Jewish Women in Nazi Germany before Emigration (Part C)
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.
Rationalising the hiring of unconventional helpers was at best a partial answer to the stresses and strains felt by women and families. After the Nuremberg Laws came into effect, articles addressed overworked, overwrought mothers. With titles like "Mommy, do you have time for me?" they pleaded with mothers not to neglect their small children in their overcrowded day 78 . After cooking and cleaning, articles suggested that women might want to turn to darning and repairing torn clothing. Then, they might try to help their husbands and consult with their children on schoolwork. There would be little time left for the youngest, but mothers should not overlook their needs either. "The baby-sitter is by far not my mother," thinks the little girl. Half a year later stories featured even more tension and strain. "Mommy is so nervous!" depicted a tense housewife whose small children were depressed as a result of her anxiety. She scolded them for small misdemeanours. Her husband, also overtired and overworked, tried to smooth things over when he came home. Eventually, she discussed her overreactions with him and he suggested that she should cry to control herself (nimm dich, wenn es irgend geht, zusammen . . . ) 79 . The happy outcome of this story was that 'although, she, like many of our mothers today, has a huge amount of unaccustomed work to complete every day and actually has every reason to be nervous,' she controlled herself and after a few weeks her child recognised 'mother, you haven't been so nervous in a while.' Obviously, these articles document the stress rather than the solution. It is hard to imagine that training daughters, streamlining work, taking on extra tasks, and repressing nervousness actually helped anyone. But then again, maybe exertion and repression did help. In August 1938 an editor summed up the theme of letters to a Jewish newspaper written by women who worked both outside and inside the home as: ' 'You have to do it' is the eleventh commandment for all of us now.' 80 Perhaps following through on this commandment did help.
Women frequently took responsibility not only for the physical double burden but also for the psychological work necessary to raise the spirits of their children and husbands and to tide the family over until better times. As late as February 1938, one woman entitled an article she wrote in a newspaper, "Why so solemn?" She urged her women readers to 'laugh again, regain humour again! Don't let suffocating air in, or chase it away!' Reminding Jewish women that they had traditionally been the ones to light the candles, she urged them once again to brighten their homes 81 . These expectations even affected Jewish women whose husbands were "Aryan" and, therefore, safe. One woman who lived in constant dread of what could happen to her mother (before she admitted to herself that she, too, was in danger) restrained herself from sharing her worries with her husband. She confided to her diary: 'I can't burden my husband ...with my family problems.' 82 This heightened sense of familiar obligation, which was fostered by community and friends, was certainly an extra burden but also, perhaps, a source of solace and strength. Suffering a nervous breakdown around the time of the November Pogrom, one woman wrote: ' ...no doctor could help me ...I also was struck by a dangerous case of asthma, the attacks came ever more frequently and seriously ...Everyone tried to convince me that I alone had to be able to overcome my fear and desperation in order to help my family in these terrible times instead of lying there so helpless. They insisted on the urgency of this to such an extent that I finally gathered all my strength in the hopes of finding a way out of Germany' 83
.
Of course, all of women's efforts could not save some families from dissolution. The Nazi regime challenged existing marriage and familial relations. The Nuremberg Laws were only the beginning of a series of court decisions regarding family life, such as intermarriages, divorce, adoption, and foster care. In 1936 Jewish papers reported that in an Eheanfechtungsprozess (a court proceeding to contest a marriage) the Reichsgericht (supreme court of the Reich) decided a spouse could contest a marriage on the basis that the other's racial heritage was unclear 84 . Moreover, divorces between Aryan and non-Aryan spouses grew, although most marriages remained intact and the evidence here is largely anecdotal. Gershom Scholem related the story of his aunt, a physician, who married a non-Jewish colleague in 1911. He noted: 'The big test came in 1933. After a while my uncle discovered, following a marriage of more than twenty years, that he was an "Aryan" and asked my aunt Kaethe to release him so he could marry a German. Thus my aunt was later taken to the ghetto of Theresienstadt, where she died' 85 . The new laws threatened family ties between parents and children as well. "Aryan" foster children could be taken from families if even one parent was Jewish. Moreover, the courts had declared that 'it was unacceptable from a national socialist viewpoint' for a "non-Aryan" child to be brought up among Aryan foster parents 'in an environment in which it does not racially belong.' 86 Furthermore, after the Nuremberg Laws, adoptions of "racially" different children were no longer permitted.
Family stress, referred to in newspaper articles, confirmed in oral interviews, and intensified by racial laws, Olsen overlapped with new job or vocational retraining for women. Many Jewish women who had never worked outride the home before now turned to the job market. Some did not have to look far afield for jobs. They worked for husbands who, facing economic decline, had to let paid help go. Not unlike their grandmothers, these women helped out in their husbands' shops, offices, and practices. One article commented, 'We find relatively few families in which the wife does not work in some way to earn a living,' and noted that women were also the sole support of many a family 87 . Praising women's flexibility and versatility, the writer continued that this was particularly the case once women emigrated: 'My wife got a job relatively quickly, while I . . .'
Finding a job in new circumstances, particularly for women who had never worked outside the home before, could be demoralising. First, one had to assess one's abilities in midlife - abilities that were often little more than a typical girl's education and no marketable skills. Job ads, employment offices, friends and acquaintances held out little hope. Middle-class Jewish women frequently met the surprised responses: "A woman like you?"; "It should be easy for her"; "A woman like you should be able to advise and help herself" These phrases even placed the responsibility on women themselves, who were already frightened, nervous, and uncertain. Rather than help and empathise, women received the message that they should not be having the problems that faced them, or that they should manage on their own 88 .
Discouragement notwithstanding, statistics indicate that women eagerly sought opportunities to train for new careers, and retrain where old careers no longer provided employment. They appeared "more versatile and adaptable," and had "fewer inhibitions" than men, were amenable to changing their lives to fit the times, and were willing to enter retraining programs at older ages than were men. In Berlin, for example, of those seeking career retraining, 51 percent of women and only 26 percent of men were over the age of chirps (of these, 15 percent of the women and 8 percent of the men were over forty). Leaders of the Berlin community noted that retraining for women was less costly, took less time (three to six months for women compared to about one year for men), and that although most women sought retraining from previous jobs in sales or office work, women had more background threlated to their new work (such as sewing or housework, one presumes) and that gave them a head start in retraining for jobs as seamstresses, milliners, or domestic workers. Moreover, jobs were available for young women 89 . Even though many had lost jobs incommercial fields, younger women (under the age of thirty-five) could find comparable jobs as other Jews began to emigrate. Also, the demand for help quickly picked up in the expanding Jewish social service sector and - after the Nuremberg Laws - in Jewish households. In Berlin, for example, Jewish employment services were more successful in placing women than in placing men 90 . In fact, one could speak of a shortage of Jewish household helpers, particularly in small towns 91 , and an even more serious scarcity of nurses in Jewish hospitals and homes. The latter caused the main Jewish social service agency to promote and support nurses' training 92
As the job market changed, so did the opportunities for young people, which was another factor in increasing family stress. Children were forced to re-evaluate their options: in other words, to change their former career plans with all the pain and disappointment that entailed. Parents and children often clashed regarding the vision each had of the children's plans for the future. This seems particularly to have been the case between girls and their parents. One school survey (1935) indicated that girls preferred jobs in offices or with children (such as kindergarten teacher), whereas parents thought they should become seamstresses or work in some form of household setting. Parents were more likely to go along with boys' choices of crafts or agricultural training, useful, for example, in Palestine. This tension must have been that much greater among girls who had high school education compared to those who attended only Volksschule and, therefore, had lower expectations from the start 93 . Moreover, the choices available to girls were more limited - if one excludes housework - than those open to boys. Welfare organisations suggested sewing-related jobs, such as knitting, tailoring, or making clothing decorations, whereas boys could consider many more options, including becoming painters, billboard designee, upholsterer, shoemaker, dyers, tailors, or skilled industrial workers 94 .
To make matters worse, it seems that parents preferred to keep girls at home, either to shelter them from unpleasant work or to help out around the house. Jewish papers urged families to provide some household tracking for their daughters. In an article enticed "That, my daughter does not need!" (Das hat meine Tochter nicht noetig!), the writer described a young woman who had left her training program because she had been treated like a servant. The article reprimanded the mother's attitude, pointing out that the young woman need not "put on airs," that the more she knew, the better off she would be 95 . The old-fashioned idea that girls would not require a career because they would marry lingered on, even as that fantasy became more and more inconsistent with reality. We can only surmise that some young girls felt protected by such parental decisions and that others were no doubt seriously frustrated, their anxiety spurred by their lack of any kind of training that could prepare them for emigration. In July 1936 the emigration preparatory career training school at Gross-Breesen could not fill its girls' section but had to turn down 400 boys 96 .
Perhaps the difficulties of family life or of finding a job in midlife caused or permitted a new appreciation of single women. The women's page of the Israelitisches Familienblatt, for example, praised the women's movement for rescuing women just forty years earlier from the terror of having to find a beau within three dance seasons or from the misery of spinsterhood and likely poverty. The writer opined that a new generation had emerged, "independent, in freely chosen work." Moreover, although single women might forgo marital comradeship and motherhood, they enjoyed more freedom to meet people in all walks of life and choose their own friends, see more of the world, pursue their intellectual interests without limits, and develop themselves independently. Alluding to the then-current situation, the writer speculated that some married women might envy the singe woman who could choose her own path independently 97 . Although the lifestyles of single women might appeal to harried housewives, the situation from the other side of the fence was, in fact, not really so green. As already mentioned, the disproportion between the number of Jewish women and men continued to grow so that newspaper wrote of an increase in surplus Jewish women of marriage age that spiralled upward by the emigration of young Jewish males 98 .
Women And Emigration: Perception And Realities
The Desire to Flee
Emigration, which became more and more crucial as time wore on, was skewed toward men. Yet, women usually saw the danger signals first and urged their husbands to leave Germany. One women's memoir noted that, in a discussion among friends about a doctor who had just fled in the spring of 1935, most of the men in the room condemned him. The women protested strongly: they found that it took more courage to go than to stay . . . 'Why should we stay here and wait for our eventual ruin? Isn't it better to go and to build up a new existence somewhere else, before our strength is exhausted by the constant physical and psychic pressure? Isn't the future of our children more important than a completely senseless holding out?' All the women, without exception, shared this opinion, while the men, more or less passionately, spoke against it. 'Also, on the way home, I discussed this with my husband. Like all other men, he simply couldn't imagine how one could leave one's beloved homeland and the duties that fill a man's life. "Could you really give that all up?" The tone of his voice told me how upset he was at the mere thought of this. "I could," I said, without hesitating a second' 99 . The different attitudes of men and women described here seem to reflect a gender-specific reaction remarked upon by sociologists and psychologists: In dangerous situations, men tend to "stand their ground," whereas women avoid conflict, preferring flight as a strategy. A more important reason why women were more amenable to emigration than their husbands is that women were less tied to the public worlds of jobs or businesses. Women were, as Claudia Koonz has pointed out, less assimilated than men into the economy and culture 100 . The daughter of a wealthy businessman commented, 'When the Nazis appeared on the scene, he was too reluctant to consolidate everything and leave Germany. He may have been a bit too attached to his status, as well as his possessions.' 101 Although their decision to leave Germany was as fraught with practical consequences as that of their husbands (since they, too, would face the uncertainties and poverty associated with emigration), women did not have to tear themselves away from their life's work, whether it was a business or professional practice, whether patients, clients, or colleagues. But even business or career women were apparently less reluctant than their spouses to leave. One wife, a wealthy manufacturer whose husband managed her inherited business, wanted to pack their bags and flee immediately in 1933. In contrast, he refused to leave the business behind. Although the wife could not convince her husband that they should flee, she insisted that they both learn a trade that would be useful abroad. After his arrest and release from a concentration camp in November 1938, they managed to escape to Shanghai, where their new skills helped them to survive 102 . In short, because of men's primary identity with their work, they often felt trapped into staying. Women, whose identity was more family-oriented, struggled to preserve what was central to them by fleeing with it.
Men and women led relatively distinct lives, and they often interpreted daily events differently. Although less integrated than men into work and culture, women were moreintegrated into their community. As noted earlier, there were the daily pleasantries with neighbours, regular exchanges with the grocer and baker, occasional visits to the school, attendance at concerts or local lectures, and, often, participation in local 's organisations. Raised to be sensitive to interpersonal behaviour and social situations, women's social antennae were more finely tuned than those of their husbands. They registered the increasing hostility of their immediate surroundings, unmitigated by a promising business prospect, a deep feeling for German culture (as experienced by their more educated husbands), or the patriotism of husbands who had fought in World War I. Women's constant contacts with their own and other people's children and with the community, probably alerted them to the warning signals that come through interpersonal relations - and they took those signals very seriously. Men, in contrast, scrutinised and analysed the confusing legal and economic decrees and the often contradictory public utterances of the Nazis. Men mediated their experiences through newspapers and broadcasts. Politics may have remained more abstract to them, whereas women's "business" - their neighbours, direct everyday contact, the minutiae (and significance) of ordinary details - brought politics home
That men and women often assessed the dangers differently reflected their different contacts and names of reference. But decisions seem to have been made by husbands - or circumstances 103 . The widespread assumption that women lacked political acumen, because of their primary role in the private and domestic sphere rather than the public and political one, gave their warnings less credibility in the eyes of their husbands. Thus, one woman's prophecies of doom met with her husband's amusement: 'He laughed at me and argued that such an insane dictatorship could not last long ...he was so certain that there would be a positive outcome.' Even after their seven-year-old son was beaten up at school, her husband was still optimistic 104 .
Some of the men who did not take their wives' warnings seriously were those who had received reprieves from the exclusionary decrees of April 1933 (although the reprieves proved to be temporary). In 1933, President Hindenburg interceded to protect those Jewish civil servants, laymen, doctors, and teachers who had fought in World War I, or whose father or son had served or who had been hired for their posts before 1918. The wives of these men typically could not convince their husbands that they were in danger. For example, Hindenburg's move restored one severely wounded veteran's faith in Germany. He would keep his job as a jurist, so he could not take seriously the idea of emigrating with four small children 105 . One woman, who argued with her husband in vain to leave Germany, noted that she was 'powerless against his optimism . . . he constantly fell back on the argument that he had been at the front in World War 1.' 106 Carol Gilligan's psychological theories may apply here: 'Men tended to view their situation in terms of abstract rights, women in terms of actual affiliations and relationships' 107
References:
78. ΓÇ£Mutti, hast du Zeit fuer mich?ΓÇ¥ CV-Zeitung , Feb. 27, 1936.
79.ΓÇ£Mutti ist so nervoes!ΓÇ¥ CV-Zeitung , Sept. 16, 1936.
80. CV-Zeitung , Aug. 25, 1938: 8.
81. IF , Feb. 17, 1938: 16.
82.Diary of Erna Becker-Kohen, LBI, 4.
83.Memoirs of Erna Segal, LBI, 93ΓÇô4. She and her husband and two children were unable to escape; three of them survived underground in Berlin.
84. IF , Feb. 27, 1936. In this case it was a man contesting the marriage because of his wife's uncertain lineage.
85.Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem . Memories of My Youth (New York, 1988), 30.
86. IF , April 23, 1936.
87. IF , Jan. 13, 1938: 13ΓÇô14; also see IF , July 14, 1938: 12.
88. CV-Zeitung , June 25, 1936.
89. JWS , 1933/34: 118ΓÇô21.
90. IF , March 19, 1936.
91. IF , May 21, 1936.
92.The agency was the Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle (Central Welfare Bureau) of the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden (Central Organisation of German Jews). BJFB , Oct. 1938: 14.
93. IF , July 14, 1938: 12.
94. JWS , 1937: 140ΓÇô3.
95. IF , Feb. 17, 1938: 16.
96.Werner T. Angress, ΓÇ£Juedische Jugend zwischen nationalsozialistischer Verfolgung und juedischer Wiedergeburt,ΓÇ¥ in Paucker, ed., Jews in Nazi Germany , 219. It may be that Eastern European Jewish women took greater advantage of these career programs than did German-Jewish women, a function of the more precarious economic situation of the former. Trude Maurer, ΓÇ£Auslaendische Juden in Deutschland, 1933ΓÇô39,ΓÇ¥ in Paucker, ed., Jews in Nazi Germany , 205.
97. IF , Feb. 27, 1936.
98.Ibid.
99.Richarz, Juedisches Leben , 237.
100.Claudia Koonz, ΓÇ£Courage and Choice among German-Jewish Women and Men,ΓÇ¥ in Paucker, ed., Jews in Nazi Germany , 285; see also Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York, 1987), chap. 10.
101.Memoirs of Marianne Berel, ΓÇ£Family Fragments,ΓÇ¥ LBI, 16.
102.Lecture by Evelyn Rubin, her daughter, at Queens College, Dec. 1988. Also, see The Long Island Jewish Week , Nov. 19, 1978, vol. 188, no. 25. This points in a different direction from Claudia Koonz, who suggested that women with strong business ties judged the situation much as men did.
Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland , 364.
103.This does not mean that wives took no initiatives, but the ultimate decision seems to have rested with the husband. In early 1938, for example, Ilse Strauss's mother 'applied to the American authorities for a quota number without my father's knowledge; the hopeless number of 33,243 was allocated. It was a last desperate act and Papa did not even choke with anger anymore.' Her parents and young brother were deported and killed. Memoirs of Ilse Strauss, LBI, B32/54, chap. 8, 44.
104.Memoirs of Erna Segal, LBI, 45ΓÇô7, 61.
105.Memoirs of Charlotte Hamburger, LBI, 40ΓÇô1.
106.Memoirs of Erna Segal, LBI, 45ΓÇô6, 61.
107.Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
