); and about one-tenth were workers (mostly in industry but olden in the offices rather than on the factory floor) 5 .
The socio-economic position of Jews was overwhelmingly middle class, although the inflation of the early 1920s and the Great Depression had definitely set them back. More and more women had to assist or support their families - a trend that intensified in the Nazi period - and more and more Jews had to rely on financial aid from the Jewish communities 6 . In addition, almost one in five Jews in Germany were a refugee from Eastern Europe. Most of these Ostjuden, as they were called, eked out humble existences as industrial workers, minor artisans, or peddlers. Among this group there was a larger proportion of women in paid employment than among those who were not refugees.
In comparison with non-Jewish women, Jewish women generally had smaller families and more education. They were less likely to work outside the home and more likely to have household help. Although married Jewish women devoted themselves to their families, parents expected their unmarried daughters to study for a career. Many - seven times as many as Christian women - went to a university 7 . As we shall see, after 1933 career development was increasingly obstructed, just as wage earning became more urgent.
During the Weimar Republic, strictly religious education and practices were on the decline and mixed marriages on the rise 8 . In the large cities, marriage to Christians was becoming so common - especially among Jewish men - that some Jewish leaders actually feared the complete fusion of their community into German society by the end of the twentieth century 9 . Jews eagerly joined non-sectarian organisations. For example, the Jewish feminist movement (League of Jewish Women) belonged to the German bourgeois feminist movement from 1908 until 1933, and individual Jewish women were prominent members of German women's organisations. Jews felt a deep allegiance to the ideals of German civilisation as they understood them - the liberal values of tolerance, humanism, and reason of the German Enlightenment. They enjoyed general acceptance in the worlds of art and culture, participated in centre and moderate Left politics, and excelled in the "See" professions of medicine and law. Possibly as many as one-third of all women doctors in the Weimar Republic were Jewish 10 . Although Jews adapted to the social, political, or cultural styles of their surroundings, "[quoting] Goethe [at] every meal," most also preserved a sense of ethnic solidarity and religious cohesion 11 . They did so through organreligious or secular Jewish groups and through maintaining tholiday celebrations in the family. Jewish women's organisations in particular fostered a sense of Jewish identity, including religious identity, throughout the Weimar years. Thus, the interest by women's organisations in their Jewish heritage during the Nazi period was not a sudden shift; it was an intensification of a trend already well under way. Finally, a small Zionist movement, although failing to make significant inroads into the assimilationist commitments of most German Jews, sharpened Jewish self-consciousness 12 .
Jewish cohesion was also a response to a pervasive antisemitism with roots in Imperial Germany (1871-1918). Virtually all Jews knew of antisemites or of an antisemitic incident directed against someone in their immediate circle of blends or relatives. The mission of one of the largest Jewish organisations in Germany, the Central Association (CV) of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, founded in 1893, was to fight antisemitism politically and judicially and to strengthen Jewish and German consciousness within the Jewish communities as well. The loss of World War I and post-war political and economic instability magnified anti-Jewish passions. To the radical Night and its diverse followers, Jews became the scapegoats for all social and economic ills. Even more common and widespread was what Donald Niewyk has called 'moderate antisemitism, that vague sense of unease about Jews that stopped far short of wanting to harm them but that may have helped to neutralise whatever aversion Germans might otherwise have felt for the Nazis.' 13 This atmosphere could be found in churches, universities, political parties, and the government as well as in relationships between Jews and other Germans. Even those Jewish women who worked closely with other German women commented on the distance between the groups: 'We lived among each other, sat together in the same school room, attended university together, met each other at social events - and were complete strangers.' 14 There were exceptions, close and lasting friendships that extended until deportation or even until today, but for the vast majority of Jews, their tenuous friendships with other Germans dissolved as the Nazi terror grew.
The Lives Of Jewish Women In Public And Private
Social Ostracism
With the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, Jews as individuals had to begin to struggle for daily survival and Jewish organisations had to gear themselves up for providing unprecedented and massive economic, social, and cultural aid. Jews were forced into an era of "dissimulation" - a process of separation and then segregation - that took about six years, gradually gathering speed and thoroughness. A brief outline of this interim, before the deportations and genocide, provides necessary background for understanding the variety of Jewish responses.
Soon alter taking power, the Nazis scheduled an official boycott of Jewish businesses and professional establishments for April 1. On that day storm troopers stood in front of Jewish stores, threatening and exhorting shopper to "buy German." As unofficial boycotts continued, the Nazis enacted discriminatory legislation. The "April Laws" of 1933 provided for the expulsion of Jews from the civil service, legal and medical professions, and post - primary schools and universities. This "legal" attack reached its peak in late 1935 with the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour," or Nuremberg Laws, which forbade sexual intercourse or intermarriage between Jews and "Aryans" (perceived as "pure" Germans) and made it unlawful for a Jew to employ an Aryan domestic servant under the age of forty-five. These laws were followed by more than 400 pieces of anti-Jewish legislation promulgated by the Nazis between 1933 and 1939 15 . The last stage before outright and organised violence was "aryanization," the attempt to drive Jews from the economy. Proceeding fitfully throughout 1936 and 1937, aryanization speeded up in 1938 and 1939 to the point at which the economy could be considered judenrein (free of Jews). Persecutions reached a new level of intensity in 1938, culminating in the November Pogrom, commonly called "Crystal Night." This milestone claimed the lives of at least 100 Jews; destroyed more than 1,000 synagogues and countless homes and shops. More than 30,000 Jewish men were incarcerated in concentration camps.
Despite what appease in hindsight to be the increasing speed and clarity of persecution, Nazi policy followed what one historian described as a "twisted road to Auschwitz." 16 Contradictory pronouncements, regional variations, conflicting satrapies, lack of co-ordination at the top, and the attempt to appear moderate to other nations gave contemporaries profoundly mixed signals. It was only alter the pogrom that most Jews were finally convinced of their peril. At every stage, some Jews thought and others hoped that the government would cease its persecutions. As the Jewish community moved from a relatively porous relationship with the surrounding society to a severely encapsulated one, many believed they could make peace with the new circumstances. Even aver the Nuremberg Laws, for example, the central organisation of Jews was wilting to see them as a "tolerable arrangement" and to work for a modus vivendi with the Nazi State 17 . As dissimulation intensified, the concept of "normal" became increasingly elastic. This was a complicated process. For some there was the longing to make life "normal" within the ever-narrowing boundaries drawn by the Nazis. Women in particular, I would suggest, attempted to create an atmosphere of normalcy within the family. For others there was a denial of what they saw happening. For many there was a combination of both at the same time: the desire and need to believe that they could remain in their homeland, even under new and trying conditions. Today historians of daily hope in Nazi Germany are attempting to capture the double character of normality and terror, the effects on its citizens of both a normal bureaucratic state and an exceptional state. This double character is all the more pronounced - and more complicated - for its victims, whose perceptions of the conflicting signals were coloured by their anxieties but also by their hopes 18 .
Life for German-Jewish women often changed dramatically with the beginning of the new regime. One of the first signs of a "new era" (even before one lost a job or one's husband, Other, or brother did) was the dissociation of former friends. One woman reported that she had enjoyed getting together with friends from her hometown in a cafe once a month: 'Since the Nazis came to power, I haven't taken part in these gatherings. I didn't want to cause difficulties for my friends as a result of my [Jewish] presence. One day she met one of her friends: She tried to convince me that they were all still my friends, so I decided to go to the next meeting . . . I couldn't sleep at all the night before the gathering. I was worried about my Christian friends, but I was also worried about myself... I knew I would observe them very carefully. I would notice even a shadow of their discomfort at my entry . . . But, I didn't have to read their eyes or note a change in their tone. The empty table in the booth where we had always met spoke loudly and clearly . . . But, I couldn't blame them. Why should they have risked the loss of their jobs only to prove to me that Jews could still have friends in Germany?' 19
Not all Germans abandoned their Jewish friends. In fact, it was often precisely an experience of loyalty - the friend who came by ostentatiously, the former classmate who went out of her way to shake hands with a Jewish woman in a crowded store 20 or the "sympathy purchases" after the April boycott 21 - that gave Jews mixed messages, letting some deceive themselves into staying on. Furthermore, in the early years, Jews experienced only isolated local ostracism or attacks that were often based on economic rivalries and resentments rather than on purely racial grounds 22 .
But the government intended to completely isolate Jews and 'after months of a period of terror, fidelity and friendship had lost their meaning, and fear and treachery had replaced them.' 23 Moreover, the Nazis could count on grass-roots enthusiasm. Well before the Nazis prohibited friendly contacts with Jews, gossip and denunciations discouraged such associations. Based on Gestapo (Secret State Police) files, Robert Gellately has observed, '…an extraordinary degree and variety of accommodation … to the regime's doctrines on race. Friendships and business relationships going back many years were broken off' 24 Of interest here is not only the fear of terror but also the often zealous auto - surveillance by the Germans themselves. This had an effect on Jews, too. For example, in a small Rhineland town in late 1933, a Christian woman went to visit her Jewish friend. When she arrived at the door, her friend looked at her in horror: 'For God's sake, Frieda, leave, don't come in, we are already being watched.' With tears in their eyes, they turned away from each other 25 . Thus, companionship with non-Jews became the rare exception. Jews felt as if they were becoming society's lepers.
Loss of friends was accompanied by general social ostracism. The Gestapo and the courts used charges of friendship and, more seriously, "race defilement", 'to discipline (or 'educate') society at large about the importance of the race issue …but beyond that,…to adjust all opinions to bring them into line with Nazi teachings.' 26 By 1936 the Nazis had "brought off a deepening of the gap" between Jews and other Germans, and companionship with non-Jews became the rare exception 27 . Loss of friends was accompanied by general social ostracism. Officials, neighbours, even the mailman looked past or through Jews as they crossed paths at the local market or in the corridors. I suspect that the loss of friends and the decline of sociability in the neighbourhood affected Jewish women more than it did men, because women were more integrated into and dependent upon the community and neighbourhood. They were more accustomed to neighbourly exchanges and courtesies. Their lives negotiated the inter-lace between family and community. Highly organised and active in communal, volunteer, or women's organisations, women suffered when they were ostracised. Moreover, women probably had more frequent contacts with the state than did men. They had more meetings with such state agents as post office and railroad clerks, social workers, and, for mothers' in particular, teachers. Men saw less of neighbours to begin with and had less time to engage in communal or volunteer activities. Also, although men now suffered the loss of even a modicum of courtesy at work, they were more used to competition and a certain degree of conflict in their everyday work life 28 .
The pain of being the object of a general, hateful taboo affected most Jews long before the actual violence began. One woman recalled that when she travelled on the tram on the day of the April 1933 boycott, she felt self-conscious about being Jewish and feared that the people next to her might move away from her if they guessed her true identity 29 . Another woman wrote: 'Anxiety accompanied me wherever I went: if I had to talk to shop attendants I'd be afraid they would be hostile to me as soon as they discovered I was Jewish; when I waited for the tram, I always thought the conductor wouldn't stop for me if he knew I was Jewish...I waited for such events all the time and this Moiety tormented me unceasingly. Long before the Nazis forbade it, I had stopped going to movies or the theatre, because I simply couldn't stand being around people who hated us' 30 . To make matters worse, Jewish friends provided lithe respite. Most Jews, even those who had made genuine friendships with non-Jewish Germans, maintained a circle of Jewish friends and colleagues. But in the strained circumstances affecting the entire Jewish community, shadows hovered over social evenings with Jewish friends. 'When one met in Jewish company, it meant mostly that there was not the slightest relaxation, because every last person had either his own unpleasant experience or some sort of ill tidings to report from somewhere else.' 31 Moreover, when groups of Jews gathered in private homes, they feared that they were being watched by suspicious neighbours or, worse, the Gestapo. One writer describes the panic that broke out at a birthday party in January 1940 when two police showed up to check why the light was on during a black out. 'The eyes of the women . . . showed how cruelly one was once again from the illusion of a normal middle-class existence . . . That more and more each day the Jew was becoming fair game was the devastating realisation chat underscored every experience of this kind.' 32 In this particular case, the policeman himself seems to have been embarrassed by the dread his visit caused and left without farther ado.
References:
1 About 235,000 out of approximately 525,000 Jews in Germany managed to emigrate. Not all of these people, however, escaped. Many were caught up in the Nazi net cast over Europe.
2 See Mary Nolan, ΓÇ£The Historikerstreit and Social History,ΓÇ¥ New German Critique 44 (1988): 51ΓÇô80.
3 Single women may not have had the motivation to write memoirs (since memoirs are often intended as family histories for future generations), and age may have impinged on the desire or ability of the elderly to write their stories.
4 People who were, or who considered themselves to be, on the edges of the Jewish community ΓÇô such as women who intermarried or whose ethnic, or religious identities or both were superseded by political loyalties ΓÇô were less likely to donate their materials to Jewish organisations.
5 The breakdown is for Prussia in 1925 but is also representative of Germany as a whole. Israelitisches Familienblatt (hereafter cited as IF ), Feb. 23, 1933, no. 8: 9.
6 Monika Richarz, ed., Juedisches Leben in Deutschland , vol. 3: Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte , 1918ΓÇô1945 (Stuttgart, 1982), Introduction. See also Erich Rosenthal, ΓÇ£Trends of the Jewish Population in Germany, 1910ΓÇô1939,ΓÇ¥ Jewish Social Studies 6 (1944): 233ΓÇô73.
7 Marion Kaplan, The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany. The Campaigns of the Juedischer Frauenbund, 1904ΓÇô1938 (Greenport, Conn., 1979), 193, note 31.
8 Richarz, Juedisches Leben , 15. Twenty out of 100 marriages were mixed in 1930, but conversions were down in comparison with the Imperial era.
9 Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933ΓÇô1939 (Urbana, Ill., 1970), 7. For gender-specific intermarriage statistics, see Usiel O. Schmelz, ΓÇ£Die demographische Entwicklung der Juden in Deutschland von der Mitte des 19.
Jahrhunderts bis 1933,ΓÇ¥ Zeitschrift fuer Bevoelkerungswissenschaft 8, no. 1 (1982): 42, 52ΓÇô3.
10 This is my estimate based on the number of Jewish female medical students before the war.
Jews had received the right to become judges, diplomats, and civil servants only in 1918.
11 George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), 14.
12 Donald Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), 164.
13 Niewyk, 80.
14 Niewyk, 93ΓÇô4.
15 Joseph Walk, Das Sonderrecht fuer Juden im NS-Staat (Heidelberg, 1981); Schleunes, 109.
16 Schleunes.
17 Schleunes, 126.
18 Nolan, ΓÇ£Historikerstreit.ΓÇ¥
19 Richarz, Juedisches Leben , 233; all quotations from this book have been translated by the author.
20 See the memoirs of Liselotte Kahn, Leo Baeck Institute (hereafter cited as LBI), 16. About her classmate's behavior, Kahn noted: ΓÇ£This I considered alreadz a heroic deed in 1933.ΓÇ¥
21 Hans Mommsen and Dieter Obst, ΓÇ£Die Reaktion der deutschen Bevoelkerung auf die Verfolgung der Juden, 1933ΓÇô1943,ΓÇ¥ in Hans Mommsen, ed., Herrschaftsalltag im Dritten Reich (Duesseldorf, 1988), 374ΓÇô8.
22 Michael H. Kater, ΓÇ£Everyday Antisemitism in Prewar Nazi Germany: The Popular Bases,ΓÇ¥ Yad Vashem Studies 16 (1984): 129ΓÇô59.
23 Monika Richarz, ed., Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 352.
24 In April 1935, Nazi Party members were forbidden from having personal relationships with Jews,unless in the line of duty. Still, even Nazi Party members kept business ties to Jews throughout 1935 and some until even as late as 1938 (see Mommsen and Obst, 387, 430ΓÇô1). Friendships with Jews were not officially a crime for non-party members until November 1941, but local laws frequently forced Germans to break all relations with Jews much earlier (see Mommsen and Obst, 428ΓÇô9). For more on denunciations, the ΓÇ£key link between the police and the people in Nazi Germany, [which made] the terror system work,ΓÇ¥ see Robert Gellately, ΓÇ£The Gestapo and German Society: Political Denunciation in the Gestapo Case Files,ΓÇ¥ Journal of Modern History 60, no. 4 (1988): 664, 669, 673ΓÇô4, 677. Gellately pointed out the centrality of gossip to the functioning of the Nazi terror system in ΓÇ£Terror System, Racial Persecution and Resistance in Nazi Germany: Remarks on the Historiography,ΓÇ¥ a paper presented to the GDRΓÇôUSA Symposium on Nazi Terror and Resistance, Princeton, N.J., May 4ΓÇô6, 1989. See also his The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933ΓÇô1945 (New York, 1990).
25 Francis Henry, Victims and Neighbors: A Small Town in Nazi Germany Remembered (South Hadley, Mass., 1984), 92.
26 Gellately, ΓÇ£Political Denunciation,ΓÇ¥ 677.
27 SOPADE report quoted by Peter Pulzer in a lecture on the anniversaries of the annexation of Austria and of Crystal Night, Harvard Centre for European Studies, April 14, 1989. SOPADE was the name of the Social Democratic Party in exile.
28 The author wishes to thank Peter Pulzer for this insight.
