German Jews in Love: A History 9781503634169

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GERMAN JEWS IN LOVE

S TANFORD S TUDIES IN JE WISH HIS TORY AND CULTURE Edited by David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein

GERMAN JEWS IN LOVE A HISTORY

CHRISTIAN BAILE Y S TANFORD UNIVERSIT Y PRESS Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2023 by John Christian Bailey. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free, archival-­quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Bailey, Christian, author. Title: German Jews in love : a history / Christian Bailey. Other titles: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2023] | Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022022179 (print) | LCCN 2022022180 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503632790 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503634169 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Jews—­Germany—­History—­19th century. | Jews—­Germany—­History—­ 20th century. | Jews—­Germany—­Identity—­History. | Love—­Germany—­History. | Marriage—­Germany—­History. | Intermarriage—­Germany—­History. | Man-­woman relationships—­Germany—­History. Classification: LCC DS134.25 .B35 2023 (print) | LCC DS134.25 (ebook) | DDC 943/.004924—­dc23/ eng/20220614 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022179 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022180 Typeset by Elliott Beard in Garamond Premier Pro 11/15 Cover painting by Charlotte Salomon . Collection Jewish Museum, Amsterdam © Charlotte Salomon Foundation. Cover design by Gia Giasullo

For Suzanne, with my love

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

 

Introduction 1 ONE



A Tabernacle in the Desert

21

The Loving Marriage in Imperial Germany T WO



A Society of Two?

64

Partnerships in the Interwar Democracies THREE



“They Stuck Together like Iron Ore”

111

Jewish and Mixed Marriages in the Third Reich FOUR



A Golden Cage?

157

Jewish Families in West Germany  

Conclusion 197 Notes

207

Bibliography

239

Index

275

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Acknowledgments

I knew the world had changed when I found myself entering a deceased rabbi’s house and putting my family’s food in his refrigerator. It was the first few weeks of the COVID-­19 pandemic, and the atmosphere on the hospital campus where I lived was at least as panicky as elsewhere. I had just done a huge supermarket run and was worried that my 4-­year-­old son would start grabbing the groceries and then touch his face. (At this point, no one quite knew how the virus was transmitted.) When we had moved in a year or so earlier, we had learned that a hospital chaplain used to live next door, in a property that was now abandoned. I had seen a refrigerator in the basement and decided that, under the circumstances, nobody would mind if I broke in and used it. This story gives, I hope, some sense of the strangeness of daily life while I was writing most of this book. A good deal of the writing was done while I was sitting in the driver’s seat of my car, waiting for my son while he attended “forest pre-­school.” This is not how I imagined myself spending my junior leave. I had envisaged researching and talking to colleagues at the Leo Baeck Institute archives in New York City, where I had a fellowship. Instead, I was living a pretty solitary existence, unusually disconnected from the academic world. ix

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Acknowledgments

This experience of isolation has made me more grateful than ever for the colleagues and mentors who have helped me to complete this project. My route to the topic went through the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where I was a postdoc with Ute Frevert’s History of Emotions research group. Without the benefit of Frevert’s pioneering work, I doubt I would have found my own way to studying the history of emotions. And, because of her support, I was able to spend my first years after earning my doctorate working with an exceptionally talented group of historians rather than anxiously job hunting and picking up whatever teaching I could. Since leaving Berlin, I’ve been fortunate to work in a number of stimulating environments. My first teaching position was at The Open University, which is one of the most exceptional institutions I’ve encountered. Working collaboratively to create their new twentieth-­century European history course helped me to appreciate just what kind of high-­quality distance learning experience is possible with the right resources. Many colleagues there were a great help, but I benefited especially from David Vincent’s insights and encouragement. His own work on autobiography and the history of privacy has been a source of inspiration to me. While in the UK, I was fortunate to take part in a number of research seminars at the University of Oxford. I am grateful to Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway for inviting me to their European History meetings and to Paul Betts and Nick Stargardt for including me in their German History events. These seminars, and the dinners afterward, were among my most sustaining experiences as I was taking my pretty uncertain first steps on the career path. It was quite a wrench to leave all of that behind when I moved to my current position at Purchase College in New York. But my colleagues here have been extremely welcoming and supportive. I’d especially like to thank the members of my board of study, not least Lisa Keller, who has been a wonderfully generous mentor. Aviva Taubenfeld has been an outstanding chair of our School of Humanities during the challenging pandemic period. Simon Surowicz was a great interlocutor, always ready with a coffee and an open mind. Thanks are also due to the members of an informal research group at Purchase who spurred me on to keep researching and writing. Ling Zhang was the linchpin of the group, hosting us at her house and always cooking

Acknowledgments

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delicious meals. Other members include Nathan Holmes, Jason Pine, and Erica Stein, who offered welcome insights from outside the field of history. This project was quite a leap from my first book, which meant that I needed a lot of help with learning about Jewish history. I have received this help from many kind individuals. Dagmar Herzog initially introduced me to the Working Group on Women and Gender in Jewish History at the Center for Jewish History, from whose meetings I have benefited enormously. I’m indebted to Natalia Aleksiun, Elissa Bemporad, Federica Francesconi, and Dina Dinon for including me in their discussions. Other colleagues have been very helpful along the way, sharing their insights and reading parts of the manuscript or related papers. These include Volker Berghahn, Howard Brown, Hasia Diner, Pascal Eitler, Ute Frevert, Benno Gammerl, Sonia Gollance, Neil Gregor, Atina Grossmann, Rebekka Habermas, Uffa Jensen, Philipp Nielsen, Anita Norich, Margrit Pernau, Till van Rahden, Marsha Rozenblit, Dirk Schumann, Naomi Seidman, Nathan Stoltzfus, Nina Verheyen, Daniel Wildmann, and Sarah Wobick-­Segev. Special mention must go to Marion Kaplan, who has helped me in countless ways, from telling me about the MARLi card for libraries in New York City to vouching for me when I was just starting out in the field. She has always had time for me and my many questions, and she has read and improved a great deal of what I have written. Individuals such as her give me hope that it is possible for busy academics to keep on doing innovative work and still look out for the people around them. The same applies to Martin Conway, who read most of this manuscript and was always willing to provide just the right advice when I needed it. His own work continues to stir and challenge me. I am especially grateful to Barbara Rosenwein, who read the manuscript at short notice and provoked me to organize my arguments more clearly and to keep thinking. Jan Plamper and Paul Betts have been extremely supportive and offered insightful feedback on large chunks of the book. Going a little further back, I’d like to thank Christopher Tyerman, John Moynihan, and Mary Duffy for their willingness to listen and for their encouragement. Many institutions have helped me to complete this project. I initially received a Small Grant from the British Academy, which was transforma-

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Acknowledgments

tive in terms of its impact. While I was busy writing course materials, this grant allowed me to do much of my preliminary research in a wide range of archives in Germany and Austria. But it also served as a much needed early vote of confidence in the project. At least as significant was the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship, which I was awarded by the Leo Baeck Institute. This enabled me to turn a semester of leave into a year when I could do really meaningful research and writing. I am also grateful for the fellowships I received from the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. My own college has provided generous funding for my research, including awarding me junior leave and a number of scholarships from the Jewish Studies Department. Particularly welcome was the Pete and Betty Fishbein Award, not least because the donor took me to lunch and encouraged me with his forensic but friendly questions about the project. Archivists and librarians in many different places have been very helpful as I undertook my research. I have particularly benefited from the assistance and advice I received from Li Gerhalter and Christa Hämmerle at the Sammlung Frauennachlässe at the University of Vienna, Monika Preuss at the Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland at the University of Heidelberg, Frank Mecklenburg and Michael Simonson at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, and Christine Tröbinger at the Bildungshaus Schloss Puchberg. I have been extremely lucky to work with the editorial team at Stanford University Press. Particular thanks should go to David Biale. He took me seriously when I first contacted him out of the blue, and he gave me just the kind of incisive feedback I needed to turn an ever-­expanding project into a publishable manuscript. I am also grateful to Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Margo Irvin, and Cindy Lim for their wonderful editorial work. Acknowledgments pages usually have an understandable element of celebration about them as authors share the credit for their achievement. But I can’t help feeling that my acknowledgments should involve some form of apology. In my experience, writing books isn’t just about deepening friendships with colleagues. It’s also about showing a certain kind of selfishness and monomania that keeps one away from friends and family. There are many individuals who have helped me along the way and who have been repaid by me being too busy to write them enough occasional emails, visit

Acknowledgments

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them when I’m passing through, and so on. I feel this particularly acutely with regard to friends in the Embassy Singers, who kept me going during my years in Berlin and who came to sing at my wedding. I am also forever grateful to friends from Hertford College, who continue to show me how to nurture friendships, even when they have to be long distance. This brings me to my family. Work commitments and the pandemic have kept me away from my parents, Terry and Alice, and my sister, Alicia, for too long. But I will always be thankful for their unwavering support and love. My in-­laws have also cared for me ever since I arrived back in the US. The two individuals who have borne the brunt of this book are my wife, Suzanne, and son, Alexander. They have done so with remarkable grace and good humor. Alexander’s boisterous entry into my life has been a wonderful tonic. He drags me out of my projects and into his and generally shows me that I have more space in my life and my heart than I realized. Suzy, as ever, has sacrificed her own well-­being to put me and the people she loves first. Writing a book about love can involve a fair bit of iconoclasm, breaking into pieces many carefully constructed romantic ideals. But, as many academics’ partners can probably testify, this isn’t necessarily how you should approach daily life. What I’ve learned from Suzy over twenty years is that it’s more important to pick up the pieces and try to make something beautiful with them. I don’t know if I’ve managed that with this book, but I watch her do it again and again and I just marvel.

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GERMAN JEWS IN LOVE

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Introduction

The nineteenth-­century historianand liberal politician ­Heinrich von Treitschke regarded the wholesome love fostered in the Christian family as among the firmest evidence of Europe’s—­and most particularly Germany’s—­unrivaled moral standing in the world. For one thing, Treitschke claimed that those “Oriental” countries where harems could be found and where polygamy was still practiced “were unable to even come close” to Christian Europe in terms of “their appreciation of the value of women.” The love between women and men in Germany was superior because it fused together pagan gallantry and Christian piety. Treitschke argued that, unlike the overly feminized Italian and French societies, the occasionally rough manliness of Germanic culture had been softened just enough in those moments when German men had deferred to feminine morals and manners. In Germany, then, a European love that was wondrously paradoxical found especially powerful expression.1 Where did this understanding of love leave Germans who were not Christians, though? Could they love in the European way? And if not, were they really German or even European?2 These were not innocent questions. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such questions were asked about Jews in Germany in newspaper articles, scholarly journals, 1

2

German Jews in Love

novels, operas, and social debate.3 At a time when German Jews were experiencing unprecedented social mobility and were achieving prominence in commercial, professional, and intellectual life, defining love as the product of a national and Christian heritage provided another means of ostracizing them. The implication was that it was not sufficient to contribute to the German economy, learn the German language, thrive in German institutions, observe German laws, or even adopt German habits. One had to possess the same emotional makeup as other Germans. If a Jew did not feel the way that other Germans did, so the argument went, then it was not really possible for them to ever become German, regardless of how many trappings of integration they acquired. This was, for example, Treitschke’s judgment when he famously claimed that the converted Jewish poet Heinrich Heine could not speak to the German spirit because he had not composed a “drinking song” like the other great German poets.4 In this book I spotlight Jewish love in Germany, setting it within a broader German culture that was, despite Treitschke’s claims, itself the product of encounters between Jews and other Germans. Jews and Christians lived and worked together, learned from each other, and sometimes fell in love with one another, particularly in the urban settings that became ever more populous in the modern era. Indeed, it was the increasing proximity of Jews and non-­Jews, especially once Jews entered the middle classes in large numbers, that explains why Jews’ emotions—­in particular, the emotion of love—­became an important means by which they were measured.5 As the middle class began to eclipse the aristocracy in the nineteenth century, its intellectuals provided justifications for its ascendance. The German middle class did not thrive simply because government was administered by qualified professionals or because the industrial economy was in the hands of dynamic entrepreneurs. As texts as varied as Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism testified, it was the values of the middle classes that really counted.6 Replacing what had been the more morally dubious lifestyle of the nobility, the German middle class prospered because of its work ethic, sense of honor, and, no less important, its stable domestic life, which was based on the love

Introduction

3

and fidelity of married couples.7 According to this narrative, should Jewish Germans wish to succeed in bourgeois Germany, they would have to prove that they possessed middle-­class virtues and sentiments. In this book, therefore, I focus on how especially middle-­class Jewish women and men understood, experienced, and practiced love in modern German society. I begin in the 1870s at a moment when marriages between Jews and Christians were first permitted and end a century later, when the children of Holocaust survivors carved out relationships in a German society where sex, politics, and memory were inextricably and messily entangled. This period was a tremendously dynamic and turbulent one in German history. A German Jew such as Victor Klemperer, who was born in 1881 and lived until 1960, would have witnessed five regimes across the period, each radically different from the one that went before. The country experienced extremely rapid industrialization and urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before plunging into two total wars that, in the case of World War II, aimed at the mass murder of Jews and many others. Gender relations changed dramatically across the period, with women demanding and gaining the right to vote and entering educational institutions and the workforce in unprecedented numbers. Moreover, in the realm of family life, huge changes took place in relations between men and women and between parents and children, most notably through the seemingly inexorable rise of marriages based on love. The impact of these changes on Germany’s Jewish populations was transformative in terms of Jews’ rights and social experience, providing new opportunities for integration and social mobility as well as surges in antisemitic discrimination and ultimately marginalization and annihilation. At each turn, these upheavals provoked anew the question of whether, and on what terms, Jews—­however that elusive category might be defined—­would be accepted as fully German. This issue played out in many spheres of life from universities to business, but it acquired a particular intensity in the realm of the family and personal relationships. Indeed, the private spaces where Jews and other Germans practiced love became testing grounds within which the possibility for integration and for the maintenance of a distinctive culture acquired its most intimate and emotional expression.

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German Jews in Love

This book is thus an exploration of the influence of the political and the public on the personal and the private, and vice versa. Historians of modern Germany have already provided pioneering and politically charged works on the history of everyday life, including everyday German Jewish life.8 But, by investigating how an apparently private and intimate emotion such as love changed, we can appreciate new means by which cultural and political influences reached far into individual subjectivities.9 Close readings of the shifting ways that emotions were experienced and communicated can show how the effects of a society’s norms could be felt in quite visceral ways, working their way into habituated bodily practices and even into seemingly preconscious feelings of arousal and desire.10 Equally, these readings can illustrate how emotional styles and norms that crystallized in private could outlive any political regime that sought to police, redefine, or proscribe them. Indeed, an emotion such as love might seem all the purer (or, conversely, more exciting) if its expression involved an individual not conforming to what was deemed permissible or respectable by the outside world. The norms for public and private expressions of love therefore informed individuals’ sense of where and how they could be their truest selves. For instance, as we will see with regard to the Third Reich, a regime’s attempts to invade private spaces and control intimate relationships could actually further sanctify them as havens where individuals could freely express their emotions, away from the choreography and coercion so evident in public life.11 These findings can help us to approach a new frontier in the study of the modern self. Alongside the numerous political shifts in modern Germany, the profound social transformations of the era also prompted individuals to reconfigure their notions of self. Industrialization and new transport infrastructure drew men and women into unfamiliar towns and cities, depriving them of established markers of status, such as their place in families, family businesses, and religious communities. In turn, these individuals were offered social, occupational, and geographic mobility and the chance to meet a wide cross-­section of people from diverse class, regional, and religious backgrounds. These new urban inhabitants therefore needed to do an unprecedented amount of emotional work to achieve and preserve a sense of self as their circumstances and social standing changed.12 As I will argue in this book, love provided one of the most important means for individuals to tell

Introduction

5

a story about themselves that gave them a sense of integrity in the face of turbulent historical forces. But this love was culturally malleable, shaped not only by traditional authority figures in families and religious communities but also by new kinds of experts, such as therapists and pedagogues who could brand actions and behaviors as rational or irrational, healthy or harmful, or even natural or unnatural.13 Emotions such as love also sat within the personal drama of individuals’ life spans and their process of aging.14 The first half of the twentieth century was a remarkable period for those who study the history of aging; it was a time of significant increase in life expectancy during peacetime but also an era when millions of young and previously healthy individuals died during wars or through other forms of mass killing. Different phases in the life course also changed in character across the period. Adolescence stretched out for the young women and men who spent more years in education and training, during which time they experienced many new freedoms as single people who sometimes lived away from their parents.15 But in times of war, these same young people were mobilized for dangerous war work and were thereby forced to confront their mortality. The disruptive nature of these changes also obliges us to be sensitive to the generational dimension in how emotions are expressed and consumed.16 For instance, how did Jewish individuals who had learned to feel and act out their emotions—­that is, who had developed their emotional intelligence—­in earlier eras adapt to a radically new National Socialist society that sought to efface many previously accepted norms?17 Were their feelings of attraction, optimism, sympathy, and loyalty differently affected by political persecution and propaganda than the same emotions when experienced by those who matured during the Nazi era? This raises challenging questions about the effect of context on the emotions, especially with regard to the experience and expression of love. It is a familiar truth in the historical literature that emotions are socially constructed;18 but, when discussing the disrupted course of modern German history, the supplementary question that arises is how much these differences of context created differences in terms of emotions. Scholars have offered increasingly sophisticated accounts of how the Nazi regime achieved a Gleichschaltung (Nazification of state and society) through a mixture of coercion and consensus-­building.19 But it is

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German Jews in Love

a moot point how far the regime’s new norms penetrated into the realm of emotions. As Barbara Rosenwein has argued, emotions are often rooted in the domains of face-­to-­face groups and communities that could form into distinct “emotional communities.”20 These were affected by Nazism, often profoundly, but they were neither created by them nor altogether brought under their control. In that sense, emotional communities—­and perhaps especially those formed out of love—­always operated at a certain distance from political regimes and obeyed their own dictates. This is emphatically not to say that they were unchanging: Modern love was a malleable and volatile phenomenon. But it had its own logics and momentums, according to which the “emotionologies” identified by Peter and Carol Stearns were a complex admixture of political influences, social norms, and the more private logics of the self.21 We should therefore guard against a reductively political reading of the emotional history of Germany in this period. Jews and other Germans were complex individuals; many of them had relatively high educational levels and were shaped by the overlapping and conflicting social norms that they learned from experience or from the consumption of culture. Thus we must expect their expression of their emotions to have been similarly complex. Individuals’ emotional lives were constructed by means of sometimes conflicting, sometimes mutually reinforcing religious, educational, medical, and commercial institutions that structured how they developed forms of communication, approached peers, related to their bodies, understood gender norms, and internalized “feeling rules.”22 The Book’s Structure and Its Protagonists This book has four main chapters, which proceed chronologically. This structure helps to foreground the elements of continuity and change, although each chapter also charts distinct stages along the life course when love was learned about, experienced, and communicated.23 Beginning with adolescents’ and young adults’ experiences of courtship and moving on to the changing role that love played in marriages, the chapters illustrate how Jewish women and men internalized and reworked their society’s conceptions and valuations of emotions as they matured. The sections on marriage discuss how love developed (or waned) between husbands and wives but

Introduction

7

also explore how children were taught about love and encouraged to love by their parents. The temporal frames placed around each chapter are taken from political history. I compare and contrast Imperial Germany with the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Federal Republic. Although the decisive junctures in social and cultural history did not always align neatly with political shifts, it is instructive to start with conventional periodizations and then track both elements of continuity across political eras and the changes within them. The main chapters are followed by an experimental conclusion, which presents excerpts from witnesses’ accounts that were often nonlinear and bore the hallmarks of trauma. Spotlighting them in this way invites readers to form their own judgments about how I have integrated the sources into a continuous narrative. It also illustrates the tangled relationship between memory and history. Throughout this project I have been confronted by the unavoidable complexities of how I should define Jewishness. This is a question that has many different answers, depending on the direction from which one chooses to approach it. However, in common with many historians, I wish to avoid imposing any retrospective definition. Therefore, in general, I use the definition offered by Jean-­Paul Sartre and Shmuel Eisenstadt when they included in their analyses all those who considered themselves to be or who were considered by others to be Jewish.24 This is, of course, a broader definition than some scholars might use. But it works better than any more restrictive definition across a broad period when the definition of Jewishness was a moving target that was complicated by the migration of Jewish communities into Germany, processes of secularization, and the intermarriage of Jews and non-­Jews. For that reason, this study consciously spills beyond any defined Jewish community. I also examine relationships both among German Jews and between Jews and Christians rather than concentrating only on intra-­ Jewish relationships. The reason for this is that either being in a mixed relationship or dealing with the effects of relatives being in mixed relationships was a significant and contentious part of the Jewish experience in the late nineteenth and particularly early twentieth century. Despite the openness of this definition of Jewishness, it is nevertheless important to note that I foreground the experiences and perspectives of Jews who were middle class and urban. Since the eve of World War I, most Jews

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German Jews in Love

in Germany were bourgeois city dwellers, although the Jewish population remained variegated, incorporating both rural and working-­class communities. As a result, I have tried to include the voices of some workers and rural inhabitants. In both cases I was limited by the much smaller number of egodocuments from these demographic groups that can be found in archival collections. Another way that I was selective is with regard to sexuality. Although I do discuss the experiences of a small number of diarists and memoirists who felt and described same-­sex desire, I cannot claim that queer experiences and partnerships receive as much attention as more typical and easily discoverable heterosexual relationships. I should also explain why I often refer to other, that is, non-­Jewish, Germans as Christians rather than as Gentiles or simply non-­Jews. The primary reason is that most of the diarists and memoirists whose accounts I read used the term Christian when referring to their non-­Jewish partners, in-­laws, and neighbors. This was not always true, particularly of those who moved in left-­ wing circles. The term Christian was also often replaced by Aryan during the Third Reich. That so many individuals nevertheless continued to refer to other Germans as Christians suggests the abiding cultural significance of the Christian denominations, even during an era that might be understood as an age of secularization. Furthermore, although not all non-­Jewish Germans professed a Christian faith, most of the German population did retain an allegiance to one of the major Christian churches throughout the period studied. And, even if church attendance waned across this era, this did not mean that confessional identity declined or that, for some, religion did not remain a source of opposition to intermarriage and other forms of legal emancipation for Jews. As recent studies have suggested, the modern era was not only a period of secularization but also a period of the accompanying trends of sacralization and confessionalization.25 The Sources Trying to interrogate multiple contexts has meant that I have had to tackle an ambitiously broad source base. I combine first-­person accounts and literary sources with a wide range of other private and public documents, including court case records, newspapers, advice manuals, synagogue records, love letters, films, and personal advertisements. In terms of archival mate-

Introduction

9

rials, I draw on fourteen collections from five countries. These include the Leo Baeck Institute’s collection of more than 2,000 memoirs; the “My Life in Germany” archive of 263 life histories housed in the Houghton Library at Harvard University; two collections from the University of Vienna that span in excess of 3,600 life autobiographical writings and 437 sets of literary remains; and the Tagebucharchiv in Emmendingen’s assortment of 22,000 documents produced by 4,500 authors. Alongside these collections of egodocuments, I use Jewish community sources from the voluminous collections at the Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland in Heidelberg, the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin, and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem. In addition, I also consulted various kinds of state and other official records, chiefly drawn from the collections at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, the Landesarchiv in Berlin, the Wiener Library in London, and the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem. By using this wide array of sources, I can not only illustrate the obvious impact of politics and particularly racial politics on the most intimate aspects of German Jews’ private lives but also bring a multiplicity of social and cultural contexts into play.26 Print media and advice literature have proved particularly useful in illustrating how “feeling rules” could be formulated and could solidify in civil society. Newspapers have been important not least because they are arguably the urban source par excellence.27 They not only helped urban inhabitants to navigate the new and unfamiliar in their cities but also provided new forms of (emotional) community, allowing readers to be shocked by the same scandals, try out the same recommendations, and consume the same political opinions. In the case of Jewish newspapers, the publications featured in this book often offered moral instruction on the topic of love. They also made space for personal advertisements, primarily as a way of binding together a new generation of Jewish women and men who might otherwise become dispersed throughout urban society.28 The flourishing genre of advice literature catered to a new kind of audience that was no longer able to find out all it needed about social mores from trusted local experts. This kind of source reveals the emergence of new kinds of authority figures in Jewish communities, such as sexual therapists and social pedagogues, while also showing how established voices such as rabbis could make their influence felt in new ways.29 Even sources that do seem more obviously

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German Jews in Love

political or legal, such as records from court cases, had knock-­on social effects. They not only showed which kinds of laws were being enforced but could also present exemplary social dramas in which transgressive emotional displays received punishments and emotionally sympathetic characters were vindicated or at least received clemency.30 While studying these sources, I asked whether they provided a kind of “emotional script” that could be read and, to varying degrees, acted out by Jewish women and men who sought out love. The concept of emotional scripts has not been incorporated into histories of the emotions to the same extent as such other concepts as emotional regimes, emotional communities, and emotional styles.31 But the concept has its roots in Erving Goffman’s theory of symbolic interaction and has been applied in various guises to the fields of linguistics, sociology, and social psychology.32 Its application by Beverley Fehr and James Russell is particularly instructive here; their work on love as a “prototype” finds that, because love has proved so hard to define, both for researchers and for historical subjects, one encounters a compensatory profusion of typologies of love.33 In other words, in the absence of a satisfactory universal concept, individuals have encountered (and produced) a multiplicity of scripts that perform love.34 This finding is relevant not only to how love is studied but also to how it has been felt in past societies. For some of the historical actors featured in this book, it was precisely the variable nature of love that led them to lean on so many cultural prescriptions so heavily. Never being sure of what love was, they searched all the more frantically for authoritative figures who could provide some reassurance. As we will see, such responses to emotional norms show not only how elites’ disciplining and punishing of various acts shaped behavior but also how the production of positive role models and engaging romantic narratives could orient behavior. The other advantage of this concept is that a script can assign different roles to different characters. Although the script for Jewish men and women in the complex cultural landscapes of modernizing Germany was a composite produced by many scattered authors, the combined effect of the many normative sources was to give different lines to men and women who, in turn, were supposed to experience different narrative arcs in their love lives. To assess these claims about emotional scripts, we need to compare and

Introduction

11

contrast the public and prescriptive texts with more intimate and private sources of the self, such as diaries, love letters, and memoirs. By producing these sources, individuals conformed with or departed from scripts, testing out whether their experience of emotions rhymed with the descriptions they found in the culture around them. This is particularly true for the period studied because the production of each of these sources peaked during this time because of the advent of mass literacy, national postal services, and the encouragement of diary keeping in schools.35 As we will see, many individuals who wrote diaries, memoirs, and love letters recognized that they needed to write their own script to make sense of their experiences at various phases in their lives, even as they sometimes hoped that their lives would follow conventional patterns. Because their experiences are not so easy to track, it is particularly interesting to explore to what extent women and nonelite men mimicked or departed from dominant scripts in their accounts. Sources such as love letters and diaries are invaluable for a study that tracks change across the life course, because they provide sequential accounts written in something like real time.36 Yet, whereas diaries are often regarded as reliable because they are immediate and seemingly transparent forms of self-­disclosure, memoirs throw up more problems. One issue is that memoirs are often written at the end of an individual’s life. Another is that they may more explicitly conform to literary models.37 This, at least, is the opinion of Philippe Lejeune, one of the foremost experts in the study of life writing. He has summed up the difference between the two genres, commenting, “Autobiography and the diary have opposite aims: autobiography lives under the spell of fiction; the diary is hooked on truth.”38 In this book, nevertheless, I make widespread use of what would usually be called memoirs, for a number of reasons. For one thing, at least some of the collections consulted for this book actually blur the boundary between diaries and memoirs. For instance, the first-­person accounts assembled by Harvard psychologists and sociologists in 1940 for the “My Life in Germany” project were not written toward the end of an individual’s life, when the author stood at a (safe) distance from the events they describe. They were instead penned in the midst of a nightmarish wartime present when murderous antisemitism raged. Although the authors may have escaped to the United States, the situation in Europe that they depicted had not been

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German Jews in Love

resolved; it arguably appeared more likely that the Europe they described would remain within a German empire that was making significant advances in all directions.39 This collection suggests that the distinction between memoirs as literary constructions and diaries as more neutral and un-­self-­conscious reports may actually not be so hard and fast in practice. Diaries are also literary sources that have been artfully constructed with the help of genre conventions. For instance, German schoolchildren were taught how to write diaries in the late nineteenth century as a means of honing their powers of introspection.40 And Jewish diarists who lived through the National Socialist period, such as Victor Klemperer, sometimes wrote their diaries for an outside audience, hoping that their account would survive as a witness to history, even if they themselves did not.41 We should not assume, then, that, even though autobiographies or memoirs are written at some distance from the events and with an eye to the audience, diaries are simply more immediate retellings. Instead, it is important to note that neither distance in time nor the presence of a perceived audience necessarily makes a source more unreliable. This is well illustrated by the important issue of same-­sex love. Diarists who were describing homosexual desire in the early twentieth century often wrote in ambiguous and elliptical ways. Perhaps they were using a form of code for fear of being discovered. Or they may have lacked a satisfactory vocabulary or emotional script to help them process their emotions and make sense of their experiences.42 By contrast, memoirists who wrote later in the twentieth century felt it important to write candidly and at length about their sexual experiences and feelings of desire. In one well-­known case study, Gad Beck, a gay activist from Berlin, wrote explicit accounts of his sexual encounters in 1930s Germany that were strongly influenced (and even inflated) by a sense of hindsight.43 Beck was presumably influenced by other gay pioneers in the postwar era who stressed the importance of bringing queer lifestyles out of the closet. One could argue that such extraneous influences could distort as well as illuminate the historical record. In Beck’s case it seems likely that he exaggerated certain sexual encounters.44 But his writings, at the very least, suggest that a greater distance in time between events lived and events recorded does not simply entail authors becoming more forgetful or their accounts becoming vaguer or more selective.

Introduction

13

Perhaps, then, it is more productive to think of both diaries and memoirs not simply as records or even as literary texts but as practices or “technologies of the self” engaged in by historical actors.45 When viewed from this perspective, both types of source become rich resources that illustrate how individuals have worked on their emotions as they lived, remembered, and relived them. As Lejeune has reminded us, individuals are narrative beings who seek to give their lives order and meaning.46 Both diaries and memoirs are a means of doing this, not least because they enable individuals to better understand their feelings about an event or series of events by assigning significance to the event or events within a meaningful sequence. Performing such a task has been vital for many individuals—­not least when living through times of crisis—­as a means of assuring them that they are not passive beings, pushed around by historical forces.47 Letters have proved a similarly important resource for individuals and couples, allowing each party to compare notes and to clarify their feelings and perceptions in conversation with a (usually) sympathetic interlocutor.48 The Argument I suggest that by falling in love and marrying for love, German Jewish men and women could construct a new conception of self during a period when established markers of identity, such as religious affiliation, occupation, education, and gendered roles within families, were in flux. But to achieve this new sense of self, these individuals had to understand their intimate relationships within the framework of an overarching love myth. This does not imply that the love felt and described by these men and women was not sincere or real or that it did not sometimes demand costs and risks to those who felt it. Indeed, I use the term myth not to imply something false but something imagined: Myths are the means through which individuals and societies explain the significance of mysterious and wondrous aspects of individual and collective life and denote what is, or should be, deemed most valuable.49 George Williamson has observed a broader “longing for myth” in nineteenth-­century German culture. This longing was a symptom of a restlessness among modern Germans who sought to understand their nation’s struggles as moments in a sacred and redemptive narrative.50 Those German

14

German Jews in Love

Jews who felt themselves to be living in a transitional state between tradition and an only partly realized modernity—­modernity entailing, among other things, the triumph of a liberalism that would deliver full Jewish emancipation—­were liable to be influenced by such a longing, which could trace its roots to Jewish and later Christian narratives of salvation.51 The love myth was one example of this longing. Borrowing from different currents in Romanticist thought, it identified love as an all-­consuming passion that threatened, or promised, to break the bounds of the currently socially acceptable and to create new models of togetherness. Yet this love found its ultimate resolution in a marriage and loving family sphere that was characterized by a warmth and sincerity that was all too often lacking in public life.52 This myth therefore encouraged the belief that the truest, most authentic version of the modern self was found in the private sphere away from the competitiveness of economic life and the factionalism of political life. Although (particularly male) Germans could be profit-­driven and competitive in their public lives, they were more selfless and collectively minded individuals in their private lives (mostly owing to female influence), or so the story went.53 Confined and disciplined at every turn in their public lives, these German men remained free agents in the personal spaces where they chose friends, companions, and lovers according to inclination and desire. This positive valuation of the domestic sphere may have had its roots in the Biedermeier veneration of the bourgeois family during the mid-­nineteenth century.54 But by the early twentieth century, when critiques of the conventional family unit had become more commonplace, it had come to embrace more personal notions of freedom. Much of the charm of a passionate love relationship by this point was that it promised an immediate transformation in an individual’s life, even before wider political and social changes could be realized.55 This love myth fed off religious ideas about other forms of love. During the fin de siècle, Christian and Jewish intellectuals debated passionately whether the Christian love of neighbor described in the New Testament was more expansive and welcoming of the foreigner than that advocated in the Hebrew Bible.56 Similarly, Jews and Christians struggled to decide whether romantic love, which could lead lovers to form recklessly and indiscrimi-

Introduction

15

nately passionate attachments, had more or less divine spark than the more obedient love that wives and husbands cultivated when they entered into arranged marriages.57 To the extent that the love myth triumphed, it signaled a migration of the sacred into a new realm for both Jews and Christians: Romantic love promised a version of heaven on earth, but one that existed in the private rather than the public sphere. Yet, as numerous cases of community or family disapproval of “unsuitable” love relationships illustrate, this new romantic love could clash with other forms of love advocated by both religious traditions.58 The myth of love also always required an element of faith. Then as now, it remained difficult to know enough about the person with whom you fell in love or whom you married. It may seem that couples who married for love, often after lengthy periods of courtship, would have had much more knowledge of each other than counterparts whose marriages had been arranged. But even if couples got to know each other over months and years, they could still find life together quite different once in-­laws were involved and questions about children’s upbringing arose, particularly if they were from unfamiliar religious traditions. During a turbulent early twentieth century, those in Jewish or mixed partnerships could also find that the person they thought they knew was quite different when one partner lost their livelihood and social standing because of economic downturns or political persecution. Loving someone in such a complex and dynamic society as modern Germany was rather like choosing to trust someone: You chose to love or trust them not because you could verify that they were worthy of this trust or love but because you could not.59 Knowing that their unique experiences were, to some degree, conforming to well-­known romantic narrative arcs might, however, help individuals to feel more confident about giving expression to their feelings. This love myth was thus a myth about those who loved and their loved ones, but it also served as a myth about a new German state and society. In this new Germany the power of love could provide a solid foundation for relationships and emotional communities that could supplant religious and class identities. According to this account, love could be the universal transformative force that could create social and individual happiness. This had a particular relevance for the Jewish community. In this narrative Jews

16

German Jews in Love

were not simply obliged to assimilate to a German way of life or remain in their own German Jewish subculture. Instead, through love they could act out the “situational ethnicity” described by Till van Rahden. They could be many things at once: hard-­headed and profitable business leaders and innovative academics but also passionate lovers, committed parents, and loyal members of their ethnic and religious communities.60 This converges also with the account of assimilation provided by Yuri Slezkine. In his provocative work The Jewish Century, Slezkine suggests that all Europeans became, in a metaphorical sense, Jewish in the modern era. According to Slezkine’s thesis, as Europeans urbanized and acquired the new skills required by service economies, they left behind markers of identity and belonging in given locales and became useful outsiders in a society of strangers.61 Consequently, they could no longer rely on status and family reputation but lived or died according to their Leistung (achievement).62 One of the primary sources of support that could facilitate such achievement in the “outside world” was a loving marriage and family unit, which would help entrepreneurs and professionals achieve a healthy emotional balance between their public and private selves.63 One behavioral trend that helped cultivate this new urban dweller was spurning arranged marriages in favor of love marriages. To acquire the skills to become a prosperous inhabitant of the booming cities, individuals had to spend more time gaining qualifications and undergoing specialist training, often in a variety of locales. They therefore could not commit to married life with a partner at the age when parents traditionally arranged marriages. Courtship—­the precursor to the love marriage—­was both a way of testing out partners for a more distant future marriage and a means of enjoying some degree of intimacy in the meantime. Similarly, the love marriage was a way of justifying the gamble of choosing one’s own partner and seeking a destiny different from the one envisaged by one’s parents. In this new environment the love marriage could even serve as a new kind of purity law for modern citizens: As novels, newspaper accounts, and films endlessly repeated, marriages that were not the product of a serious love were thereby impure or materialistic.64 Only if this love proved itself to be so profound as to risk upsetting families and scandalizing local religious communities could it command respect in German society.65

Introduction

17

Of course, when applied to almost a hundred years of German history, this thesis needs to be nuanced. For one thing, women and men were assigned quite different roles in this myth.66 Men could celebrate a loving married life as a counterweight to an increasingly competitive public life—­a “Sabbath for the heart,” as Selma Stern put it. But for women, who had less access to and a smaller profile in public life, the private sphere was often their place of (unpaid) work rather than a refuge.67 Jewish women and men therefore needed to construct somewhat different romantic utopias for themselves. Whereas men could experience a loving relationship as compensation for discrimination in professional life or setbacks in political life, women’s social aspirations often had to be channeled into their married lives. For those women who did not expect the private sphere to offer them respite from social and economic pressures but rather anticipated experiencing those pressures in their private lives, the prevailing love myth could sometimes offer less appeal. Particularly for a generation of young Jewish women in the early twentieth century who acquired new levels of education and remained single for longer periods, love and marriage entailed not so much a romantic utopia as a return to a conventional lifestyle. This lifestyle often consisted of tying their fate to that of their husbands rather than carving out their own identities and futures. The inevitable question that arises is, What happened to love when German society was so radically transformed by the National Socialists? I suggest that the power of the love myth outlived the circumstances that gave birth to it and that it allowed many women and men to survive the traumatic changes that occurred during the Third Reich. By focusing on the value of loving partnerships and by honoring the fidelity that loving couples showed to one another, Jewish couples—­and sometimes the communities around them—­were able to hold on to a different value system from the Nazi racial creed. As a result, they could still find meaning in their personal lives. However, Jewish and mixed couples who lived through the Third Reich often hankered after altogether more conventional romances to restore some normality in lives that had become terrifyingly unfamiliar and precarious. This created tensions when the circumstances imposed by the Third Reich provoked an inversion in gender roles, such as when Jewish men were no longer able to play the role of breadwinner or protector.

18

German Jews in Love

This argument suggests that National Socialist ideology did not itself radically alter how most German Jews valued and practiced love. The genocide carried out by the Nazis did, however, and not just because the decimated Jewish populations in the postwar Germanys were made up of many survivors who had been brought up in culturally distinct Eastern European communities. As we will see in Chapter 4, even the children of German Jewish survivors who had lived in mixed marriages and survived because of them were drawn toward a new romantic utopia. The new love ideal promised not that love could provide a compensatory private happiness in an often hostile German society but rather that love could foster broader social transformations primarily in thriving Jewish communities outside Germany. For those who remained in (predominantly West) Germany and who, in many cases, found non-­Jewish partners, it proved painfully difficult to imagine that their personal histories conformed to any satisfying romantic script. The finding that numerous German Jews held on to their preexisting beliefs about love throughout much of the Third Reich offers striking evidence of just how durable emotional scripts can be. Across generations, many German Jews had learned to venerate a loving private sphere as an “emotional refuge” that could fortify individuals who needed much resilience to seek out professional success, often in the face of hostility or discrimination in public life.68 Even after the Nazis’ violent intrusions into the private sphere, it proved difficult to abandon an approach that had previously helped German Jews to prosper in German society and still retain a sense of their Jewish selfhood. Yet, once this model was overhauled, a new ideal that reaffirmed intramarriage as a key ingredient in preserving Jewish distinctiveness and self-­consciousness also had significant staying power in many Jewish communities, not least because of memories of the German Jewish experience and the Shoah.69 There is much in this study that is distinctively German: the changes of political regime, the nature of the Jewish community, and the emotional and cultural worlds that surrounded the protagonists. But this study of Jewish love does not remain confined within the borders of Germany as defined in either 1871, 1918, 1939, or 1945. As these dates suggest, Germany—­whether regarded as a geographic space, a political entity, or a cultural unity—­was a malleable entity. I therefore follow the life experiences of Jewish individuals

Introduction

19

who moved across borders in German-­speaking Central Europe. As a result, I feature stories from pre-­and post-­A nschluss Vienna, as well as those from what would later become the Czech borderlands. This does throw up complications, notably because of the legal differences pertaining to intermarriage in Austria and Germany. But, by retracing the life histories of individuals who lived in different German lands and, in some cases, who moved between German-­speaking countries, we can gain a valuable comparative perspective on what it meant to be Jewish and German and how these categories were redefined by new kinds of intimate relationships. After all, the history of love in modern Germany is emphatically a history of movement. Individuals formed new bonds as they moved to new locales; they moved with partners for family, professional, or political reasons; they sometimes moved up or down the social scale through marriage; or they moved between religious communities. For all these reasons, this book negotiates its way across many borders, just as its subjects did.

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ONE

A Tabernacle in the Desert The Loving Marriage in Imperial Germany

In a 1922 article titled “Changes in the Types of Jewish Woman in Germany Since the Emancipation,” the historian Selma Stern dwelled on the emergence of a “new, European love” during the Romantic era. Quoting the nineteenth-­century writer and salonnière Rahel Varnhagen, Stern characterized this new type of love as “a serious, even life-­threatening . . . Eros” that was more profound than the “trifling, slightly wounding Amor” of bygone times. Whereas in previous generations, a husband was valued because he provided access to a secure family life, in the nineteenth century he became a woman’s “mystical destiny which she must follow, regardless of whether he brought blessings or calamity into her life.”1 Stern thereby announced the arrival of a profoundly contradictory love ideal. Married life remained the unmovable telos of “the Jewish woman.” Yet it came to involve not simply occupying a predictable role on a familiar domestic stage but setting out on a potentially perilous journey with a companion who remained, in important ways, an unknown quantity. The inherent tension in this model of the Jewish marriage was a product of the broader transformations in family life brought about by urbanization and capitalist work patterns during the 21

22

German Jews in Love

second “period of transition” (Sattelzeit) of the late nineteenth century.2 Whereas premodern marriages were usually arranged to consolidate family businesses and preserve local networks, modern economies required laborers who were willing to leave behind their families and local attachments. New justifications for partnerships between strangers therefore had to be found, chief among them the emotion of romantic love.3 Yet therein lay the paradox: For all its functional value, this serious Eros was most renowned for the disruptions it caused in the afflicted. In this chapter I chart the stages that structured most heterosexual Jewish relationships. I begin with courtship and engagement and move through marriage and parenthood, concluding with a discussion of how marriages ended, either through divorce or the death of a partner. In each section I compare the experiences of women and men, although, where possible, I also explore how male and female partners discussed and negotiated their often differing experiences. In this and the next chapter I suggest that the conflict between following one’s heart wherever it may take one and arriving at the preordained destination of married life was easier to resolve for young Jewish men than for their female counterparts. Although a significant proportion of male suitors enjoyed professional and social successes throughout the Imperial era, they also encountered discrimination and prejudice in the public spaces where they were active. This often meant that a loving private sphere held special appeal as a counterworld within which these men hoped to choose their relationships freely and experience sincere, noninstrumental attachments all too often denied them in public life. The experiences of falling in love and marrying for love therefore became important markers for achieving selfhood, and the love of a companion or soulmate could provide a much needed sense of “ontological rootedness,” to use Simon May’s term.4 This may have made such men into enthusiastic romantics, but it also meant that their partners were put under significant pressure to provide them with emotional compensation for the vicissitudes they experienced in their professional lives. Through the passionate and selfless love that they showed their husbands and children, wives were supposed to provide not only the ideal preconditions for their husbands’ public success but also reassurances that their

A Tabernacle in the Desert

23

partners’ inherent value did not simply rise and fall with their professional successes or failures.5 Wives could also offer their husbands an anchoring in Jewish communities. During the Imperial era, as men increasingly interacted outside exclusively Jewish circles and as their participation in the religious life of Jewish communities waned, their wives tended to shoulder the burden of preserving Jewish traditions and—­should either party wish it—­passing on religious traditions to their children.6 Married Jewish women were also expected to nurture relationships in Jewish milieus and thereby enhance the social respectability of busy husbands.7 These wives therefore demonstrated that acculturation was usually achieved as a team effort. They could also assuage the anxieties of partners who, in their daily practices, had moved away from religious orthodoxy yet who wished to honor their heritage. For these reasons, among others, the relationships between love, courtship, and marriage were often more fraught for young Jewish women. They too experienced new educational and professional opportunities during the period, but they usually found that both love and arranged marriages tended to abbreviate rather than complement their professional development. Making a love match did not so much provide the final staging post on the journey toward selfhood as cause a rupture in the life course, with one model of the self being replaced by another. Usually men’s careers had a good degree of continuity as they moved between single and married life, but women tended to experience a more total transformation in their daily lives through the act of getting married. Especially for those women who had stayed longer in education and who had experienced an increasing range of career prospects while single, marriage had to be reenchanted within a love myth that ennobled the role of domestic wife and mother. As we will see, to buy into this love myth, women (and men) often needed to follow emotional scripts that provided a rationale for their feelings. But these scripts also created a social drama in which men could play the roles of career seeker and loving husband and women more often had to give their whole selves over to their marriages.

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German Jews in Love

“How Could Neighborhood Friends . . . Become Lovers?” Courtship Rituals German Jews’ “conversion” to a religion of love is often seen as an important staging post on their journey from the enclosed and traditional world of the ghetto to an open, metropolitan, and cosmopolitan German culture.8 Cautionary tales in nineteenth-­century Jewish newspapers would suggest that this process was rather rocky, as young German Jews challenged their parents’ authority with their determination to date and marry as they pleased.9 Certainly, some young Jewish Germans had good reasons to do things differently from previous generations. Jewish children had proved themselves to be unusually adept school students, entering and remaining in German secondary schools in numbers that proportionally far outstripped their Christian counterparts, as I discuss later in this chapter. This meant that many spent much of their time with peers rather than elders, often in multi-­or nondenominational settings where they encountered a plurality of religious teachings and traditions alongside other secular influences.10 Particularly if they lived in the larger cities, these young Jews often witnessed their parents and/or other Jewish couples abandon the rituals and daily rhythms of traditional Jewish daily life for lifestyles that comprised an à la carte assortment of Jewish and secular commitments. They were also addressed directly by an increasing diversity of Jewish groups—­Liberal, Orthodox, and Zionist—­ whose youth organizations and newspapers offered them competing models of how to fortify their Jewish identities.11 The result was that many young Jewish women and men were presented with the choice and the challenge to define what, if any, sort of Jew they wanted to be. Choosing how and who to marry was an important way that these individuals addressed this question and articulated a definition of self. Jewish families also urbanized at a far more rapid rate than other Germans between 1870 and World War I. By 1910 about 70 percent of the German Jewish population lived in towns and cities; the corresponding figure for the rest of the German population was only 21 percent.12 This meant, at least in theory, that a significant number of young Jews could socialize in the new leisure venues that sprang up across the German urban landscape after unification. In the salons, coffeehouses, dance halls, and bars that were dispersed across cityscapes, women and men could benefit from a degree of anonymity

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25

and socialize more freely than when under the watchful eye of neighbors and family friends. Indeed, especially Jewish women were often regarded as virtuosos of these new forms of social interaction. This was at least partly because famous Jewish salon hostesses such as Berta Zuckerkandl and Eugenie Schwarzwald were renowned for attracting the most avant-­garde artistic figures, such as the members of the Vienna Secession, to their gatherings.13 Of perhaps the most significance for many German Jewish individuals, however, was the Civil Registry Law of February 6, 1875. This piece of legislation asserted the preeminence of state law over religious canons and thereby made possible marriages between Germans from different religious traditions.14 Yet no dramatic watershed moment separated the romantic lives of those who grew up in the Imperial period from those born earlier. By the early nineteenth century, Romanticist celebrations of a wild romantic love that could disrupt social hierarchies and norms had already been absorbed by the maskilim, a new generation of Jewish writers who called for Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment.15 Although these intellectuals did not envisage or welcome interreligious marriages, they did counsel young Jewish men to cultivate their emotions and embrace spontaneity when seeking the hand of a partner rather than relying on dried-­up formulas.16 Furthermore, although most Jewish religious leaders remained opposed to intermarriage, there were some notable exceptions, such as Rabbi Ludwig Philippsohn, the founder of the newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums; Gabriel Risser, the first Jewish judge in Germany; and leading Reform rabbi Samuel Holdheim. During the 1840s Holdheim had even defended mixed marriages as love matches, arguing that “love stands as the highest ethical standard on its own and does not need to be propped up by faith.”17 As Holdheim’s comment suggests, feeling and honoring deep and sincere stirrings of love became something of an emblem of belonging for Jewish members of the educated middle classes. If the ascendant commercial middle class (among whom Jewish businessmen were reputedly so prominent) represented the values of an increasingly pitiless capitalism, the educated middle class was supposedly as much characterized by its loving family life as by the professional qualifications of its males.18 Perhaps also eager to show that Judaism was as much a “religion of the heart” as Pietistic Protestantism, a wide range of Jewish religious leaders and intellectuals dedicated studies to comparing various kinds of Jewish love

26

German Jews in Love

to their Christian counterparts during the late nineteenth century.19 Rather than romantic love simply being a threat to Jewish religious traditions, then, it was increasingly sacralized by both rabbis and secular Jewish intellectuals. Influenced by the surrounding culture and by these subtly shifting religious teachings, Jewish parents proved increasingly willing to make room for romance in courtship rituals. Although intramarriages were strongly favored, anxious parents often worked hard to arrange situations where couples could fall for each other rather than directly arrange their sons’ and daughters’ marriages.20 By avoiding outright conflict with their children, these parents therefore veiled from their offspring the role that marriage was supposed to play in reproducing a new generation of Jewish community. Yet all of this concealed choreography spurred especially more educated Jewish suitors to seek out companions with whom they could discuss the contradictions of modern courtship and marriage and agree on their own pathways. This was the case for Rose Malachowski, a well-­to-­do young Berliner who fell for a much older man in 1892 when she was 18, after she received much encouragement from her family. Although “erotic thoughts were far from [her] mind,” she fell for her fiancé because he was someone with whom she “could share [her] thoughts and ideas.”21 Her parents had been remote figures and had entrusted her upbringing to governesses who were equally emotionally distant. When, some years earlier, an amorous brother-­in-­law sought to sabotage possible romantic interests, even slapping her when he found her conversing with a young Scottish man, she noted that her father was “helpless” and simply “stood by silently.”22 Malachowski’s engagement transformed both her self-­regard and her standing among relatives and friends. Not only was she taken seriously by a man who sent her notes and flowers every night during their engagement, but the surrounding society also started to treat her as an adult, inviting her to a whirlwind of social gatherings. As she recollected, “The engagement period [was] a time of giddiness and enchantment for two people in love. Each day brings new pleasures and parties. Everybody is eager to welcome and entertain the young couple.”23 In the end, though, Malachowski’s marriage turned out not to provide a new dawn for her so much as to reinsert her into a stereotypical role that she resisted. For one thing, it reaffirmed the authority of a religious tradition that she had already rejected. In her youth Malachowski had stopped attend-

A Tabernacle in the Desert

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ing synagogue during the High Holy Days because she believed the gender segregation in the building represented the persistence of “oriental customs.” Echoing antisemitic tropes, she also complained that the atmosphere in the building resembled “the stock exchange, not . . . a house of worship.”24 Noting that her wedding day was the first and last time she returned to a synagogue, she reflected that her marriage signaled the moment when she, still too young to understand what she was doing, resigned herself to the role that her community and society had preassigned her. Yet, even though she conformed to what was expected of her—­for one thing, bringing with her a sizable dowry—­her husband could not always play his part as breadwinner, losing much of his (and her) money in property speculation.25 The experiences of another wealthy Berliner, who turned 18 a decade later, offers us an alternative vantage point on the role that romance played in Jewish coming-­of-­age dramas at the fin de siècle. Vera Rosenberg-­Borchardt belonged to a prominent family of formerly Jewish converts to Christianity and, accordingly, she was expected to marry someone from the same milieu. This she ultimately did, allowing herself to be swayed by her mother, who had encouraged a young suitor to spend time alone with her daughter during evening walks through the local gardens. However, Rosenberg-­Borchardt’s initial reaction had been to wonder, “How could neighborhood friends suddenly become lovers?”26 But first she explored aspects of her heritage through a passionate romance with a Zionist, who condemned former Jews’ decision to convert and with whom she learned to write notes in Hebrew.27 (As she noted, this had the added appeal that her mother could not read such messages.) For Rosenberg-­Borchardt, part of her first boyfriend’s attractiveness was that he confronted issues head-­on that her parents had sought to avoid. Chief among these was the Dreyfus affair, which her parents ignored, even though signs of antisemitism swirled around them in 1890s Berlin. Falling in love with a “self-­ conscious Jew” allowed an adolescent Rosenberg-­Borchardt not simply to go through the motions of attaining a desirable match but to reassess who she was and to contemplate competing visions of her future during an age not only of secularization but also of reconfessionalization and organized political antisemitism.28 Even so, she ultimately followed the path laid out for her. This suggests that, even though some exploration was allowed such a young woman, parents’ expectations

28

German Jews in Love

were likely to prove the deciding factor. Tellingly, Rosenberg-­Borchardt hinted at the pressure she felt she was under, writing to her fiancé that she would like to “sleep through the engagement, sleep through the wedding, all the upheavals—­and then . . . wake up in your arms having been married for half a year.”29 It is difficult to be certain how typical or representative any stories of courtship can be, particularly in terms of what individuals found attractive about their partners or how they understood their relationships informing their sense of self. As both personal documents and fiction from the era testify, young women from less wealthy families were more likely to worry about how they would find any kind of match, particularly if they were younger siblings who could expect to bring only a small dowry with them. They were also just as likely to be anxious about whether they had acquired the education and social graces likely to attract upwardly mobile partners.30 What can be said with some degree of confidence is that popular or “middlebrow” literature from the era was preoccupied with the theme of how young Jews’ passionate relationships would affect their religious commitments. As Jonathan Hess’s study illustrates, the model trajectory in such novels was for a new generation of Jews to not only fall in love with other Jews but also thereby to become reenchanted with Judaism.31 Implicit in such narratives was the hope that a new generation would not be so weighed down by the material worries that had prevented an earlier generation from contemplating higher spiritual concerns. Emblematic in this regard was the 1863 novel Buchenstein und Cohnberg, written by Reform rabbi Salomon Formstecher. This novel describes the path of two virtuous heroines who find true love, one with a rabbi and the other with a physician, in the face of opposition from family members who had envisaged money-­minded businessmen as future partners. A perhaps subtler rendering of a prototypical journey toward modern romance and modern Jewish selfhood was provided by Rahel Meyer’s 1865 novel, In Banden frei. This work traces the journey of a young woman who is alienated from her parents’ arid religion but who also rejects the alternative path of conversion chosen by an earlier generation of emancipated Jewish women, such as Berlin salonnière Rahel Varnhagen. Meyer’s heroine eventually chooses a companionate marriage with a Jewish husband (who also happens to be her uncle) but, equally important, she took

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29

time in the intervening years to build female friendships and come to her own mature understanding of her faith.32 That novelists sought to provide such model characters suggests the persistence of anxieties that young Jews would not find the resolution that Formstecher’s or Meyer’s characters did when they managed to live out their religious commitments in a new key. Victor Klemperer, a rabbi’s son who married a Protestant in 1906 and converted to her religion in 1912, reflected on the many opportunities young couples had to develop intimacies away from the disciplining gaze of family members. Speaking of himself and his future wife, he explained, “So long as we felt we were on the same path, we wanted to stay together and not a moment longer. Waiting for the approval of our family and the state we called cowardice. . . . [Besides] one found in Berlin and elsewhere thousands of possibilities to hide out together.”33 Here, Klemperer gives the impression of having an altogether emancipated consciousness that was barely constrained by the dictates of tradition or feelings of obligation to one’s elders. Yet he acknowledges that it was difficult to carve out one’s own niche if it involved breaking with one’s parents and their religious community. Talking of the pressures that families could still exert on those who went against traditions, he remarked, “It was easy to mount a challenge against a love match. But it was much more difficult and probably impossible to attack a legally conducted marriage.” For this reason, he and his wife hurried to get married in a secret civil service, with only friends as witnesses.34 From these examples, it might appear that the greatest constraint on young Jewish women and men was parents and that, left to their own devices, they would revel in their social freedom. Yet a good number of young German Jews recalled entering late adolescence entirely unprepared to interact with viable love interests. This owed much to the gender segregation that became a more pronounced feature of elite educational institutions such as the Gymnasien (academic secondary schools) and the new youth groups that proliferated at the turn of the century.35 As John Spurlock has shown with regard to parallel trends in the United States, by the 1920s child development specialists regarded the “achievement of heterosexuality” as a crisis for the young women and men who had spent much of their time in homosocial environments.36 Consequently, these individuals may have looked on poten-

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tial partners with the same feelings of confusion and apprehension that an earlier generation of adolescents had when they regarded their future spouse to whom they had been promised. “Be Mine as I Imagine You”: The Engagement Unsurprisingly, some young women and men found that it was only after becoming engaged and following prescribed courtship rituals that they could explore their feelings and desires. One such avenue was provided by the Brautbriefe, or courtship letters, which became an increasingly common means for engaged pairs to get to know one another before their wedding day.37 As Eva Wyss has discussed, the genre of Brautbriefe contains within it a broad spectrum of approaches. Many letters were not particularly free-­ flowing or exploratory but followed carefully stipulated formulas and rules. Authors typically provided an initial greeting and expression of gratitude, declared their longing for the partner, and then asked for some token of their partner’s affection before signing off. In some cases, parents also decided in advance how many letters an engaged couple could exchange.38 Other letter writers, however, emulated the correspondence of renowned Romanticist authors and self-­consciously broke the rules of decorum in an effort to demonstrate their boundless emotional depths and uncontrollable passion. Among the most famous examples of the latter sort are the renowned collection composed by Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays between 1882 and 1886. For much of this time, Freud and Bernays were separated: Freud worked in Vienna, and Bernays moved with her family to the outskirts of Hamburg. An earlier, highly selective edition of the letters gave the impression of a mostly charming and good-­natured Freud who reworked romantic clichés to profess his adoration, likening himself to a lovesick medieval knight and imagining himself as a gardener who steals a kiss when he brings flowers to his princess.39 A much fuller recent edition of the more than 1,500 letters the couple sent to each other has revealed more of Bernays’s voice in the exchange, capturing the passion she was able to communicate. For instance, on one occasion she told Freud, “When you have me on your arm, nothing occurs to me apart from the blissful feeling that flows through me, that causes me to close my eyes and makes me dumb.”40 But this new collection also exposes how conflicting ideas about gender and religion led the partners

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to clash and, in Freud’s case, to try to reconstruct his partner’s notion of self to fit his own post-­Orthodox and supposedly more enlightened model. In many ways, Freud demonstrated what might seem the typical insecurities and possessiveness of a fiancé, particularly one who got engaged in secret and thereby risked the disapproval of Orthodox in-­laws who were already liable to regard a nonreligious and financially insecure medical researcher with some wariness. In a letter from October 1882 (when both Freud and Bernays were still living in Vienna), Freud complained that Bernays’s family passive-­aggressively frustrated his attempts to be close to her. They told him on one occasion when he visited that “she couldn’t be spared from the home” and offered him excuses why she could not buy the kind of secular textbooks that he expected her to read. Freud lamented that “my Martha will, of course, allow all of this, being convinced that it can’t be otherwise.” His anger steadily crescendoing throughout the letter, he told her, “I’m ashamed that my girl is regarded as an unworthy child” and warned her that “if you don’t create the position [within the family] that you deserve, I won’t speak with you at all during all the years we have to wait.”41 Bernays responded by defending her family and telling Freud that she did not occupy the “Cinderella” role among “tyrants” that he imagined. With a good amount of equanimity, she admonished Freud that, though he wanted her to “love him without any consideration [rücksichtslos lieb haben], that isn’t possible, at least for me. For me love and consideration [for others] are one.”42 For Freud, however, the limitations placed on Bernays were symptoms of the religion that her family practiced. It was, he complained, a “household that sticks so much to its forms.”43 He found this objectionable on a number of occasions, such as when Bernays was unwell on vacation and she checked with her mother about whether she could eat ham rather than just deciding what she thought was good for her health and what “tastes good to her.” In this instance he wondered, “Why can I not tell myself that my Marthchen knows her health doesn’t belong to her but to me, and will . . . find the resolve to be free of a wild, barbaric constraint.”44 Through all of this, Freud was sure that he knew Bernays “in [her] true essence, as a person with their own insight and will.”45 But it is perhaps no accident that the editors of the first volume of these letters named the collection “Be Mine as I Imagine You,” as though to summarize the young Freud’s attempts to remold his fiancée in his image.

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Although Freud regarded himself as more of a modern than the Bernays family, when he and his bride-­to-­be discussed what he regarded as the odd marriage of John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill, he used the opportunity to argue against women entering the workforce as “competitors” to men. Rather, he imagined telling his wife that he would “do his utmost to take her away from this competition and toward carrying out quiet, blameless activities within his house.”46 Although he worried that “an altered upbringing could suppress all those delicate feminine qualities that are in need of protection,” Bernays gently countered that there were “many of my sisters who are more well suited to carrying out one or other serious career than being housewives and mothers.”47 It is easy to see evidence in these letters that, for all his impatience with the rules imposed by Orthodoxy, Freud was unwilling to let Bernays chart her own path if it diverged from his. In this regard, the couple’s exchanges illustrate the ways in which a new generation of nonreligious husbands might still seek to impose other kinds of social orthodoxies on their partners. However, regardless of such differences, it is important to acknowledge that, through the practice of writing letters, the couple engaged in a genuine exchange of views. Even though Bernays usually adopted a more emollient tone than her bridegroom-­to-­be, she nevertheless proved quite adept at listening to and, not infrequently, countering her partner’s perspective. That both parties invested as much time and energy as they did in discussing their beliefs about romance and family obligations suggests that they were seeking a degree of self-­affirmation through being heard and being taken seriously, even when (and perhaps particularly when) they disagreed. Expectations about the gendered division of labor in Jewish (and Christian) marriages became a more pressing issue as the model of the companionate marriage gained appeal during the fin de siècle. Another well-­heeled couple who wrote engagement letters in 1897 envisaged precisely this kind of partnership, as the future bridegroom’s proposal, issued in the form of a poem, made clear. In passages that imagined the couple’s future life together, the author, another psychiatrist, Hugo Liepmann, wrote of how they would “dig and lift” together, “work, walk, desire and strive” alongside each other. He wanted to “talk” and “act” with his future bride, “sow” and “reap” with her.48 Yet, when his fiancée, Agathe Bleichroeder, tried to play the role

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of supportive bride-­to-­be, writing him poems in return and praising some of his “doggerel” as “pretty poems,” Hugo objected that she was showing “the politeness of a ‘run-­of-­the-­mill bride.’ ”49 He generally expressed unease whenever he felt that they were fitting into stiffly tailored gender roles, for instance, complaining when their engagement photographer insisted on presenting the illusion that he was taller than his fiancée.50 The occasional misfiring of their communication is quite telling in terms of how each partner could romanticize their future shared life. For one thing, it was no doubt easier for a male psychiatrist to depart from preexisting scripts, given that his sense of self was reinforced by his prestigious profession, which he would continue to practice throughout his marriage. For his partner this was not the case: She was to become a housewife. And so, rather than them working, sowing, and reaping together, the couple would spend most of their days in separate spheres. To conjure up romantic images, she therefore had to rely more on well-­worn conventions. Although the couple grew closer as they shared details from their daily life, their letters nevertheless reveal how differently each party imagined both the act of marrying and their life trajectories after marriage. The future bridegroom was concerned that the marriage ceremony accurately capture who they were and how they understood this act of commitment to one another. Because they were both atheists, it nagged at Liepmann that Bleichroeder’s father insisted on them having a religious ceremony. On at least three occasions, he discussed how he had tried to persuade his future father-­ in-­law to allow them to celebrate a nonreligious service. Twice he claimed to be reconciled to going through with the “meaningless ceremony,” but then, in another letter, he spent six pages describing his further efforts to change the bride’s father’s mind before acknowledging that he might be boring his fiancée.51 Clearly the marriage ceremony was an important means for Liepmann to present himself and his values to the surrounding community, and it mattered that it demonstrated the sincerity of the couple’s love. Bleichroeder was less invested in this topic but often wrote instead with details of how her plans to furnish their new married home were progressing. On occasion Liepmann teased her for her seeming obsession with interior decorations, telling her that “since your letters became ‘free of furniture,’ they are almost

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even more exciting than before.”52 But he soon realized that, whereas he could imagine married life as a “golden future,” because she was uprooting her life, leaving Berlin and her “parents’ house, siblings, friends, the big city” to join him in Breslau, his future wife had to worry about establishing herself in a new community.53 Bleichroeder’s experience was by no means unique: Jewish brides relocated to a greater extent than their Christian counterparts and, as Andrea Hopp’s study has shown, they invested an unmatched amount of time and resources in preparing elegant homes in their new abodes.54 They may have done so as a way of verifying that Jewish families belonged squarely in the educated and not merely commercial middle classes. Or perhaps they were simply conforming to the higher standards noted among Jewish households. Either way, it is clear that Jewish wives took on the burden of ensuring that through their refined consumption patterns, the couple’s status conformed with or exceeded the class position that their husbands could attain through their labors. As these Brautbriefe suggest, though the new love marriage might promise brides-­to-­be some kind of transcendence, as they planned for their future marriages, they became aware of the many conventionally gendered responsibilities they would assume. This potentially generated a paradoxical situation, whereby women were supposed to feel a new kind of passionate love for a partner who usually offered them a quite predictable and carefully circumscribed future. The issue is thrown into sharper relief when we focus on individuals whose desires did not lead them toward the conventional end point of a heterosexual marriage. In the following section, I look at individuals who either felt same-­sex desire or a different kind of inclination to pursue educational and professional goals instead of settling down in a marriage. The Inevitable Institution of Marriage Lotte Ginsburg was a young woman from Berlin who reached adolescence on the eve of World War I.55 In many ways she was one of the freest of a new generation of German Jewish women, not least because she attended the Dorotheenschule, a prominent all-­girls’ school renowned for its academic rigor and socially liberal atmosphere.56 Her diaries reveal that her first romantic experience was with a man when she was on holiday as a “sweet sixteen.”57 As she spent many free hours socializing with female friends, without

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the scrutiny of adults, she nevertheless developed feelings of intense longing for her peers. She also implied that she had been physically intimate with a number of them. Ginsburg’s struggles with her desires and her sexuality appear to have had little connection to her faith, though. The only references she makes to her religion involve her resolving to fast on Yom Kippur “because she was religiously inclined” and to join a Zionist organization.58 Ginsburg’s experiences are interesting, then, not because they offer a simple conflict between the dictates of religion and the possibilities of modernity but because they suggest how difficult it was for young German women—­ Jewish or otherwise—­to become conscious of their desires as they struggled to find new romantic scripts to follow. Ginsburg wrote a great deal about friends from a Jewish youth group, in particular “a little hothead” with whom she shared kisses in 1915.59 But she poured out her most profound feelings for a married Christian colleague some three years later. On one occasion she reflected, “The best is always the evening for us; then Hansi is so clinging, quite affectionate. . . . Are our souls attracted or is it a purely physical affection? I do not know; however, I know that it penetrates deeper into me than everything.”60 Referring to some cherished moments of intimacy, she reminisced, “It was nice again; now already for the third time one after the other. How I love this woman; and yet, I will forget these days as with Grete, Mr. Haas and also Dr. Rosenberg. I . . . remember only the sensuous. . . . I am sad that I cannot bind the now with the before.”61 What is being described may simply be the acting out of a same-­sex physical attraction that was not validated or tolerated by the early-­twentieth-­ century society into which Ginsburg was born. Ginsburg’s attempts to conceal her feelings and experiences seem to confirm this impression. As she wrote in March 1915, “I would like to write a few things but not in here. . . . Well, let’s leave the writing alone. [What then follows is written in code, or what Ginsburg’s niece, who wrote the English translation, called “secret language.”] I am a stupid goose, but why should everybody read this?”62 But Ginsburg more generally struggled to make sense of her feelings. A month earlier she had complained, “Too bad that one can never express one’s thoughts. I believe it never works.”63 Ginsburg may have experienced such frustration and inarticulation because she could not unify her desires in the present with her hopes for the future, as the quotation about Hansi

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implies. In February 1918, some months before her relationship with Hansi blossomed, Ginsburg tried to talk herself into falling for a young man. Although she felt little passion for him, she intimated that if she could develop feelings for him, she might be able to bridge the apparent void between her present emotions and the conventional future she imagined for herself. She wrote of him, “I definitely like him; I know exactly that I do not feel love for him but it would be possible if he would show interest in me.”64 Ginsburg’s abiding difficulty was that she knew she wanted to be married by her mid-­ 20s—­she made repeated references to a future husband who would laugh at her present struggles—­but she feared how her feelings would guide her actions in the meantime. Here Ginsburg is addressing one of the predicaments faced by young German women and men during this era: how to make desire the basis of their relationships when a sometimes lengthy gap existed between the onset of sexual stirrings and entry into marriage. How were young women and men supposed to navigate this period during which they may well develop passionate feelings for individuals who were not necessarily plausible marital partners? This was perhaps particularly difficult ground for young Jewish men and women to navigate because they were expected to embark on marital relationships at different times in their lives. Jewish men tended to marry later than their Christian counterparts (at around age 30), whereas Jewish women generally wed at about the same age as other female Germans (typically when they were 25).65 As Rose Malachowski, writing as an unhappily married woman, reflected, these trends meant that men could choose a partner when they were capable of understanding their feelings of love, but “a girl marries when she is quite young and generally not yet aware of her sexual desires. . . . In her ignorance she imagines to feel love where none exists. She only realizes her mistake when true passion enters her life. By then it is too late. A woman’s full maturity is reached between the ages of 30–­40, at a time when she is long bound in marriage.”66 It may seem that Malachowski—­who was about twenty years older than Ginsburg—­was wrestling with, or diagnosing, a different problem from that experienced by the younger woman. Although Ginsburg struggled with the intensity of her adolescent desires, Malachowski suggests that women were actually only capable of understanding their sexual desires at a much later

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stage. But in both cases these women were intimating that desire could not reliably and punctually be activated and steered toward an individual who was available and who would be deemed a suitable match by wider society. As a result, these individuals struggled to construct a version of themselves that was based on acting out their most powerfully felt desires but that also conformed to the models of mature selfhood accessible to Jewish women from the era. Some young men faced a similar predicament, but many had the option of seeking out sex workers rather than postponing all sexual gratification until their (late) marriages.67 As Edward Ross Dickinson has shown, a variety of surveys taken between 1910 and 1914 revealed an extremely high proportion of (perhaps especially middle-­class) German men who first had sex with a prostitute. This was true of 93 percent of medical students and doctors for the years 1910–­1911, and a broader study from 1914 revealed that 60 percent of men admitted to having paid for their first experience of sexual intercourse.68 Although no discrete set of data exists for Jewish men, contemporaneous statistics detailing convictions for solicitation suggest that the same proportion of Jewish and Christian men were found guilty of this crime.69 How, then, could young Jewish men and especially young Jewish women who felt a conflict between their sexual desires and conventional routes toward a respectable marriage make sense of their situation? Certainly, young individuals did not simply invent a new language of love for themselves from scratch. Those who spurned the advice of traditional authority figures such as rabbis and priests could receive guidance from a new kind of sexological expert who claimed to offer scientific insights into how individuals sought out partners. The growth of sexology is an important context because it was a field in which a generation of Jewish doctors thrived—­so much so that sexology was often referred to as the “Jewish science” by skeptical contemporaries.70 The advice provided by such doctors was not necessarily empowering for women, however. One of the most influential voices in the field, Richard von Krafft-­Ebing, even suggested that the heterosexual woman fundamentally did not feel sexual desire for her male partner. He argued that it was such a lack of desire that served as a check on men’s natural inclination to be polygamous and provided the basis for the monogamous marriage.71 In case

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we think that such a perspective was unique to male experts, it should be noted that even a leading feminist such as Helene Lange could make similar claims, although Lange celebrated monogamy as a female victory over men’s promiscuous desires.72 Josef Löbel, a renowned popularizer of sexological theories, saw sexual difference as a kind of invisible hand that steered the evolutionary progress of humankind. According to Löbel, women’s reluctance to fall for male suitors was not simply a sop to society’s moral double standards. Women proved initially frigid to weed out unreliable or inferior male partners and secure the commitment of more viable companions.73 The prevalence of such new and apparently scientific theories of sexuality is particularly significant in Ginsburg’s case, because, although female same-­ sex desire was largely marginalized by sexological experts, theories of nondesiring heterosexual women were quite widespread.74 As a result, women such as Ginsburg would have received partial advice when trying to evaluate their feelings for male or female peers. As Laurie Marhofer has elegantly put it, “Queerness was more an epistemological problem than a biological one” in a society where female same-­sex desires were not displayed or discussed.75 It is perhaps no surprise that there are contemporaneous examples of young Jewish men who also struggled to put the same-­sex desire they felt into words. The aspiring Jewish writer Ernst Collin-­Schoenfeld wrote in his diary about the love affair he had with a male companion when he was in his late teens in 1900. Both parties had other female love interests, and Collin-­Schoenfeld’s lover struggled with his feelings of attraction, writing letters about “purity and sensuality” to Collin-­Schoenfeld as he tried to disentangle himself from the relationship. Part of the reason for this young man’s unease may have been the relatively recent criminalization of male homosexuality through the notorious Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code of 1871.76 Yet, even though male homosexuality was rarely mentioned in Jewish moral literature during the modern era, it was the subject of sexological research by physicians such as Magnus Hirschfeld, who led a prominent campaign to decriminalize and normalize this form of sexual attraction.77 Perhaps emboldened by the existence of sympathetic subcultures in German society, Collin-­Schoenfeld could write unabashedly erotic poems about his lover, celebrating “torrid . . . endless kisses,” the “smell of [their] naked bodies,” and urging his partner to “believe and honor the wondrous power of his love.”78 What is more, such

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poems did not remain private tokens of devotion but were published (in discreetly veiled form) as The Songs of a Boy in 1903.79 Viable romantic scripts were therefore more accessible to young men who sought to make sense of desires and attractions not preordained by the dominant religious frameworks. They may therefore have been able to develop a notion of queer selfhood that remained more inaccessible to young women. It would nevertheless be wrong to conclude that young German Jewish women were only living frustrated and confused lives in the early twentieth century. From a reading of about fifty young women’s memoirs and diaries in the Leo Baeck collection and thirty-­four Jewish women’s memoirs from the “My Life in Germany” collection at Harvard, what is much more striking is how greatly young German Jewish women enjoyed their freedom. Particularly significant in this regard is that this freedom often had less and less to do with being free to date or find a partner. Philosopher Margarete Susman remembered the sense of liberation she felt during her first days of being a student. Upon seeing the bedroom in which she would live away from parental supervision, she exclaimed, “Free! Freedom! Everything inside of me shouted that out.”80 Reports sent by a school leaver, Lotte Cohn (later Fairbrook), to her parents as she spent the later World War I years touring along the Rhine River offer a similar impression. Traveling alone through Frankfurt, Mainz, and Cologne among other places, she assured them, “You cannot imagine how great it is for me to float around in the world this way all by myself having sole responsibility for myself! I am in seventh heaven!”81 Apart from using the time to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, she took in as many plays, operas, and concerts as she could.82 Summing up, she told her parents quite simply that she was “having a whale of a time!” It is perhaps easy to understand why; when she had her first kiss with her future husband soon after taking this trip, she initially warned him not to try to build a relationship out of a fleeting encounter. Her later reflections on this episode do suggest, however, that she may have been conforming to a romantic script in this instance. By emphasizing how reluctant she was to give up her freedom, she thereby proved to herself how great the love must be that persuaded her to eventually give in to her suitor.83 In any case, for several good reasons, falling in love endangered the freedoms achieved by particularly wealthier young Jewish women. Alongside

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German Jews in Love

their male counterparts, they benefited from the increased educational opportunities on offer in early-­twentieth-­century Germany and Austria. Jewish parents also tended to have more money available for daughters’ higher education because they had limited the size of their families to two children significantly earlier than their Christian counterparts.84 For instance, in 1886, when only 6 percent of non-­Jewish schoolchildren in Prussia extended their education beyond primary level, 47 percent of Jewish schoolchildren continued into secondary schooling. By 1911 the figures for Christians had risen to only 9 percent but had continued to increase to 64 percent for Jews.85 This difference between Jews and other Germans also applied to girls.86 While single, Jewish women were five times as likely to study at a university as their Christian counterparts in Germany (or four times as likely in Austria).87 As a result, Jewish women made up nearly 13 percent of the female student body in Imperial Germany, despite making up little over 1 percent of the female population.88 Those Jewish women who found paid employment were also likely to experience an unusual degree of freedom, as about one-­third were self-­employed in the commercial and trade sectors.89 And so, although avant-­garde journals such as Die Jugend may have celebrated the early twentieth century as an era of free love, it seems clear that freedom for young German women often meant the freedom not to fall in love. Particularly for young Jewish women, this was a period of exciting intellectual awakenings to a greater extent than it was an era of sexual freedom. Such women might therefore have felt a particularly acute tension between following their romantic inclinations and pursuing academic and professional success, not least because falling in love could mean the end of their independence. Indeed, an advanced level of education might even have been considered a disqualification for marriage. Personal advertisements from the late nineteenth century that asked that female partners “not be educated to too high a level” suggest that some potential husbands foresaw a conflict between their conceptions of a wife’s role and how highly educated women might imagine married life.90 Ideologies such as socialism, which advocated countercultural models of marriage, did circulate in Jewish culture. Social Democratic movements attracted support from growing numbers of young Jews in Germany and

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Austria, not least because they were not as flagrantly antisemitic as many of the other major political groups.91 One of socialism’s leading lights in the late nineteenth century, August Bebel, made women’s rights the centerpiece of his agenda for social change, publishing the most widely read socialist book of the era, Women Under Socialism in 1879.92 Offering a critical perspective on bourgeois marriages that Friedrich Engels would amplify with his almost contemporaneous work on the family, Bebel depicted how marriages had come to serve the needs of the market and thereby turned women into commodities.93 This applied to wives who were traded on the “matrimonial market” and also to sex workers, whose services were required by men as they waited to marry late, once they had accumulated enough capital to embark on a bourgeois marriage.94 Bebel and others advocated free love as an alternative. This concept was frequently cited as a radical attack on monogamous marriage, but in most cases it primarily offered a contrast to arranged marriages, which involved dowries and usually reinforced class and religious divides. The influence of such ideas among female Jewish intellectuals was evidenced by the striking critiques of contemporary sexual relations provided by figures such as Therese Schlesinger-­Eckstein and Grete Meisel-­ Hess.95 But the socialist rejection of bourgeois sexual mores even influenced Jewish figures who otherwise remained aloof from what they regarded as a secular and materialist ideology. Noting the eugenic damage that capitalism had wrought on Jewish families, the sexologist, Zionist, and race scientist Felix Theilhaber argued that contemporary socialism could free modern Jews from the “capitalist spirit” and open their eyes to the more communitarian utopia promised long ago by the biblical prophets.96 As a result, he argued for a Zionist reappropriation of socialism. We will more fully explore the impact of socialist ideas about love on young Jews in Chapter 2. During the Imperial period, it was only a prominent minority of Jewish men and women who were won over to its values. This working-­class movement could seem particularly remote to middle-­ class Jewish women, who were disproportionately held back from working by parents who considered a daughter’s leisured premarital life an important symbol of status. Furthermore, even though Jewish women were more likely to be engaged in semiskilled or skilled clerical or shop floor work than other

FIGU R E 1. The inside cover to Volume 3 of Lotte Fairbrook’s memoir, Dear Family (Adolescence and Young Womanhood), 1976. Fairbrook collected mementos from her travels and studies rather than photos of social or romantic outings. (Joachim was a friend who died early during World War I.) Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, ME 974. Reprinted with permission.

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German women, they were often working for family members and in roles that rarely had career prospects.97 For some, marriage might then have held significant appeal as a way of moving from one family in which they had subordinate status to another where they could take more of a leading role. It might also have signaled a kind of freedom, particularly if they had exercised their discretion in choosing their partner. By contrast, women who remained unmarried had neither high status nor an easy pathway through adulthood. This theme was dramatized in the best-­selling novel Aus guter Familie, by Gabriele Reuter; the novel, which went through sixteen editions between 1895 and 1906, depicts the fate of “the old maid” in agonizing detail. Regardless, once married, most Jewish women were expected to relinquish their public and economic roles. Indeed, whereas as much as 35–­40 percent of German women remained in work after marriage, only as few as 1 in 5 Jewish women retained their jobs.98 These figures might conceal hidden (and usually unpaid) work and might indicate that most Jews were able to live out the bourgeois ideal of the single-­earner family. But they should also remind us that, for all the changes that occurred in terms of how Germans talked about love in the early twentieth century, the institution of marriage remained unchanged in a number of important ways. In fact, women who married for love may have been expected to shoulder a heavier burden, as they were exhorted to infuse the household with their love, providing primary emotional nurturing for children and comfort for busy, economically active partners. Of course, especially educated married women were able to hire household help, which allowed the first generations of female doctors, for example, to maintain a private practice while also bringing up children. Advice columns for brides in the widely read Israelitisches Familienblatt nevertheless warned of Jewish women mimicking what was deemed a practice common to Christian mothers, thus suggesting that this trend was not uncontroversial.99 As nuclear families broke away from surrounding relatives, performing this emotional labor may have been all the more taxing and lonelier for wives and mothers who were deprived of the companionship of mothers and other female relations. Although not all wives moved far away from families, up to a third of Jewish women still had to relocate after their marriage, a much higher proportion than among their non-­Jewish counterparts.100

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The Threat of Intermarriage World War I brought some of these structural tensions inherent in modern Jewish courtship and marriage into the open. Jewish men who enlisted initially embraced the role of male protector alongside other Germans, seeing in girlfriends and wives the personification of a nation that must be defended.101 For instance, male members of the Zionist youth group Blau-­ Weiss detailed their valiant actions in reports that were published by their female colleagues in the organization’s newsletters.102 Yet, as draftees were sent to the front and women performed tasks conventionally designated as male jobs, women and men experienced new forms of gender segregation and gender role inversions. Responding to these unsettling social changes, some of the same Blau-­Weiss members issued instructions from the front about the role that Jewish women should play in supporting their menfolk and carrying out their duties as wives and mothers.103 Franz Sachs, a leading chemist and one of the older soldiers serving in the German army, having turned 40 in 1915, sent a similarly didactic article titled “German Jewish Women” to Martin Buber’s renowned journal, Der Jude, in January 1917. His major concern was to explain which of modern Jewish women’s characteristics had made many young Jewish men seek out Christian partners. In so doing, he rehearsed numerous stereotypes about Jewish women, suggesting that he had internalized and displaced onto Jewish women the antisemitism that was being more openly expressed after Jews had been forced to submit to a special audit of Jewish military service (the Judenzählung) in 1916.104 According to Sachs, urban Jewish women were all too often “overly made up, vain coquettes” whose lifestyles were extreme manifestations of capitalist culture. More typical Jewish women, the “daughters of the smaller towns,” were, by contrast, “unharmonious,” too spiritually cramped and unsure of themselves to “affirm life” in the same way as many other German women.105 What is perhaps more interesting than Sachs’s not especially novel perspective is the self-­assured response it provoked from female readers, three of whom had their replies published in a later issue of the journal. Sachs had contrasted Jewish men’s industry and enterprise with Jewish women’s inactivity and uncertainty. One respondent, Hildegard Krohn, conceded that Jewish men had been busy in commercial life but suggested that this may be why they made such unsatisfactory partners for a new generation of ed-

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ucated and intelligent Jewish women.106 Too busy to have acquired culture or learned social graces, these men could offer little to entice Jewish women to choose them as partners. Another respondent, Johanna Simon-­Friedberg, explained that any spiritual renewal among Jewish women would have to take place while they were using their hard-­won practical skills as educators, nurses, musicians, and so on.107 In a language that broke with the usual deference shown to the sacrifices of male soldiers, Simon-­Friedberg went on to lament the “boundless egoism of young Jewish men . . . who spoke so much of taking and not of giving.”108 In many ways Sachs’s appraisal of Jewish women echoed the all too typical assessments of soldiers at the fighting front who underestimated the deprivations of those operating on the home front. But it also betrayed an ignorance of how active especially middle-­class Jewish women had been in German civil society in the years preceding and during World War I. Various surveys carried out between 1909 and 1913 reveal that tens of thousands of Jewish women were members of Jewish and nondenominational organizations that provided food, education, and employment services for a variety of Jews and other Germans. And, as Marion Kaplan has argued, Jewish members of welfare associations may have had more opportunities to socialize with non-­Jewish colleagues than their male counterparts, who often worked quite autonomously as independent traders.109 At the least, Jewish women’s social activism showed one more way that they could carve out their own version of acculturation rather than gaining access to German society only through their husbands’ career networks. Sachs was, in part, addressing the notable shift in terms of which kinds of intermarriage were most common. Spotlighted in Theodor Fontane’s Poggenpuhls and a wide range of belletristic literature, the most stereotyped intermarriage in the late nineteenth century had been between a wealthy (and often exotically beautiful but also sometimes ugly) Jewish heiress and an impoverished Christian nobleman.110 This marriage provided debt relief for the husband and an entrée into German high society for a socially ambitious wife (or rather for her socially ambitious family), so said its detractors. But by the end of World War I, the more common ideal type was of a Jewish husband who ended up marrying a Christian woman with whom he had invariably already enjoyed intimate premarital relations.111 This male figure was

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roundly condemned, not least because, if Jewish men’s professional activities drew them away from their religious obligations, their marriage to a Jewish bride promised to refortify what might be called their ethnic identity.112 Indeed, such a happy return to one’s Jewish roots was possible because wives were supposed to not only maintain a busy schedule of visits to relatives but also, at least in middle-­class circles, join the Jewish women’s associations that proliferated at the end of the century. Yet, even in the face of such moral pressure, Jewish men continued to enter into mixed marriages in greater numbers than their female peers. Perhaps because fewer Jewish women worked in market-­related jobs and for a shorter period of their life, they did not have as many chances to find partners in mixed-­gender multicultural settings. For those who did work, their chances of marrying a non-­Jewish partner were indeed high. Kerstin Meiring found that three-­quarters of Jewish women who had entered into mixed marriages between 1875 and 1933 had been working before their marriage, and Till van Rahden, who focused on Breslau during the period 1874–­1910, calculated that 40 percent of Jewish women with Christian husbands had been employed while single.113 Statistics from the Imperial and Weimar eras nevertheless indicate that intermarriages lost appeal for Jewish women. They may also have become less attractive to non-­Jewish men who could choose from an even greater “oversupply” of women after 1918 and who were less likely to secure a dowry, especially after runaway inflation decimated middle-­class family savings.114 Steven Lowenstein has found that, although intermarriage rates quadrupled from the very low number of 4.6 percent between 1876 and 1880 to 16.28 percent between 1911 and 1915, they increased steadily rather than dramatically during the 1920s, reaching 21.52 percent between 1926 and 1930.115 However, Jewish women made up a smaller proportion of those Jews entering into intermarriages during the Weimar era (34–­38 percent) than in the years leading up to World War I, when they had taken part in 40–­45 percent of intermarriages.116 Lowenstein also reminds us that even when intermarriages reached their peak, about 2 of every 3 married Jews had chosen to marry a coreligionist, although intermarriage rates were much higher in highly integrated cities such as Hamburg. His data therefore suggest that for the Imperial period and the following decade, a good match from within one’s own

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religious community remained the most desirable option, at least for those better off women who did not need to earn their own income. One of the most significant reasons that intermarriages attracted so much controversy was the proportion of children from such unions who were baptized. Based on figures taken from five-­year intervals between 1890 and 1910, as little as 14.9–­18.1 percent of children from marriages between Protestant men and Jewish women were brought up as Jews. Statistics would suggest that not only was it easier for Jewish men to maintain their religious affiliation in intermarriages, but it was also easier for them to determine their children’s religion, even if the majority still chose to bring up their children in a Christian tradition. (The corresponding figure for children of Protestant wives and Jewish husbands who were raised Jewish is 23.3–­28.8 percent.)117 Although we cannot offer definitive explanations of these trends, it seems likely that patriarchal traditions in the various denominations ensured that men’s authority regarding their children’s religious affiliation remained decisive. This was despite the fact that mothers were usually more responsible for the day-­to-­day practice of religious life in families. These statistics offer us another glimpse into how acculturation was therefore a gendered experience: Despite increased opportunities in civil society, in important ways the opportunities for married women to inhabit multiple Jewish and non-­Jewish worlds remained scarcer than for married men. And so, even though Rahden is right to cast doubt on whether intermarriage was the final step in a one-­way assimilation process, the situational ethnicity he observed predominantly among Jewish men was less easy for female counterparts to attain and retain.118 Given the unprecedented degree of choice that Jewish marriage seekers had between 1875 and 1918 and the perceived threat that such a choice presented to Jewish traditions, the wedding ceremony offered religious leaders the chance to reassert conventional teachings and to present model marriages to those in surrounding communities. As we will see in the next section, wedding rituals did change across the era, although they did not simply signal the fading away of religious considerations. Rather, they illustrate that, as couples became more autonomous from their surrounding religious communities, they needed to assume greater responsibility for maintaining and passing on Jewish traditions.

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“Written in the Eternal Book of Destiny”: The Wedding In a popular collection of sermons first published in 1870, the rabbi and Talmudic scholar Elias Karpeles described Jewish marriages as a study in contrasts. He was quite up-­front about the possible challenges a couple might face in the outside world, which was “full of deception and faithlessness . . . of frustrated plans and expectations.”119 But this predicament threw into sharper relief the Edenic environment that the domestic life of the married couple would resemble. Drawing on a variety of biblical allusions, Karpeles likened married life to living on the ark in the time of the Flood or to being in the sacred tabernacle transported by Moses and the Israelites on their journey to the Promised Land.120 Karpeles’s use of spatial metaphors—­ describing marital spaces as sacred ground or as a kind of entrance into Israel—­is particularly striking. But so is the temporal framework that he and other rabbis used in their sermons. Married life was the telos of adulthood toward which all young men and women should aim; Karpeles even pictured God’s finger placing a marriage in the “eternal book of destiny.”121 Perhaps the idea that what took place on the wedding day conformed to a divine plan was reassuring, given that more couples were basing their marriages on love, an emotion whose unpredictability was proved by the increasing numbers of Jews who married outside their religion. Wedding booklets penned by couples’ families and friends reinforced this idea, establishing parallels between a couple’s journey together and the journeys of prototypical biblical characters.122 Karpeles’s comments to one bride nevertheless recognized that brides might actually need to navigate many rapid changes in their lives as they managed the transition from living with their parents to building their own families. He reassured the bride that, although she might be particularly fearful about leaving her parents, siblings, friends, and “all the things she loved” from her “dearest Heimat,” she had been “sent out by the Lord to sustain her husband.” The words of comfort and encouragement he offered to the bridegroom were briefer, perhaps because the rabbi expected that the young man was already more independent of his parents. The man should “honor and provide for, love and pay attention to, struggle and fight for” his wife, and “protect [her] from worries, sorrows and affronts.”123 Most of the man’s duties involved continuing to be active in the outside

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world, but the woman’s primary responsibility was to respond to the challenges created by her husband’s professional life. The reorientation of her life was more profound. This fundamental gender difference was also laid out in another popular collection of sermons published by Nehemiah Brüll, a rabbi in Frankfurt am Main. In one wedding address he urged the bride to imagine herself not only becoming a biological mother but henceforth a maternal figure to the wider local community. She would tend to children who had lost parents and through “motherly compassion” make her “husband’s home . . . a sanctuary of happiness and an abode of intimate warmth.”124 We cannot be sure how couples absorbed the messages they received from those who officiated at their weddings. The most memorable moment during the marriage of Hugo Liepmann and Agathe Bleichroeder was when Bleichroeder succumbed to a sustained fit of giggling while the rabbi was making his address. She offended him so gravely that he left the reception party at the first possible opportunity.125 Humorous wedding newspapers from the late nineteenth century nevertheless tended to corroborate the perspective offered in wedding sermons, although they imagined (and prescribed) a somewhat more equal division of emotional labor between husband and wife. A “Song of Complaint” composed by a bride and groom’s friends at an 1887 wedding in Hamburg lamented that the pair would no longer be available because they would be so committed to each other. Not only would the bride no longer be fulfilling her teaching duties, but the husband was going to be equally missed at his religious association’s evening gatherings.126 In a World War I era ceremony, parents echoed this perspective in a duet that explained how much the bride’s father and groom’s mother would miss their respective children, chiefly because both possessed such fine domestic virtues. Although guests might have expected to learn that the bride helped clean her father’s medical practice, the groom was so surprisingly well domesticated, cooking his mother stewed lentils and ironing his own trousers, that she described him as “being as kind as a daughter.”127 Tellingly, this gendered metaphor suggests a certain uncertainty on the mother’s part about whether a husband should really possess such domestic skills or whether in so doing he signaled his feminization. The sense that a married couple formed something like a domestic cocoon was further entrenched by the modern custom of the honeymoon.

FIGU R E 2. A page from the wedding booklet of Gustav Lipstadt and Helene Munk. It is full of gentle humor. There are advertisements for “slippers” for the young couple. A rabbi asks the remaining single men in the party to bear his unmarried daughters in mind. And the pictures of the crockery are part of an appeal by the bride’s mother for someone to come and take tea with her, now that her daughter would not be so available to visit in the afternoons. Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, AR 1499. Reprinted with permission.

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It should be noted that the honeymoon was something of an innovation in Jewish communities; the Orthodox Israelit newspaper complained in 1876 that it was an “un-­Jewish custom” that had nevertheless taken off among Jews. Couples should, its author argued, have remained with their families for the “seven days of rejoicing”: a week of celebrations and daily prayers.128 Indeed, the honeymoon was a recent invention, pioneered by wealthy British couples in the early 1800s before spreading across the continent (and among the social classes) by the end of the century. In the mid-­to late nineteenth century, it actually remained common for couples to spend some of their honeymoon traveling with parents or between relatives from either side of the new hybrid family.129 But by the early twentieth century, honeymoons tended to be more private affairs, valued as a period when couples were left to focus on each other while family members often “secretly” arranged their new home. Perhaps for this reason, this new kind of private honeymoon brought with it its own pressures. Our contemporary understanding of the honeymoon period identifies it as the most carefree phase of married life when novelty, passion, and the afterglow of wedding celebrations give couples (perhaps overly) idealistic expectations of their lives together. By contrast, a study of Victorian honeymoons has shown that this period could be one of profound and difficult “reorientation” for couples.130 Sons and daughters who were previously not recognized as fully adult were supposed to return to their communities from honeymoons as independent and mature beings. They would, most likely, have gone through the novel experience of spending time alone with their partner in unfamiliar locales. They would have had to get used to a new kind of physical intimacy. And they would have known that they were not returning to the familiar life they left behind. What is more, German Jewish husbands and wives could experience the honeymoon quite differently from one another. Male memoirists rarely devoted more than a line or two to the honeymoon and usually stuck to the facts in their accounts. Rather than men being less romantic or following gendered conventions when it came to writing about personal experiences, it may be that the honeymoon really was a quite different kind of holiday for women and men. This theme emerged in a short story that was published in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1891 and reissued in a collection

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of stories on “Jewish cultural and family life.” In the narrative the husband delights in how his new bride looks with wonder upon the sights he shows her during a honeymoon spent in Munich and Vienna. However, he notices that she could sometimes be moody. The reason, it eventually turns out, is that she had been hungry, having not wanted to eat anything that was not kosher. That this young woman would continue to live the way she had with her family in Poland did not occur to her husband, who had gotten used to different mores in Berlin. Finding the whole episode amusing, he simply and selfishly expected her to adapt to her new circumstances as the wife of an acculturated Berliner.131 This fictionalized account of a wife being expected to abandon practices that were central to her religious identity had its real-­life correlates. Perhaps the best known example is of Freud forbidding his wife to light the Sabbath candles in their home, a practice that she nevertheless resumed after his death.132 Particularly in the nineteenth century, middle-­class wives often did describe the novelty of seeing famous cities and renowned beauty spots as thrilling. Being transported down the Rhine or into the Alps and being addressed as “Madame” in a city’s best hotels exposed these young women to a new world.133 Rural couples of more modest means were more likely to travel for short trips to local big cities, although accounts suggest that brides from this background might also regard this kind of holiday as a rare treat.134 For especially wealthier middle-­class husbands, who were more likely to have traveled on business, these experiences left less of a lasting impression. The novel experiences could provoke anxiety as well as delight in new wives, even if they usually only expressed their fears obliquely. For instance, Marta Appel enjoyed the beauty of the Bavarian Alps and lakes while on her honeymoon in 1918. But even as she and her husband were beginning their married life amid unspoiled nature, she hardly forgot that they were now a couple with a public profile. As the wife of a rabbi, she may have been particularly sensitive to how outward-­facing her role would be. In any case, she imagined the gaze of others on her even before the honeymoon was over. The couple spent the last few nights of the trip going to the opera in Munich, where she noticed with embarrassment that her husband stood out as a darkly dressed civilian figure among all the other men wearing their military colors. As a result, she insisted that he don his “war

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medals” the “next evening.” She felt “much more at ease” once they were “glittering in their rightful place.”135 One reason that the honeymoon could provoke anxiety in some Jewish wives was because of its internal contradictions. The most cherished images of honeymoons may have been those that set couples against a backdrop of mountains or beaches. But the idealized middle-­class honeymoon was also a luxury leisure experience that usually required couples to spend unusually large amounts on hotel bills, guided tours, and evening entertainment. The couple was on display, sometimes before relatives or other honeymooning couples. Another contradiction was that the “romantic utopia” presented by the honeymoon was based on shared consumption, whereas most future marriages would require shared labor. As we already know, the usually unpaid labor of Jewish wives was a vital counterpart to the commercial or professional activity of many husbands.136 Some wives certainly noticed the jarring difference between the honeymoon and the new life that awaited them. Bertha Bach, who had enjoyed a fairytale honeymoon traveling through Switzerland in 1901, nevertheless dreaded the domestic chores that awaited her upon arrival in her new home. Her “mother-­in-­law . . . wanted [her] to keel over with joy and admiration” at the sight of the “seven-­room apartment” that her husband had rented and furnished, but she “saw only the enormous corridor with 15 not yet unpacked cases waiting for me to unpack them.” In fact, although she set to work within an hour of her return, she could not get the kitchen ready quickly enough, and so the couple started out their married life eating with her parents-­in-­law. This she found “quite uncomfortable.”137 Bach, as the daughter of wealthy winemakers, was actually quite privileged. Many couples, particularly in the period of housing shortages after World War I, either had to postpone honeymoons while they waited for new accommodation or had to take their honeymoon anyway, knowing that they would not be returning to their own home.138 The honeymoon, then, was designed to ease the transition from arranged marriages to love marriages by giving these new relationships a flying start. Whereas families helped manage the transition in earlier periods, couples were left on their own to a greater extent and may have needed a more carefully prescribed romantic script to follow, at least in the early stages of the marriage. Once they returned home, though, the main expectation was

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clear: A wife was to care for the household, a husband was to make a living, and together they were to begin the task of rearing children. Life After the Wedding When it came to parenting, the script for mothers was particularly sharply outlined. It largely avoided being rewritten across the fin de siècle, not least because conventional religious teachings were blended with new kinds of biological research to naturalize the gender roles performed by mothers and fathers.139 Although less was written about the benefits of fatherhood, a mother’s love was identified in Jewish advice literature as the primary, most natural, and most unchanging emotion from which all other forms—­ including the love between husband and wife—­derived.140 A lead article in Der Israelit from 1884 adopted an almost post-­Darwinian view, expressing wonder for a “mother love among most animals,” which was full of “tenderness and self-­sacrifice.” The author merely argued that this form of love was even “greater” among “people who were endowed with reason,” concluding that it “achieved its highest degree of perfection among those of Jewish stock.”141 By contrast, the German Jewish philosopher Constantin Brunner, who had discounted romantic love as a fiction that could not be upheld in the face of evolutionary science, saw mother love as the form of affection that made the most biological sense. Whereas there was self-­deception in monogamous sexual love, he claimed, this was not the case with mother love; here an individual’s love of species and love of self were mutually reinforcing.142 These were male voices. But most women who wrote on the topic offered similarly glowing depictions of a woman’s journey to motherhood. Even iconic feminists such as Bertha Pappenheim, who never married and sought to win for those women who were not wives or mothers new roles as social reformers, guardians of Jewish rituals, and practitioners of charity, usually explained that they were offering women a new model of “social motherhood.”143 During World War I, female Jewish authors adapted this model to argue, in the face of antisemitic slurs about Jewish disloyalty, that Jewish women were not just excellent biological mothers but mothers to the nation at a time of acute need.144 In reality, motherhood and fatherhood were fluid social constructs and not simply biological imperatives. As Marion Kaplan has shown, a spectrum

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of approaches to parenting is discernible in Imperial Germany; in some cases, mothers were relatively absent figures in the lives of their children, whereas some fathers proved quite devoted. But the unmistakable trend is that mothers, including those wealthy enough to employ governesses and wet nurses, tended to direct the dramas that were their children’s daily lives.145 Indeed, child-­rearing diaries from the 1880s and 1890s resemble a contemporary parent’s video album: These mothers collected a welter of information about their children’s first words, their eating habits, the first poems they learned, their early attempts at conjugating French verbs, and so on.146 As a result, wives developed different daily rhythms from their husbands; they were much more tied to their children’s schedules, and their plans often had to change because of their children’s frequent outbreaks of sickness. One consequence of this difference in husbands’ and wives’ lifestyles is that particularly educated wives sometimes had to narrow the gap that opened up between their “space of experience” and their “horizon of expectation” (to use terms introduced by Reinhart Koselleck).147 This was true even in the case of particularly adept multitaskers such as Rahel Straus, family doctor, Orthodox mother of four, and leading light of the Zionist and Jewish women’s movements in Munich. Straus reflected on the differences between husbands, who could dedicate almost all their attention to their careers, and professional wives, who had to have the talent to keep their careers and their home lives mentally separate. Even managing all of this, such wives would have to settle for cameo roles in the ongoing drama of Jewish acculturation in Germany. Straus once joked to her husband, “If I hadn’t married you, I would have been a famous woman.”148 Although said in jest, Straus’s comment reveals that she not only imagined herself capable of achieving professional renown but also desired the wider social recognition that male colleagues had sought and achieved. Because of their profound sense of responsibility for their children’s thriving, mothers could provide some fairly pitiless reflections on whether their sons and daughters were hitting their developmental markers or showing signs of desirable adult character traits. To take just one example, Agathe Bleichroeder provided her sister with regular updates about her children’s trajectories between 1899 and 1913. In one letter from 1905 she confided that her barely 3-­year-­old son “Hans is in good condition but . . . is exactly as I

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would like him not to be; a weak, cowardly, intelligent and soft little Jewish boy.”149 She expressed equal levels of concern about her daughters. Whereas the middle daughter, Lotte, was “untalented indeed” when it came to learning languages, she did “all right in arithmetic and is otherwise a darling.”150 The eldest, 9-­year-­old Kaethe, “was almost always the best in her class,” which sounded like praise but led her mother to worry that this would make her into “an arrogant Jewish brat.”151 To understand why Bleichroeder may have internalized antisemitic stereotypes when assessing her children, it may be helpful to reflect on her husband’s situation at the time. Although not religiously observant, psychiatrist Hugo Liepmann was discriminated against as a Jew, being passed over for academic positions, and his colleagues openly discussed whether he should convert or accept defeat and go into private practice.152 Through all of this, Liepmann remained committed to an academic career, apparently believing it to be a higher calling than the commercial activities engaged in by numerous other wealthy Jews in his neighborhood. In this regard, he may have internalized critiques of Jews who were successful in the commercial sectors. Indeed, he and his wife “avoided quite ostensibly the rich, Jewish society. Hugo was more interested in his work and did not approve of their materialistic, superficial standards.”153 As a result, Bleichroeder no doubt worried about how German society would continue to regard her children primarily as Jews—­a fate from which she, occupying a largely domestic role, could not protect them. Fathers generally belonged more to the outside world. This could mean that they brought its harsher rules back into the family home.154 But even when fathers figured as benevolent characters in daily accounts, they were often doted on by their children, because their appearances were brief enough that they were treated like guests of honor in the family home. Typical were accounts of children agreeing to go to bed so long as their father would be there when they woke up.155 Or on those occasions when fathers were confined to the house, such as during a period of illness, children were often delighted to keep their bed-­bound “papas” company, lavishing them with attention and affection until they got better.156 In these ways, middle-­class Jewish marriages were not just strikingly conventional in terms of the gendered division of labor between partners;

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they also provided models of gender relations for the next generation. But, in increasing numbers, the model and the marriages broke down and ended in divorce.157 Tellingly, most of the requests to end a marriage were made by wives who, at least according to biblical law, were not allowed to initiate divorces. An article on divorces in Berlin published in 1908 by leading Jewish demographer Bruno Blau found that six out of ten divorce requests came from women.158 In this regard, Jewish women were quite typical compared with other German and European women.159 Concern among Jewish elites regarding rising divorce rates were by no means unique: So worrying was the increase in divorce to German lawmakers that the German Civil Code of 1900 was more restrictive in this regard than either southern German versions of the Code Napoléon or the General States Laws for the Prussian States had been.160 Whereas the earlier legal codes had made provisions for some kind of mutual or blame-­free divorce, the Civil Code of 1900 envisaged divorce only as a remedy for one party breaking their marital vows or failing to fulfill their marital duties. Yet, although the absolute number of divorced individuals in Germany doubled from 70,000 in 1871 to 138,000 in 1910, this reflected more than anything the growth in the German population, which at nearly 65 million in 1910 was about 150 percent of what it had been at the founding of the empire.161 Thus divorce did not increase nearly as much as the population itself. Still the perception that marriage was endangered by new urban lifestyles persisted among Jewish opinion formers, not least because Jewish communities were disproportionately urban and cities were where marriages broke up in the greatest numbers.162 In reports from court cases and in the self-­reporting of dissatisfied Jewish wives, two reasons for their discontent stand out: husbands who struggled to play the role of breadwinner and the infidelity of husbands, which in both intra-­Jewish and mixed marriages attracted widespread attention at the end of the Imperial era.163 Sometimes the two issues overlapped, as when husbands regarded an affair as an escape from the frustrations of unsuccessful marriages, or when wives were attracted to other men who seemed more dependable. Rose Malachowski, whose whirlwind engagement in 1892 was discussed earlier, actually did not get divorced but wished she could have found a different partner. Her problem was not uncommon: Having brought a dowry with her, she found that her husband was draining their resources. He

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accumulated debts early in their marriage and again over a decade later. She fell madly in love with another man after ten years of marriage and remained with her husband only because she feared society’s negative judgment and did not feel sufficiently financially secure to strike out on her own.164 Malachowski was dealing with an all too common problem for German women at the end of the nineteenth century: Although they typically brought more money into their marriages than their husbands, they usually lost control over most of their funds once married.165 The other problem that unhappy wives such as Malachowski raised was the kind of social role a divorced woman could play and whether she could develop any sense of self that was validated by those around her. A similar set of questions confronted those wives whose partners died early during a period when marriages became longer-­term commitments and remarriages became less common. During peace time, life expectancy rose from under 40 for men and women in 1875 to over 60 by 1933, which meant that most partners could expect to have long-­lasting marriages and see their children reach adulthood.166 Smaller-­scale demographic studies suggested that the life expectancy figures looked even better in Jewish communities.167 Once they lost their role as husband or wife, remaining partners therefore needed not only to grieve for their loved one but also mourn the loss of their old identity and achieve a new form of selfhood. Gender differences were apparent in death as in life: Men often had a public self that was commemorated after death or that endowed widowers with some sense of personal continuity after they lost their companion. Commemorations, especially when carried out by local Jewish associations, often celebrated a man’s professional renown and civic activism not only as personal achievements but also as further strides forward for a Jewish community still seeking greater recognition in German society. For women, who had more often been encouraged to dedicate their whole selves to their marriages and families, fewer traces were left of the lives they had lived while married.168 In the earlier nineteenth century, it was not uncommon for wives and especially husbands to remarry. The customs of yibbum and halizah, whereby the unmarried brother-­in-­law of a childless widow either inherited his brother’s bride or freed her to remarry someone else, foresaw this eventuality.169 Although detailed demographic data for remarriages among German Jewish

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widows and widowers is lacking, studies of Eastern European Jewish marriages and of German marriages as a whole suggest that previously higher rates of remarriage among surviving Jewish partners decreased to the point that they fell in line with the overall decline in remarriages.170 These trends suggest another way in which the love marriage triumphed, at least as an ideal. Wives were increasingly expected to have, and marry, only one true love, which also meant that widowhood was supposed to be a life sentence, no matter how lengthy.171 Indicating how unrealistic this ideal might prove to be in an age of increasing life expectancy, taboo-­breaking intimations of the sexual viability of especially younger widows surfaced in psychoanalytical accounts. In a revised version of his Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud recalled a high-­ranking officer’s 50-­year-­old widow who, in 1915, had struggled to repress a dream about offering herself and other women to the soldiers as a “Liebesdienst.”172 In updates to his Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud also included among his examples of “slips of the tongue” instances of men who, while trying to comfort widows, let out an intimation of their sexual thoughts about them. In one instance, a male interlocutor who could not help noticing a young widow’s figure, tripped up when telling her about a store’s window display, which, he said, had been “decollated” instead of “decorated.”173 In the belletristic literature of the period, widows with sexual appetites and independent wills also featured as problematic figures in a striking number of instances. German Jewish feminist Hedwig Dohm’s short story of 1894, “Werde, die du bist!” depicts a widow who, while going through menopause, ends up being treated in a psychiatric hospital after she falls in love with a young doctor whom she met while traveling.174 Austrian Jewish author Arthur Schnitzler explored the theme of widows’ sexuality in similarly provocative ways in two works, Frau Berta Garlan (1901) and Frau Beate und ihr Sohn (1913). In both texts an uncomfortable tension emerges between these widows’ roles as mothers and as lovers. Frau Beate’s overweening love for her son leads her to seek out a young lover as substitute, and Frau Berta neglects her son once she becomes infatuated with an old flame, at which point she fantasizes about her death or at least her symbolic death as a chaste widow and mother.175 The message from such works seems to be that just as there was an emerging “woman surplus” in Germany, the feelings of

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women who survived their husbands were also surplus emotions that could find no suitable outlet.176 It is difficult to chart how the longer life expectancy of marriages changed how widows grieved once their partners died. Few widows’ memoirs dwell on their experiences of bereavement, although children’s accounts can, to some extent, fill this gap. In most cases, widows were not only grieving for their husbands but also for what had become of their former life as a married woman and head of a conventional household. There was no doubt a symbolic aspect to this: Widows occupied a more marginal social role than wives in wider family and community networks, and they lost legal rights and protections.177 But practical concerns were arguably more pressing. Widows might have to give up their properties and their children because of the income they lost with the passing of their partners. Older widows could sometimes rely on their children or other relatives to offer them a room, although this entailed them giving up some of their former independence.178 As young men and women spent longer in education and professional training, they also became less willing and able to provide for a surviving parent and younger siblings. Such was the case with a cantor’s widow from Nördlingen who lost her husband’s endowed house when he died in his mid-­50s in 1911. Her eldest son was reluctant to shoulder the family’s financial burden while training to be a lawyer and was saved only when his fiancée’s relatives offered him rent-­free accommodation.179 Particularly for widows with more means, inhabiting the role of widow was not just a way of demonstrating the depth of their love for their husbands. It also allowed them to maintain some distance between their nuclear family and newly assertive relatives. This was true for Rahel Straus’s mother, who was eager that her children grow up with the values of their rabbinic father rather than be influenced by relatives who were less religiously inclined. This mother was also eager not to become a dependent “poor relative” and so made the quite bold decision to live without a maid, instead taking on various service roles herself and renting out part of the family property.180 Egodocuments would suggest that widowers rarely dwelled on their grief at the loss of a partner, and, if they remarried, they seldom suffered any recriminations for seeking out a new, intimate relationship. Of course, interpreting silences in written sources is always difficult, especially in

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male-­authored documents composed at a time when grief was increasingly identified as a female emotion.181 But one constant in such accounts is that widowers, because of their public and professional roles, could experience some continuity in their lives amid whatever disruption and grief the death of their partners occasioned. Reflecting this situation, widowers’ memoirs tend to consign details from their wives’ lives and their marriages to the back pages, foregrounding instead their experiences and achievements in the public sphere.182 A constant in children’s accounts of their fathers remarrying was that the practical challenges faced by single fathers with children were so pressing that a new wife had to be found. In other cases female in-­laws were expected to perform the domestic labor previously carried out by a deceased wife. One husband who was left with four children when his wife died around 1890 ended up marrying his only unmarried sister-­in-­law as soon as the year of grieving was over. She had initially come to care for her sister and then took upon herself the task of looking after the children.183 A contemporaneous account of a marriage between a wealthy Bavarian widower with children and a younger bride mentioned the bride’s family’s understanding that a widower might not cope with looking after children and would, in any case, feel an “increasing desire for a woman.”184 Widowerhood was therefore not supposed to be a terminal condition for men who had lost their wives, nor was the grief they felt expected to engulf them in the way prescribed for widows. This no doubt reflects the reality that most husbands migrated between the private and public spheres, occupying multiple social roles and displaying a variety of emotional styles in the process. Their sense of self did not need to be reconfigured quite so completely as that of a wife whose daily life centered on the household and whose public profile was usually fixed by the occupation and social standing of her husband. In 1914 the young Freudian Theodor Reik published an anonymized piece of self-­analysis in a leading psychoanalytic journal. It dealt with the death of his father and his ensuing feelings of guilt. Reik initially felt responsible because he had been sent to pick up medication while his father was struggling between life and death. Reik reproached himself because he had returned too

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late; had he walked too slowly, he wondered, and was this because, en route, he had briefly imagined (with some satisfaction) how he would become the male head of the household once his father died? Reik’s feelings of guilt continued to haunt him as he embarked on his first sexual relationship soon after his father’s passing. He worried that he would contract a sexually transmitted infection as a sign of his father’s disapproval, and he even imagined that his girlfriend would die of a sickness should he not visit his sister and light a candle of remembrance on the anniversary of his father’s death.185 Reik’s unease surfaced whenever he reflected on his role as his father’s successor. It indicates how young Jewish men also worried about how to honor familial and religious obligations as they sought out partners and contemplated charting their own life courses. Both Jewish men and Jewish women may have felt similar tensions as they moved across multiple Jewish and non-­Jewish settings and confronted a plurality of models and teachings about love. But, once married, it was Jewish women who found that their opportunities to continue carving out individual pathways narrowed more sharply than their partners. At every stage of their relationship, the kinds of emotional labor performed by most male and female partners were also different.186 Even the experience of falling in love played out along gender lines. Although it rarely knocked men off their career course, it usually required women to end one phase of their life and emotionally commit to a new stage. The emotional demands made on men and women after marriage also remained different in quality and might even have diverged across the period. Whereas wives and mothers were increasingly involved in more solitary emotional labor, creating loving nuclear families without as much day-­to-­day assistance from the extended family, “breadwinner” husbands and fathers were more often protected from emotionally taxing drains on their time and energy. This might have signaled that married Jewish men’s lives had started to more closely resemble those of other German husbands. But it also suggests that middle-­ class Jewish husbands were under a special kind of pressure to secure a firmer acculturation for their families through their professional achievements. One upshot, as we have seen, is that some married women were more likely to be discontented than their spouses. This was partly because men could not provide the expected stability and partly because the romantic

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future promised by the love marriage ended up looking rather predictable and mundane, particularly when an alternative destiny was more accessible to well-­educated single women. As we will see in the next chapter, once World War I had decisively disrupted gender relations and upended German society, an unprecedented opportunity dawned for young Jewish women and men to rethink marriage. It is to their experiences that we now turn.

TWO

A Society of Two? Partnerships in the Interwar Democracies

It may be a little grand to liken the experience of falling in love to Walter Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history. But when Benjamin characterized revolution as a blasting out of the now from the “continuum of history,” he could also have been describing how some young Jews understood the experience of falling in love and how it fitted into their imagined life trajectories.1 After 1918 the relationship between political revolution and changing lifestyles became a more pressing issue for many, especially urban young women and men. Once the promises of August 1914 had gone up in smoke and the Germanic empires had collapsed, it was far from clear what kind of future a new generation of Jews could imagine for themselves, either as individuals or as members of a German nation. Some did not want to just blast their personal “nows” out of any preordained life trajectory. For them, the revolutionary postwar epoch when, among other things, women and men gained equal political rights, offered an unprecedented opportunity to collectively reevaluate everything they had inherited, including religious and political loyalties and norms concerning family and gender. 64

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Yet the interwar period was more an era of contrasts than of revolutionary change in any one direction. As has been frequently noted, it appeared to contemporaries such as Ernst Bloch as a moment when different historical epochs coexisted or collided.2 Interwar Jewish communities were also a study in contrasts. They were more urban and secular than ever yet simultaneously reshaped by migrations of Orthodox communities from Eastern Europe and bound together in an unprecedented array of Jewish educational, health, and welfare organizations, youth groups, and so on. Many German Jews therefore went through a process of what Sharon Gillerman has described as “dialectical assimilation,” coming to understand themselves as a distinct “social body” that nevertheless drew sustenance from the surrounding German culture.3 Ideas about love and marriage circulating among young Jews reflected these contrasts. Some of the growing number drawn to socialism believed that the values of a more egalitarian and open society could be practiced in private relationships in anticipation of and as an accelerant driving forward wider social and political transformation. But to a broader cross-­section, the new republics did not promise a political revolution so much as offer an enlarged private sphere that was freer from political or religious interference.4 This was at least partly because, instead of an established church and a hereditary monarch, the new governing elites were often fractured along ideological and confessional lines and had only a temporary hold on power. Rival epistemic elites, such as medical experts and religious leaders, also competed to frame attitudes and norms surrounding sexuality, abortion, child rearing, and so on.5 In a more pluralistic polity, married couples could therefore live as what Georg Simmel has described as a “society of two,” which, though influenced by the values and norms of the surrounding society, could follow its own logics.6 As we will see, part of the charm of these marriages was that they were supposed to exist in a more refined realm than the raucous surrounding political culture. This could mean, however, that some of the dynamics of pre–­World War I partnerships remained intact. Indeed, the loving marriage continued to have appeal (particularly to men) as what historian Selma Stern has called a “Sabbath for the heart”: the counterpoint to a public life in which antisemitic prejudice and discrimination persisted amid all the

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signs of Jews’ professional flourishing and cultural impact.7 Furthermore, particularly when it came to child rearing, medical and religious leaders who might otherwise seem at loggerheads could offer mutually reinforcing advice, especially concerning the responsibilities of mothers. Even in terms of the laws governing marriage and divorce, many of the Imperial era provisions and regulations were undisturbed by the political changes that occurred after 1918.8 Jewish marriages could therefore be valued as both harbingers of decisive political change and refuges from economic and political turbulence. To the extent that the character of Jewish marriages changed between 1918 and 1933, this was caused not so much by an explicit revolution in values as by situational factors. These factors included male partners’ struggles to find work, the resulting pressures on wives and mothers, and the greater uncertainty that the rise of organized antisemitism provoked. As we will see, such crises did not generate a new romantic script but rather reaffirmed the value of marriage as an institution that could help individuals endure adversity. I begin this chapter by tracing out how many Jewish women and men looked forward to marriage as a pivotal stage on their paths toward self-­ realization.9 For some, personal goals were tightly intertwined with the collective project of further Jewish emancipation and acculturation: A good marriage would cement individuals’ status in their religious communities and in the surrounding society and could serve as a conduit for especially husbands’ professional success.10 Others sought to fashion new kinds of marriages that decisively signaled their break with preexisting norms for ethnic-­ religious identification, gender, and so on. In the second section I focus on how couples negotiated and aligned their visions for the future. One of the challenges for especially equally well-­educated partners was to conform to or depart from the still starkly different roles that wives and husbands were expected to play. In the final sections I analyze how marriages matured, especially once couples became parents, and why in a minority of cases partnerships broke down. Although some Jewish cultural commentators might have believed that marriages were under an unprecedented assault during the interwar era, this did not lead to any widespread discrediting of marriage. What happened instead was that marriages were celebrated less for

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any transcendence they might offer and more for the grounding influence they had on those who had to endure economic uncertainty and increasingly violent manifestations of antisemitism. Falling in Love amid Revolution and Insecurity Historians who look for representative Jewish experiences in the interwar period are likely to notice instead the diversity of pathways that especially young Jewish women and men could follow. For instance, although most Jewish children went to Christian or nondenominational schools, some received separate Jewish religious instruction and others attended Christian religious classes. Siblings often made divergent decisions about whether they joined a liberal Jewish, Zionist, or socialist youth group. (With the exception of socialist groups, most other non-­Jewish youth groups excluded Jewish members.) These brothers and sisters sometimes displayed quite different forms of religiosity and could differ in terms of whether they chose a Jewish or a Christian partner. The Scholem family typifies this trend. The four brothers chose to go down liberal, nationalist, socialist, and Zionist paths, respectively, and one of them married a non-­Jewish communist.11 Family events were liable to draw out these differences; memoirs recall awkward moments at family meals on religious holidays when relatives would struggle to agree on which rituals to follow.12 In some instances sons or daughters found the religious atmosphere in their household uncongenial enough that they chose to spend holidays with relatives whose religious practices were more closely aligned with their own.13 That such a diversity of ways of being Jewish existed meant that young Jewish women and men had the freedom, and burden, to chart out their own courses. Some relished this: Lotte Fairbrook, who met her future husband in 1919, remembered experiencing a moment of “metamorphosis” as an adolescent when she realized she was becoming an independent adult woman.14 Partly she was seeking out her own religious pathway: She wrote essays that pondered “Am I a Jewess in the true sense of the word?” and sought out her own forms of spirituality, searching for God not through conventional religious rites but when she was particularly moved by the beauty of the natural world.15 In this endeavor she looked for support from potential

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partners, even disqualifying one possible suitor, a young veteran from the war, when she found him too cynical to speak seriously about religion.16 But Fairbrook’s awakening to being an adult was also concerned with her sexuality. The moment when she first felt herself becoming a woman was when she locked her bedroom door, forbid her father and any other members of the household from entering, and regarded her naked body in the mirror. She admired the beautiful young woman she was in the process of becoming and resolved to guard and enjoy her independence—­a decision that only the “stronger will” of her future husband could overcome some years later.17 Fairbrook’s sense that, in terms of her spirituality and physicality, she was living at the dawn of a new age was not unique. Jewish youth movements focused on the twin goals of realizing a new, stripped-­down Jewish spirituality and recovering young Jews’ natural beauty through exercise and time spent amid the peace of nature. It should come as no surprise, then, that when members were told to love themselves and their religion, some ended up falling in love with one other. Indeed, this was a cherished goal of most groups, not least because the mainstream Wandervogel movement had excluded Jews from its membership and thereby heightened many young Jews’ sense of their distinctiveness and embattled status in German society.18 Although it is all but impossible to quantify how and where young Jewish suitors found partners, a youth group member’s recollection that it was “not through . . . the famous encounters on the street and not on the dance floor” but more often within quite wholesome youth movements was widely shared.19 This sounds plausible, given that by 1933 a third of all Jewish youths in Weimar Germany had at some point been members of a Jewish youth organization.20 This glimpse into Jewish courtship might still surprise us because our images of interwar Germany tend to be cinematic and Berlin-­centric.21 Iconic scenes from city symphonies record passersby flirting on street corners, men and women lounging together in cafes and nightclubs, and audiences enjoying risqué performances that offered up (usually female) naked bodies for the enjoyment of strangers.22 The interwar Berlin of cabaret and carnal enticements depicted by the Dadaists, Christopher Isherwood, and others leaves an indelible impression on our imagination. But these images are more spectacular than documentary.23 Those who worked in Germany’s largest cities actually had much less time to socialize than we might imagine.

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Robert Dinse’s 1932 study of 5,000 young Berliners’ daily routines revealed that many working youths were stuck between the equally strict regimes of work and family life. Dinse discovered that 65 percent of saleswomen had to work until 7 p.m., which left them little time to socialize, given abidingly rigid parental rules about bedtimes.24 Similarly, a third of young men were instructed to be in bed by 9 p.m. by parents at whose homes they continued to live.25 Reflecting on the quite mundane lifestyle of the average Berliner, Lotte Lenya, that apparent siren of the Berlin demimonde, addressed the difference between Berlin’s image and reality, commenting, “It’s a funny thing the way people think of Berlin in those days as a sexual paradise, or hell. But besides the famous corner of the KDW and the well-­walked pavements of the Friedrichstrasse, there were other places and other occupations. People did go to work in the morning and come home in the evening.”26 Albert Schrekinger, a shopkeeper’s son who turned 20 in 1918, offered a similar portrayal of how couples got together in the Austrian capital. Rather than mixing in Vienna’s hot spots, Schrekinger and his friends found partners while sharing in the romantic aura of an ideologically committed youth movement. After being briefly drawn to Zionism during his mid-­teenage years, Schrekinger joined a socialist youth group. This collective rejected what it regarded as a decadent urban culture and offered its members an alternative regimen of teetotalism, folk clothing and music, and respectful comradeship but also free love between men and women.27 Schrekinger described the romance of socialism for a young man such as himself: Beyond its promises of economic justice and progress, socialism offered a holistic philosophy of life that promised to change gender relations and the relationship between religion and politics. Schrekinger had been moved by Bebel’s Women Under Socialism when he first read it as a 15-­year-­old and found that, by the time he could discuss personal relationships with high school and university friends, their shared socialism gave these young men, whose “experiences with girls had been scanty,” an elevated ethical vocabulary with which to “share our intimate feelings, and . . . help each other cope with the emotional problems of our lives.”28 In this regard, Schrekinger was a quite typical young Viennese Jew. Socialism held out significant appeal in Jewish communities in Vienna; Jews voted for the Social Democratic Party in overwhelming numbers and

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p­ rovided the intellectual leadership for the party.29 It should be no surprise, then, that Schrekinger met his first serious girlfriend, a Jewish milliner from Vienna, in the socialist youth movement. Schrekinger fell in love with Trude when he saw her at a camp outing and witnessed her “innocently seductive femininity . . . her wholesome personality, and beautiful body.” She had “radiant blue eyes and [a] sparkling joyfulness, expressed often by laughter that reminded [him] of the gurgling of a mountain creek.”30 Although Schrekinger’s bucolic descriptions of Trude may remind us of the back-­to-­nature rhetoric of the fin de siècle youth movement, he was equally sure that if they were to have a relationship, it should be a modern one. As they became closer, Schrekinger and Trude were “eager to attain the highest possible degree of intimacy,” but “as ‘new human beings,’ ” they were also committed to testing their sexual compatibility before committing to one another.31 In his memoir Schrekinger dwells on the significance of their first sexual encounter. It is worth exploring his account in more detail because it reveals intriguing ways in which young Jews who were drawn to left-­wing ideologies imagined political emancipation working its way into their most intimate relationships and even into how they used and experienced their bodies. To have sex “in a responsible manner,” Schrekinger and his partner carefully planned a romantic getaway where they could deepen their intimacy. They booked a room in Kritzendorf, a Danubian holiday resort near Vienna, and when they arrived, “Trude suggested that we first do calisthenic exercises to loosen our muscles and to reduce tension” before the couple tried to consummate their relationship.32 What may seem like an amusing instance of either overpreparation or stalling was actually a form of bodily training advocated by many socialist youth groups. Socialist pedagogues had long advocated these kinds of exercises as a form of rational leisure and pleasure—­ and even of life reform—­for workers whose bodies had been damaged by physically taxing labor in unhealthy urban conditions.33 In any case, despite such careful considerations, Schrekinger and Trude’s first attempts at lovemaking were not terribly successful; Trude’s pleasure was purely vicarious, although “neither she nor [Schrekinger] knew that this could be different.”34 Over time, the problems proved to be more serious than they had envisaged. Having agreed to continue having sex with Schrekinger but not wanting children yet, Trude decided to visit a doctor to be fitted for a contraceptive

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diaphragm. At her appointment, however, she was told by the doctor that she showed no signs of having lost her virginity. Confused and dismayed, Schrekinger resolved to visit the renowned sex therapist Wilhelm Reich to find out what had gone wrong. After his initial inquiries, Reich discovered that the young couple had been using an unconventional position: “Dr. Reich asked me if I knew that the supine position was the most commonly used. I knew that, I responded, but had decided, with my partner’s consent, not to use a position that symbolized male superiority; as a socialist, I believed in equality of the sexes, symbolized by the lateral position.”35 This story clearly illustrates how genuinely political Schrekinger and his partner believed the act of lovemaking to be. But we might wonder why Schrekinger and Trude sought to deconstruct and reconstruct anew even the most physical aspects of an intimate relationship. Indeed, the couple set out to do everything differently. Instead of dating in the evenings “like young couples of past generations,” the couple met up and read together in the outdoors before they went to work in the morning.36 They socialized with nudist groups, believing they would thereby share the members’ “closeness to nature, friendship, honesty, and, yes, modesty.” Schrekinger wrote lyrically of one experience rowing with the group: At the end of the outing, as the evening light was fading, all the rowers held hands and formed a chain, drifting back toward the shore in a line. It was a moment of pure innocence and togetherness, although Schrekinger later learned that the group had regularly proved a source of both amusement and outrage among tourists and neighbors who peered at them through telescopes.37 The couple’s search for a radically new romantic script was clearly motivated by Schrekinger’s desire to live out the new kind of equality between men and women advocated by socialist intellectuals. We cannot know for sure what his partner made of this, as we only hear her voice through his account. But Schrekinger’s (quite self-­critical) narrative suggests that she initially concurred with his ideological program. For one thing, she agreed to retrain as an early childhood educator while he completed his doctorate in law—­all because he deemed that they would play a more useful role in the future socialist society with their newly acquired skills.38 But she eventually admitted to wanting to explore her sexuality with other men, complaining that Schrekinger was too “angelic.”39 It seems that, even though the couple

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tried to perform their fundamental equality through sex, Trude started to realize that Schrekinger was the one providing their new romantic script and she found herself straining to shape her own path. Indeed, Schrekinger may also have had less than radical (and perhaps unconscious) motives for how he planned out their future; for one thing, his suggestion that Trude retrain was likely to please his parents, who had expressed concern that she came from a more modest background.40 Schrekinger’s insistent attempts to live out the values he imagined for a more enlightened society also reveals on which terms he thought he could be Jewish in the Austria of his day. In explaining why he had become a socialist, he noted that one important factor was that only the socialist leadership condemned antisemitism and, further, counted Jews among its members; most other political groups of the time tolerated, if not fostered, antisemitism in their ranks. Only by embracing socialism could Schrekinger therefore continue “striving for complete identification with my native culture.”41 This socialist movement allowed Schrekinger to create a new version of himself and his partner as socialists without confession (he had declared himself Konfessionslos at some point after joining the movement) and without preexisting class and status differences. It also enabled him to envisage a new version of Austrian society that was more egalitarian, less patriarchal, nondenominational, and freer of religious and ethnic prejudice. Schrekinger therefore might have thought he was living out his political values in a new and uncompromised intimate relationship while he worked for a broader social transformation. But he might just as well have been channeling his hopes for a free and open society into a romantic relationship that could never provide adequate compensation for the discrimination he witnessed elsewhere in public life. He lamented, for instance, that once the Dollfuss government assumed power in 1932, he would never gain a more senior position in the civil service, partly because he was known to be a Social Democrat and partly because he refused to convert. And he was equally certain that he was not wealthy enough to set up his own law practice.42 Such an approach to courtship was by no means unique to Schrekinger; it was shared by numerous other young Jewish men who wanted “not the preservation of the Jewish race but the privileges and positions that society and the

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state denied us, in spite of the constitution,” to quote the reflections of noted jurist and Jewish community leader Friedrich Gottschalk.43 Although, interestingly, by the mid-­1930s, when political prospects looked much less hopeful for Schrekinger, he rejoined the Jewish community and began to date a number of Christian women. Rather than seeking social transformation through these relationships, he instead relished breaking taboos, writing of the fun he had taking partners on more conventional dates, drinking and dancing in Vienna’s traditional wine taverns (Heurigen).44 Female counterparts to Schrekinger also looked for fellow travelers as they acquired new levels of education and charted out novel paths. As we saw in the last chapter, a disproportionately large number of young Jewish women attended elite secondary schools and universities in Germany and Austria. These young women were a relatively small minority of the overall female Jewish population, though, given that just over 2,500 Jewish girls were in German Mädchengymnasien (the most academically ambitious secondary schools for girls) in 1911.45 Stories still circulated of female students whose first love affairs were with male study companions by whom they were taken seriously and with whom they could broach taboo subjects. These kinds of interactions raised such widespread concerns that the Jewish Women’s Association, as part of a sexual education program they ran in 1928, enlisted a rabbi to persuade parents not to allow youngsters of the opposite sex to socialize or study in rooms where others could not come and go.46 As Harriet Pass Freidenreich’s study of highly educated Jewish women shows, shared interests and admiration for one another’s professional abilities could be important reasons why couples might fall for one another. For one thing, more Jewish women were working in white-­collar employment, to the extent that they made up 34 percent of all Jewish employees in this sector by 1933. About 5,000 of these women were listed as “Independent Professionals, Church and Civil Servants,” suggesting that they had attained prestigious administrative and professional positions.47 But the usual divergence in professional fortunes that occurred once couples got married—­the wife typically giving up her career and the husband gaining more authority and prominence—­meant that couples who started out as colleagues often had to build their married life on an altogether different basis.48 One should not overstate this argument, though: Freidenreich’s study also revealed that,

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although 80 percent of female doctors married and two-­thirds had children, almost all ­continued to practice medicine.49 It might be instructive to compare Schrekinger’s experiences and perspectives with those of renowned socialist Käthe Frankenthal, who rejected the prospect of marriage precisely because it would divert her from her career goals. Both she and Schrekinger were professionals: he a civil servant with a doctorate in law and she a physician and researcher. Both were politically active in their respective socialist movements in the Red cities of Vienna and Berlin, although she attained more prominence as a city and then state parliamentarian. And both were at most only formally Jewish. Still, Frankenthal understood the political significance of intimate relationships quite differently from Schrekinger. While flourishing professionally and politically, Frankenthal reflected that she actually had no time (or great desire) for a partner. She was in demand as a doctor for a new generation of women who no longer wanted to be examined by male physicians. She was offered the chance to train for a professorial role. And she was successful when standing for election as a city and regional politician. At best, marriage appeared to offer her a pair of helping hands at a moment when she was exhausted and unable to look after herself. But, after some reflection, she decided that a housekeeper could perform this role better than a partner who would make demands on her time and her spirit. For her, intimate relationships therefore did not have the same redemptive political potential as they did for Schrekinger. But neither did they carry with them the same political burdens. As she reflected in her memoir, “Sexual matters were never a problem for me. Since the time when I reached full maturity as a student, I have given to this part of life the space that nature intended. As a result, it never played a dominant role in my life.”50 For Frankenthal, then, even if the politics of daily life were difficult—­as they surely were for a socialist councillor in late Weimar Germany—­there was no prospect of one’s personal life providing any kind of counterutopia or even a reasonable alternative. No doubt Frankenthal might be regarded as an unusual character. For instance, she relished rebelling against feminine ideals when she learned to box, fence, and perform other martial arts. But these were ways that she coped with always feeling on the defensive in a society where she believed invisible walls still encased the Jewish minority.51 When she visited her sister

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in Munich after the sister had concluded what seemed like a dream marriage with a successful Jewish student, Frankenthal noted that, although the couple appeared to thrive in the city’s high society, they were actually only ever able to circulate in distinctly Jewish milieus.52 For Frankenthal, then, marriage did not provide a gateway to a successful and meaningful public life in the new Germany. Instead, it tied women to what appeared to her as a doomed acculturation project within which men still played the starring role. Frankenthal is interesting as a case study not because she is typical but because her life course illustrates the plurality of paths that opened up to Jewish women during the interwar era. The most conventional avenue, particularly in the middle classes, was still to seek marriage with a fellow Jew whose career trajectory offered social mobility and a respectable position in Jewish communities and German society. One sign of this was that, after the inflation of 1923 wiped out many middle-­class savings and all but eliminated dowries, four times as many women as men applied to Frankfurt’s Jewish Marriage Bureau for help finding a Jewish partner.53 Nevertheless, as Jewish communities became more diverse, not least because of migrations from Eastern Europe, women’s preferences and priorities may also have diversified. For instance, among the growing number of personal advertisements posted in the Orthodox Israelit newspaper (of which, based on Trude Maurer’s data from 1927, the majority may have been posted by or on behalf of women), a slightly larger number of marriage seekers in the 1920s explicitly mentioned that they were religiously observant or seeking a religiously observant partner.54 We can also find examples of individuals whose perspectives on marriage changed across their life course. Margarete Sallis-­Freudenthal initially gave up her studies during World War I when a much older law professor at the university in Frankfurt proposed to her. She identified so closely with his professional progress and his activities on behalf of local Jewish communities that a sizable portion of her memoir is filled with lengthy excerpts from his scholarly writings and letters to newspapers. Yet, when he died in 1929, she changed course. Not only did she reenroll at university and end up attaining a doctorate in sociology, but she also refused remarriage, even when an old flame reappeared and provided her with the most satisfying sexual

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relationship of her life. During this period she rediscovered her Jewish roots, embracing Zionism and moving to Palestine in 1934, even though this meant breaking up with her new partner, who was unwilling to leave Germany.55 For Sallis-­Freudenthal, the alarming rise of Nazism in the early 1930s had forever severed the connection between personal fulfillment and a fuller Jewish integration into German society. By this point in time, however, other signs were indicating that marriage did not necessarily offer wives a fast track to social integration in the interwar republics. For one thing, despite their great educational success in the early twentieth century, Jewish men did not really see their occupational profiles change. In Germany and also in Austrian cities such as Vienna, almost half of Jewish taxpayers were self-­employed (compared with 16–­17 percent for the German population as a whole).56 Overwhelmingly, this meant that Jewish men were working in the less socially prestigious trade and transport sectors and that Jewish professionals continued to thrive only in the independent professions of law and medicine. In the arenas of academia and the civil service, they continued to experience discrimination. And, despite being pioneers of urbanization, Jews rarely became significant presences in heavy industry, either as producers or as workers. Most Jews in industry continued to be independent artisans or small shopkeepers, often in the clothing sector. The almost 20 percent of the Jewish population in Weimar Germany who were Eastern European immigrants were mostly working class and urban, and they also tended to remain outside large German industrial concerns, usually making their living as craft workers, tradesmen, or small businessmen.57 Viewed in total, Jewish occupational distribution hardly converged with the mainstream in a Germany that remained strikingly agricultural but that had also advanced to the status of Europe’s industrial powerhouse. Although Jews tended to experience slightly more rapid upward social mobility than other Germans throughout the 1920s, this success did not change their status as an economically separate but nominally equal ethnic group in Germany.58 The fact that most German Jews either worked for themselves or in Jewish firms might have had some significant effects on Jewish men’s social attitudes. Their relative prosperity might have concealed, to some degree, the abiding social cleavages in German society. But their experience of work life also showed that social divides were not necessarily bridged by acquiring

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education or thriving in one’s work life. As a result, one of the most viable routes to integration was through leisure pursuits. Private life could also provide a refuge from the social pressures that were all too evident in the rest of Jewish men’s and women’s everyday lives. In a series of articles that profiled the changing types of Jewish women in Germany, historian Selma Stern suggested that, although a partnership between Jews could not eradicate social or ethnic tensions and hierarchies, it could provide solace from them. Speaking of what Jewish men looked for in their female partners, she claimed, “One seeks a woman to be a redeemer from the dark, mysterious forces [of the world], to be a friend and a soul mate. . . . Then love becomes . . . a ‘Sabbath for the heart,’ which one must observe, which one must celebrate.”59 For Stern, Jewish women could provide this solace because of Jews’ “raised awareness of the otherness and uniqueness of the Jewish psyche.”60 Stern’s concluding remark that Jewish otherness was more readily acknowledged by Jews themselves, while increasingly influential among a certain kind of Jewish race scientist, was by no means shared by all German Jews.61 That ethnic and faith differences in Germany were becoming sharper rather than more blurred after 1918 is a theory that we should consider seriously, however. The Weimar era was not simply a period of secularization or of cosmopolitanism. It was also an epoch when religious groups carved out distinctive niches; for one thing, a great variety of Jewish schools, sports teams, publishers, journals, and so on flourished during this time.62 Jewish communities, particularly in larger cities, were also enlarged by the presence of Eastern European migrants, who made up the vast majority of the just over 19 percent of Jews in Germany who came from abroad (based on figures from 1925).63 Significant parts of these migrant communities brought with them Orthodox practices that made Judaism appear more culturally foreign to other Germans.64 Jewish communal politics thrived too, again predominantly in major cities, as greater numbers of young Jews participated in community elections to ensure that their version of Judaism was well represented.65 If a certain revival of Jewish life emerged in the Weimar Republic, a similar claim could be made about the Christian denominations. In Germany the formerly established Protestant Church was perceived as a major loser in the new secular constitutional settlement. As a result, Protestant theologians

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and politicians urged the faithful to play a more prominent and ideologically partisan role, lobbying them to join nationalist and monarchist groups that had limited or no loyalty to the new republic. The Catholic Center Party was a beneficiary of the new republican order, but this did not mean that Catholic antiliberals did not continue to battle liberalism and secularism in their own ranks and in wider German society.66 In Austria such Catholic groups were more influential still. They were led by Father Ignaz Seipel, who, as chancellor and leader of the predominant Christian Social Party, advocated that Christians become more assertive political actors, because they had been freed from any institutional ties to what had become a secular state.67 Christian confessions also sought to encourage sociability in their communities as a way of limiting the potential for mixed marriages between different kinds of Christian. For instance, it was primarily after World War I that Catholic fraternities at universities organized programs of social events for young Catholics to meet potential partners.68 The relevance of these developments for Stern’s argument is that, although Jews were working hard to be economically successful and culturally significant, they were not simply becoming more assimilated within a larger German melting pot. Instead, they retained their distinctiveness within an arguably more segmented postwar German society. It could, of course, be argued that this situation describes a process of Jewish acculturation rather than assimilation. It is certainly possible that confident German Jewish subcultures emerged alongside other ethnic and religious subcultures and that their coexistence illustrates how the interwar republics became relatively successful pluralistic societies. Young Jews’ greater desire to date freely nevertheless suggests their eagerness either to live out the freedoms denied them in other areas of public life or to be free from political responsibilities and social obligations in their private lives. The experiences of a Berlin shopkeeper, Fritz Selbiger, illustrate how romantic relationships could provide consolation for the alienation that some young Jews were experiencing. As an independent small businessman, Selbiger did not have to encounter direct discrimination in the workplace, but he also lacked opportunities to develop more than functional or casual relationships with non-­Jewish business associates and neighbors. In his love life he was sometimes able to bridge this religious divide, although he was, on

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occasion, thwarted by the antisemitism of partners’ families. For instance, a relationship in mid-­1928 was doomed by the opposition of his girlfriend’s father, a former military officer who shared the “prejudices of his class” and took Selbiger to be a “typical, unpleasant Jew.”69 But more often Selbiger found that economic circumstances played a greater role in shaping the fate of his romantic relationships. He, like many young German Jews, felt himself only recently freed from the economic imperative behind arranged marriages and was painfully aware of the dramatic differences between economic winners and losers in Germany’s fast-­paced capital. While walking home his first great love, Else Bannenberg, one night in April 1923, he reflected that he would “like to have a pretty, graceful and spirited girlfriend. . . . Not just one of those who is only around as long as you have money.” For him, love relationships should not wither or flourish according to the fluctuations in individuals’ economic fortunes. They belonged instead to a realm of pure freedom that was “bound [only] by ethical laws.”70 The reality rarely lived up to such ideals, though. When Selbiger started dating Erna Hirsch, the niece of the former Prussian (and Jewish) prime minister Paul Hirsch, he could not help noticing how hard it was to hold on to a “girl from a good household” when he took her dancing at the Tiergartenhof. But he also admitted enjoying the advantages of dating such a well-­to-­do young woman, acknowledging his delight at using Erna’s famous uncle’s tickets to see the smash-­hit film Rin-­tin-­tin at the Ufa Zoo, at just the moment he realized he found Erna to have little personality.71 Selbiger’s musings here speak not only to his perceptions of how relationships are influenced by material concerns but also to his search for a new moral code that could replace the religious laws he no longer wished to follow. In common with numerous other memoirists who recorded their first romances, he integrated his personal romances into a broader pantheistic schema. At moments of romantic rapture, he would write poems to girlfriends, likening the new life he felt inside himself to the reawakening of the world as winter passed into spring.72 In this regard Selbiger was echoing common refrains in the German youth movement as well as the fashionable philosophy of Max Scheler, a formerly Jewish convert to Catholicism. Scheler posited that through the acting out of love, individual selves would feel their “oneness” with each other and eventually with all elements of the

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“single life-­stream.”73 Yet Selbiger could never quite free himself from his sense of obligation to his religious community. He reflected on the words spoken at a friend’s wedding when the rabbi remembered the faithfulness of Ruth in the Hebrew Bible, who, after her husband’s death, promised to follow her mother-­in-­law, Naomi, wherever she might go.74 And, on at least one date, Selbiger brought a girlfriend to a Jewish graveyard, where he recited the Kaddish for all the Jews who had encountered “the hatred and foolishness of humanity.”75 In general, Selbiger hoped his love life would either spur him on to greater industry in his work life or provide an antidote to the stresses and status hierarchies of public life. Of the woman he dated immediately after Erna Hirsch, he conceded that her relationship with him was no great love. But the time he spent with her “help[ed] him to overcome the daily struggle to survive that was never free of disappointments but full of self-­sacrifice.”76 This was a fleeting moment, however; throughout his quite numerous liaisons, he found himself noticing or suffering from the social distinctions that were particularly conspicuous as people consumed their leisure time. And so, writing at the end of the tumultuous 1920s, about four months before the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, he concluded that he could not share the “life of luxury and wealth” of one girlfriend, a 28-­year-­old divorcee and secretary at the popular tabloid newspaper 8-­Uhr-­Abendblatt. He nevertheless struggled to overcome feelings of disappointment when he visited his next girlfriend’s parents’ house and recognized the “petit-­bourgeois milieu” that they inhabited.77 Selbiger’s experiences suggest that the tensions of everyday life for young Jewish men were not just due to ethnic or religious issues, although these factors were rarely altogether absent either. During the economic upheavals of the 1920s, his difficulties were often rather more profoundly financial. Selbiger mentioned in September 1924 that he had resolved to go to the theater less so that he could help his father pay the 10 marks required to attend synagogue services. Similarly, when he contemplated receiving an inheritance from his ailing father in 1929, he concluded that the family’s debts would mean that he had no financial incentives to offer a future partner.78 Individuals such as Selbiger, who was committed to breaking with the orthodoxies of his father’s generation and to loving freely, nevertheless often ended

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up living rather confined lives, largely because they did not have the means to strike out on their own and build relationships based on their passions. For such individuals, even if they wished to inhabit social spaces—­the cafés, nightclubs, and cinemas—­that were not necessarily organized around confessional or community allegiances but potentially open to all, they often lacked the material means to do so.79 Taken together, Selbiger’s and Schrekinger’s love lives illustrate the possibilities for young Jewish men to date multiple women from a variety of social backgrounds. In both cases these would-­be lovers were not simply living out their freedoms, though, but seeking a kind of transcendence from the constraints and disappointments of their daily public lives. Although this approach to romantic relationships was surely not uniquely Jewish, we can still notice a strikingly inverse relationship between these men’s hopes for their romantic lives and the frustrations they experienced in their public lives. For highly educated Jewish women, the relationship between public and private flourishing could be the reverse: professional fulfillment often beckoned but was potentially endangered by romantic attachments. As the noted philosopher Margarete Susman reflected in a 1926 article, young Jewish women felt torn between the demands of modern romance and public life. Better equipped to play an active role in public life, they ideally looked for male companions with whom they could share values, insights, and knowledge. But modern romance had taught men to value women as passive objects of their passion and as helpmates. Equally, women had been encouraged to concentrate on their beauty, because, once they had attracted successful and dynamic men, they could then look forward to lives of comfortable leisure. Male love was thus a rival to women’s search for a meaningful and active existence rather than a source of support, argued Susman.80 Numerous Jewish women did nevertheless manage to thrive professionally while married or in long-­term partnerships. One prominent example was Rahel Straus, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi who was part of the first generation to attend a girls’ Gymnasium and qualify as a doctor before World War I. Her life as a married woman in Weimar Germany serves as an interesting counterexample to Schrekinger and Selbiger’s experiences. She achieved success in both sectors, thriving as a general practitioner and activist in the Jüdischer Frauenbund, the Women’s International League for

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Peace and Freedom, and the Women’s International Zionist Organization, all while being the mother of five children.81 One reason that Straus did not feel a conflict between her public and private selves was that she did not give up her studies to find a partner. Indeed, she risked losing her future husband, Eli, when she continued with her medical degree despite his initial opposition.82 But at that stage in her life, she was most interested in cultivating the kind of intense female friendships that could be sustained amid the demands of married life and motherhood. Although she acknowledged that late adolescence was a time when one’s “longings were all directed towards the future,” she still cherished this independent phase in her life when she could enjoy “serious friendships with girls” that were possible only during an “era when newly independent women were growing to maturity.”83 As mentioned in Chapter 1, another crucial factor that allowed professional women such as Straus to have both marriages and careers in the Weimar years was that they could employ other women to help out with domestic chores. Traditional models of marriage assumed that women would have responsibility for child care and the household to free up time for their husbands to dedicate to public roles. If professional wives could afford to pay individuals to perform tasks that had previously been part of a wife’s unpaid labor, they no longer faced a zero-­sum choice between love and career.84 One more consideration worth our attention is that Straus was a committed Zionist who emigrated to Palestine soon after her husband died in 1932. Because of her Zionism, Straus did not necessarily measure her activity in German civil society as a marker of successful assimilation in mainstream German culture. Nor did she need a perfect marriage to compensate for a shattered dream of full assimilation in the way that young Jewish men such as Schrekinger and Selbiger might have. “It’s Not Paradise We Are Expecting”: Courtship Letters in an Age of Anxiety We have so far been contrasting men’s and women’s perspectives and life courses. But men and women in relationships also compared their own romantic and professional aspirations in conversation with one another, not least when they shared courtship or love letters. Whereas nineteenth-­century

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Brautbriefe were often a means for relative strangers to get to know one another, letters between fiancées during the interwar era were more usually a way for already acquainted couples to compare notes, particularly during periods when they were separated. These letters still allowed suitors to do some self-­presentation, but they tended to offer less in the way of extravagant promises and more in the way of frank admissions and even tests for future husbands and wives. By exchanging notes about everyday goings-­on, couples shared perspectives and feelings, checking in that each party at least understood the other’s views and was not scared off by the realities of what their lives entailed. In this way, they suggest the emergence of a new love ideal that fitted Simmel’s concept of the society of two: one that promised not transcendence from everyday challenges but comfort, fellow feeling, and some validation of one’s sense of self amid all the upheavals. The letters between prominent Zionists Hans Kohn and Jetty Wahl provide a particularly interesting case study for a number of reasons. Kohn was an important intellectual presence in the German Jewish community, writing for Martin Buber’s Der Jude journal among many other publications. Taken together with Felix Weltsch, Max Brod, and Hugo Bergman, those other members of what became known as the Prague Circle, Kohn emerged as one of the most influential voices for Zionism among German-­speaking Jews.85 Yet he was not really a representative German Jew in terms of his experiences. After returning from wartime imprisonment in Russia, he spent much of the interwar period in Paris, London, and Palestine. Wahl had a similarly itinerant lifestyle, moving between Germany and Britain as she worked for the British Zionist Federation.86 Kohn and Wahl serve as useful witnesses, then, largely because their atypical experiences and perspectives throw into sharper relief the arguably more common experiences described in the previous section. Kohn wrote to his girlfriend and future wife between 1920 and 1921, when both were working for Zionist organizations—­she in London and he in Paris. Kohn and Wahl were able and eager to compare notes as colleagues and not just to imagine their future together as lovers. Much of their chat about day-­to-­day business involved little more than complaining about the boredom of daily tasks, “the miserable mood in the office” or, say, a “greedy, stupid and inexperienced” colleague.87 But the fact that each party was in a

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position to empathize with the other alone proved to be important. For one thing, speaking as colleagues allowed Kohn and Wahl to talk frankly and realistically about their economic prospects as a married couple. Whereas Kohn made calculations about how they would survive on his salary as a married couple (given that he had no property of his own to speak of), Wahl warned him that she was “as poor as a church mouse” and would bring nothing of financial value to the marriage.88 (Note still the assumption that Wahl would stop working once the couple got married.) Rather than imagining married life as a blissful haven, Kohn also warned his prospective bride that “marriage with me will by no means be easy or comfortable.” This was because, in terms of “the big things” he was a “good, yes an exceptional person,” but in smaller matters he had “more failings, weaknesses and dishonest tendencies” than most. Kohn was also under no illusions about how he would be in private, warning his potential bride that he was a “despot.”89 There was little reason to believe that marriage would offer either partner any kind of private redemption for the difficulties they experienced in their professional lives. Another striking feature of the letters (in particular Kohn’s letters) is that they are at once erotic and unromantic. In one letter Kohn wrote directly about his desire to rush to Wahl and “somewhere in the green grass, to kiss your lips, kiss your body.”90 But, in the next paragraph, he followed this statement with a matter-­of-­fact question, asking Wahl to tell him “if you accept the offer of engagement.” If she did, he said he would “write and inform your mother and the rest of the outside world, to the extent that anyone else would be interested in the matter.”91 This excerpt illustrates some of the playful humor that Kohn used while dating Wahl. Kohn really was quite unromantic, though, at least insofar as he refused to imagine that the couple’s relationship could stand apart from the demands, exigencies, and frustrations of outside life. One reason for this lack of romance might be that romance did not have to play the same compensatory role for Kohn as it did for the other male lovers that I have profiled. Or to put it another way, Kohn did not try to use this intimate relationship to construct a version of himself as a new type of emancipated and emotionally refined young man. Young German Jewish men such as Schrekinger inserted their romantic lives into a broader social drama of young Jews exercising new rights, enjoying

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new freedoms, and practicing new virtues in Central European societies. By contrast, Kohn did not feel the same pressure to integrate romantic relationships into an overarching narrative of his successful integration into the German middle classes. He was perhaps trying to display a different kind of unsentimental sincerity. Taken in sum, the letters between Wahl and Kohn give the impression of two fellow travelers who are sharing notes and experiences as they go about their daily lives. When Kohn offers strident arguments against them having a child—­one of which is that the child could expect to die in another European war—­Wahl counters that she would like a child but only if Kohn also felt it would be a blessing.92 Neither party ever spoke of a future home life as a refuge from the demands of their public existences. This was perhaps because professional Zionists were less likely to envisage a radical separation between their public and private lives. Indeed, as Adi Gordon’s intellectual biography of Kohn has shown, Kohn rather argued that a recognizable Jewish self would emerge only when it firmly rooted itself in the cultural life of a more self-­conscious Jewish collective. For him, any society of two was likely to be a mirage amid the ongoing alienation experienced by Jews in the public sphere.93 Reflecting on the refreshing honesty displayed in these letters should not lead us to make any easy assumptions about the impact of Zionism on young German Jews’ love lives, though. It would be too simplistic to suggest that embracing Zionism encouraged couples to aim for realistic satisfactions and emotional authenticity and that those who sought assimilation were doomed to harbor exaggerated and inevitably crushed hopes for their love lives. However, these unusual letters do suggest that the challenges men and women faced in communicating love for one another were constructed within particular social and cultural situations. More precisely, these challenges were the product of a modernity that promised novel freedoms but delivered different forms of social mobility to men and women and different kinds of cultural belonging to the various religious, class, and ethnic groups in Central Europe. Letters written between fiancées who were in mixed relationships allow us to assess the links between young couples’ personal and social goals from another angle. Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya provide intriguing insights into

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how such mixed couples could feel pulled in different directions. Weill was the son of a cantor and scion of one of Germany’s oldest Jewish families. Before his relationship with Lenya, he discussed the conflicting forces drawing him, on the one hand, toward a comradely partner and, on the other, toward the stereotypically innocent and unworldly wife he expected to find through an arranged marriage. Writing to his brother and sister between May and June of 1919, Weill put in a humorous (and misogynistic) request for help with finding a wife. He told his brother, “Just once I would like to fall madly in love so I could forget about everything else. . . . It would be wonderful to get married as soon as possible, if only one could find a suitable partner.” But, he continued, he wanted to be with someone “brainless,” explaining: I must confess that these types of girls are quite preferable as far as females in general are concerned. The other kind, with whom I can converse more or less intelligently, I consider to be more like comrades, like-­minded people. What I require of a woman, what everyone, we artists perhaps the most, needs of a woman—­not only in the sensual but also in psychological and spiritual aspects—­is what Goethe raised to its highest incarnation with his “ewig Weibliche” [the eternal Feminine], the very thing that one rarely finds in intelligent girls. . . . And where can one find the woman who offers a happy medium between the two?94 

Writing even more provocatively to his sister the following month, Weill told her, “In my neighborhood there are several young girls who sing all kinds of folk songs in harmony every evening. I love that kind of fresh, unspoiled, girlish voice. Isn’t there by chance someone marriageable for me among your pupils? My terms: extremely pretty, very stupid, unmusical, with a dowry of a million marks.”95 The woman that Weill ended up with was, of course, altogether different: a renowned actress with working-­class roots who had already courted scandal moving between the theaters and nightclubs of Zurich and Berlin. Perhaps for that reason, the letters Weill sent to Lenya between 1924 and 1925 offered no promises of an unspoiled future together. They rather focused on the here and now: Weill promised to be Lenya’s “Lustknabe [lover boy]” and “less than a husband,” and he humor-

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ously professed that he “would like to lavish on you all of what I am. Because I have nothing.”96 Writing to Lenya just before she moved in with him, Weill offered an unconventional vision of their future together that inverted the usual gendered expectations and promises. He professed to her, “I am aglow in your hands; forge me according to your will. It’s not paradise we are expecting, but hot, burning life.”97 In this regard, for all his rhetorical flourishes, Weill was probably being quite realistic. Rather than hoping marriage would reaffirm an idealized version of himself, he sought a companion to accompany him on an uncertain path at a time when his professional success was unassured and Germany’s political trajectory was highly unpredictable. The element of playfulness and comedic exaggeration in Weill’s imagery illustrates one strategy that couples used to manage the uncertainty that surrounded them. Correspondence from a much more squarely Jewish middle-­class couple, Alfred Rahn and Lilli Bechmann, captures this just as powerfully. Rahn, a businessman who had inherited a metal works in the Bavarian town of Fürth, met Bechmann, the daughter of a mirror glass factory owner, “around 1929.”98 They shared a love of hiking and skiing but ended up having a long-­distance engagement until 1933, largely because Bechmann was completing her studies. The couple self-­consciously but humorously reflected on why they were writing and whether they were conforming to the rules for writing courtship letters. When Bechmann asked for factual reporting from Rahn’s life, her suitor wondered whether couples should avoid including such details for fear of boring or depressing one another, or whether they should share them in the hope that in so doing, they would lighten each other’s burden.99 In what appeared to be a marked break with earlier conventions, Bechmann was the more willing to express her feelings of longing and desire, lamenting in one poem, however, that “it was not Sachlich [objective], and therefore not modern to speak of love.”100 Particularly striking is how happy the pair was to play with ambivalence. They were a couple who trusted one another enough to call the other or themselves nicknames, such as “Schlampsi” (my little trollop), “Du Riesenekel” (you great horror), and “Liliputekel” (tiny or Lilliputian horror). Another notable aspect of these letters is that they express significantly less enthusiasm about the future than nineteenth-­century precursors had done. One reason might be that they were written between 1930 and 1933.

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Coming from business families, both partners were hardly oblivious to the disastrous economic consequences of the Wall Street Crash in Germany and Austria. They also shared worries about the rise of Nazism. On one occasion in June 1931, Rahn let his fears burst through his usually humorous style, and he confessed that he was “a great pessimist,” even if he said that everyone’s worries were really just “about [a] bit of money.” Still, “Today, things are not how they used to be,” he complained, “when you could predict the future and plan accordingly.”101 Many of the letters written after 1914 have this sense of insecurity: The correspondence between Weill and Lenya and between Rahn and Bechmann reminds us that couples were imagining a future life together in a society where economic and existential stability could suddenly vanish. Perhaps the most interesting feature of Rahn and Bechmann’s letters is that they openly discuss whether a couple should remain monogamous during the kind of extended engagement agreed to by many Jewish couples. Early in 1932, Rahn had asked Bechmann to marry him while he was in Fürth and she was studying in Vienna. She responding by asking to postpone her decision for another year. She explained that their future looked so uncertain; not only had the economic problems of the period put the family business in jeopardy, but also the rise of Nazism had made her father’s commercial prospects all the more uncertain. During this period, she also observed fellow Jewish students being attacked at the university. “We are all suspended in mid-­air,” she complained.102 Although there were intimations that Rahn (and perhaps Bechmann) had entertained alternative romantic prospects even before this marriage proposal, it was after Bechmann’s nonacceptance that Rahn started to more assiduously court a “substitute” for Bechmann. The couple discussed his actions: Bechmann accepted what he was doing but “insisted” that she remain his first choice, although he refused to concede on this point.103 Bechmann even counseled Rahn to be careful as to how he treated her rival, who was only 19 years old—­she cautioned that this other young woman (a mutual acquaintance) might not show quite the same modern coolness that she herself had learned to display.104 Partly the couple were trying to navigate a new course in terms of maintaining an honest, potentially nonmonogamous relationship. Given that it was much easier to date without chaperones in the early 1930s, it may have

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seemed a particularly great sacrifice to keep up a long-­distance relationship over the space of years. But the couple were not simply making up their own rules as they saw fit. Norms were still enforced by families, as Bechmann recognized when she told Rahn that he must deny a rumor that the couple had been seen sharing a double room in a hotel.105 Bechmann warned Rahn that she had relatives in Bavaria who could be relied on to send such worrying rumors back to her parents in Berlin. The couple therefore had to work hard to agree on a romantic script that reflected their (potentially conflicting) desires and still ensured their social respectability. Viewed across the period, these courtship letter show how young couples, even before they were married, looked to one other to confirm their sense of self and provide the ontological rootedness that families and religious communities had previously given them. This remained true even if, or rather because, all the political and social volatility of the period made it more difficult for each party to discern the shape of their life trajectories. Letter writing between fiancées could therefore reenchant marriage in a new love myth. This myth suggested not that a married future would be radically different but that a partner would be a constant companion amid all the turmoil that would inevitably surround the married couple. As the various job-­related worries that surface in letters nevertheless suggest, the task of providing support and comfort would, in this model, predominantly fall to wives. As we will see in the next section, wedding ceremonies served to persuade fiancées that they would not be supporting each other alone but could rely on being nurtured by a surrounding community (Gemeinschaft), which would prevent the couple from getting lost in an increasingly anonymous German society (Gesellschaft). This community was not necessarily centered on extended families and religious institutions but could be composed of self-­selecting cohorts. From Weddings in the Gemeinschaft to Marriages in the Gesellschaft? New Year’s Eve, 1927. The streets of Danzig resound with the cheers of celebrating crowds. Champagne corks explode; fireworks screech and thunder. Many of the town’s youngsters keep their neighbors awake long after midnight with their chanting and laughter. But not Erwin and Irene. They sit

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quietly inside the town’s finest restaurant. He looks nervously into her eyes. She blushes a little. The young couple has only just met; they were set up by friends. Still, before the night was out, they had made plans to be married and to spend next New Year’s Eve in the quiet of their shared home.106 This story is a fond retelling of how the newlyweds met, “published” by members of the bridegroom’s party in a wedding “newspaper” from August 1927. It seems to be an innocent, perhaps all too innocent account of the couple falling in love and is aimed at the members of the bride and bridegroom’s families. But the title that introduces this story is the incongruous-­ sounding “Love While Intoxicated” (Liebe im Rausch), borrowed from a daring Orientalist film of the same year. The story therefore seems to point in different directions, at once wholesome and provocative. Another article in the booklet perhaps encourages readers to take the story with a pinch of salt: A wedding is described at which “A Miracle of Nature” takes place and a bride gives birth immediately after the ceremony.107 Ultimately, we cannot know whether this couple decided to marry with little more knowledge of each other than partners from their parents’ or grandparents’ generations would have had, or whether they experienced the racier lifestyle depicted in Weimar movies. All that is clear is that they lived in a society where both of these models of marriage could coexist and collide. In this section we will see how conflicting norms played out across the course of marriages. In general, even when marriages started out as unique societies of two, couples became more tightly integrated into the value systems of the surrounding communities, especially once children were born. This was not just because couples needed to rely on the resources that extended families and religious communities could provide. It was also that norms in society at large, particularly concerning child rearing and motherhood, had not changed all that radically between the prewar and interwar eras. What placed preexisting models of the family into question was not so much new ideological impulses as the changes in couples’ circumstances that successive economic downturns provoked. For instance, when men were no longer able to so reliably play the role of breadwinner, gender roles in marriage became more uncertain, although this often happened without either party particularly desiring it.

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Sources from the wedding day suggest that friends increasingly set the tone for how couples presented themselves at the start of their married lives. This tone was usually gently irreverent; for instance, a “Hochzeits-­ Kladderdatsch” (satirical newspaper) from June 1924 included a mock wanted poster that described the bridegroom as a “rogue” who had kidnapped the bride and “stolen her heart.” Although this all sounded wholesome enough, mischievous details included a description of the perpetrator that played on the German word Stand, or social standing, saying that his “Stand,” or position, “used to be mostly around young women.”108 The new tone adopted indicates that couples had become more assertive in shaping their weddings, recruiting friends to provide something like a running commentary. It also implies that the romanticizing of future married life performed by rabbis and parents in the late nineteenth century was no longer required by couples who already knew each other quite well. But equally, jokes may have allowed couples to negotiate conflicting messages: to express, even somewhat tongue-­in-­cheek, some of the old romantic hopes about their fates (and perhaps their personalities) being transformed, even during a time of Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) and social and economic dislocation. However, Jewish marriages did not conform to any one overarching model; rather, the plurality of types of ceremony offers more evidence of the diversity of Jewish experiences during the interwar era. Marriages involving Jews ranged from lengthy, heavily ritualized religious ceremonies to brief secular affairs, carried out in registry offices with few witnesses. Focusing just on the issue of witnesses can illustrate some of the contrasts between contemporaneous weddings. For instance, Till van Rahden’s data from Breslau shows that, between 1919 and 1920, 68 percent of the witnesses in intra-­Jewish marriages were parents and relatives, but for mixed marriages, colleagues and friends performed this service 56 percent of the time.109 A Berlin-­based humorous magazine, Schlemiel, played with how the contradictions of modern Jewish life made their way into weddings in an article titled “Beggars’ Strike.” The article offers a fictional rendering of a Jewish wedding set in a stereotypical Eastern European context. The joke revolves around how the local rabbi wanted to carry out a traditional Jewish custom and invite the poor of the neighborhood to dine with the wedding party. The

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beggars, however, did not want to come unless they were paid. This farce suggests that such faithfulness (or perhaps lip service) to traditional notions of charity did not fit the realities of a modern situation. But the other point of the story is to stress that this was a real “Jewish wedding,” where traditional rituals were observed, rather than the all-­too-­typical ceremonies where men wore “morning suits and waxed moustaches,” women sported dresses with “plunging necklines,” and most of the menu was written in French.110 More sober sources such as Orthodox advice literature also drew out the contrast between many modern weddings and those that followed Jewish law by explicitly citing numerous German conventions that an Orthodox couple should not emulate.111 We might expect the influence of families and religious communities to recede once couples began their marriages during the age of the nuclear family. Yet two relatively well-­to-­do young Jewish women offer us conflicting accounts of how marriages could be shaped by the values of the surrounding society and continually influenced by family networks. The first woman, the sculptor Elisabeth Dittmann Model, chose to describe her marriage in a series of sketches titled “A Little Picture-­Book from a Perfect Marriage—­ without the help of Dr. Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde.” This humorous title references renowned Dutch gynecologist van de Velde’s best-­selling marriage counseling book of 1926, which went through forty-­two printings in Germany and scandalized religious leaders because of its frank depictions of erotic love. What is initially most striking about Model’s depiction of her marriage is how abstracted from the society around them the couple appears to be. This is not to say that no interesting details about the environments in which they moved emerge. As the couple leaves Germany for a new life in Amsterdam in 1922, a “helpful mother-­in-­law” ensures that food is waiting for them upon their arrival. The husband has to travel between Germany and the Netherlands, paying tolls as he seeks to bring goods back and forth. There are even some mysterious images of interactions with others. In one sketch, two women dance; in another the artist’s husband is curled up beside a different woman on a couch; another sketch has two couples discussing something while sitting in pairs at either end of the same bed. But even

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these images depict young adults sorting out their lives for themselves: The mother-­in-­law leaves the food but stays out of the way; the couples do not involve anyone else in their affairs; even a modern expert like van de Velde is not needed. The “happy end” displayed in the final image, which portrays the parents playing with their infant, suggests how successfully this couple has navigated their path through a modern marriage.112 Contrast this with Ernestine Freud’s almost contemporaneous account of her marriage to Martin Freud, son of the famous founder of psychoanalysis. At every turn, she found that the limits to her freedom of maneuver were set by wary parents, even after she was married. While looking for a partner, her parents impressed upon her that “it was an extremely important matter to an upper middle class family in the Viennese Jewish ghetto” that she “maintain [her] reputation as a sexually inexperienced girl.”113 They then set the tone for the couple’s early life together. The marriage in December 1919 was a modest affair, apparently designed to communicate parental disapproval of the match. Sigmund Freud’s notoriety was hardly impressive to Ernestine’s parents, who lamented her earlier failed courtship with the handpicked son of a wealthy factory owner.114 Once married, Martin and his bride lived in the same apartment block as his parents-­in-­law, who paid rent for the couple. In this regard, they were fairly typical: Most wedding contracts stipulated that in-­laws would support a young husband in the early years of the marriage. As David Biale has shown, this often provoked resentment in young men who were frustrated by their prolonged lack of independence.115 So it proved in Martin Freud’s case. Ernestine then had to live a depressingly conventional petit bourgeois existence as a housewife, not being able to afford the domestic help on which her mother had relied. Living through a period of rampant inflation, Ernestine survived on a meager allowance from her husband, who had secured a job as a bank clerk because of his father-­in-­law’s connections. Once in his 30s, Martin retrained to be a lawyer before eventually working for his father as the director of the psychoanalytic publishing house. In the meantime, Ernestine proved herself to be the real entrepreneur, qualifying as a speech and voice therapist and eventually becoming a pioneering female instructor at the venerable University of Vienna. She also arranged salon evenings, at which

FIGU R E 3. Paintings from Elisabeth Dittmann Model’s “Little Picture Book” (Kleines Bilderbuch au seiner vollkommenen Ehe). Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, DM 192. Reprinted with permission.

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she maneuvered potential patrons into Martin’s orbit. Martin had little appreciation for her efforts, however, apparently wishing that she would have found less time-­consuming and more lucrative job opportunities.116 Freud’s narrative alerts us to many of the persistent limitations placed on individuals who wanted to freely choose their partners and their careers. These were chiefly economic hardship, parents’ attitudes, and the inherited prejudices of a new generation of husbands, who might resent rather than celebrate their partners’ professional achievements. By contrast, Model’s account tells us more about the ideals of at least some young couples. The individuals in her story were “treasure seekers” who could travel freely, experiment with their lifestyles, and ultimately find what they were looking for.117 Yet, what seems like a clear contrast between the two marriages starts to disintegrate on further scrutiny. In many ways, Model’s marriage was the more traditional: Her husband was the breadwinner who allowed her to follow her passion for the fine arts. By contrast, Freud confronted the challenges of being a working wife, even reluctantly agreeing to have an abortion because of the economic pressures she and her husband experienced.118 Reading their stories together might nonetheless give the impression that freedom lay outside in society, as far away as possible from the strictures imposed by families and religious communities. This was a widely held perspective that was reiterated, albeit with a critical spin, by the prominent doctor and Jewish activist Rahel Straus, who offered reflections on “Marriage and Motherhood” during the closing months of the Weimar Republic. Summarizing the changes that had taken place since the nineteenth century, Straus described the new social and psychological realities to which Jewish marriages had to adapt. Every person has the right to their own, free life; they are not beholden or tied to the [religious] community; it is their task to develop themselves, to become an individual. . . . Marriage now became a way for two people to seek out personal happiness. Every man could not be matched to every woman; the choice depended on the character and individuality of the man and woman. Marriage is no longer a mission and a duty; it is [about] happiness and free choice.

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Contextualizing these changes, Straus explained that “next to the individual, the social reasons were decisive”: “The Jew left the narrowness of the Jewish community for the broadness of the surrounding national community.”119 The Weimar Republic’s legal and institutional framework for marriage hardly provided a clear contrast to conventional religious rules and regulations, however. Indeed, in the area of marriage the new republic simply adopted the conservative legal code implemented during the Imperial era. For instance, although single women formally gained equal political and social rights according to Article 109 of the new republican constitution, important Imperial era distinctions were upheld with regard to the unequal rights and duties of husbands and wives. The reinstated Civil Code of 1900 regulations ensured that control of economic matters remained in husbands’ hands, but wives’ responsibility for maintaining households was reasserted.120 One particularly important stipulation stated that male heads of household could curtail a wife’s right to work outside the home. This provision thereby illustrated how decisively a marriage—­whether arranged or freely chosen—­could abridge women’s professional development. More generally, these marriage laws were defended as a means of reinforcing paternal authority at a time when war deaths had endangered the traditional family unit by so dramatically reducing the number of current and future husbands and fathers.121 They thereby ensured that marriage would serve as a fundamentally conservative force, restraining the apparently runaway tempo of parts of Weimar society. The story in Austria was a similar one; there the social democratic government was unable to push forward a reform of prewar marriage laws in 1919 because of opposition of the Christian Social and the Pan-­German parties.122 It may not make much sense, then, to draw too stark a contrast between supposedly conservative Jewish communities and more liberal German and Austrian societies, at least in the realm of marriage. Even if we might assume that social attitudes were running ahead of the law in the interwar period, we nevertheless catch plenty of glimpses of societies in which quite traditional norms for marriage were widespread and, to varying extents, enforced. To cite one perhaps surprising example, Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya acknowledged that their decision to marry was made primarily because of neighbors

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who cast negative judgments on them living together out of wedlock. Weill’s stiff demeanor during their wedding ceremony suggested just how hard he was trying to conform; much to Lenya’s amusement, her diminutive husband incongruously adopted a Prussian military demeanor, placing his hands on his waist and exclaiming “Jawohl” when asked if he would “love, honor, and obey” his new wife.123 Religious leaders nevertheless cited the increasing number of mixed marriages as evidence that religious values were under assault from an increasingly secular society. A pamphlet written in the 1920s described “the growth of mixed marriages” as “a social ill, an emergency.” Its author worried that “between two people who diverge in the deepest and holiest matters, a righteous, ideal marriage is unimaginable.” “Even if the couple get along with each other,” continued the author, “this is because the marriage does not reach into the deepest parts of their souls.” Getting along was apparently more difficult for mixed couples too: Although only 8–­9 percent of marriages recorded in Prussia in 1919 were interfaith, 17 percent of the divorces from that year were concluded by mixed couples. For these reasons and because of how many children were lost to the faith as a result of such unions, mixed marriages were “in principle something that had to be combatted.”124 However, the author of this pamphlet was not Jewish but Protestant, and he was referring not to Jewish-­Christian marriages but to interconfessional matches between Catholics and Protestants. Christian opposition to mixed marriages is important to note because the question of how intermarriage affected Jewish acculturation looks different when we remember that leaders of both the majority faiths in Germany and Austria never really made their peace with what remained to them a baleful sign of secularization. It is not that German Jews who intermarried were integrating into a unified majority culture so much as they were breaking taboos that were upheld by all major denominations.125 And so, although almost 37 percent of all marriages involving Jews in Weimar Germany were mixed unions, this relatively high figure was more the product of changes in daily life than a sign that any more permissive social consensus had emerged.126 As Kirstin Meiring’s figures based on 103 surveys show, about three-­quarters of Jewish women who entered mixed

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marriages between 1875 and 1933 had worked outside the home.127 This not only offered them the chance to meet more non-­Jewish men but also provided them with parallel experiences to their future partners that most wives in Jewish marriages who had not entered the labor force before marriage did not have. Between 40 percent and 50 percent of women in Jewish-­Christian marriages had also been living with their partners before their wedding day, which was not true for more than 90 percent of women in intra-­Jewish marriages. And these interfaith partnerships were usually between couples of a similar age, in contrast to unions between Jews, where husbands tended to be noticeably older.128 For all these reasons, intermarriages were more the product than the progenitor of profound social changes. Motherhood Turning our attention now to attitudes toward motherhood, we will see that secular medical authorities and political elites propounded orthodoxies that hardly diverged from preexisting religious teachings. For one thing, all the major political movements—­with the partial exception of the Communist Party—­offered their own version of pronatalism in their policy programs. Alongside what might be the expected “family values” positions of German nationalist parties and Catholic liberals, social democrats agreed that maternity was women’s primary social contribution, although they argued for a more comprehensive welfare system to support women in this role.129 Similarly, Clara Bohm-­Schuch, editor of the Social Democratic women’s newspaper Die Gleichheit, talked of women’s responsibility as “protectors and rearers of the species” and outlined the social democratic goal of inspiring a “will to maternity” in younger women.130 The pronatalist political consensus was perhaps best represented by the creation of mother advice centers across Germany in the early 1920s and the introduction of maternity leave in 1927.131 These measures signaled the secular state’s willingness to provide the advice and support that had previously been the monopoly of families and religious organizations. Nevertheless, most women’s organizations, including the Jewish Women’s League, supported the general direction of the German state’s pronatalist policies.132 Medical leaders amplified such maternalist messages, with Austrian Jewish feminist author Grete Meisel-­Hess dedicating a 1917 work to thinking through how the monogamous Western

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marriage could prove fertile enough to survive. The answer lay in making it more viable for couples to start families earlier, when the biological preconditions were ideal, she argued.133 In terms of how motherhood would affect marriages, the dominant message from almost all quarters was that child rearing would provide the most satisfying experiences available to married women. Rather than partnerships between husbands and wives being disrupted by the new roles and responsibilities that had to be assumed by mothers and fathers, parentage was supposed to reaffirm the value of marriage for both parties but especially for new mothers. Despite this almost unanimous affirmation of the value of motherhood, the falling birthrate observable across Western Europe from the 1880s to the 1930s was particularly acute in interwar Germany.134 So dramatic was the downward shift in births that the journalist Ernst Kahn (among others) came to speak of women being on a “birth strike.”135 Jewish demographers recognized that Jewish families were even smaller than average in early-­twentieth-­century Germany. Although some identified this as another baleful indicator of Jewish assimilation, others attributed it to parents’ recognition that they could invest heavily in each child’s education and training only if they kept their families small—­a strategy that Jewish parents had used since the mid-­nineteenth century.136 It nevertheless remained difficult for religious commentators and policy planners to pinpoint exactly why birthrates had declined so sharply, not least because, as psychoanalysts recognized, negative feelings about motherhood were among the most repressed emotions.137 The first generation of female Jewish doctors such as Rahel Straus and Helene Deutsch offered particularly interesting perspectives on emotions about motherhood, given that they wrote on the topic professionally and in a personal capacity. Contributing to the Blätter der jüdischen Frauenbundes during the ominous twilight of the Weimar era, Straus lamented the waning desire for children among contemporary German Jews. She laid the blame partly on the contemporary nature of marriage, “which should bring about individual happiness” and therefore could “no longer bear the burden of lots of children: because these limit the cultural and social development of the parents.” But the more fundamental problem, she maintained, was that many modern Jews, once they lost the support provided by organized reli-

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gion, were confused about the “meaning and goal” of their own lives. They therefore struggled to see where children would fit into their disoriented lifestyles. “Working for the preservation of Judaism was not their mission anymore,” said Straus of this modern Jew (she did not specify whether she was talking about men or women in this instance). “They ask themselves, now that so many of their ideals lay shattered on the floor, ‘What kind of life, what kind of fate can I offer my children? Should I even have children in today’s world?’ And, with their weakened will to live and courage to live, they answer this question with a ‘No,’ ” even though they belonged to a “community that, when it was still intact, had borne much heavier burdens with acceptance and trust in God.”138 Interestingly, Straus’s personal experiences did not quite align with the collective portrait she sketched out in 1933. She and her husband—­a doctor and a lawyer, respectively—­were comfortable enough that they could pay for child care and so could, for instance, afford to take four-­week summer vacations without their children.139 Yet Straus still remarked on more than one occasion that her husband’s additional voluntary work in the Jewish community made him a remote figure for his children and left her with the heavy burden of not only caring for them but also making sure “that [they] did not disturb him when he returned home tired and burned out by work.”140 Another pioneering Jewish intellectual, the philosopher (and mother) Margarete Susman, who moved between countries with her husband and child, addressed the predicament of women such as Straus in a reflection piece titled “The Problem of Women in the Contemporary World.” For her, the mother was bound to be a uniquely lonely figure, having given life to another person for whom she remained responsible but who had the freedom to shape their own destiny.141 Susman stressed the fundamental alterity of mothers and fathers in this sphere, arguing that, whereas men never stopped gaining their sense of self primarily through their interactions with the outside world, women were supposed to give more of themselves over to their role as mothers.142 What is more, women continued to feel profound guilt for those moments when they did not give their whole selves over to motherhood, as the experiences of psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch reveal. Deutsch suffered numerous miscarriages but persevered with her attempts to give birth, not least because she hoped to become a mother different from

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her own, who had communicated her disappointment that Deutsch had not been born a boy. Yet, as one of her earliest psychoanalytic papers, published in 1919, revealed, Deutsch was uneasy about how much of the motherly duties she had delegated to her son’s nurse. The paper was titled “A Two-­ Year-­Old Boy’s First Love Comes to Grief,” and it detailed not only the pain the boy felt in losing his mother substitute but also how possessive his nurse had become of him. So attached were her son and his nurse that Deutsch felt she needed to pay the nurse extra so that she would allow Deutsch and her son to spend time together.143 As a disciple of Freud, Deutsch was predisposed to explore her feelings of guilt in a particularly unsparing way. But it would hardly be surprising if those women who departed from the dominant emotionologies around motherhood, by postponing, limiting, or rejecting their mother role, felt guilt, not least with regard to their sexual desires.144 Indeed, other psychoanalysts found that the experience of becoming a mother allowed some of these women to enjoy, and possibly not feel so guilty about, experiencing other aspects of their lives, including their sexuality. To take one example, in an article on female “castration complexes,” Karl Abraham noted the “old and well-­known medical experience, that some women first achieve a normal sense of their gender when they have given birth” and then start to enjoy sex for the first time.145 Although it is difficult to assess whether unconscious conditions such as castration complexes really were a factor among early-­twentieth-­century Jewish or other German women, it might be possible to use Abraham’s insight in a different way. Perhaps it could be easier for some women to admit to and cherish their feelings of love for a child when they could not be so frank about sexual desire. Once sexual activity led to childbirth, this may have provided a validation for the sex act itself. This, at least, is one way to interpret an otherwise strange aside from one Jewish memoirist, Lotte Fairbrook, who explained that she allowed herself sex with her husband against doctor’s advice in spring 1926 largely because she knew her husband wanted more children.146 Satisfying a partner’s desire for more children may have seemed less improper than satisfying one’s own or one’s partner’s simple desire for sex. This was a topic tackled by a female Orthodox feminist author, Hannah Meyer-­Breuer, who argued that, in contrast to a

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Christianity that venerated a virgin mother and thereby separated motherhood from sexual desire, Jewish scripture affirmed the relationship between them. She cited those passages in the book of Genesis when Eve was told that she would be the mother to all humankind and she would long for her husband.147 Although Meyer-­Breuer signaled this as an advance over Christian theology, she nevertheless still acknowledged that the sex act was validated primarily through its role in procreation. And so, for all the talk of “free love” and of the “New Woman” during the interwar period, some of the most defining features of interwar Jewish relationships—­the abidingly gendered division of labor, the lateness of marriages, and the smallness of new Jewish families—­were, more often than not, a product of economic circumstances rather than the reflection of a new set of values. As we have seen, religious norms concerning courtship and marriage were in numerous ways not so much overhauled as renovated by secular social policy, which assigned wives and husbands separate roles and reinforced the centrality of motherhood in women’s lives. These were good reasons why modern marriages might turn out to be neither a Sabbath for the heart nor a society of two that could operate according to its own internal logic. Instead, there were numerous signs that marriages could not always remain impervious to the stresses that came from the outside. As we will see, particularly during periods of economic downturn, shifts in circumstance could reveal that the apparently timeless institution of marriage was much more sensitive to circumstances and contingency than any religious communities would have liked to admit. Marital Failure in a Crumbling Society? Although the growth in the number of divorced individuals in Germany from 138,000 in 1910 to 521,744 in 1933 suggests a striking increase in divorces across the interwar period, the 1933 figure represents only 0.8 percent of the population, compared with 0.2 percent in 1910.148 What is more noteworthy than any absolute change in figures is the effect of certain social and economic crises on Germans’ marriages (of all kinds). The turmoil of postwar public life was reflected in private relationships, with the annual number of divorces in Germany rising from 13,552 in 1919 to 22,534 in 1920.

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The figures then remained relatively stable across the 1920s (including in the aftermath of the hyperinflation), but soared to 42,485 by 1933 after the onset of the Great Depression, when public debt and deflationary policies saw unemployment climb to 6 million.149 This significant increase suggests that situational factors, such as economic hardships after the war and the Great Depression, were the great stressors on marriages, along with the psychological effects that these events had, especially on already vulnerable veterans and the unemployed. Economic problems certainly featured more frequently in interwar accounts of unhappy Jewish marriages and, despite a lack of divorce law reform, wives increasingly resisted the pressure to stay with their partners.150 In 1922 a young member of a large Jewish Viennese family complained about her husband to one of her sisters. She worried that he was not taking his studies seriously while eating through the dowry she had brought into the marriage. As a result, she was looking for employment herself, which was not altogether plentiful in early interwar Vienna. Perhaps to compensate for his professional and marital difficulties, her husband was, “in contrast,” the “Salonlöwe” (salon lion) in his private life, “swarmed around” by female students, she complained.151 The language used by this wife—­noting that her partner acted like a lion when socializing—­suggests that her husband’s masculinity was under threat so long as he struggled to carve out a career path and perform the traditional role of male breadwinner. She ended up leaving this failing medical student for an office equipment salesman and Zionist who proved a more faithful partner and a better paternal figure for her child.152 Intellectuals as varied as author Grete Meisel-­Hess and psychoanalyst Ernst Simmel agreed that husbands’ search for a new role in an era of female employment and increased competition for jobs was a common pressure on marriages. Simmel noted that, although working-­class women had always been present in what was seen as a male workplace, new clerical positions for middle-­class women meant that men’s economic role was under threat across the social strata.153 Hence male partners, such as Martin Freud, who were struggling to find profitable employment, could show resentment toward their wives when the latter sought out their own careers rather than thanking their wives for their economic contributions.

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Jewish newspapers avidly collected stories of marital strife across the period. The Wiener Morgenzeitung (a Jewish paper, although its title implies that it was a wider circulation daily) had a regular column in the 1920s titled “Gerichtssaal” (courtroom) that often featured noteworthy divorces from across the city. One case focused on the divorce proceedings of a factory owner who complained that he had been forced into marriage by his father-­in-­law, an officer with the German army. The father-­in-­law would grant army orders to the factory only on the condition that his daughter marry the proprietor.154 Another story of economic struggles and the persistent presence of in-­laws features a wife who moved back in with her parents when her husband returned from the war and could not find the couple their own home. While living in shared accommodation, the husband then went on to bring another woman into the home.155 Both partners had apparently nurtured expectations about what married life would entail—­a family home and a constant companion—­yet both ended up finding what they sought elsewhere. The Wiener Morgenzeitung did not just hone in on scandals, however. More generally, it evinced a fascination with all the pressure points that existed in modern marriages. One column wondered about what constituted faithfulness in an era when men and women could socialize freely with one another. It cited the instance of a divorce case where a judge had to decide whether a woman dancing in her home with another man constituted a “break with marital fidelity.”156 (It did not, ruled the Viennese judge.) Another column wondered whether adultery was still adultery when one’s partner had seemed to tolerate it, referencing another court case where this question had been posed. (It was, although, in this case, the “wronged” partner’s alleged tolerance of the behavior was in doubt.)157 Many human interest stories on marriage appeared alongside these reports from court cases. One featured the efforts of researchers to provide a science of reading emotions that would eliminate individuals’ uncertainties about their partners’ feelings.158 Yet another heard from those who held out less hope for science, such as the Austrian League for Men’s Rights, which advocated that its members take out a kind of divorce insurance.159 All these reports suggest that the newspaper’s readership was not really

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sure what made marriages work anymore or what expectations individuals could have of their partners. What one finds when reading family members’ letters to one another is that, by contrast, siblings and parents provided quite predictable explanations when marriages failed. The Koeb family correspondent who complained about her student husband was one of a large extended family whose members wrote regularly to one another from 1897 to the end of World War II. Their letters reveal that two other siblings were trapped in especially unhappy marriages, which happened to be mixed marriages. In the letters the two non-­Jewish partners were marked out by their unintelligible, frightening emotions. A brother Max was married to a French Catholic, whose animosity toward him and their children remained a mystery to all the Koeb correspondents. A sister Bertha was married to a borderline violent Protestant, whose most notable appearance in letters was when he almost hit Bertha after becoming angry that their daughter was spending money on books.160 We cannot know whether these partners were really so angry or whether their relative remoteness made them appear more mysterious or frightening. Certainly, the siblings’ laments usually focused on religious differences when explaining marital problems. For instance Max’s decision to convert to Catholicism—­a religion with an absolute proscription of divorce—­was cited as the reason he remained in an unhappy marriage.161 Fairly stark and heavy-­handed contrasts were provided between the disrespectful Protestant husband and another sister’s Jewish bridegroom from whom “respect flowed as if he were a teacher.”162 (Presumably this contrast was particularly telling, given that Bertha’s husband seemed to have little regard for learning, having objected to books being bought.) The important takeaway from these letters is that, although many Germans or Austrians may not really have known what made marriages work, cultural alibis such as religious differences could be invoked as explanations once marriages—­particularly marriages that broke conventions—­started to flounder. The data on divorce do not provide any really unambiguous clues as to its causes in either Jewish or mixed marriages. Partly this is because the Prussian statistical office did not make distinctions between all-­Jewish and mixed marriages when presenting the reasons for divorces. The figures for

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the years 1927–­1929 nevertheless reveal that in all divorces involving at least one Jewish partner, the most likely cause was “gross neglect of marital duties,” followed by adultery. Interestingly, Jewish women were the most likely to have been found guilty of “gross neglect” (this was the cause in 70.1 percent of divorces where the wife was Jewish) but the least likely to have broken up a marriage through their adultery (which happened in 26.4 percent of divorces involving a Jewish wife). By contrast, non-­Jewish wives were the most likely to have caused a divorce through an act of unfaithfulness (this occurred in 46.1 percent of divorces involving a Jewish husband and a non-­Jewish wife) but the least likely to have been found guilty of neglecting their marital duties (this was cited as the reason in 48.2 percent of cases). Divorcing Jewish and non-­Jewish men in either intra-­Jewish or mixed marriages were slightly more likely to be found guilty of neglecting their duties than of committing adultery (neglect being the reason in roughly 55–­60 percent of cases, whereas adultery proved to be the case in only 38–­44 percent of divorces).163 Although these figures do not lend themselves to easy analysis, a couple of significant trends stand out. For one thing, adultery receded from being the primary cause of prewar divorces and was replaced by the controversial “gross neglect” cause, which allowed dissatisfied partners to cite a much broader set of behaviors as the cause of marital breakdown. For this reason, gross neglect was suspected of being the closest thing to a no-­blame divorce, which would make it easier for couples to end their marriages. Perhaps, then, this trend suggests not only that more “liberal” attitudes toward divorce in German courts had grown but also that any preexisting consensus about what the roles of wife and husband should entail had broken down. The other significant factor was the difference in how often adultery was the cause of divorces in marriages involving Jewish partners. Although 44 percent of divorces were attributed to adultery on the part of a Jewish husband, little over a quarter of marriages involving Jewish wives were ended for this reason. When seeking out explanations for this difference, we should remember that some male marriage seekers hoped for a freedom in their intimate relationships that could compensate for professional lives still marred by prejudice and discrimination. Given their high hopes for love relationships (alongside dowry considerations), such men may have been more prone

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to feel disillusion with how their marriages worked out in practice. But, as the data on divorce requests in Prussia from the 1920s and an earlier study on specifically Jewish divorces in 1908 suggest, it was not as though plenty of women were not also discontented with their marriages.164 The question that lingers is why more men turned to adultery and more women envisaged divorce as a solution to their dissatisfaction. Perhaps men continued to seek the “Sabbath for the heart” they had hoped their partner would provide, seeking it elsewhere rather than wanting to end their marriages altogether. They also had more opportunities to meet other women as customers or through business contacts. More women may have realized that the expectations placed on them were too onerous, or, more likely, they sought outside help to reform their partners’ behavior. Data from earlier reconciliation processes suggest a greater willingness among women to return to their marriages after an arbitration process in any case.165 The expressionist classic Die Stadt ohne Juden, or The City Without Jews, was released by H. K. Breslauer in 1924, two years after the publication of Hugo Bettauer’s hugely successful and widely translated novel of the same name. The film tells two stories of contemporary Austria, one personal and the other political. The viewer initially watches the rapid rise and climax of political antisemitism, as the Austrian chancellor persuades the nation’s politicians to pass a law forcing all Jews to emigrate. Antisemitism is not just imposed from the top down, though; rabble rousers in cafes and bars also start to denounce the Jewish presence in Austria. It is at this moment that the film’s focus shifts and we see a young couple trying to enjoy an evening out in one of these venues. As we learn more about this young couple—­she is Christian, he is Jewish—­we appreciate how a political campaign crashes into the intimate life of a couple in love. The film shifts back and forth between scenes showing the couple courting and tableaus of the increasingly angry political classes. The almost exaggerated gentility on display between suitor and girlfriend jars with the brashness of an ever rowdier and all-­male political sphere. What we realize is that political life makes it ever more difficult for the young Jewish man to preserve a pleasant relationship with his partner.

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This case study encapsulates one of the larger stories of Jewish private life from the period: that it became extremely difficult for intimate relationships to function as a semi-­autonomous society of two. But perhaps the bigger story to come out of this chapter is how durable marriages were, particularly when we consider the enormous and unsettling changes that couples and families experienced during the interwar years. Even if Jewish marriages had slightly higher divorce rates and mixed marriages significantly higher ones, the fact remained that most marriages survived all the political, economic, and social upheaval of the period. Freud’s biographer, Fritz Wittels, himself a psychoanalyst, also wondered about this in a 1928 article, “The Sacrament of Marriage.” Wittels was interested in how marriage’s promise of permanence and stability worked in an age of social mobility and migration. But he also reflected on the relatively unchanging models of masculinity and femininity that marriage offered at a time when labile sexual drives and a certain gender fluidity were recognized. His answer was that marriage was built on a “glorious error.”166 Men and women who remembered the apparently unchanging love of their fathers and mothers were encouraged to believe that their sexual love could turn into the kind of stable love that kept families together even as new generations moved away from their parents. This was an error, thought Wittels, but a glorious one that was often self-­sustaining—­so long as factors such as religion, mores, and the law contrived to uphold it. Wittels was getting at the essence of how marriages could be endowed with a certain kind of romance—­a romance that promised eternal, unchanging, unyielding love at a time when so many other aspects of German (and especially Jewish) lives were in flux. As his decision to speak of marriage as a sacrament suggests, Wittels was not speaking about specifically Jewish marriages. Rather, he was generalizing about all marriages sharing a certain sacrality. In this regard, he was illustrating that Jewish and Christian teachings may have converged in modern Europe, or, to put it in the terms of German Jewish philosopher Constantin Brunner, that Christian societies had learned the “language of love” invented by Jews.167 But as both Wittels and Brunner contended, this language was really a noble and beautiful fiction that survived only so long as individuals and societies believed in it. Even if it became harder to believe

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in this fiction amid the tumult of interwar Europe, we have seen that couples continued to try, even if they sometimes did so with a degree of humor. Their belief in the strange sacralizing work done by marriage was important for Jewish and mixed couples before 1933 but vitally sustaining when they found themselves living in the Third Reich. In the next chapter we witness couples’ efforts to hold on to each other as they are cast adrift from a German society they had regarded as their own.

THREE

“They Stuck Together like Iron Ore” Jewish and Mixed Marriages in the Third Reich

In the spring of 1942, 17½-­year-­old Fred Löwenberg and his friend noticed a girl walking toward an advertising column in their home town of Breslau. They both wanted to ask her out, and so they raced each other to reach her. Löwenberg was sure it was “love at first sight” and ran faster. He managed to talk to the girl first but noticed that she did not reply. Instead she lowered a bag from her shoulder and showed her yellow star. At the sight of this, the young man apologetically dropped his head and she carried on her way. Löwenberg was only half-­Jewish and therefore, just like “full Aryan” Germans, was forbidden to date Jewish women. The next time he saw the girl, about five or six months later, she was being marched toward the Breslau train station with other Jews who were being sent to the camps.1 Löwenberg’s memory captures the agonizing choice that individuals faced if they felt attraction to someone deemed to be of the wrong racial stock. They could follow their hearts but then risk imprisonment or death, or they could do what was politically expedient. The realities confronted by the various kinds of outsiders—­Jews, mixed-­race Germans, disabled people, Roma, and those who fell for Jews—­were not always so clear-­cut, however. 111

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For those Jews who continued to fall in love with one another or even with other Germans, the very experience of falling for someone could be preciously life-­affirming. It revealed the psychological and emotional limits of a regime that aspired to totalitarianism and hoped to utterly dehumanize its victims before murdering them. And the reality that at least some few individuals could still feel a love that escaped the logic of political expediency and fear could be a source of hope that Nazi racial doctrine might, after all, prove transient. In this chapter I trace the trajectories of individuals and couples who fell in love and who were, in some cases, able to get and even stay married during the Third Reich. As in previous chapters, the narrative continues beyond the wedding day, exploring how marriages endured or were, in some instances, unable to survive. The terrain over which this chapter traverses is particularly hard to navigate because the dramatically deteriorating situation for German Jews meant that couples’ circumstances could shift dramatically. And yet a significant number showed a tenacious belief in their relationships and a remarkable fidelity to one another. Even though falling in love could convince some individuals that they could listen to and act on their desires in whatever was left of their private lives, it is worth dwelling on exactly why Jewish and mixed couples got married after 1933, given that so many expectations about what marriage would entail had to change. Before 1933 many German Jews could hope to move on and up in German society and give birth to children who would be similarly mobile. By the end of the 1930s, couples instead had to fear that not only would their social status continue to diminish but that any children they had would live dangerous and degraded lives. We might expect that Jewish and mixed marriages would suffer in such altered circumstances. And some marriages did collapse, but the more striking phenomenon is how many endured.2 Using figures from Baden-­Württemberg and Hamburg, Ursula Büttner found that as little as 7 percent of intermarried Germans in Nazi Germany went through with a divorce.3 The data are sketchy for Jewish marriages, but it appears that even more Jewish couples stayed together and that the marriage rate actually increased between 1933 and 1939.4 One of the central theses of this chapter is that the dominant romantic model of the love marriage before 1933 proved

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strong enough to withstand the changing norms that the National Socialists sought to enforce after 1933. This was despite the fact that Jewish and Christian religious leaders rarely spoke up for love matches between adherents of different faiths. One reason for the survival of marriages between persecuted individuals is that to a greater extent than their Christian counterparts, Jewish and mixed couples often had already left behind families and communities when they began married life.5 Husbands and wives looked to each other as the one constant in their lives as they moved to new towns and cities and as usually husbands started new jobs. This experience of being a source of support for one another during periods of social isolation prepared couples, at least to some extent, for the marginalization and persecution they suffered during the Third Reich. Such experiences also meant that couples were already somewhat willing to move and start again in order to build viable social and professional lives. This helped some to envisage emigration or forced resettlement in profoundly different circumstances. Trends that predated 1933—­and that had been motors of social mobility and multiculturalism in cities—­therefore served as formative experiences that helped couples to survive downward social mobility and forced migration after 1933. Couples who had ascribed a political significance to their love relationships were also more likely to remain committed to one another. If they were Zionists or Orthodox Jews, the experience of Nazi Germany might confirm to them that intimate love relationships could thrive only when embedded in religious or cultural communities that shared the same values. For those who had advocated free love in an earlier era, it was more difficult to believe in love’s political valence when interethnic and interfaith relationships were excoriated as perversions that went against healthy German racial instincts. Understanding how such couples managed not to internalize the feelings and judgments of other Germans and to remain in love is one of the goals of this chapter. We will see that some couples sought to practice familiar gestures that had evoked feelings of love in the past and thereby hold on to the image they had formed of their partner before 1933. Others had to disconnect from the here and now and displace those feelings onto safer figures such as a deity, who usually served as a surrogate for newly enfeebled (particularly male) partners.

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A related paradox that I seek to explain in this chapter is the survival of marriages despite the dramatic changes in their gender dynamics.6 I have shown in the previous chapters that for all the political claims made about love matches, many modern marriages—­Christian, Jewish, and mixed—­ turned out to be quite traditional in terms of the division of labor. Whereas these modern marriages could signal the end of adolescent freedoms and a return to traditional roles for many young women, the repressive conditions of Nazi Germany often compelled women in mixed and Jewish marriages to take on more responsibilities in the public sphere. Particularly if the female partner was not Jewish, she might have to play an entrepreneurial role, negotiating with officials to secure rations or visas or better treatment for Jewish partners.7 As we have seen, before 1933 the private sphere could be a counterworld in which especially male partners might live out the freedoms denied them in their professional lives. But once they were cut out of their public and professional roles during the Third Reich, their lack of freedom was primarily experienced in previously cherished private spaces. Marriages therefore had to survive an astonishing upheaval in gender dynamics. Because of so much traumatic change, marriage came to have a strong appeal for vulnerable couples, even when it did not promise any material advantages. These couples clung to an institution that endowed them with some status and mutual support and, in most cases, still commanded a degree of respect in the surrounding society.8 And so, although marriage was an extremely dynamic institution during an era of persecution and mass migration, it came to be celebrated for its apparently unchanging nature, which, in turn, provided some solid grounding for any unified sense of self that persecuted individuals could preserve. From Free Love to Comradeship in Suffering One of the charms of falling in love was surely that it might not have happened that way. It was not just that individuals chose one another; this increasingly was the case with arranged marriages. There was also the sense that falling in love could happen by chance; one’s horizons were not fixed in place. As Vera Deutsch, a middle-­class Austrian woman who met her Jewish husband when she entered the world of Viennese Social Democratic politics,

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explained, “Chance meetings play a decisive role in the lives of individuals who no longer fear violating dogma or family traditions.”9 Individuals in modern societies usually mixed in multiple circles and met strangers who might belong to what seemed like a different world. In feeling attraction toward and trying out love with an unfamiliar person, the lover might then experience some kind of self-­revelation, understanding in new ways what they most desired and prioritized.10 For these reasons, among others, love relationships played a pivotal role in helping Jewish women and men to gain a sense of self in modern Germany and Austria. And so it was precisely this open-­ended experimentation with selfhood that National Socialists tried to prevent when they excluded Jews from German society and made it more difficult for interethnic love to blossom. To the National Socialist regime, the idea of self should, in one fundamental way, be stable; it should be rooted in an individual’s sense of their racial identity.11 The regime introduced a two-­sided program of incentives and proscriptions to instill such a racialized sense of selfhood in non-­Jewish Germans. Heinrich Himmler consistently advocated early marriages, arguing that Christian morality had proved unable to discipline young Germans’ sexual behavior while they waited to marry in their mid-­to late 20s.12 Indeed, so eager was the regime to channel young Germans’ desires that they arranged mass marriages of over 100 “Aryan” couples as early as November 1933.13 More generally, as Dagmar Herzog has shown, Nazi-­approved advice literature and even the official SS journal, Das Schwarze Korps, venerated romantic partnerships as the most enriching and fulfilling relationships that members of the same Volk could experience.14 Individuals who found racially desirable partners—­among whom the vast majority of Germans could be counted—­ received honors and financial rewards for what was described as a valuable service to their communities and their nation.15 Fearing that incentives would not prove sufficient to change Germans’ sexual behavior, the regime also imposed legal restrictions, such as the notorious Nuremberg Laws of 1935. These measures explicitly forbade marriage and sexual intercourse outside marriage between Jews and “Aryans” and assured dire consequences for those who transgressed the new legal proscriptions.16 The National Socialist government thereafter passed progressively more drastic laws to ensure that ever fewer public locations provided spaces

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where sociability and affection between Jewish and Christian Germans could flourish. Once cities and towns forbade Jews from entering parks, restaurants, cinemas, and eventually almost all public spaces during those evening hours when most people were at leisure, it became all but impossible for friendships or romances to spring up out of daily interactions.17 Yet, as police records, the regime’s own statistics, and some corroborating Sopade reports reveal, Germans’ sexual behavior remained somewhat unruly. Incidences of casual sex increased in the later years of Nazi rule, and instances of interracial intimacy (known as Rassenschande, or “racial pollution”) were, though relatively rare, all too noticeable, particularly in settings where “Aryan” Germans came into regular contact with outsiders.18 How, then, did Jewish men and women, not least those who were socialized in a more open era, internalize the message that such exclusionary measures were supposed to communicate? Some young men certainly recorded feeling an antipathy for their own Jewish characteristics and a more intense need for affirmation from “Aryan” Germans. Walter Warmbrunn, a teenage member of the German Jewish nationalist group, the Schwarzes Fähnlein, fantasized that he was the illegitimate son of a German prince. He also became infatuated with a member of the Hitler Youth who took him to an SA riding camp in 1933. He later understood his feelings of attraction to an aspiring Nazi to be symptomatic of a broader “identification with the aggressor” that a subset of right-­wing nationalist Jews displayed.19 Older men usually did not prove quite so impressionable, although personal advertisements that mentioned Jewish suitors’ status as World War I veterans suggest that their authors’ self-­images and perceptions of what might make them attractive to prospective Jewish partners were still strongly shaped by the surrounding German culture.20 It is more difficult still to track the preferences of Jewish women. The odd glimpses of interethnic desire surfaced in dreams, such as those recorded in Charlotte Beradt’s remarkable account of Germans’ dream life in Nazi Germany, Das Dritte Reich des Traums. For instance, one “very German-­ looking” baptized Jewish woman recalled a dream from 1934 in which she was in Switzerland with two blond naval officers. At one point she found herself recoiling at the sight of a “very ugly Jewish woman” who fell to the ground while walking with her husband. The dream combined antipathy for

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imagined weak, unattractive Jews, guilt for such a feeling, and barely suppressed erotic thoughts about the German military companions. Although the woman protested in her dream that she had little in common with either the Jewish couple or the members of the German military, she nevertheless remembered herself conceding to the German pair that “she looked like them . . . at the most she might find herself in bed with . . .” Before she could finish the thought, the woman woke herself up, presumably, according to Beradt, because her conscious mind sought to prevent this subconscious thought from fully forming.21 If we turn to diaries and memoirs, we find numerous young German Jews who did not so much desire “Aryan” Germans per se as the freedom to continue choosing their partners. A novelistic autobiography written in 1938 by a German Jewish émigré, Martin May, described the horror he felt when he considered not following his desire to date a non-­Jewish colleague but instead orient his relationships around the prejudices of the new regime. In 1932 May had responded positively to his secretary’s advances and found himself soon after threatened by the woman’s brother and his colleagues in the SA. A former comrade from the World War I trenches who was now also a Brownshirt protected May.22 When May resolved to marry his secretary, he signaled his commitment not only to her but also more generally to continue living a free social life. Indeed, in his narrative May dwells on the significance of his wedding day, not really because of what it meant for him and his bride but because it brought together friends whose love for the couple transcended the new political orthodoxies. In one of his most moving descriptions of the wedding, he describes the small party of seven who attended as “an unusual assortment who held on to one another like iron ore.”23 Instead of the woman’s family, who did not condone the marriage, the bride and groom were surrounded by two other married couples and May’s elderly father. One of the couples was the author’s wartime comrade and current SA member and his wife, and the second featured a previous (Jewish) girlfriend, whose wealthy father had prevented her from marrying May because of his relatively lowly social standing. In an even more heightened way than had been true for earlier generations of Jewish men, a loving private sphere could compensate for the persecution and marginalization that men such as May experienced in public life.

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Private refuges were especially important for mixed couples, given that increasing numbers of Jewish institutions perceived the regime’s exclusionary policies as confirmation that intermarriage had, in this and previous eras, been a false path for Jews to pursue. As a column in a November 1934 edition of the liberal Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung explained, recent history had reminded Jews to once more heed the teachings of Ezra, who had brought fifth-­century BCE Jewish communities back to Jerusalem and to a life founded on observance of the Torah. The columnist quoted the emphatic words of the high priest: “Faithlessly have you acted and brought home foreign women. Thus have you increased the guilt of Israel.”24 Drawing parallels with the present day, the columnist noted that, although some high priests’ families in Ezra’s day had taken non-­Jewish partners, the common folk understood the wisdom of Ezra’s exhortations.25 Local community newspapers echoed this refrain, comparing the current political threats to Jewish communities with longer-­term self-­imposed dangers. Contrasting the recent sterility of German Jewish communities with more enduring trends among European Jewish populations, the author of an article in the Gemeinde-­Zeitung für die israelistischen Gemeinden Württembergs used demographer Arthur Ruppin’s research to show that, until recently, Jewish communities had been unusually fertile. Indeed, by 1930 the worldwide Jewish population had multiplied fivefold over the previous hundred years; this was apparently not only due to innovations in modern hygiene but also to a new kind of “religiosity.”26 Viewed from this perspective, the decreased fertility of those German Jews who intermarried and sought assimilation in German culture was therefore a short-­term aberration, caused by decadent elites, that could be corrected by returning to more traditional ways of being. The message that marital love could not go against a natural order that demanded intramarriage within ethnic groups was not so much a rejection of an “anything goes” morality from the Weimar years as an adaptation of a biological perspective that had become increasingly influential in the early twentieth century.27 If the material that appeared in Jewish publications nevertheless gave the impression that Jewish authors were mimicking the völkisch perspective of their oppressors, that was no coincidence. Jewish publications were censored, and so whatever was published could not openly contradict the racial

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gospel of the regime. A Zionist perspective was particularly favored because it suggested that Jewish peoples belonged in a particular place rather than envisaging them as part of fluid, multicultural European societies.28 This may be one reason that Felix Theilhaber’s arguments against intermarriage and other signs of assimilation enjoyed a revival in those few Jewish publications that were allowed to function in Nazi Germany.29 This is not to say that Theilhaber’s perspective did not have a longer intellectual lineage behind it; certain Jewish demographers had worried about the eugenic consequences of mixed marriages since the turn of the century.30 But it is significant that other voices could not be heard. However, by no means were all Jews or other Germans ready to think in exclusively racial terms when contemplating future partners. Other cultural and political pressures could still predominate. This was true for Edgar Lohner, a non-­Jew, who fell in love with an Egyptian German Jewish woman while visiting fellow Catholic opponents of the Nazi regime in Paris in the summer of 1938. An inexperienced 20-­year-­old from a small town in the Rhineland, Lohner was captivated by his new lover’s worldliness and intelligence and wanted her to be the first woman he kissed.31 What is perhaps even more striking about Lohner is that, even after he was arrested, he willingly and unashamedly, even proudly, confessed to loving a Jew. It is tempting to portray Lohner as a hero who doggedly believed in love in the face of hatred and repression, but he was not simply a free spirit who defended his right to love whomever he liked. He proved quite sensitive to other cultural taboos when he was accused and convicted of being sexually intimate with male friends during his trial. In this instance he denied having had homosexual experiences, even though the punishment his friends received for this “crime” was much less harsh than his sentence for “race defilement.”32 (Lohner received a prison sentence of nine months.) Perhaps, then, Lohner’s proud declaration of love for his Jewish partner was not so much an expression of a love that was blind to politics as an assertion of a heterosexual identity. Other manifestations of especially working-­class Germans’ Eigen-­Sinn (willfulness or independent spirit) were evident in memoirs written by Jewish men who survived the war years by living illegally. Tauchers (Jews or “mixed-­ race” Germans who lived underground) from Berlin such as Lothar Orbach

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and Gad Beck recalled receiving advances from male and female fellow factory workers who seemed entirely unconcerned with the consequences of being caught.33 Court cases involving instances of group sex, including one between Jewish and “Aryan” Germans, were also noted by puzzled investigators, who struggled to understand not only such apparently meaningless hedonism but also why a number of these collectives stuck together, meeting up regularly for a year or more.34 In some instances, Jewish Germans were engaging in promiscuity with a purpose. Particularly for young men who were living semicamouflaged as Tauchers, there was not only the thrill of breaking taboos but also, more profoundly, a sense that by accumulating positive, enlivening experiences, they were displacing fearful feelings that were otherwise omnipresent and demoralizing. As they became comfortable expressing and receiving signs of affection from Germans who were not constantly consumed with fears for their own existence, many might also have regained access, albeit fleeting, to some sort of normal life. Orbach explained the significance of his first sexual experience with an unhappily married woman whose husband was fighting on the Eastern Front: “For this one amazing night, I did not think of death, of war, or of danger. . . . In Trudy’s arms I was a young man like any other, and I became totally lost in the moment.” But equally important was what followed. As he became comfortable coming and going to her apartment, he recalled that he “savored the serene rhythms of our domesticity,” appreciating that for his partner, he “was her treasure, sheltered from the outside world.” Once the woman’s husband returned and he had to give up the relationship, he reflected, “It was the first and only taste of adulthood I had known.”35 The sense that illicit sex could provide comfort was not unique to persecuted Jewish individuals; it sometimes applied to those who had sexual relations with them. Gad Beck explained this in the case of a boss of his, with whom he had sex and who provided Beck and his friends with a trailer where they could hide. As Beck remembered, this individual also needed to briefly forget his guilt and escape the racial rules and emotional norms of the regime. In our fifteen or twenty meetings I had the feeling it was his way of putting everything aside for a few moments—­the responsibility of the company, the war, the dismal times we were living in. He could do or not do

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whatever he wanted, far removed from reality, and on top of that he was doing something good for those of us he was helping. For him it was a combination of moral action, his own desires, and the appeasement of his feelings of guilt.36

When young Jews demonstrated their Eigen-­Sinn, this might not mean choosing any German they liked so much as choosing someone who promised to accompany them on a path that was altogether different from what their assimilated parents had followed. One well-­to-­do Berliner, Ruth Nessel, found that her “very very foreign and very dark looking” partner, the son of Polish Jews, helped her to disengage from her German Jewish identity and carve out a new sense of self that depended less on the codes of assimilation that she had inherited from her father.37 Whereas her father told her to remain in Germany or Austria, believing nothing would happen to her because the Germans were “a cultured people,” her partner, whom she married six months after meeting him in 1938, belonged to a different world and had a different perspective. A factory technician equipped with practical skills, he was ready to begin again in a new country and was willing to emigrate east before eventually settling in Palestine. As Nessel acknowledged, the contrast he presented to an assimilated German Jew was extremely attractive: She was “crazily infatuated” with him, mostly because of his strength and because he looked “so foreign.”38 Another Berliner, Margot Lieblich, drew a similar kind of strength from a Polish Jewish boyfriend, Jurek Dränger, whom she met as she and her Galician Jewish parents were forced to migrate to Poland. He was an ardent Zionist and a member of the Polish resistance and was well connected to useful locals on the outskirts of Kraków. Among his attractive qualities was his willingness to resist: Dränger recalled that his organization not only hid Jewish refugees from the Nazis but also carried out attacks, including shooting German occupiers at Kraków’s Germans-­only Cyganeria nightclub in December 1942.39 In many ways, Dränger proved the perfect companion for the formerly acculturated Lieblich as she was sent east and discovered that she did not belong to what was apparently now the Christian West. This quest to find a new kind of selfhood that was not allied with German nationality was something that young women and men embarked on not

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only as individuals in search of partners but also as a collective. Increasing numbers looked to Zionism. This ideological movement appealed not just as a political response to the apparent failure of assimilation but also as a means of creating a self-­conscious community of otherwise spurned young Jews.40 It is important to note that Zionism thrived (in some senses) among young Jews because by 1936 the National Socialist regime had banned all other forms of Jewish youth groups. As a result, the membership of Zionist youth organizations grew to 50,000—­about 60 percent of the total Jewish youth population—­although these organizations were, in turn, closed down after Kristallnacht in November 1938.41 But there were other reasons that young Jews gravitated toward the movement. Agnes Weiler Wolf, a teenager from Munich, explained the emotional appeal of Zionism when she discussed why her youth group adopted its philosophy. Her organization, the Bund deutsch-­jüdischer Jugend, had actually started out as a non-­Zionist German nationalist group but had turned toward Zionism in the mid-­1930s under Martin Buber’s influence. Having read Buber’s Hassidic Stories, Wolf recalled that “we assimilated Western Jews became aware for the first time in our young lives that our downtrodden, despised, and desperately poor Eastern Jewish brothers treasured a world of indestructible splendor in their love relationship with God.” Once emboldened by knowledge of this new kind of love, Wolf “poured [her] feelings into . . . fiery poem[s]” and fell for an older member of the group, Paul, when she heard him speak as the voice of God in a performance of Beer-­Hoffmann’s Jacob’s Dream. Paul, who resolved earlier than many of his youth group peers to settle in Jerusalem, “help[ed Wolf] to cope with being rejected, persecuted, and threatened by the same people whom we have been taught to trust and love.” One night, Wolf and Paul walked through Munich until 3 in the morning, “discussing the philosophy of suffering, guilt, punishment, and the sense of revenge and hate, or the lack of its sense.” Even though she had spent a “night alone in the company of a man on whom I had a crush,” “only [their] minds had touched with unforgettable intensity.” She recalled thinking that her father, brought up in a different age, “would never believe that such a spiritual need cover [sic; could?] override physical involvement.”42 If Wolf felt love without sensual desire for her youth group leader, a young gay Berliner, Gad Beck, explained how life in an underground

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­ ionist organization allowed him to feel and communicate desire in an asZ toundingly joyous and carefree way. For instance, in 1940 he enjoyed a “romantically surging youthful love” for a young man with whom he worked on a hakhsharah, or training farm for Zionists, in Skaby, southeast of Berlin. Beck found that living in this environment “was incredibly erotic . . . such an unfamiliar closeness to nature for an entire summer—­and the other boys! I relished the sight of their beautiful bodies in the group shower after work.” One explanation for Beck’s desire for his fellow pioneers was that by encouraging physical strength and agricultural and craft skills, Zionism was cultivating young Jews who displayed characteristics esteemed by the surrounding culture. For young Jewish men who had been subject to stereotypes about unmanly, physically underdeveloped Jewish males, this may have been of particular significance. But equally important was the opportunity these young people had to see one another in a relatively happy state and not cowed by the surrounding society. For Beck and others, “The hachshara was . . . remote and idyllic, while outside the storm of history was raging.”43 Apart from Beck’s own account of his relationships, we can also learn valuable context from reading reflections by two of the leaders of the Chug Chaluzi, the underground Zionist youth organization to which Beck belonged from 1943 to 1944. Jizchak Schwersenz and Edith Wolff explained the role that first a legal youth aliyah school (which prepared young German Jews for emigration) and then the illegal resistance group played, serving those who had gone underground. Our young people, who were no longer allowed to visit the theatre or cinema, to go hiking, who lacked any sense of community—­which is so important for a maturing person—­who had no conventional schooling or professional training, this youth longed to be completed by a companion. But, confronted with deportations and the “despair and growing apathy of parents and adults,” these youths “shrank and fell apart.”44

Partly the message preached by the informal Zionist school they attended—­ that an alternative future elsewhere was possible—­helped, but at least as important were the activities that this tight-­knit and embattled community

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performed. Most of all by dancing, these young people occupied their minds and filled their time with affirming experiences. Schwersenz wrote movingly of the almost manic dancing that “these downtrodden Jewish children” performed at the end of the day in their school. With “an almost wild stamina,” these children danced “folk dances, young people’s dances, rounds, Israeli Horrah-­dances [sic; hora]” and thereby let their “dammed up youthful passions run riot.” Through these interactions the boys and girls learned a kind of bodily intimacy that, in some instances, turned erotic, with at least one couple being found to be expecting a child.45 Equally important was the vision of a shared future together that such Zionist groups offered young women and men. Once these individuals could fantasize about a future that was free from the daily fear of annihilation, they rediscovered what Ernst Bloch called the principle of hope: They could plan for a shared life together and turn what had been cravings for any kind of closeness into feelings of love for a particular individual.46 As we will see in the next section, the hope of sharing a life with a partner continued to be a source of strength in all but the worst circumstances. The Abiding Appeal of Marriage The guests were given vol-­au-­vents, trout, beef consommé, goose, even fruits from California. The groom’s family had traveled from Vienna, the bride’s from Leipzig; Karlsbad, the venue for the wedding, was a central meeting point. How important it must have been for the young couple, Hermann Bondi and Erna Merkin, amid all the tumult of life in 1935, to make the most of this day: to eat plentifully, to dance, and to be joyous, however fleetingly. They observed all the right conventions: Bridal marches by Wagner and Mendelssohn were performed at the outset, and by the end of the program, the guests were singing along to Jewish folk songs.47 Getting together to mark this special day surely made sense: A communal celebration of love could revive even the most worn out spirits. But as for the marriage: What kinds of hopes could a young Jewish couple nurture, given the situation in their countries? Private records such as wedding booklets, telegrams, and the humorous wedding-­day “newspapers” produced by couples’ families and friends offer a perspective on the aspirations that couples and their loved ones brought with

FIGU R E 4. Pages from the ­wedding booklet for ­Hermann Bondi and Erna Merkin. Source: Yad Vashem, O.30/266.

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them as they entered into marriages. (It should be noted that it proved much easier to locate these kinds of records from all-­Jewish rather than interfaith weddings.) What is most striking is that they did not change as dramatically as we might expect. Certainly irreverent humor was more prevalent in booklets produced before the Nuremberg Laws. A young couple’s wedding booklet from March 1935 includes jokes about ensuring that the official announcement of the marriage was published by the local synagogue in Karlsruhe at least ten months before the birth of a child. Another skit describes the couple being found hanged in a civil registry office after the discovery of a family scandal. Such jokes would surely have been too lighthearted in later years, when couples were extremely anxious about giving birth and were genuinely contemplating suicide.48 Still, wedding-­day booklets and telegrams did not really become much more solemn in later years, although the good wishes expressed in them were more formulaic and less personal. A Bavarian couple, Joseph Neuburger and Therese Guttmann, were wed in May 1937, when much of their family had emigrated or were preparing to leave Germany. The set-­piece greetings nevertheless showed little trace of the chaos that had engulfed many families. A poem sent to the couple offered this forecast for the future: Time of roses time of dreams Wondrous joy of love Cross the threshold with our blessings Leave your worries far behind This day marks for you the beginning Of many years of endless joy.49

This poem adhered to a romantic script that imagined the home to be a peaceful and loving refuge from the outside world. Although this was written before Kristallnacht and before the wartime peak of roundups of Jews, it still had to overlook the violent intrusions into Jewish and mixed couples’ homes that had become commonplace. The Talmud-­Torah Commission sent a similarly anodyne greeting, although its description of marriage as a journey across the high seas, unwittingly or not, suggested that perilous travels might lie ahead for the couple.

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Happy journey on the sea of marriage Happy travels on the high seas A large portion of happiness and blessings The Talmud-­Torah Commission wishes you

Such formulaic greetings were commonplace, for what else was there to be said? To adapt a Stephen Spender quotation, Jewish couples had had the floor collapse under them. They “resembled dancers suspended in mid-­air yet miraculously able to pretend that they were still dancing.”50 For such Jewish couples, going through the motions of getting married and planning for the future was no mere foolishness but perhaps a psychologically crucial form of self-­deception that allowed them to go on living rather than become altogether apathetic and fatalistic.51 For these reasons, among others, the number of yearly intra-­Jewish marriages continued to rise from 2,174 in 1933 to 2,851 in 1938.52 (The number of intermarriages had already dropped dramatically before 1935: As much as 44 percent of Jews marrying in Germany chose non-­Jewish partners in 1933, but the number fell to 15 percent by the following year.)53 As political measures took away agency from Jewish Germans in bewilderingly arbitrary ways, grasping control of one’s destiny by committing to marriage served as a sign that some kind of stability could still be secured. This continued to be true even in the later years of the Third Reich, and it applied to mixed couples as well as Jewish ones. Beate Meyer collected stories of mixed couples in Hamburg going to remarkable lengths to achieve a respectable, bourgeois marriage, including committing “crimes.” One couple traveled to Britain to be wed, hoping that their union would be recognized when they returned. Another couple that was surviving nightly bombings sought to take advantage of the chaos in evacuation areas, hoping that they could secure false papers or avoid being asked for their genetic heritage. Neighbors sometimes even pressured mixed couples who were living together to get married, even though such marriages were illegal.54 Taking part in what might seem like the unchanging institution of marriage could help couples to cope with the profoundly disorientating changes that affected the rest of their lives. In reality, the shifting dynamics of marriages provoked by National Socialist policies could be profoundly unsettling. Babette Buch, a descendant

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of the venerable Jewish Schwarzschild family of Frankfurt, wrote a short story, “The Skull Cap,” that explored the psychological impact of racial politics on couples. In this roman à clef, she offers a semifictionalized account of how her husband (in real life ex-­husband) pleaded for his son’s life when the son was arrested in November 1938. While interacting with the authorities, the boy’s father, a former university professor, shed his debonair garb and demeanor and acquired the hunched gait and haunted aspect of a “ghetto Jew” from centuries past.55 Part of the irony of the story is that the father barely remembered his Jewish ancestry. In her story Buch is addressing a painful reality for many Jewish Germans who were assigned an ethnic identity that they did not recognize. In his diaries Victor Klemperer ruminated on this process whereby he was stripped of all German attributes and forced to present an unfamiliar Jewish aspect to the surrounding society. Not only did Klemperer seek to maintain that he was more authentically German than his oppressors, but he also rebelled against his confinement in Jewish enclaves made up of unfamiliar characters who, he complained, too readily accepted their oppression.56 Klemperer’s Protestant wife stiffened his resolve to remain a “German forever, [a] German nationalist,” even as Jewish acquaintances lauded fellow assimilated Jews for leaving Germany and starting again in Palestine.57 We might assume that in other cases loving couples helped each other to retain some sense of their former selves under drastically altered circumstances. But, as we have seen in previous chapters, individuals in modern German society developed a sense of self in a reflexive way. Their presentation of self had to be observed and accepted by others, who served as a kind of mirror through which they could then see themselves.58 If Jewish individuals were no longer able to present themselves in all kinds of ways that were formerly possible—­as civil servants, academics, other kinds of professionals, and so on—­and were forced to display themselves as degraded and defeated beings, how could their loved ones regard them in any other light? Evan Burr Bukey has uncovered numerous court cases that reveal how racial stereotypes and prejudices seeped into even long-­standing marital relationships between Jews and Christians in Nazi Austria. Couples who struggled to maintain a relationship that had been denounced by the regime often found that the surrounding culture encouraged them to attribute their

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frustrations and their negative experiences to their partners’ supposed racial characteristics. One husband seeking divorce described his wife’s sarcastic tongue as “characteristically Jewish,” and a disillusioned wife blamed her husband’s “unreasonable” antipathy for National Socialism for the breakdown of their marriage. Accounts were recorded by neighbors who recalled hearing a wife call her husband a “Jewish pig,” while he retaliated by saying she was a “shickse.”59 In these instances partners who sought a divorce were, no doubt, saying what they thought the courts wanted to hear. But they were also showing that the political culture had worked to legitimize and naturalize antipathies caused by daily struggles. To understand the predicament of Jewish and mixed couples, it may help to recall Ernst Fraenkel’s theory of the Third Reich as a dual state. In his legal analysis Fraenkel divided Nazi Germany into a prerogative state and a normative state. The prerogative state was dominated by party organizations and exercised its power arbitrarily and violently, and the normative state functioned through legislation, court rulings, and the procedures of administrative bodies. Whereas the normative state was ultimately subject to the prerogative state and served its interests, it was never altogether eclipsed.60 In an analogous way, we can speak of German society as a dual society during the Third Reich. The Nazis politicized social life to an unprecedented degree and eroded the borders between private and public, eventually forcibly “coordinating” German society to such an extent that Jews were denied any place in it. But, at least in the period before Kristallnacht, it was still possible for some Jews, especially those defined as Mischlinge, to encounter some fellow Germans as customers and neighbors and not only as members of a Volk that was committed to an unrelenting racial war. Jews and those married to Jews were often perplexed about how they fitted into this dual society. For all the regime’s efforts to sharpen the divide between Jews and “Aryans” in Germany, the issues of mixed marriages and of mixed-­ethnicity Germans proved intractable.61 The regime made various compromises after the notorious Nuremberg Laws of 1935. These included guidelines issued from December 1938 that created the category of “privileged” mixed marriages for unions between “Aryan” men and Jewish women and nonprivileged marriages for unions between Jewish husbands and Gentile wives.62 Similarly, children and grandchildren of mixed marriages

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were assigned the racial identities of Mischling of the first or second degree. Mostly these categorizations were made on the basis of ethnic heritage, although certain biographical details about wartime service or other signs of patriotic commitment could also affect one’s ethnic assignment.63 The effect of such racial schemas was to turn partners and parents in mixed families into assets or liabilities. For some partners the challenge was, say, to carry on loving a husband whose new designation ensured economic hardships and social isolation. For others, an “Aryan” partner was a life raft that they could cling to while fellow Jews were violently cast out of German society. Clearly, these measures drastically altered power dynamics in relationships. Making a distinction between privileged and nonprivileged marriages also served to accentuate the supposed differences between Jewish and “Aryan” men. “Aryan” husbands could perform the cherished role of protector of their wives. By contrast, Jewish husbands not only imperiled their partners by their very existence but also served as a drain on couples’ resources, as they were forced out of the German economy and deprived of all markers of social and professional status. Interestingly, however, more non-­Jewish wives remained with their Jewish husbands than vice versa.64 No obvious reason for this pattern emerges from court cases or from memoirs, although the relative marginalization of all women under the Nazi regime meant that the incentives to conform may have been felt more strongly by “Aryan” men, who could retain a degree of employment and social ambition during the Third Reich. For some partners such as Edeltrud Posiles, a Catholic Austrian wife who successfully hid her Jewish husband and his brothers in her sister’s fiancé’s apartment in Vienna, it was self-­evident that she would tie her fate to that of her partner. But she acknowledged that the loyalties of family and friends could not be taken for granted. Although she told her sister about her plan, Posiles left her future brother-­in-­law—­who had been drafted—­in the dark.65 Indeed, like Fraenkel’s two states, the two societies often confronted one another in antagonistic ways—­sometimes even within the same family. Daisy Koeb’s family, spread across Austria and Germany, experienced this particularly sharply when the Koeb’s cousin, Senta, married a member of the SA in May 1934. Her great aunt Grethe and aunt Trude were puzzled that the pair could be so “happy and in love,” given that the man was marrying “a half-­

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Jew.” Perhaps Senta’s father’s status as one of World War I’s fallen softened the impact for the man, or maybe the new husband was only a “pro forma” member of the SA, they wondered. In any case, the relatives in Austria were sure that their attendance at the wedding would only cause embarrassment, and so they stayed away, although they reassured each other that Senta still loved them even if she would rather they not attend.66 Non-­Jewish partners also witnessed the cleavages that opened up in their families once the National Socialists pressured German citizens to take sides in a racial war. Within one month of the Nazi takeover, a Catholic actress, Maria Donath, whose husband was Jewish, realized that her sadness about the political transformation in Germany was not shared by her relatives. In contrast, her brother received promotions, her aunt enjoyed the new outings that were put on for German children and their parents, and her cousin, an officer in the army, saw his salary double. Even her mother discounted Maria’s political worries as evidence that she was just being a Cassandra.67 Donath was offered professional incentives to divorce her partner but chose instead to emigrate to Vienna to live a precarious existence chasing after whatever work came her or her husband’s way. The gnawing anxiety that such an existence provoked drained the married couple’s strength, though.68 What made this daily life so difficult for Donath was the access she had to the relatively carefree existence of other Germans, once she was apart from her husband. On one solo trip back to Berlin in 1938, Donath visited a funfair and experienced the love (“Oh, the love that was there!”) that Germans seemed to have for one another. Having stopped off at a stand where she could test her shooting ability, she found herself joyously embraced by strangers who were impressed by her marksmanship. She had to remind herself that this German society was not happily apolitical but rather contaminated with Nazi ideology.69 Even carefully chosen articles in Der Stürmer, the Nazis’ antisemitic tabloid, showed how families were split apart by the regime’s racial policy. One notorious case pitted a sister who was engaged to a Nazi against her mother and another sister, who was in a relationship with a Jewish man. But it also positioned the regime’s racial zealots against the local courts and family services. The sister with the Nazi partner wanted to move out of the family home to live with her boyfriend’s ideologically conformist family. However,

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the local authorities were more inclined to reinforce the authority of the mother who, in the absence of a father figure, was head of the household. In this instance the dual state and the dual society were in conflict.70 A Jewish counterpart of Donath’s, actress Eva Wysbar, experienced at close range how precarious life was in this dual society. Her “Aryan” husband, a moderately successful director, sought to continue his career in Nazi Germany, making obliquely political films for the regime. But, as Wysbar explained, her husband became two people: a film director who had a good degree of freedom and the husband of a Jew whose marriage was excoriated in the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps. Both partners tried to live double lives. The (ex-­)husband, outwardly conformist, having sued for divorce at some point between 1933 and 1934, accepted a commission from Goebbels to make a film about “a complaining petit bourgeois” who became a “worthwhile member of society” after experiencing a Kraft durch Freude cruise. But, at the same time, while officially living in a hotel, he spent his evenings patrolling his (ex-­)wife’s house to make sure she was not picked up by the Gestapo. Wysbar continued trying to live as though circumstances were normal; she was eager that her first child not be born a German and so sought, in vain, to emigrate, but she went on to have a second child in Germany, believing it was important to reinforce the family unit in the face of a hostile outside world.71 As Victor Klemperer’s diaries painfully illustrate, it became obvious to Jewish and mixed couples that they had become dwindling and ostracized minorities by the end of the 1930s. In June 1935 the German Jewish population numbered 500,000, of whom only 35,000 were living in mixed marriages. But by mid-­1943, fully 12,987 of the remaining 13,217 registered Jews in Germany were married to “Aryan” partners.72 In some cases, Jewish couples or even non-­Jewish spouses suggested that their love deepened as they faced tribulations together. They also found solidarity among the oppressed. Wives who participated in the Rosenstrasse protests told Nathan Stoltzfus that they preferred the warm company of Jewish in-­laws to their own families, who, to varying degrees, imbibed the prejudices of the new regime. Some wives even chose to share the far less comfortable Jewish shelters during wartime aerial bombardments because they drew strength from the cheerfulness and charitableness of Jewish relations.73 Other memoirs

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written in the post-­Shoah period make similar claims about how embattled mixed and Jewish couples and families grew closer. Vally Fink’s recollections of her joyful wedding in 1941 are particularly striking, given that the ceremony took place shortly before the young Jewish couple were sent to Theresienstadt. Fink insisted that when she and her new husband “looked into each other’s glowing eyes” at the climax of the ceremony, “they forgot all of their troubles and their worries.” This was despite the fact that Fink’s husband, a forced laborer, would finish his wedding day with a twelve-­hour shift shoveling snow from the streets of Prague.74 We can read such post hoc accounts with some skepticism, suspecting a certain idealization of relationships that could retrospectively be celebrated as a form of cultural resistance. Another factor to consider is that these stories were narrated by women. As articles from the Jewish Women’s League Bulletin can testify, Jewish women were instructed to regard their suffering during this period as a way of proving their capacity to love. One column in the Bulletin urged women to consciously reject those organizations and communities from which they were barred and focus all their energies on bringing joy back into family life.75 Female readers were also counseled to learn from the wisdom of their Eastern European counterparts, who, so the story went, had gained much nobility of spirit through their suffering. For instance, the editors of the Bulletin quoted a poem by the renowned Russian poet Chaim Bialik that implied that Jewish women could discover their creative potential and demonstrate the depth of their souls by experiencing intense suffering. In the rock of my heart hides a spark Only a little spark—­but all mine. I didn’t borrow it, or steal it. No, it’s mine, and lives in me. And my great sufferings, like a hammer Burst asunder the rock, they tear open my heart. Spraying sparks, lighting up my eyes And igniting this, my song.76

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We do not know whether this familiar emotional script was depressing, infuriating, or comforting for German Jewish women. But it did attempt to provide some model for coping while reinforcing the message that women should remain committed to their husbands and to their marriages, even, or especially, if these entailed suffering. If we think back to Babette Buch’s “Skull Cap” story, we might wonder once more how Jewish or Christian partners carried on loving husbands and wives who had apparently undergone a terrifying transformation in Nazi Germany. Venerating the virtues of Jews from Eastern European communities may have been one way that they performatively trained themselves to find attractive the partner who lived a strange new, segregated life and possessed an apparently foreign identity. But equally, the achievement of such marriages—­to remember tender feelings from happier times and to overlook the daily emotional realities of fear, frustration, humiliation, enforced indolence, or forced labor for Jewish men in mixed marriages—­might suggest that individuals tried to numb themselves to whatever feelings they witnessed around them and train their thoughts on past lives. “He Was a Broken Man”: Coping with Male Weakness Stoicism was also prescribed for those Jewish men who suffered social and economic ruin during the Third Reich. The promise lurking behind this advice was that the afflicted would thereby prove their masculinity and perhaps persuade their oppressors that they deserved better treatment.77 The opportunities for young men to prove themselves in stereotypically masculine ways were nevertheless scant, as the experiences of Oskar Scherzer, an 18-­year-­old who emigrated to Austria to escape persecution in Germany, can attest. Scherzer found his great love, Rika, shortly after the Anschluss had taken place. He recalled their first kiss, which took place against a background scene of SA and SS men marching and singing “Wenn’s Judenblut vom Messer spritzt” (When Jewish Blood Spurts from the Knife) while an old Jewish man was being dragged along the street by his beard. Oskar had not noticed any of this at first though: He kissed Rika on the street, and it was as though “love had put an iron shield in front of us.”78 Still, he recognized later that their relationship was not immune to the changes in social

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dynamics caused by Nazism. On one particular night when Scherzer wanted to accompany Rika home to make sure she was safe walking through the streets of Vienna, she recognized that young Jewish men might be at more risk from attacks by Nazi thugs than women. Scherzer thought he had seen his girlfriend home safely only to discover that she had rejoined him and insisted on accompanying him to his house. After an initial impasse, he had to accept her “protection,” albeit with the remark, “Alright, my little bulldog, you always have to get your way.”79 As pedagogue Walter Blumenfeld has explained in his study of Jewish youths, this was a profoundly unsettling situation for young men who often looked for quixotic challenges to prove the nobility of their love. The teenage boy, Blumenfeld explained, “builds castles in the sky . . . imagines himself in situations within which he has overcome obstacles and, as the hero, has fought for and saved his princess from the threat of the enemy.”80 But in Nazi Germany, the stakes were far too high for these young men to risk proving their masculinity in this way. Older male diarists and memoirists railed against their fate as their prospects deteriorated, often placing the political situation in the foreground when discussing frustrations in their personal lives. For instance, Helmut Krieger, a first-­degree Mischling and army veteran, recalled the day of his daughter’s birth in November 1942 with anger. Having had his lawful application to marry his “Aryan” partner ignored, Krieger had lived in a “wilde Ehe” (wild or unofficial marriage) in Berlin while his fiancé Hertha was waiting to give birth. As he reflected on the significance of becoming a father at this time, he “cried bitterly.” His terse postscript to the day showed how political pressures made it impossible to publicly celebrate this landmark occasion: “Hertha was asked who the father was. She doggedly maintained that she didn’t know.”81 A common predicament faced by Jewish and mixed couples was how to cope once the men who had been the breadwinners lost their careers and their social standing. Of course, it made a dramatic difference if the husband was Jewish or not, although “Aryan” men usually suffered professional consequences for their decision to marry a “non-­Aryan” woman. Even as early as November 1933, doctors and dentists with Jewish partners were denied payment from state health insurance funds, whereas those in mixed marriages could no longer seek medical certification. By mid-­1935 a similar provision

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was enacted against aspiring judges and public attorneys.82 The economic impact on Jewish men was, of course, much more dramatic. Although 52.5 percent of German Jews (women and men but mostly men) were active in the commercial and communication sectors in 1933, only 4.4 percent of a diminished population still had jobs in these areas six years later. Whereas 19.1 percent of Jews had worked in industry and handiworks in 1933, by 1939 the number had dropped to 8.7 percent. Perhaps most starkly, 16 percent of German Jews were living independently without occupation in 1933, but this figure rocketed to 75.8 percent by the end of the decade. These individuals had to survive on savings or insurance payments—­at least until they became forced laborers during the war years, although many were widows or elderly enough that they could not work.83 Jewish men were particularly aware of their diminished status in a society that placed new patriarchal demands on men. As a result, many men suffered from psychological symptoms caused by forced joblessness, constant fear for themselves and their families, and the shame of being designated either a race traitor (if they were in a mixed marriage) or an enemy in a racial war (more generally). Female partners often watched with pity as these formerly proud men could express only impotent rage or despondency. This proved particularly difficult for prominent non-­Jewish partners, such as one previously wealthy wife—­“ large, light blond, full-­breasted—­a Königin-­Luise-­type,” according to her stepdaughter—­who was a former patron of the arts and who, by 1944, found herself living in cramped Jewish quarters in bombed-­out Cologne.84 She had to tackle doing housework without light, gas, or running water, but her “overly nervous husband” fluctuated between crying and turning “angry and enraged” and eventually became so debilitated that his wife had to take over the most basic tasks of self-­care, such as bathing him. Only his (quasi-­natural) death in a Jewish hospital in Berlin in early 1945 allowed her to access more tender feelings for this once proud jurist who was “deeply religious,” a “lifelong comrade,” and capable of “inconceivably great love.”85 Other mixed couples realized that they had to live in a make-­believe state of “as if” to protect themselves from the terrifying unfamiliarity and unpredictability of their new lives. One mixed couple who survived the war years in Berlin found their own unconventional ways to maintain their self-­respect. The wife spent her nights smuggling individuals out of wartime Berlin by

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means of resistance networks, and her Jewish husband would start each day by dressing for work, although he remained housebound while living in hiding. Even when he could not wear a fresh shirt, he changed his bowtie daily to persuade himself that his standards had not slipped.86 In these ways, couples could give a reassuringly conventional patina to what had become altogether unconventional relationships. In general, wives were more likely to be active in responding to their marginalization than their husbands. They took on unfamiliar work, negotiated over food rations, planned emigration, and made the necessary compromises with Nazi bureaucrats, even if this involved losing face.87 Their greater resourcefulness may have been possible because most women never had the public profile of their partners and thus had seemingly less to lose. In addition, they had often already envisaged having to start and restart their lives as they moved in sync with their husbands’ careers. Helen Lange (not her real name), a Russian-­Jewish émigré who was married to an imprisoned non-­Jewish German dissident, even felt reassured that she could do whatever it took to secure her husband’s release, without him knowing the details and having to feel ashamed. As she told herself, “If I do some humiliating things—­it will not be Peter’s fault, it will be my fault. I will take the responsibility.”88 By contrast, the half-­Jewish husband of Protestant Verena Hellwig proved a liability as they tried to find work and eventually to emigrate from Baden. Hellwig knew that her husband, a former insurance executive, would never make it abroad when he asked their lawyer to find him a job “that matched his dignity and knowledge.” He proved unable to hold on to jobs and ended up losing all their money. Before he committed suicide in 1939, he was “not only physically weakened but psychologically altogether broken.”89 His fate was sadly all too typical: Suicides reached the exceptionally high number of more than 2 percent of the Jewish population during the period of deportations in the early 1940s. We cannot be sure if more of those committing suicide were men, although statistics from 1933–­1939 suggest that suicides among all male Germans were significantly higher than those among women.90 Jewish wives married to “Aryan” men felt even more acutely the reluctance of their partners to uproot their lives. Actress Eva Wysbar reflected on her film director husband’s unwillingness to emigrate with a simple gen-

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eralization: “The Aryan doesn’t leave.”91 An anonymous Jewish housewife resented having to return to her Christian partner in Bavaria, having scoped out possibilities in Palestine. She acknowledged that love for her children (who also did not want to emigrate) and even patriotism (Vaterlandsliebe) played a role in her returning, but she pointedly did not suggest that love for her husband was the primary reason. She instead described his demand that she return as “selfish.”92 The couples who were most expressive about their love tended to be those who were most politically mobilized against the regime. For them, romantic love did not provide an apolitical private refuge but was intensified by their passionate political commitment. For instance, Helen Lange possessed an unshakable confidence in the righteousness of her husband’s and her own left-­wing political commitments. She drew strength from the fact that they were self-­conscious opponents rather than mere passive victims. Indeed, regard for her husband’s political convictions set limits on what she could do to secure his release. As she explained to the son of a famous academic who was close to the regime and from whom she sought assistance, “I do not want to use Professor’s help under false pretenses. I have to say it—­I owe it to my husband’s honor and integrity.”93 Another factor that convinced Lange that the love she and her husband shared stood for something larger was the solidarity and sense of emotional community she experienced with other political prisoners’ wives. She recalled the righteous anger of wives who were waiting to see their husbands in prison on one occasion in April 1933. When a Nazi official entered the waiting room and tried to compel the women to make the “Heil Hitler” salute, he witnessed the wives sharing smiles and then bursting into ironic laughter.94 Such open opposition to the new political values was possible only because this incident occurred during the early days of the Nazi regime, admitted Lange. Still, wives and future wives shared the political sensibilities of their partners, addressing each other with Du just as the prisoners did, and they arranged to look after each other’s children when emergencies occurred. All of this mobilization was easier for working-­class women than for the wives of middle-­class professionals, however. As Lange recalled, one middle-­class woman “waiting . . . in front of the prison gate in Konstanz . . . kept repeating: ‘I hope nobody will see me here. I hope none of the people I know go by

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this way.’ ” Lange, who had grown up in revolutionary era Russia, had a different attitude: “I was proud of the fact that I was the wife of a Hitler enemy and I had been brought up in the idea that every decent man goes to prison at least once in his life.”95 Such shared opposition became much more difficult as the regime became entrenched in German society. But even in the early 1940s, by which point the regime had proved itself to be far more intolerant of mixed marriages and of dissent, a small minority of couples could still reinforce one another’s oppositional political convictions, so long as they were surrounded by supportive fellow travelers. One striking example comes from Liesl Will (née Zuckermann), a baptized Jewish woman from Vienna who wrote love letters to her husband, the artist Heinrich Will, after he was imprisoned for listening to “enemy programming” with members of the oppositional Kaufmann Circle in Giessen.96 For Liesl, Heinrich had proved himself a hero who was worthy of intense devotion. She may have felt some guilt too, for she acknowledged how her husband had already proved his “self-­sacrificing love” by staying with her in what became a privileged mixed marriage. In one letter Liesl encouraged Heinrich to maintain his heroic opposition. She did this, no doubt, because he needed to hear such a supportive message. But it may also have been psychologically important for Liesl that he embody this heroic figure rather than resembling the kind of defeated man that many male partners had become. In a letter dated July 19, 1942, she wrote: Let us go along this way of suffering together and make it through. Believe me, things will not always be this way. . . . We will rebuild our life, it will be better and more beautiful! Just have the courage to do it, dear husband, stay strong, healthy and optimistic.  .  .  . Hold your head up, don’t let yourself be troubled by small or dark thoughts. Whatever we’re accused of, your opinions are right. They are the only opinions that any decent man who loves his Fatherland can have and you will be honored for having them.97

It helped Liesl to think that she and her husband had God on their side. Even after Heinrich was sentenced to death and she to six years’ imprisonment, Liesl could trust that “God would hear [her] prayer” and rescue them.

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As such, she had the moral self-­confidence to believe that she and Heinrich could be united by a love that was uncontaminated by Nazi ideology. As she wrote to Heinrich, about three weeks after his sentencing in late July, “Let’s not let this period of our lives do us any harm. Let’s build a wall around us, dearest, so that none of this ugliness reaches us and we can move forward with purer hearts, having been tested and refined by this experience.”98 Liesl may have been fortified by the theology of the Confessing Church, members of whom were part of the oppositional circle to which she and her partner belonged. The Confessing Church had formed to protest the major Protestant denominations agreeing to found a national “German Protestant Church” that was loyal to the Nazi regime and willing to defrock ministers with Jewish heritage or Jewish wives.99 In some cases Orthodox Jewish couples reported that their beliefs became similarly appealing, particularly to those assimilated or mixed couples who had tried and failed to make their accommodations with the regime. Lotte Popper, an Orthodox teacher from Hamburg, recalled one of her few “Aryan” friends particularly enjoying the gemütlich atmosphere in her household. Elsewhere in this particularly interfaith city, reported her concert singer friend, individuals were weighed down by anxieties that they would be found not German enough. Popper agreed with her friend’s observation, explaining that Jews such as themselves collected a “cultural elite” around them once all Jews were “forbidden to visit the theatre and public leisure venues.”100 For those in mixed marriages whose partners were not able to occupy the position of opponent but who assumed the role of unwilling and powerless victims, it was often necessary to displace their feelings of love away from partners whom they could lose at any moment. The tragic mixed marriage of Lilli and Ernst Jahn, grandparents of Spiegel journalist Martin Doerry, illustrates the tendency of some immiserated couples to turn inward and away from one another. On one level the story of their marriage is the perhaps predictable tale of a non-­Jewish man resenting becoming an outcast and finding a more socially desirable partner. After seeing his medical practice boycotted and watching fellow well-­to-­do professionals in his small Hessian village of Immenhausen turn their backs on him, Ernst eventually abandoned his Jewish wife, fathering a child with an “Aryan” colleague. What is more striking about the relationship, however, is how each partner withdrew into

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a safer spiritual realm in which they could more safely store feelings of love they were no longer able to communicate to one another. Ernst, by birth a Protestant, became immersed in Catholic theology, and Lilli filled twenty-­ three pages with reflections on love, dwelling particularly on St. Paul’s description of the self-­denying aspects of love (although she remained Jewish until she was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944).101 Such a turn to religion was (prophetically) explained by Hannah Arendt in her dissertation of 1929, which tackled the theme of love in the works of Saint Augustine. Arendt wrote of the close connection between desiring an intimate relationship with someone and fearing losing that which you desire. Such was the predicament of the individual who sought erotic love with a partner who might change their feelings or who might be taken away for a variety of reasons. This situation, according to Arendt’s gloss of Augustine, could be ameliorated only by individuals turning their desire to an eternal God who could not be changed and who therefore freed them from worrying about an uncertain future.102 Although Arendt’s treatment of Augustine’s thought may have spoken to worries that were common in the fast-­moving 1920s, it eerily prefigured the fears that many German Jews felt much more acutely while living in the Third Reich. A particularly interesting example of this turn to God is described in a diaristic memoir written by Irma Rafaela Toledo, a self-­taught artist who lived on the border between Austria and Bavaria. Her husband was classified as “Aryan,” which meant that she lived in a privileged marriage and survived the Shoah, although thirty-­nine of her relatives perished.103 However, she and her husband, Franz, became physically and mentally remote from one another, even though the couple and their two children remained together throughout the war years. Indeed, her husband had suffered for not abandoning her: After being discharged from the army on health grounds, he was sent to the work camp Gera in Thuringia as punishment for remaining with his “non-­Aryan” partner. After he returned, the pair lived in daily peril, sought after by the Gestapo, from whom they hid in what had been the holiday home they used to rent.104 In July 1941 Toledo wrote about the strain they were both under: She could no longer be “tender and loving” and noted that Franz also wanted distance from her. At this point, she still hoped that their relationship could improve. But by the following month, Toledo was

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reconciled to their being lonely together; she explained that their hardness and coldness helped them to survive rather than putting them in the vulnerable position of being too dependent on one another.105 Toledo was trying to make a virtue out of necessity. She lived an extremely lonely existence, hiding herself with her children in a mountainous region between Salzburg and Berchtesgarden. Although she was never denounced by neighbors, she could not be sure of their loyalties. Her landlady, a member of the Nazi movement, had tipped her off before she could be deported, but she was surrounded by other Nazi enthusiasts who had already verbally abused her and her husband.106 Toledo’s response to her isolation was to look for closer communion not with her husband but with God, a God whom she was starting to approach through Christian rather than Jewish sources. Quoting the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, she vowed not to “become sad or happy about the transient things of this world.” She felt that her susceptibility to still feeling emotions such as “vengefulness and anger” showed how far she was from God. Toledo sought to channel any “Eros” (alongside other feelings) she felt toward an “omnipotent God . . . who, alongside His creation, would endure.”107 These reflections came from an exhausted and traumatized psyche, but they were not altogether unique. A Christian counterpart of Toledo’s, Therese Lindenberg, who lived in a nonprivileged mixed marriage in Vienna, reacted to her precarious situation in remarkably similar ways. She too withdrew into an inner world, where she sought out a mystical relationship with her God and with friends from her past, whose voices she began to hear. Lindenberg remained a constant companion for her Jewish husband as they were moved into “Jewish houses” between October 1939 and May 1945 and he was brought back and forth between roundups and interrogations.108 She admired her husband’s “patience” as she watched him suffer and reflected that she “could only love—­and protect—­him.”109 The primary male companion in Lindenberg’s diary was not her husband, however, but her Creator. In her diary entries the contrast between a husband whose health was failing and who could not defend himself against arrest or humiliation and an all-­powerful God who would always be present and who had the power to keep Lindenberg safe is striking. Indeed, at moments of great strain, such as when Lindenberg feared that her husband would no longer be allowed to

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move freely on the streets of Vienna, she felt God’s presence most keenly. At these moments God was not so much a substitute husband as a father, whom she usually heard instructing her to find solace in submitting to her fate. On her silver wedding anniversary in January 1940, only a couple of months after being forced to live in a “Jews’ house,” Lindenberg focused not on her partner but on the God who protected her: “Always feel protected, always grateful—­for us—­never feel hatred. . . . I feel myself to be HIS child.”110 The day before her husband had to wear the yellow star, she heard a voice, possibly God’s, speaking to her while she and her husband were taking an illegal walk in the woods with friends. Momentarily struck by terror that her husband would be picked up, she heard the command, “Kneel down, I will bless you.”111 Perhaps a fatherlike God was particularly necessary for this woman, who found herself safeguarding her husband and who sent her daughter to the Philippines, precisely because her partner’s ethnicity was making her daughter’s life more rather than less dangerous.112 Another reason that Lindenberg may have retreated into an interior world peopled by God and by other voices from her past is that she was compelled to move around between ever more crowded ghetto dwellings. Not only did she not get to choose with whom she lived, but she also risked developing attachments to individuals who were then sent to their deaths in the East. In her interior life Lindenberg could choose with whom she communicated rather than being limited to those who inhabited the spaces where she was compelled to dwell. These admittedly idiosyncratic accounts can tell us a number of things about particularly those mixed marriages that survived until the end of the Nazi period.113 Those relatively few individuals and couples who had understood their marriages as countercultural were often able to appreciate one another as righteous Germans who had not sold out to the regime. This mutual admiration could intensify the love of partners for one another. For other couples in which one partner did not relish their new position as outsiders, they often found it harder not to internalize the surrounding society’s racialized judgment of them. Rather like those intellectuals who had not sought to be political opponents but who found the new regime uncongenial or even immoral, these individuals often went into a kind of inner exile. That persecuted individuals in mixed or Jewish marriages could go on this mental

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journey toward inner emigration challenges us to think about preexisting theories of the emotions.114 As we have seen, these individuals often needed to, and could, to some extent disconnect their emotions from their physical surroundings. This might make us reconsider whether currently dominant theories of emotions that stress the importance of the physical and performative aspects are altogether adequate for understanding the emotions of Jewish and mixed couples who lived through the Third Reich.115 When studying the lifestyles of these married couples, we see the many limitations that were placed on their physical activities, all of which made experimenting with physical communications of emotions difficult. But these individuals were able to focus on their inner lives, even if this sometimes meant that their emotions seemed rather stilted. Deportations “The modern individual is let loose on life’s journey with lofty hopes about earning money and finding love. Men and women are usually trained for their career but they have never heard of doing an apprenticeship in love. All young men and women who want to learn about the challenges of love before it’s too late should, without delay, buy this instructional manual for engaged and married couples.” So read an advertisement in Theresienstadt’s satirical newspaper, Šalom na Pátek (Shalom on Friday), in November 1943. It appeared below a wedding announcement that was illustrated with a photo of the couple wearing blindfolds and going in for a kiss.116 The joke in all of this was surely that ambitious individuals who had high hopes for the future were unlikely to be found in Theresienstadt in 1943. Theresienstadt was a special case in the concentration camp universe created by the Nazis: a transit camp for Czech Jews who would be sent to the forced labor and death camps in the East but also a ghetto labor camp for elderly and prominent Jews.117 Similarly, the promise that the reader of modern advice literature could carefully avoid the pitfalls of modern relationships seemed Panglossian in such an environment where inmates were at the mercy of their captors. Yet it might still have been a relief for young couples to imagine that their fears and hopes for the future were comparable to those of other previously engaged pairs who felt a heady mixture of excitement and trepidation about their future lives.

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FIGU R E 5. Advertisement in Šalom na Pátek (Shalom on Friday), November 26, 1943. Source: Yad Vashem, O.64/64.

Romantic relationships certainly helped some ghetto dwellers to cope, providing them with solace and sometimes protection.118 In a memoir called “Shakespeare Saved My Life,” one Theresienstadt survivor, Eva Rocek, wrote of how a romantic relationship with an equally intellectually ambitious boy allowed her to mentally inhabit a counterworld full of great works by Dante, Goethe, and French poets that was far removed from the squalor of everyday existence.119 Her account was echoed by the testimonies of numerous former ghetto inhabitants who participated in Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation project.120 Nevertheless, romantic relationships more generally were marked by the Darwinian social logic encouraged by the Nazis in mainstream society. Desire, particularly male desire, was never altogether extinguished, but it was usually satisfied by instrumental sex that was offered predominantly by women in exchange for other vital commodities such as bread. This, at least, is the conclusion drawn by Anna Hájková, whose project on Theresienstadt describes sex as one commodity within a desperate barter economy.121 In this economy men who produced foodstuffs, such as bakers, or those who could allocate housing were

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the most desirable partners.122 But being able to feed oneself and others did not just mean that a man offered practical advantages to a prospective sexual partner. It also meant that he would have been more likely to have maintained his sex drive and would have appeared more physically healthy. This was, for instance, particularly true of the few Danish Jews in Theresienstadt who received care packages throughout their time in the ghetto.123 Hájková also suggests that in the sexual economy of the ghetto, women were producers who used their emotional and physical labor and their human capital to secure other goods for themselves and their relatives.124 (This is not to overlook the numerous incidences of rape that occurred, which remain “underexplored and increasingly hard to uncover,” as Zoë Waxman has explained.)125 By contrast, men, who usually had better jobs than women, were largely consumers of intimacy who traded other products for the precious commodity of sex and affection. For those men the ability to have sex with a woman and to display her as a kind of girlfriend not only satisfied a basic physical desire but also became a symbol of high status among those who had lost many other markers of prestige or social standing.126 Perhaps because sex became so commodified in the ghettos, a young woman such as Rocek could insist on maintaining the purity of her romantic relationship in Theresienstadt, first crying to her mother when the boy who would become her husband kissed her after a second or third date. Throughout their courtship, Rocek “vehemently refused” when her partner tried to sit her on his lap. So chaste did the relationship seem that Rocek’s father joked that the couple would spend their wedding night reading poetry.127 Another column that appeared in Šalom na Pátek in early 1944 conveyed the sense that having a conventional relationship was a much-­cherished ideal for young couples in Theresienstadt. Called “Die Überraschung” (The Surprise), the article told the story of Otto and Erna, a young couple who were preparing for their first wedding anniversary. To celebrate, Otto wanted to buy a new band for his wife’s watch, and Erna tried to find the money to get Otto a frame for one of his most prized pictures. A touching farce ensues when Erna sells her watch to afford the frame and Otto attempts to raise funds by selling his unframed picture.128 By the end of the story (which echoes O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”), the reader can not only appreciate the material struggles of the couple but more acutely recognize how

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important it was for them to still feel as though they could make romantic gestures.129 For many young inhabitants who sought out partners, getting married in such a camp-­ghetto environment as Theresienstadt was less a strategic decision for the future and more a day-­to-­day tactic for survival. Marriage provided a companion for the struggles ahead and, almost as important, promised some kind of private life that set one apart from other inhabitants who were often unfamiliar but who lived in stiflingly close proximity. Marta Mosse described the difficulty of building any kind of robust human relationships in Theresienstadt precisely because individuals were crammed together in configurations they did not choose and in conditions that did not allow anyone to retain a sense of themselves. She complained about “the closeness/crampedness, the not-­being-­alone, not being able to get yourself together, the leben without silence, without distance” and also noted how many of the inhabitants internalized the antisemitism of their oppressors in a group-­think that said, “We’re all only Jews.”130 Getting married therefore served as a sign to young ghetto inhabitants that they did not accept the verdict of their jailors but believed that they were worthy of some happiness and capable of making noninstrumental relationships. Individuals often had to be persuaded of this, though. Margot Friedlaender, a 24-­year-­old who got married directly after the war, in June 1945, initially needed convincing that she was “capable, mentally ready for love.” Her suitor, an old companion from the Jüdischer Kulturbund in Berlin, first reminded her that “someone cares” by passing a tree branch (the closest available thing to a rose?) through the window when she was confined to an isolation ward in the Theresienstadt hospital. “That felt so good,” and it persuaded her to “make up for lost time.”131 Vally Fink’s richly textured account of married life in Theresienstadt similarly illustrates how psychologically valuable marriages were, not least because they placed intimate relationships in a “pure” realm of consensual, noninstrumental partnerships that could seem more legitimate than the many forms of sexual barter that proliferated throughout the ghetto. In her narrative Fink recalls how young people became more desperate for intimacy as a kind of sensual and emotional release from the tensions of living too close to resentful strangers.132 But equally striking in Fink’s account is the desire of young people to

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s­ olemnize relationships. When Fink’s brother-­in-­law and his veiled wife got married under a chuppah in a touchingly traditional ceremony, his father was bemused, regarding such a ritual as a strange “piece of theatre.”133 But, for the couple, it was a psychologically vital foretaste of what a normal life could look like. Harder to interpret is a young Zionist couple’s successful attempt to be married while waiting to be deported from Berlin to Auschwitz. They pleaded with Gestapo agents to return to their hakhsharah (agricultural training center for Zionists) in nearby Neuendorf, where a tearful mayor conducted the ceremony. Hans Hirschfeld, who was given the job of ensuring that the couple returned for their deportation, wondered whether their desire to marry was a sign of their blissful ignorance of what kind of future awaited them. But he also noted the bravery of the hakhsharah comrades who surrounded the pair and who sang and played while they waited for the transports. Perhaps, then, this couple’s marriage was a kind of self-­assertion, a consecrated last free act before they “disappeared into the Auschwitz darkness.” This defiant expression of joy had “stay[ed] with” Hirschfeld, writing a half-­century later.134 Accusations were made that marriages conducted in the ghettos did not exist outside the sexual barter economy but merely constituted a particularly valuable currency within it.135 Getting or being married did not necessarily offer greater security to individuals, however. The evidence from Vally Fink’s account is mixed, to say the least. Her husband’s job, preparing people in Theresienstadt for transports to the East, did mean he could negotiate to have family members taken off deportation lists.136 Other individuals’ attachments to their partners were, in contrast, exploited to extract labor from them. And others still were hanged for trying to surreptitiously meet their wives or for smuggling food to other family members. Indeed, Fink’s brother-­in-­law agreed to take what turned out to be a fatal journey to a camp because his new wife could not bear the thought of abandoning her sister when the sister’s name appeared on a deportation list.137 An interesting examination of the issues surrounding marriages in ghettos and transit camps comes from a Dutch Jewish woman, Nora Keizer, who was imprisoned in Westerbork with numerous German Jewish refugees. The circumstances around her marriage seem straightforward. Every Friday she

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waited anxiously to find out whether her name was on the lists of people to be transported to the East. She and other inmates knew that the best way to keep their names off these lists was to be married to one of the “old-­timers” at Westerbork.138 One such old-­timer from Germany, Ernst Blumenthal, was well aware of his privileged position and, during one of these weeks, offered marriage to Keizer so that she would not need to fear the next roll call. Keizer carefully scrutinized her motivations and wavered for a number of days until, on the Thursday morning, she finally agreed. The dynamics behind her decision may seem easy to discern: Keizer was offered security, and Blumenthal was offered the chance to play protector to a grateful wife. To paraphrase the title of Keizer’s account, she was clinging to Blumenthal while all around her demonic figures were leading her on a “danse macabre.” But what is more interesting to observe is how necessary it was for both partners to follow well-­established romantic scripts to validate their decision. When trying to persuade Keizer, Blumenthal protested that he was not just trying to save her but was also acting as he had because, for him, it had been “love at first sight.”139 Keizer also suggested that other factors, alongside her survival instinct, explained her readiness to be married. She had already noted that Blumenthal had “infected” her with his optimism, which was another kind of survival tool. Keizer had already lost a fiancé at Mauthausen and, shortly before getting together with Blumenthal, had attended a camp wedding, where she noted bitterly all the usual rites of passage that had been denied her.140 But, once Blumenthal proposed, she at least experienced the nervous excitement of writing home to parents for their permission and of dressing for her wedding day, even if she had only a black dress and brown shoes at her disposal.141 She could also show Blumenthal off to her relatives when they joined her at Westerbork; even in this environment, she had managed to move on with her life, it seemed.142 For inmates such as Keizer who were hoping to outlast the death camp universe, there was probably no either-­or choice between looking for authentic love and finding a functional relationship that aided their chances of survival. The psychological comfort provided by having an apparently stronger and better connected partner was itself profound; once Blumenthal’s seniority stopped counting and he and Keizer were deported to Auschwitz in September 1943, his psychological resilience evaporated, which infuriated

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Keizer. Seeing tears roll down his cheeks as they waited for their train, she recalled, “That angered me, a man who cries!” She had to encourage him to be strong by making the “rough joke” that she would leave him on the platform if he carried on.143 Those couples whose marriages predated deportation to the ghettos had usually gone through devastating experiences that had already drastically altered the dynamics of their relationships. Some partners had even been forced to grieve for husbands and wives they believed to be dead, only to discover that they had survived a roundup or an arrest. The joy at such moments was usually short-­lived. Samson Reichstein went through just such an experience, having been deported from Hanover and sent across the border to Poland. From there he and his wife fled to Soviet-­occupied territory, which included his birthplace of Tarnopol. After the German invasion in 1941, he was discovered hiding when his wife did not dare to lie to Gestapo agents who were conducting roundups. Improbably, Reichstein managed to escape while other prisoners were being assembled for their execution, and he hid in a cornfield while 4,000 other Jewish men were shot.144 Although he survived, he continued to suffer at the hands of Ukrainians, who, soon after, made him dig up the dead bodies of fellow Jews for reburial while SS officers indiscriminately shot at the remaining forced laborers. Reichstein’s wife could not muster up sympathy for her husband when he returned from this work, however. She instead told him, “You smell awful—­I can’t take this,” and insisted on sleeping in a separate room that night. Reichstein understood that she could not bear to inhale “the odor of death.”145 Still, the estrangement between the two must have been difficult to bear, particularly because Reichstein, like many other Jewish men, had been instructed to appear at the jail the next morning, with the threat of more executions if he did not. The Nazis’ tactic of sometimes seizing one partner and sparing the other, all without any warning, deprived couples of the ability to face their fate together. Indeed, Reichstein recorded that his wife urged him not to go into hiding with her once she discovered her name was on a local militia list and his was not. Her unselfish decision meant that Reichstein survived while she was transported to her death at Belsen.146 Once in the ghettos, the constant scarcity meant that couples and family members often faced a zero-­

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sum choice of satisfying their own needs or those of their loved ones. Dawid Sierakowick’s diary from the Łódź ghetto starkly contrasts the altruism of his mother, whose continual sharing of her “provisions” eventually ensured that she received the death sentence of being deemed “sick and unable to work,” with the avariciousness of his father, who apparently cheated family members out of their rations and used up precious heating supplies to cook himself potatoes.147 Sierakowick was writing in the midst a rageful grief. It may have been relatively easy to blame the proximate figure of a father when the real architects of loved ones’ annihilation were inaccessible and death sentences were passed and carried out by doctors who concealed their guilt behind their medical standing.148 But, more generally, typical assumptions about how a couple’s love for one another provided the basis for creating a loving family unit were obliterated in ghetto and camp conditions. Family members could well regard each other as competitors for scarce resources. Moreover, couples who might usually contemplate starting a family with joy were more likely to fear bringing new life into an environment with such dismal prospects. Nora Keizer, who discovered her pregnancy shortly before being deported from Westerbork to Auschwitz, accurately regarded this diagnosis as a death sentence.149 Although she was reluctant to have an abortion without gaining the consent of her husband, once she was assigned the relatively privileged status of trial patient for medical experiments at Auschwitz, she agreed to have the procedure.150 Keizer’s experience of concentration camp life was actually quite atypical, which explains her survival and her ability to maintain relatively conventional emotions about her husband.151 While at Westerbork, she and her husband were given their own apartment, which afforded them privacy and gave them the chance to plan their future together. When Keizer arrived at Auschwitz, she remained unusually interested in her husband’s fate and continued to speak of him for many months. Other couples learned to shut down their feelings for one another much more quickly. For Hermina Vlasopolos, a Romanian Jew sent to Auschwitz in June 1944, what was most troubling was that she could not even access any feelings for previously loved ones. Just after being liberated by the Soviets, she reflected, “I began to think again of those long months of horror which killed my feelings, my power

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to love. How could I describe, how could I explain the meaning of loving or caring? The ones I used to feel when thinking of a loved one wasn’t there anymore. For instance, I knew I was in love with my fiancé, but I didn’t feel, I didn’t feel it during that year of intense pain and humiliation. I didn’t even care about his well-­being anymore. There was nothing in my heart, only an alarming emptiness.” She discussed this with a camp mate, Flora, who conceded that she had also lost her feelings of love for her child and husband, saying, “No, I don’t feel anything. I know I love my husband, I know, but the thought of my child not being alive anymore should drive me crazy, but it doesn’t. I don’t feel my heart warm up when I think of them. It’s like having a big empty space in there.” As Vlasopolos concluded, “So Flora too had acknowledged the complete loss, the complete loss of our faculty to love.”152 Tamara Reiner, a Viennese native who had married in Theresienstadt less than a year earlier, similarly remembered her feelings “lock down” after she saw her husband and realized that he did not recognize her after her head had been shaved by camp guards. It was only a short while after they had arrived, and Reiner’s husband was only 5 meters away, but still he appeared not to know who she was.153 This was another terrifying realization: Not only could individuals’ own feelings of love seemingly be extinguished, but so could what made them familiar and lovable to their partners. Numerous camp prisoners therefore retained a sense that love was an important psychological reality for anyone who wished to maintain a sense of their precamp self, even as it became accessible only as a memory. A poem by Otto Bernstein, written while he was living in gender-­segregated conditions in Theresienstadt, explains how important the mere sight of women’s faces was for men who did not want to lose their capacity to access and remember tender feelings. Bernstein recalled the men’s anger at having to leave “Lager Drei” for “Lager Vier,” because this meant that they could no longer look over and have their gaze returned by their female neighbors. Although Bern­ stein thought some might mock the “Platonic love” that these men sought, for some, just being able to spend hours looking through the fence at women from their world made them “happy” and “at peace.”154 Prisoners at Dachau, Buchenwald, and elsewhere also wrote songs to try to access lost feelings and to urge each other to “stay a human being” even if far from “all joys . . . [their] homeland  .  .  . [their] women.”155 What became known as the Buchenwald

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Song counseled its singers that, if they could think back to their love for their “sweetheart far away” and recall a song that was “sung at home,” they would turn the “worry . . . in our hearts, in our hearts [to] love” and preserve “in our hearts, in our hearts—­faith.”156 Those such as David Boder who interviewed survivors right after the war still wondered why, in their accounts of camp life, more of these survivors did not mention loved ones who had perished. This seemed particularly jarring in cases where couples had shared so much adversity together, even escaping work camps and so on before finally being caught and sent to the death camps. The difficulty in recapturing individuals’ emotional states during their time in the camps was that, when survivors were interviewed by oral historians, the “wounds” were still “fresh.” As a result, it may have been too painful for interviewees to revisit feelings of love that were most sharply felt at those moments when they feared for their partners’ existence or grieved their loss. “Gentle prodding” during interviews suggested that latent feelings of love still existed but that the trauma of surviving while loved ones had not kept such feelings, should they have persisted, inaccessible.157 One other factor with which survivors had to reckon was that they had been cheated into feeling emotions such as worry and hope for loved ones who were already dead. This was Nora Keizer’s fate: She learned of her husband Ernst’s death seven months after it had happened. When she eventually received written notification that he had died, she remembered sadly how she had spoken of him in the present tense across that period: “My husband is in Buna,” “My husband always says . . .” “When I tell my husband that . . .” Reflecting on his death, a “sentimental hit song” from the prewar period lodged itself in her memory: The house is haunted by the echo of your goodbye The house is haunted by the memory that refused to die.158

Instead of crying, she lost herself in the sweetly nostalgic melody played by “the muted trumpet [and] the wailing saxophone,” which she remembered from happier years before the war. Keizer, who had spent more than a half-­ year hoping for a future with an already deceased partner, realized that she had been living in a world of only echoes and memories.

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Keizer’s experience of losing a partner for whom her feelings were still vivid and vital is unbearably sad. But in some ways many Jewish and mixed couples survived by mentally inhabiting a world of echoes and memories, even when their partners were still with them. As we have seen, the struggles of daily life drained so much strength from couples that they often lacked the energy and resources to perform acts of devotion that typically kept marriages alive. Some wives and husbands therefore had to remember each other in happier times and overlook the realities of living with someone who was physically and mentally debilitated by their oppression. Such an achievement on the part of persecuted couples again suggests that the usefulness of performative theories of the emotions has its limits.159 These theories focus more on “expressive emotions” that are manifested through verbal or body language. They can therefore struggle to explain how couples were able to use memory and to romanticize what were in reality relationships with little scope for romance. Each individual may have had to rely on their “inner speech”—­a hidden, interior world of rememberings and imaginings where they could keep alive their feelings of love through a “voice without a mouth,” to use a term employed by Samuel Beckett.160 Then again, performative theories can also challenge us to be more attentive to how important even little gestures were—­handing a tree branch through a bedroom window—­as a way for couples to conform to romantic scripts. When Yuri Slezkine suggested that the history of modernity is the history of everyone becoming Jewish, he did not put love relationships at the center of his argument. Yet, as we saw in previous chapters, by falling in love with partners before marrying them, Jews and other Germans discovered a new way to find companions as they urbanized and became useful service-­providing outsiders in booming towns and cities.161 If the practices of falling in love and marrying for love were therefore conduits of social mobility, how did they survive once the National Socialists radically altered how social mobility worked? Jews were a tiny minority even before 1933, so most non-­Jewish Germans were unlikely to have to choose between love of a Jewish partner and the new political imperatives. But, as evidence from this chapter has suggested, it was not always easy for non-­Jews to unlearn their earlier emotional education. Even if, as Dagmar Herzog has persuasively shown, certain kinds

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of eroticism and sexual libertarianism were encouraged in Nazi Germany, countervailing pressures on “Aryan” Germans to marry early and avoid contact with outsiders could prove onerous.162 For some Germans, then, the Nazi emotional regime was an attack on the freedoms intrinsic to adulthood and a shrinking of what had been broader emotional and social horizons. Needless to say, the future in this society looked vastly bleaker to German Jews. They faced either a terrifying future in the camp universe or an uncertain future, likely outside Europe. Nevertheless, falling in love could still shape the destinies of German Jews before and after 1933. If finding a partner through dating had been one way of selecting a companion for what promised to be a mobile future before 1933, falling for someone in the Third Reich was an important way of finding a comrade for a much more terrifying future of displacement. As I have illustrated in this chapter, falling in love was not simply a strategic decision: The experience of falling for someone also gave vitality to otherwise fearful and increasingly hopeless individuals. These individuals often fell for those who had an attractive strength of character that made them seem somehow invulnerable to their daily circumstances. But, equally, given the curtailments on individual freedoms and the terrifying reality of lethal institutional violence, it became difficult especially for Jewish men to perform what was the attractive role of protector to their partners. Similarly, a striking common denominator in the many varied stories is how in the midst of immense, traumatic upheavals, marriage provided an at times illusory sense of stability in Jewish women and men’s lives. The marriages themselves often underwent painful changes but were usually venerated as a form of partnership that existed above politics and that was nourished by a love that, at least as an ideal, could survive persecution, degradation, and even death. The endurance of these marriages was, in no small measure, a testament to the imagination of married couples, particularly of wives. They proved able to hang on to memories of their husbands from a period when it had been easier for partners to love each other. If this was not possible, some wives were able to find substitutes in their lives, such as a masculine God whom they believed could offer the protection their vulnerable husbands could not. Others embraced their roles as the public face of embattled families. Husbands often found it harder to reimagine their roles, no doubt be-

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cause their identity in their marriages, as well as outside them, was often inextricably linked to their public profiles. The differences between mixed and Jewish couples’ experiences are not as pronounced as we might have expected. This suggests that the convergences that took place between Jewish and Christian lifestyles and value systems before 1933 outlived the Nazi Gleichschaltung, at least among some couples. One aspect of this convergence was a shared and retained belief in a love myth that maintained that the most authentic and virtuous self in Germany was cultivated in the private sphere. As I have shown in this chapter, sometimes marital love was hallowed by supportive Christian and Jewish communities. In Zionist groups, a shared ideology fortified individuals, promising them that by holding on to each other and staying alive (and, in the cases of younger couples, keeping alive the hope of having children in the future), they were performing a kind of spiritual resistance and fulfilling their religious or national destiny. As we will see in the next chapter, Zionist responses to the Shoah served to decisively realign the boundaries between private and public life for German Jewish men and women and thus challenged the basis of what had been a surprisingly durable love myth.

FOUR

A Golden Cage? Jewish Families in West Germany

In Barbara Honigmann’s autobiographically inspired novel, A Love Made Out of Nothing, the narrator, a Jewish woman living in Paris, reminisces about her former life as a dramaturg in post–­World War II East Berlin. She recalls her strange romance with a non-­Jewish colleague, Alfried, a director at the Berlin Theater. One peculiarity of their courtship was that they would go to each other’s apartments, but, rather than actually spend time together, they would slide love letters under the door and leave. When Alfried did visit his lover, it was always at night, when no one else was around. He would then disappear in the early hours, when none of the neighbors could identify him. His partner (if that is the right word) was never welcome in his apartment and, on the one occasion when she broke in, she felt so unsure of herself that she abandoned plans to leave her mark and quietly slipped away. It soon became clear that this romance was destined to remain an altogether private affair, one conducted largely on Alfried’s terms.1 It is not difficult to imagine how this fictional account resonated with actual romantic experiences between Jews and other Germans after 1945. The incidence of mixed marriages between Jews and non-­Jews remained 157

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high throughout the postwar period, making up over 70 percent of all marriages involving Jews in the Federal Republic by the late 1970s. But taboos around such relationships were keenly felt in Jewish families and in the wider communities.2 And, of course, given that antisemitism hardly vanished overnight, non-­Jewish partners also had to contend with potentially hostile judgments from the surrounding society.3 For these reasons, among others, interreligious love relationships often started out as secrets that were only sometimes revealed to apprehensive families. Once together, couples might explain that, though they made sense as a pair, they remained an anomaly rather than some hopeful sign of a broader German-­Jewish rapprochement.4 This aspect also features in Honigmann’s novel: The protagonist, although “she did love him, almost against [her] will,” could not bring herself to ever call Alfried by his quintessentially Germanic name. And whenever she dreamed of having a child with him, the imagined child “loosely put together out of individual parts that did not stay together . . . would fall apart and shatter and not stand upright.”5 The boundary between private and public mattered to many Jews who lived in any of the German lands after 1945. But the private sphere assumed particular significance in the Federal Republic, the German territory with the largest post-­Shoah Jewish population. The private sphere, prized for its emotional warmth, which contrasted sharply with the potentially hostile outer German society, did not just become hallowed territory for Jewish families living in the Federal Republic. It also gained new valence for the ascendant Christian democratic movement in Germany that aimed to restore the authority of the family and the autonomy of religious, particularly Christian, institutions.6 As we will see, the role that love relationships played in the lives of Jews in Germany before and after 1945 had some surprising continuities. In the postwar era a loving private sphere once more served as a refuge from and compensation for a public life that was full of uncertainty, struggle, and discrimination. The more distant the ideal of a stable and conventional family life seemed from the actual conditions of Jewish family life, the more it gained in appeal. Most Shoah survivors had lost their partners or parents and had spent the years between 1942 and 1945 in gender-­segregated concentration camps in which no semblance of family life could be recreated.

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Although the experience of Jews was dramatically different from that of other Germans, it was nevertheless true that non-­Jewish Germans also experienced a sharp disconnect between the ideal and the realities of postwar family life. In the immediate aftermath of defeat, millions of German husbands were either dead, languishing in prisoner-­of-­war camps or returning home with physical and/or mental disabilities.7 For these other Germans the appeal of restoring a normal family life also increased the more vanishingly distant a prospect it became. It is important to note that the significance and value of love relationships differed according to which kind of Jewish community one belonged. Jews who had lived in Germany before and during the Third Reich were disproportionately found in communities from northern cities and were often married to non-­Jewish partners. These individuals usually retained a memory of earlier forms of Jewish acculturation. Their understanding of how marriages could reinforce or transform their sense of being Jewish and German was therefore quite distinct from that of Jews who had emigrated to the Federal Republic from Eastern Europe and whose first encounter with the German state was typically during the Shoah. Families from this immigrant group, many of whom had spent time in displaced persons (DP) camps, tended to be much more influenced by Zionism and regarded the Federal Republic as, at best, a staging post.8 Although in this chapter I explore the differences between these two communities, I also trace the ways in which convergences of perspective became observable, particularly among the children of survivors. For instance, the romantic ideal of a Jewish marriage as either a foretaste of a new life in a vibrant Jewish community outside Germany or a symbol of Jewish endurance in a hostile Germany was a leitmotif than neither children of Eastern European nor those of German Jewish parents could ignore. This shift in sentiment also had a gender aspect. Many studies have drawn attention to the gender differences in Jewish communities that persisted or even sharpened in the postwar Federal Republic—­for instance, the double standards about dating and intermarrying applied to daughters and sons.9 And indeed, in some ways, more intense pressure was exerted on Jewish women after 1945. They were tasked with restoring a decimated Jewish community through their role as mothers and were also responsible for cultivating a family life that would serve as a walled garden in the

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midst of a threatening German society.10 Yet most Jewish wives were not put under quite the same kind of pressure as previous generations to help their husbands make it in German society. Husbands typically did continue to be the breadwinners and they had to be successful in their careers, not least because they were often saving up for the family’s later emigration. But expectations about women’s domestic roles changed. No longer were they expected to create the ideal bourgeois German household so much as rear a family that was ready to emigrate, ideally to the new Jewish state. To perform this function, wives were also encouraged to take a more active role in Jewish and especially Zionist organizations. Rather than being the silent partner in an assimilated German Jewish marriage, they could then become the public face of a more assertively Jewish family.11 As we will see, however, even though this change in role was welcomed by some women, for others—­ especially those who dated or married non-­Jewish Germans—­the growing divergence between what it meant to be German and Jewish made it all the more difficult to make sense of their relationships according to any preexisting emotional script. “After Five Minutes They Were Married” When Victory in Europe Day was declared on May 8, 1945, and troops were demobilized across the continent, most Jewish survivors, especially those in Eastern Europe and Germany, could not rebuild their prewar lives. Many did not want to; those who might have, often returned to unwelcoming or even violently antisemitic communities.12 The murder of forty-­two Jewish residents in July 1946 by Polish soldiers, civilians, and police officers in Kielce, a city 70 miles northeast of Kraków, provided the most chilling signal that a new age of pogroms and persecution beckoned for Eastern European Jews who sought to go back home.13 Instead of returning, many Jews were therefore compelled to seek refuge at DP camps. In these locations spread out across liberated Europe, Jews who had been forcibly separated from family members and who no longer knew whether any relatives survived searched frantically for information about their loved ones. Most of these individuals were between 18 and 40 years old and so were often left without parents or children.14 Their primary goal was thus to revive whatever family life they still could have.15 Their situation was quite unlike that of Jews living at the

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start of the twentieth century, who had often sought to take part in projects of national renewal in democratizing and socially fluid European societies. For the sherʾit ha-­pletah, the surviving remnant of European Jews, the priority was to inculcate feelings of solidarity among the embattled minority that had endured.16 What kind of individuals made up these almost decimated Jewish communities? Many young survivors—­malnourished and otherwise physically damaged, fearful of authority, and traumatized by experiences that their stunned consciousnesses could not process—­were in desperate need of orientation. But reports sent to camp administrators described squalid conditions in the DP camps, which were hardly likely to nurture these individuals back to physical or emotional health.17 Accounts written by local priests worried about the moral well-­being of particularly male outcasts who were being drawn into black marketeering and whose casual sexual relationships had apparently left young women from neighboring populations pregnant.18 These reports were hardly the work of objective outsiders, though; they were penned by locals whose outlook was shaped by the antisemitism of the era. Indeed, such accounts rehearsed and reinforced antisemitic stereotypes about particularly Eastern European Jews bringing their lawless ways with them to Germany. And stories of Jewish men corrupting young German women revived a notorious National Socialist propaganda trope.19 Some male camp inmates did, however, admit to sexual relations with German women, acknowledging the pleasure in breaking interethnic taboos and upsetting racial hierarchies that had been enforced with deadly seriousness by the Nazis. These men also reported being willing to experiment with non-­Jewish women in ways they would not have dared with fellow survivors.20 There is also the fraught issue of whether some Jewish men sought to use sex as a violent form of revenge, which emerged most prominently in discussions about the different language versions of Elie Wiesel’s Night. (The 1956 Yiddish edition refers to survivors going to town “to rape German girls,” whereas the French translation of 1958 only speaks of these survivors sleeping with these women.)21 At the least, this issue reveals how difficult it is to recover the experiences, actions, and feelings of survivors who spoke through the filters of postwar taboos and prejudices. Community leaders such as Jacob Oleiski of the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews were

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certainly keen to place interethnic love beyond the pale of respectability. As Oleiski explained, “People who could enter nowadays in intimate friendship with the Germans, must be ostracized [excommunicated] and excluded from the Jewish community.”22 His perspective was echoed by youthful leaders of the Buchenwald Kibbutz, the first agricultural training camp established in Germany after the Shoah. They impressed upon their (male) members that simple human self respect must prevent us from having relations with German women. . . . When our beloved Jewish girls burned in the crematoria, their clothes were brought to Germany, and these very girls might be wearing their dresses, their rings. It seems to me there is no more to say on this subject. . . . We are people who can, when necessary, control our instincts.23

Statistics would suggest that Jewish displaced persons did not, in any case, need all that much encouragement to begin relationships with one another rather than outsiders. The 1,438 marriages and 500 circumcision ceremonies carried out in the Belsen DP camp in the first two years after liberation were quite representative of what happened in most camps, where thousands of marriages were recorded, often hastily arranged by couples who were expecting a child.24 At the Föhrenwald camp an employee of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee reported that “by the spring of 1946, every third woman was either pregnant or pushing a baby carriage.”25 Birthrates among Jewish displaced persons stood in stark contrast to those of the surrounding German population: 14.1 births per 1,000 Jewish displaced persons in Germany were recorded in November 1946, whereas the corresponding figure for the German population in Bavaria was only 3.7.26 These new lives and partnerships were a cause for celebration for community leaders such as Samuel Gringauz, head of the Landsberg DP camp, who had explicitly told young people that they had a sacred duty to rebuild the decimated Jewish community. As he urged them in a speech given on Yom Kippur in September 1945, “For you, our young people, are agents of our revenge which ought to be a proud assertion to continue life. You must readily show the world and all our enemies that despite everything we are here to stay. . . . You

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must create and build, dance and sing, open yourselves to life, to living and labor.”27 Despite the ongoing traumas they suffered, survivors did soon feel revitalization within themselves. Emaciated bodies that had become unsexed came back to life. As Atina Grossmann has explained, displaced persons photographed each other almost obsessively, proving to themselves that they were still alive and also thereby creating a new archive of happier memories.28 Wearing conventional clothing again helped too: Women and men could emphasize feminine and masculine characteristics through their dress, even if their bodies still failed to conform to gendered ideals.29 Marriage worked like another kind of clothing; the time-­honored institution provided a layer of familiar, normal identity to couples who had already lost out on so much of what made up a typical journey to adulthood. Still, those embarking on new relationships rarely used conventionally romantic language to describe the partnerships they formed. Sex and love seemed eerily disconnected for many camp inmates. We have seen that after 1933 it was often hard for Jews who felt desire for other Germans to imagine these feelings turning into love because there seemed to be no future for Jewish or mixed couples. By 1945 survivors’ capacity to project positive experiences into the future was even more compromised. If hope in the future entailed imagining that you might grow and become something you were not yet, then this kind of hope seemed beyond many young displaced persons who described already being old in terms of experience.30 One explanation for the baby boom is that for these prematurely aged survivors, the only youth they could experience was that of offspring who would be untainted by a genocidal past. This hope spoke to the predicament of displaced persons who often understood new relationships primarily as compensations for the loss of loved ones during the Shoah.31 All of this may make displaced persons’ actions seem more strategic than they really were, though. For many survivors the world after the camps was so utterly unpredictable that to apply conventional labels to actions and relationships was to romanticize them in a totally unpragmatic way. After being subject to the arbitrary power of camp guards or having received the protection of non-­Jews who might turn them in at any moment, displaced

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persons were reluctant to trust that their relationships would conform to any reliable patterns. Even those who did describe “falling in love,” such as Polish Jewish displaced person Benjamin Piskorz, tended to be rather matter-­of-­fact about how this love was demonstrated. Piskorz first really appreciated that his future wife “worrie[d] about me, that she indeed love[d] me” when she brought him a “change of clothes and food to the prison.” (Piskorz had been in the Judenberg DP camp in Austria and was briefly imprisoned for fighting with an Englishman, presumably a soldier.) Furthermore, when explaining how nice their wedding was, Piskorz did not focus on the couple’s vows or feelings but rather recounted that “on my wedding there was enough to eat” and that “I received cigarettes for the wedding. I received clothing from the UNRRA [United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration].”32 Piskorz was a particularly damaged individual. He had endured excruciating torture and had confessed to emulating Nazi crimes in revenge. But his commitment to finding a partner as a means of survival rather than being an act of passion was not untypical. As psychologists who visited the DP camps commented, survivors were resolutely focused on the here and now, and future-­oriented emotions such as hope remained frozen. Paul Friedman, a psychoanalyst who surveyed the mental health of Jewish displaced persons for the Joint Distribution Committee, was astounded by the relative uninterest in sex of adolescent displaced persons and their profound inability to fantasize about potential partners.33 Partly this was a product of camp inmates’ survival strategy of distancing themselves from their feelings during their imprisonment. But their psyches were also ravaged by memories that they tried to repress but that reasserted themselves during sleep.34 Indeed, one important reason for starting new relationships was that they could generate new psychological content that would efface older memories. A poem from one lover to another recovered by Atina Grossmann illustrates this aspect well. We only met each other a couple of months ago. And already, dear, I find I love you so! And what do you know, she smiled at me In my dreams last night, My dreams are getting better all the time! Replace bad memories with good ones.35

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The significance of these displaced persons’ experiences is that they challenge conventional understandings of how mind and body interact in the feeling, communication, and perception of emotions. An initial reading might indicate that there was a gap between actions and feelings—­sex and love—­in displaced persons that was a result of the emotional damage done to them. But if we try to think about the daily interactions of these individuals, we could conclude that they were really acting lovingly toward one another even if they did not describe their relationships in conventionally romantic terms.36 (This was the opposite of especially the young men focused on in earlier eras who sometimes developed an ornately romanticist language to describe often quite conventional behavior.) Perhaps because the language of romantic love had been so important for the self-­perceptions of assimilated Jews earlier in the century, such a vocabulary was either unwelcome to disenchanted German Jewish survivors or relatively unfamiliar to most Eastern European displaced persons who had not necessarily subscribed to such cherished German middle-­class values. The advantage of taking this interpretive approach is that it allows the historian to imagine displaced persons not simply as victims who were lamed by their experiences but also as individuals who were once more capable of experimenting and gaining agency through their interactions. Such individuals might not have simply lacked emotion but rather learned strategies for intimacy through physical interactions that did not really fit into any preexisting emotional script. In a sense, their “knowing bod[ies]” were more trustworthy than their minds, which had to use tainted languages and concepts.37 This might also explain another reason for the baby boom: By tending to the physical needs of their offspring, Jewish parents (but particularly mothers) could observe themselves acting as nurturing individuals who were fostering and safeguarding life. They thereby carried out a “re-­affirming of the self.”38 When love is specifically mentioned in oral histories, it is usually talked about with reference to the community rather than as something experienced in a particularly intense way by couples. Solomon Horowitz, an Orthodox rabbi from the eastern part of Poland, offered a glowing account of this change in sensibility when he explained that in the camps “people strive that there be a brotherly life. One for another would walk into fire. The love of one another becomes here forged together. All of us are constantly to-

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gether. One treasury, one food, one treatment. . . . We all have one aim and one endeavor.”39 Horowitz’s testimony should be treated with caution, but it expresses at least the aspirations of a newly prominent religious leader in the camps. In a camp environment where Orthodox religious leaders were given unprecedented authority by the Allies to regulate marriages and gender relations more generally, appeals to romantic love seem to have been omitted or tabooed.40 Some Zionist leaders in the DP camps even expressed mixed feelings about whether survivors should return to normality, at least with regard to reconstituting nuclear families. Educators who set up a home for orphans in a French DP camp came to prize the domestic arrangements they had created as a substitute for the traditional family. As one of them explained when questioned about whether it would not be a better idea to raise children in conventional families, “The facts show that a private life has many more faults than a collective life. . . . To our children the concept of egoism is completely alien. . . . The children are living under truly just, social ideals.”41 Their perspective was widely shared by members of kibbutzim who wished to raise a new generation of Jews that would be more concerned with the welfare of the community and less with its individual prosperity and standing in host European societies.42 For other religious leaders, conventional marriages were certainly still to be celebrated but primarily because they reinforced the surrounding Jewish community. As Rabbi Horowitz explained, “When one gets married here, it is a joyful event for everyone. Everyone joins in the happiness. A joy the same as if his own brother . . . would get married. And his life creates in the people a great love of one for another.”43 Horowitz was active in a French rather than German DP camp before he emigrated to Israel. But like-­minded colleagues from Eastern Europe who settled in Bavaria sought to ensure that future Jewish marriages would serve as building blocks of a refortified Jewish community. Rather than believing that marriage would inculcate the values needed to thrive in bourgeois German society, Eastern European religious leaders valued marriage as a way for individuals to support one another in a potentially hostile society, strengthen one’s Jewish identity, and plan a future move to a country with a more vibrant Jewish community, such as Palestine or the United States.44 If Georg Simmel could describe the early-­twentieth-­century marriage in

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Germany as a society of two, into which the values of the surrounding society penetrated, the post-­1945 Jewish marriage could, by contrast, create a community of two, which radiated the values of newly self-­conscious Jewish collectives. Although this shift might seem altogether attributable to the uniquely vulnerable position of Jewish communities after the Shoah, it also reflects a broader realignment in postwar Central Europe in which members of previously multi-­ethnic societies retreated or were expelled to their ethnic “homelands.”45 This change was also evident in the actions of UN aid workers, who strived to revive family units that had been decimated by the war. These officials reinforced the cords connecting families to ethnic and religious groups when they decided whether orphaned children who had lived with religiously different or foreign foster parents should be adopted in situ or “returned” to their “home” religious or national communities.46 One sign of this shift in sentiment was that weddings conducted in the early postwar years were often as much outlets for survivors to weep and remember murdered partners and parents as opportunities to celebrate signs of new life in embattled Jewish communities.47 For Jewish couples who were not at all sure what sort of identity they possessed in the bewildering postwar world, getting married in a Jewish ceremony was a powerful symbol of recognition from a surrounding community. In the DP camps, married couples sometimes sought strength in numbers by living together rather than breaking off into recognizable nuclear family units, despite the pressure to conform applied by Allied camp organizers.48 Indeed, one relief worker reported to the British Jewish Central Information Office that children were initially removed from living with their parents because “married couples sleeping with two or three friends [was] a common thing.”49 The blurred lines between the family domain and the life of the wider religious group meant that some especially Zionist and Orthodox religious leaders took a keener interest in the character of new marriages, which they hoped would provide the building blocks for a more self-­conscious and self-­sufficient Jewish community. Women no doubt felt the pressure most when rabbis in the DP camps spoke of their efforts “to rededicate people to the observance of moral chastity and modesty.”50 Whereas men’s sexual explorations might not always have obvious consequences, the risk that a woman would become pregnant with a non-­Jewish man’s child threatened

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to ­rupture the integrity of newly formed Jewish communities. Rabbis were also the ultimate arbiters of whether men and women were free to remarry if they suspected that their former partners had been killed. The impact of not being able to prove the death of a partner hit women especially hard, as they were then deemed agunot (abandoned wives) and not permitted to remarry. Rabbis often inclined toward leniency in such instances, however, such was the pressure felt by all to help survivors reacquire some kind of conventional family life.51 As Jacob Oleiski explained, encouraging conventional family units to form would create the kind of emotional “coziness” that would allow “the mournful past [to] be forgotten.”52 The hope that the “the mournful past [could] be forgotten” once the rhythms of family life reasserted themselves proved illusory in many cases, not least from the viewpoint of survivors’ children, who often sensed the shadow of the Holocaust looming larger rather than receding with time. This was a struggle that Austrian Jewish author Robert Schindel captured so well in his 1964 poem, “Memories of Prometheus.” Schindel’s father had been murdered in Dachau and his mother survived spells in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück before returning to Vienna. The poem is full of internal ironies and dissonances: Schindel plays with the myth of Prometheus, who brought fire from the gods to the mortals, provoking the reader to wonder who are the gods and who are the humans in this post-­Shoah world. In the poem’s first section, Schindel recalls the experiences of his parents during the Holocaust; perhaps these figures from an unfathomably distant world are the sacred figures, seemingly sanctified by their immense suffering. But when the poet deals with them, they are painfully fleshly beings. “Knocking about” in a cattle car, his mother is a “skeleton” with “overalert senses”; his father, who once apparently possessed “a wonderfully analytical mind” and “loved music and gymnastics,” could only be recognized by “his bony shield and his skin.” By the time Schindel turned 1 year old, his father had been killed and rendered “sense-­less.” Schindel’s own sense of self was thus left marooned between the then and now. Even though the young survivor’s child “learned a myth  .  .  . with [the] happy ending” of his being alive, he found that, in reality, the baby with a traumatized mother and murdered father had “glued / His old being with great silent eyes” onto the poet who existed twenty years later.

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And yet this survivor’s child nevertheless wanted to return to something like a normal world, within which human attachments and sensual pleasures were cherished. As Schindel explained, what he and his generation “insist[ed] on” was “Where Heaven and / Earth touch / One another. The morning-­like / Caress.”53 Although the bodily had been so degraded by the indignities of the Shoah and was left eerily disconnected from the spiritual, this survivor’s child focused not on lofty political goals and agendas but on the more immediate matters of sensual and physical revitalization and affirmation. Schindel thereby addressed the predicament of especially those who stayed in either of the Germanys or Austria. They no doubt desired some kind of normality and, in some ways, found it in societies such as West Germany, which seemed to recover, at least economically, with incredible speed.54 But, as we will see, survivors and the following generation, particularly those Jews and other Germans who developed mutual attachments, also experienced present-­day intimacies that plunged them and their families back into an infinite and unmanageable past. The Community of Two Courtship and marriage practices were bound to change profoundly during an era when the “German-­Jewish symbiosis” was irrevocably over, as declared by former German Jewish intellectuals such as Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. The World Jewish Congress seemed to confirm this judgment at its opening postwar assembly in July 1948, when the remaining Jews in Germany were urged to emigrate from the “blood-­soaked German soil.”55 When the Jewish Agency closed its emigration office in West Germany in 1949, it offered a trenchant judgment that “some ten thousand Jews still living in Germany have no justification for remaining here, neither a Jewish, nor Zionist, nor human justification.”56 Similarly, Jacob Oleiski, who lived in Munich after being released from nearby Dachau, explained how impossible it seemed for Jews to imagine reintegrating into German society after 1945. A Jew in Germany who moves about surrounded completely by Germans—­among Germans—­is unable to forget the grave experiences. Besides the Jews in Germany are compelled to look on and see that they who once lived a fine and citizenlike life, possessing everything;

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and then the Germans had everything taken away and have ruined everything that they possessed—­materially and spiritually . . . and these people [the Germans] live a normal life in beautiful apartments . . . they are able to have everything. . . . And still more, one does not see any spiritual transformation or change in the German people.57

Because most Jews followed through with plans to emigrate from Europe, the Jewish population in the postwar Federal Republic did indeed shrink to less than 25,000 by the early 1950s.58 This was a precipitous decline from the 500,000 strong population that had lived in Germany in the early 1930s. Any continuous narrative of Jewish experience in Germany therefore has to recognize that what constituted a Jewish community after 1945 is hardly comparable to the Jewish community of the pre-­Nazi era. Indeed, the Jewish population after 1945 was really made up of two communities that had quite different pathways into German society. One was German Jewish, made up mostly of survivors who were usually married to non-­Jews and located mostly in the British Zone. The other, slightly larger community was Eastern European, whose members were not necessarily all that familiar with German culture or even the German language and who settled in the south.59 For Eastern European communities that had remained marginalized in their surrounding European societies and among whom Zionism and Orthodoxy had long held more appeal, the prospect of marrying within the Jewish community in West Germany may have been uncontroversial. But on the ground realities meant that the allegiances of German Jewish survivors, many of whom owed their survival to Christian partners, were often conflicted. More than 65 percent of this group had lived in mixed marriages during the Third Reich, and in cities with larger Jewish communities, such as Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt, the numbers were even higher.60 Some of those who had loosened ties to Jewish communities to pass as members of the German Volk during the Third Reich had still experienced persecution as Jews, but they were no longer regarded as confessing Jews by postwar religious leaders who awarded relief and compensation.61 Understanding how their marriages fitted into the life of surrounding religious communities and German society was therefore far from simple for these individuals.

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The Jewish community in Düsseldorf provides a particularly interesting case study of how German Jewish women and men formed (or sometimes did not form) a collective after 1945. As a group of Jewish husbands pointed out when appealing to the local synagogue community for financial support for their Christian wives, about 80 percent of Jewish survivors in the city lived in mixed marriages. For this reason, among others, Jews in Düsseldorf were among the most reluctant to emigrate from Germany, according to surveys conducted from 1949 onward.62 Jewish husbands’ appeal for support for their wives was no doubt motivated primarily by their material needs. But it also revealed the husbands’ abiding belief that non-­Jewish Germans could love Jews and that Jews could practice love in a socially enriching way while remaining in Germany. The husbands likened the love shown by their wives during the Third Reich to the loving loyalty of the biblical figure Ruth, when she refused to abandon Naomi, the mother of her deceased husband. These women were “people like Ruth,” who, according to the book of Ruth had vowed, “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die—­there will I be buried” (Ruth 1:16–­17).63 On the one hand, these husbands were arguing that their wives had been exceptional individuals who had not taken the path followed by most Germans between 1933 and 1945. On the other hand, however, they suggested that the union of two peoples in one family held out the promise of redemption for all Germans in the future. These husbands went on to contend that Jews in Germany needed to demonstrate their capacity to practice Nächstenliebe (love of neighbor), which “would be a measure of our culture’s standing.” Once more, they urged, Jews needed to show that “Jewish spirituality, Jewish ethics created the notion of loving your neighbor.”64 Although this reference to “love of neighbor” emphasized the distinctness of Jewish culture and thus resonated with contemporary Zionist philosophies, it also echoed late-­nineteenth-­and early-­twentieth-­ century appeals to Jewish Nächstenliebe. These appeals had claimed that Jews would prove their ethical equivalence with Christian counterparts and thus their capacity to integrate into German society by their ability to love non-­ kinfolk.65 As such, this kind of moral appeal was regarded with contempt by Eastern European displaced persons, who felt they already knew all that they could ever want to learn from supposedly rarefied Western civilizations.66

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Such a defense and even valorization of the mixed marriage as a microcosm of the good German society is certainly significant, although it did represent an exceptional rather than a typical attitude among Jews stranded in the Federal Republic after 1945. For the majority, West Germany was a staging post where they would never belong, even if some were not in a great hurry to emigrate or could not leave. A striking number of those Jews living in postwar West Germany who were interviewed for the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive at the University of Southern California described either how they had sought migration abroad and reluctantly returned after unsuccessful stints in Israel or elsewhere, or how they were the lone members of their families who had not managed to emigrate. Added to this mix were Eastern European Jews who had returned to their former home countries but, because of political events such as the pogroms in Poland or the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia, found West Germany or Austria to be the least worst options.67 Indeed, a 1967 study of German Jewish youths found that almost 40 percent of parents had lived in at least three countries.68 These Jews were therefore what might now be called “Germans plus,” although no such positive hybrid identity was on offer at the time.69 For such Jewish “sojourners,” who ended up staying in a land they never regarded as their own, there were few alternatives to some kind of de facto integration into mainstream German society, usually through marriage to non-­Jewish Germans.70 Between 1951 and 1958 most Jewish marriages were to Christians: 2,009 mixed marriages (mostly between Jewish men and Christian women) compared with 679 intra-­Jewish marriages.71 This pattern was largely a result of the lack of Jewish women still alive; most of the concentration camp survivors were men. Mixed marriages then declined before rising once again in the 1970s. One reason for the decline was that young Jewish men and women who hoped to be married were not emboldened to take a chance on romance with a stranger, as a previous generation might have been. Given that strangers might have questionable pasts, survivors instead tended to seek out partners with comparable experiences of victimhood who would understand their ongoing emotional difficulties.72 Dora Skala, a Slovakian who settled in Frankfurt am Main after surviving Auschwitz and first emigrating to Israel, married a boyfriend in 1949 whom she had known in Slovakia and who had also made it through the same death

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camp. Although they were both “terribly hardened” by the time they met again after the war, they still needed a great deal of emotional support from one another. The couple went through the process of “screaming and crying in the night” together; knowing that “the two of them had stayed together gave [Skala] the strength to live.”73 Other married partners recognized that they had lived in a time and place where romantic horizons were relatively narrow. Ilse Rübsteck, who returned to the Rhineland after surviving the Riga ghetto, wondered if she would have married her husband had she had the opportunity to live in a country like the United States, where she believed she might have also met Christian men. Instead, she had married her husband in a kind of emergency ceremony when they received word that she would be deported. As she explained, having been a teenager in Nazi Germany, she had had the opportunity to meet only Jewish men. Her youth was therefore not one of romantic possibility but of caution and wariness.74 That Rübsteck used the United States as a point of comparison rather than a German city with its own history of Jewish-­Christian unions, such as Hamburg, is instructive, suggesting how remote earlier experiences of German multiculturalism seemed to German Jews after 1945. Jewish women in Germany may have especially longed for the freedoms apparently enjoyed by their American counterparts because they, much more than their male peers, were expected to marry within their religious communities. This at least was the conclusion of Lynn Rapaport, who conducted oral history interviews with eighty-­three second-­generation Jews in Frankfurt am Main in the 1980s. About 50 percent of the forty-­three men ended up marrying non-­Jews, although almost half of their partners (22.7 percent) converted to Judaism. By contrast, less than 10 percent of the forty women in this study entered into interfaith unions.75 Pnina Navè Levinson’s study of a broader cross-­section of German Jewish communities during the 1970s found a smaller difference, however, with about 1 in 3 men marrying a Jewish partner, whereas the corresponding figures for Jewish women were usually more than 40 percent.76 In Rübsteck’s case the partner she found in Nazi Germany was the companion she needed for life in the Federal Republic. After 1945 she was rather isolated, being the only Jewish woman in her adopted hometown of Bad Honnef; she had previously returned to her old family town, only to

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find that a former SS man was living in her family house. Meanwhile, the rest of her family had emigrated to France, Britain, and Israel.77 Rübsteck’s experience of being displaced and seeing her family dispersed is emblematic of the experience of Jews who lived in West Germany after 1945. For such individuals local Jewish institutions could provide some kind of substitute for lost family members and thereby play a vital intermediary role in helping marriages to work. Initially, rabbis were often called on to assess the validity of second marriages between individuals whose first partners had probably not survived.78 But they also helped especially male partners to find work, sought relief payments for couples at times of need, and even helped arrange German-­language instruction for Jewish children whose families were emigrating to West Germany.79 They also tried to protect returning Jewish couples who faced hostility and threats from resentful neighbors.80 In these ways, Jewish bodies played a paternalistic role that could make up for the continued weakness of male partners, whose economic and social standing had been decimated by National Socialism. Indeed, community leaders could take on the role of loving parents if preexisting families lacked such figures. For example, rabbis from the Düsseldorf Synagogue Community sometimes mimicked the role of loving father to their community during the 1950s and 1960s and enlisted the help of the local Jewish Women’s Association to take on maternal duties, such as visiting the sick and providing babysitting for married couples. In the case of a Frau B., the rabbi tackled official business, such as securing a passport extension from the Israeli embassy for her so that she could continue to look after her children in the Federal Republic. It appears that the rabbi was acting on Frau B.’s behalf because her husband had gone missing somewhere in Germany. In the meantime, the Jewish Women’s League paid visits to Frau B. to check on the cleanliness of the house and to ascertain whether the children were likely to suffer any “moral threat” from their upbringing.81 The absence of father figures was a particular problem for the children of German Jewish parents—­about 27 percent of fathers were missing in this community. Furthermore, a quarter of German Jewish parents were divorced, mostly those who had been living in mixed marriages.82 Rabbis in Düsseldorf were asked to intercede for distant fathers, who sometimes wrote, trying to excuse material difficulties or instances of infidelity.83 It is

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significant that when a father was alive and involved in his children’s upbringing, rabbis were reluctant to play the role of substitute paterfamilias. In a case from 1962 a rabbi in Düsseldorf was disinclined to support a mother who was eager for her daughter to be educated in an Israeli school precisely because he did not want to encroach on the parental authority of the girl’s father.84 The rabbi instead vouched for the child’s good upbringing before Düsseldorf ’s Youth Office (Jugendamt), thereby reinforcing the father’s case that his daughter should remain with him in West Germany.85 This was despite the fact that on other occasions, rabbis and other community leaders seemed equivocal about whether the Federal Republic was indeed an ideal environment for young families to settle.86 The broader significance of these stories is that they show how Jewish institutions became vital conduits for Jews in Germany to get and stay married. Jewish families contacted rabbis to ask whether a couple might find a viable Jewish community should they seek to (re)build a life in Germany.87 Long-­standing marriages were commended, resolemnized, and publicized by these local religious leaders, who even sent notices to local and Jewish newspapers and corralled mayors and state senators to attend the celebrations.88 Such signs of official validation could be of particular significance to precisely those individuals who were not sure of where or whether they belonged in the postwar Federal Republic. Within this context we can see how marriages could become communities of two, within which religious institutions played an amplified role. Such religious institutions were able to expand their influence, not only because needy families relied on them for financial support, child care, educational provision, and so on but also because their teachings reinforced a conventional, paternalistic model of the family at a time when the absence of male heads of household was painfully felt.89 It might also be helpful to remember that Jewish institutions played this enhanced role during an era when a parallel “re-­Christianization” was taking place in the early Federal Republic.90 The dominant model of Christian democracy rejected the “secular religion” of Nazism in West Germany in the name of the individual and the family, whose God-­given (and thus religiously defined) rights set limits on what any state could and should do. As a result, religions had a crucial role to play in creating the right kinds of citizens for a post-­totalitarian German state.91 Although these citizens were

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supposed to possess a loyalty toward their nation, they were also expected to retain a prior, prepolitical commitment to the religious communities that cultivated their fundamental moral sensibilities.92 This kind of rhetoric, somewhat paradoxically, might have allowed young Jews in West Germany to avoid the conflict between religion and modernity that earlier generations of German Jews had experienced. The fact that many Jewish children had parents from Eastern Europe who had not experienced the promises and disappointments of Weimar Germany also helped them to imagine a new, albeit often quite attenuated, relationship between their religion and their German nationality. Because religion served as such a useful counterpoint to an otherwise ever more mighty state according to this model, Jews no longer needed to choose between assimilation and maintaining their religious allegiance. They could foster an anti-­totalitarian political community precisely by cultivating their own religious communities, both through their civic engagement and by nurturing their faith within the family. Focusing on Charlotte Knobloch’s path to marriage helps to clarify this argument. This trailblazing figure, who survived the war years by pretending to be a Christian peasant girl, went on to serve as president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and vice-­president of the World Jewish Congress. She also sought to live a much more Orthodox life after 1945 than her resolutely assimilated German Jewish father had when he practiced as a lawyer in interwar Munich. Although she asserted her agency against the wishes of her father by marrying an Orthodox Jewish man from Eastern Europe, she nevertheless embraced a quite traditional model of marriage, at least after she had initially pursued her future husband and fallen in love with him.93 One of her husband’s attractive features, she recalled, was how he honored his “priestly heritage” by “living his religion in his everyday life,” observing the “613 commandments and proscriptions of the Torah” and thereby helping her to uncover the meaning of Jewish rituals that had lain “hidden deep in [her] heart” since childhood.94 Perhaps Knobloch’s inclination toward Orthodox Judaism simply reflected the greater influence of Eastern European communities in postwar Munich. But her decision to marry an avowedly religious Jewish man did not mean renouncing the promises of modern romance. Not only did she fall in love with a given individual, but she also took part in a generational

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romance that young Jews who asserted their Jewish identities experienced. As Schoschana Seckel, a member of the Frankfurt Jewish Youth Center in the mid-­1960s, explained, parents could even be grateful that their children learned to assert their “Jüdischkeit” (Jewishness) in a way their parents could not teach them.95 Knobloch’s own (not ethnically Jewish) mother had vanished after divorcing Knobloch’s father in 1936. As she explained in a chapter titled “Mamma—­and Other Offices,” she therefore relished the opportunity to be a mother who could offer her children the familial love and security of which she and her husband had been deprived. She was also eager to teach them how to be proud of their own identities as Jews, given that she had needed to conceal herself as an illegitimate daughter living in a Christian farmer’s family to survive the Third Reich.96 It was equally important for Knobloch to understand her maternal role in broader terms, though. She first became involved in Jewish organizations when she administered care to lonely survivors for whom, she hoped, she could provide some kind of substitute for their deceased family members. From this starting point, Knobloch took on ever greater duties, performing various prominent roles for the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO). As she noted with satisfaction, the “WIZO balls” that she organized in the 1960s were “legendary  .  .  . a firm feature in the Munich society calendar.” Yet “these many wonderful evenings” spent in the famous “Bayerischer Hof Hotel,” which might, in another era, have looked like a sign of successful assimilation into the local Bildungsbürgertum, were cherished by Knobloch because they “helped many facilities for children, youths and families in Zion.”97 In this way Knobloch could combine her private and public roles as “mother and [holder of] other offices.” Few German Jewish women could achieve Knobloch’s prominence in Jewish communities.98 But for most, marriage still offered them a new start, some freedom from their parental home, and/or a sense of place in German society. Even someone in an unhappy marriage such as Dina Dzialowski, who had fled Germany as a child, first settling in Israel after surviving the war in a Belgian convent, believed marriage provided some kind of stability. Dzialowski explained that she agreed to her first marriage “not out of love but simply because I wanted my own house. I wanted to stop being a ball or a packet that can be passed here and there.”99 The first generation of

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Jewish women living in Germany after 1945, like earlier generations, tended to occupy domestic roles, whereas their husbands worked in more public, market-­oriented jobs.100 If these married women were to possess a public identity, it was often through their roles in Jewish organizations; the Jewish women’s group in Berlin with its 500 members believed itself to be the largest women’s group in the city in the mid-­1950s, according to the community’s governing body.101 Jewish women’s organizations ended up playing such prominent roles in postwar communities largely because it was so difficult to find men who were willing to contribute formally to Jewish religious life. By 1960 only seven trained rabbis were serving German Jewish communities, alongside four or five nonacademic rabbis from Poland, who were responsible for smaller DP communities.102 Jewish men’s lack of commitment to their congregations was also a source of discomfort; on one occasion, the board of Düsseldorf ’s synagogue community reported with embarrassment that an English Jewish soldier was unable to say Kaddish because a minyan (prayer quorum) could not be formed.103 By contrast, women usually took the lead in providing care in Jewish homes and hospitals for seniors and children. Their work was so crucial because, as Philipp Auerbach, well-­known member of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, remarked in 1949, “It would be humiliating for Jews to ask for help from German welfare institutions, even if this step would mean an improvement of the desperate situation of the poor Jews. Welfare institutions for Jews living in Germany must, as prior to 1933, be administered exclusively by Jews.”104 And, for those like Knobloch who could welcome taking a leading role in Jewish communities, assuming these responsibilities meant that they could finally combine public and private roles and carve out a niche within German society for themselves and their families. It is important not to overgeneralize here. For those such as Dzialowski, who resented an Orthodox upbringing, the most important impact that Jews’ religious communities had on them was to stifle their freedom of maneuver, especially in their private lives. Dzialowski reflected that she and her sister were pressured into marriage by their teachers at an Orthodox Bais Yaakov school in Belgium, whose “pious” atmosphere provided no adequate substitute for parental love. Her sister remained a virgin four months into

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a marriage with a man “who disgusted her”; Dzialowski described “feeding and providing for” her first child despite feeling no “patience or love.” The problem, she explained, was that the sisters “never found their place”: “We never had a home where we could do what we really wanted, we were never given the time to find the right partners that we really wanted.”105 Yet both the happier descriptions of marriage offered by Knobloch and the unhappier account provided by Dzialowski illustrate the strong connection that such women felt between married love and the love of a wider Jewish community. For Jewish men, who enjoyed more autonomy than their female counterparts and who could gain more prominent roles in “outside” German society, any relationship between their private emotional lives and their public roles was often harder to discern. This, at least, is the impression left in oral history interviews. Eugen Herman-­Friede, a businessman and former Communist resistance fighter from Kreuzberg who emigrated to West Germany by way of Canada, reported having had a happy experience of marriage. Indeed, when he gave his interview, he was looking forward to his golden wedding anniversary. But he focused on how his wife had been a companion while he moved around with his career rather than discussing how their relationship might strengthen any local Jewish community.106 Indeed, a common feature of the responses given by male interviewees in the Visual History Archive is their reluctance to attribute any positive political or communal valence to their love relationships. When respondents mention love in relation to wider social relations or the political sphere, they are more often inclined to offer critical reflections on how insignificant Christian ideas of charity or love of neighbor had proved to be.107 As a result, numerous interviewees created a rigid separation between a loving private realm and a public sphere within which relationships were little more than functional. Baruch Friedman-­Bleicher, a Hassidic survivor from Poland, and his Sephardic wife described how their private life worked in the new Germany. Friedman-­Bleicher’s wife explained that their loving marriage was rooted in their shared faith, but he noted that Jews like them lived double lives. Using a term that, wittingly or not, conjured up military associations, Friedman-­Bleicher explained that in public they were “in camouflage.” Such a way of being was primarily possible because they lived in the

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border territory of Aachen, which, he believed, was “not really Germany.” In this city the community was multicultural, and the influence from neighboring “Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg” was a major factor. Although Friedman-­Bleicher acknowledged having non-­Jewish German friends and mentioned the existence of local Christian-­Jewish societies, he stressed the importance of “insisting” on living a Jewish life, describing this as way of “not capitulating.”108 To emphasize the separation between private and public, Friedman-­Bleicher focused on his decision to hang mezuzahs on the doors of his house. Prominent photojournalist Harry Weber, who lived in a mixed marriage in Vienna, drew a similarly bold line between the private and public spheres. Condemning fellow “diaspora Jews” for being mostly concerned with making money in their host societies, he projected his most intense feelings of “fervent and deep” love toward Israel, lamenting that he could not live out the Zionism he felt in his heart. Believing the postwar Austrian society in which lived (and enjoyed professional success, including receiving honors from the Austrian government) to be somewhat antisemitic and more profoundly selfish and individualistic, he stressed how important it was that his wife shared his intense Zionism. However, their love did not enrich the surrounding Austrian society so much as protect them from it, as illustrated by a story they told about when his wife punched an “older woman” who had called Weber a Saujud (Jewish pig) one night.109 The argument that private love could serve a political purpose, but usually only within a Zionist framework, was reiterated by Uli Gurewitz, a former Belorussian partisan who left Israel for Germany in 1963 after his first wife suffered a nervous breakdown. Gurewitz worked on German-­Israeli reconciliation, representing the interests of those pursuing reparations, but he also built a successful career as a property developer in Stuttgart. Yet he created what he regarded as an Israeli family that only happened to live in Germany. His second wife, a German born in 1947, converted to Judaism, and his “proudly Jewish” daughter always spoke Hebrew on the streets with him and made regular trips to the family apartment in Israel.110 These men’s pessimism that the love they felt and practiced in their families would permeate wider society in Germany or Austria is particularly striking, given that they built families during the 1960s, when an affective

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revolution was supposed to transform the nature of political community in these countries.111 In the early postwar years fledgling Christian-­Jewish groups had hoped that shared understandings of love might help to heal wounds. Theodor Heuss’s 1949 address to the Gesellschaft für Christlich-­ Jüdische Zusammenarbeit in Wiesbaden was titled “Mut zur Liebe” (The Courage to Love).112 Such Christian-­Jewish organizations approached their interactions with relatively muted emotions, though. It was important that these dialogues not be seen as attempts by Christians to convert the few remaining Jews in Germany, and so discussions about love remained at a fairly abstract level rather than wading into more intimate territory such as intermarriage.113 Moreover, as Frank Stern has argued, it was hard to disentangle heartfelt from instrumental professions of neighborly love during a period when evincing a certain kind of philosemitism served as a symbol of an individual’s successful denazification. Suspicions were also voiced that Christian notions of love of neighbor (Nächstenliebe) entrenched an image of Jews in Germany as perpetual foreigners who had to be loved as proof of the universality of Christian love.114 Maintaining a distinction between a loving, religiously infused private life and an unemotional German public life may therefore have served as an alibi for a West German society that sought to separate itself from its Nazi past and integrate into a cold war era democratic West. Jewish families that were firmly nested in the life of the Jewish community and semidetached from the surrounding German society could serve as evidence that a post-­totalitarian Federal Republic had restored the distinction between the public and the private. This state had also evidently abandoned earlier efforts to Germanize its minority groups. In this way German Jewish couples and families could play an important role in the drama of the West German democracy that emerged out of the moral ruins of Nazism.115 They provided an example of how a supposedly postracial state and society could practice a form of multiculturalism that did not demand that its minorities assimilate and thereby lose their distinctiveness.116 At least this is how things might look in retrospect. Our knowledge of how marriages actually played out is rather patchy. Statistics on how many marriages took place in the Jewish religious communities or how many Jewish or mixed marriages ended in divorce are not recorded in the yearly

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surveys published by West Germany’s Federal Statistical Office. The country surveys published annually in the American Jewish Yearbook also do not refer to such numbers. By piecing together studies by one of the foremost Jewish demographers, Sergio DellaPergola, and smaller surveys carried out by the director of the Frankfurt Jewish Youth Center from the mid-­1960s, however, we can surmise that Jewish marriages were not particularly different from other German marriages, at least in statistical terms. As DellaPergola explains, though Jewish teachings have stressed the centrality of marriage as the nucleus of a distinctive and enduring Jewish community, Jewish populations in Europe have tended to mirror the courtship and marital practices of surrounding societies.117 During the baby boom era, Jewish women and men also showed a high “marriage propensity,” but, by the 1970s across North America and Western Europe, Jewish marriage rates declined to the extent that they were even slightly lower than the average. In this regard, West Germany’s Jewish communities were unexceptional; alongside other comparable nations such as the United Kingdom, France, and Switzerland, the number of marriages recorded declined sharply during the 1970s.118 With regard to divorces in the Federal Republic, after dropping to about 10 percent in the mid-­1950s and remaining at this level until the mid-­1960s, divorces among all Germans steadily increased until they reached just over 30 percent by the early 1980s.119 From a survey carried out between 1962 and 1963 with a representative sample of 274 Jewish children drawn from the various Jewish communities in West Germany, it appears that at least 25 percent of these German Jewish children’s parents were either separated or divorced (many of whom had been in mixed marriages). What was equally striking was that the number of divorced “Israeli” parents (the largest immigrant Jewish group after the Eastern European displaced persons) was closer to 10 percent.120 The significance of these figures is that, although German Jewish parents seemed at least as likely to divorce as their Christian neighbors, those who had been at least partly socialized in Israel were much more likely to stay together. The apparent resilience of “Israeli” marriages and the greater propensity of Israelis (i.e., individuals still living in Israel) to marry—­and marry young—­did not go unnoticed. Indeed, when summarizing their findings, the demographers suggested that the “demographic distinctiveness” of

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Jewish Israeli society was due, at least in part, to the “diffusion of family norms”—­norms that had, presumably, been eroded in Western society.121 We cannot know the exact effect of these kinds of demographic studies on couples who lived in the Federal Republic. It is at least plausible, however, that the contrast between German Jewish families, whose relationships were not as distinctive as they might have liked, and Jewish families in Israel, whose personal lives appeared to reinforce a reviving Jewish population, strengthened the romantic utopia of a married life in Israel and confirmed the perils of remaining too long in the German staging post. The Next Generation Young Jews, who needed affirmation and companionship in their everyday existence and yet had to preserve the legacy of survivor parents and murdered relatives, tended to regard the push and pull between their private and public lives as a struggle. One source of pressure on survivors’ daughters and sons was that they, the first generation of Jews born after the Shoah, were supposed to be different. Unlike their parents, they would not be damaged by firsthand experience of the Third Reich. They would also not repeat what were regarded as the mistakes of earlier generations, who had sought integration in German society rather than prioritizing the collective strength of the Jewish community. And, perhaps most important, these young Jewish women and men could belong to an imagined Jewish community that had its own perceived national homeland. Speaking of what a blessed generation they were to live when the State of Israel was created, Rabbi Lazar Lipschütz reminded the members of the Jewish youth center in Düsseldorf that “we were not told about this great event by our fathers. We experienced it ourselves and felt it with every fiber of our hearts. The longings and hopes of many generations have in our day become reality.”122 Yet, having been told that they belonged to a uniquely blessed generation, Jewish youths reported feeling under pressure to prove their allegiance to this newly self-­conscious Jewish community whose centers were in Israel and the United States. This was understandable, given that even in August 1967 the World Union of Jewish Students exhorted Jews in Germany and Austria to “realize in the shortest possible period the incompatibility between being Jewish and living

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in Germany and Austria.” Those who remained were suspected of being “in search of personal advantage.”123 Youth organizations thus encouraged their members to deepen their Jewish identities by sponsoring reciprocal visits among Jewish youth groups across Europe. They also promoted trips to Israel as a preparation for eventual emigration.124 Yet, once it became clear that those families who had remained in or emigrated to the Federal Republic in the 1950s were not leaving, Jewish leaders also embarked on a major effort to reconstruct a Jewish communal life. They rebuilt synagogues and youth centers in the major cities, most notably Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, and Düsseldorf between 1958 and 1962.125 At the youth centers, dances, outings, and religious-­educational activities were organized to foster Jewish self-­awareness in the young and to give them opportunities to socialize and develop attachments to one another.126 One effect of such fervent community building was that German Jewish youths felt themselves being pulled in opposite directions by their Jewish communities and the surrounding German society. As the journalist and children’s author Thomas Feibel recalled, Jewish youths experienced undramatic daily lives within which ideas of “genocide remained  .  .  . incomprehensible, abstract, unreal,” and yet they were constantly reminded that they “were living in enemy territory.”127 One problem was the eerie normality of life in the Federal Republic: Jews and non-­Jews were, at least ostensibly, able to meet with one another in West Germany as freely as they had before 1933. Indeed, because there were so many instances when Jews in the Federal Republic found themselves in a minority of one (in schools, offices, and so on), their ethnic otherness was actually unlikely to be acknowledged in everyday interactions. And, for this reason, it was impossible for significant numbers to remain aloof within a religious-­ethnic enclave. Oral history interviewees reported that they were able to have friendships with non-­Jews in schools and at places of work, although they usually kept their Jewish and non-­Jewish friends separate.128 As a result, Jews once more were displaying the “situational ethnicity” that Till van Rahden argued characterized Jewish citizens in Breslau in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.129 Yet, as these same interviewees acknowledged, even though they may have acted like a perfectly assimilated minority, subjectively they believed themselves to possess a dis-

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tinct “peoplehood” from other Germans.130 The theater director Benjamin Korn addressed this predicament, speaking of how “every young Jew had to build . . . [a] bridge” between what they regarded as the separate entities of their Jewish community and the German society, a “footbridge across which social or sexual contact took place.”131 As a result, Jews were less likely to display what we might call situational emotionality, whereby they felt and displayed emotional responses based primarily on the situations in which they found themselves in daily life. Instead, the further that especially young German Jews ventured into postwar West German society, the more keenly they felt the presence of their families’ arms around them, pulling them back toward an immovable past. This was the predicament described by the editor of Schalom: Jüdische Jugendzeitschrift für Deutschland in 1964, when he explained that young Jews did not want to be “isolated from [their] Christian peers” and have a “ ‘special status’ just because they were Jews.” Although they understood the justifiable “resentments” with which their parents were burdened, the gulf between their own experiences and their parents’ stories put them in an awkward position that led to these young Jews “behaving in their own peculiar way.” They “tested out every contact with young Christians with great caution and remained extremely sensitive and vigilant.”132 This sensitivity and vigilance were even maintained when young Jews were confronted with German philosemitism. As one young female journalist explained: I don’t like it at all when they [Germans] think I’m something special because I’m Jewish. . . . I wouldn’t say people love me because I’m Jewish, but it’s a plus. It makes me feel very bad. . . . In a certain way I associate it with people who want to have a disabled friend, and the first disabled person that comes along on the street is supposed to be their friend, but only because they want to adorn themselves by knowing someone disabled, or a Jew.133

Young Jews also reported feeling conflicted about the role that romantic relationships should play in creating a new Jewish community. Some remarkable columns in the Munich-­based Jewish youth group magazine Atid

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illustrate that the members, who mostly had Eastern European heritage, felt the pressure to make a good match and not betray their parents by becoming romantically entangled with non-­Jewish Germans. Still, their eagerness to respect their elders conflicted with their desire to individuate and seek out their own romantic opportunities. In an interview conducted with anonymized young women for a column called “Girls’ Worries” from 1963, respondents complained that they did not have the chance to flirt and experiment like normal teenagers. Of the Jewish boys with whom they socialized, the girls commented that the 19-­year-­olds in the youth group just wanted to meet “German girls.” Of the younger teenage boys who were their contemporaries, they complained, “We’ve known each other for five years. . . . In this time, we’ve met three times a week, and know all our faults and virtues. This makes flirting, which is a typical part of teenagers’ conversation, impossible. We always meet the same people at parties.” These teenagers also tended to attend the same summer camps, spending so much time together that it was difficult for them to regard each other as potential partners rather than as something more like siblings. Communal pressures nevertheless made it uncomfortable to look beyond Jewish circles. As the young women explained, “We can’t date boys from other faiths. Our parents have forbidden this and most of us girls don’t disobey them, although it hits us hard. And if a girl does date a non-­Jewish boy, and is seen by a neighbor or school colleague, she loses her good name and provides the grown-­ups with a whole week’s worth of gossip.”134 About a decade later Thomas Feibel offered similar insights into the difficulties of finding either Jewish or other German partners. Of the party for the grand opening of his Jewish youth center in Mannheim, he remembered, “Like all our parties, it fell flat. As usual, hardly any girls came. The few who did show up were soon scared off by our show of pubescent charm.” Things undoubtedly became “livelier” when non-­Jewish members of the Society for Christian-­Jewish Cooperation came to visit at a later date, primarily because of “the girls [who] never ceased to fascinate us. Beautiful, blond, and desirable.” Yet, as Feibel and his friends sadly reflected, “It was clear they would never belong to us. The most beautiful girl in the world did us no good if she wasn’t anchored in the Jewish faith.”135 Perhaps in response to some members’ lack of enthusiasm for intra-­Jewish get-­togethers, youth magazines provided

FIGU R E 6. “Girls’ Worries [Mädchensorgen],” Atid (1963). Source: Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, University of Heidelberg. Reprinted with permission.

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enticing reports of romantic trysts that took place on such occasions.136 For instance, when a group leader from Munich described a trip to visit counterparts from Frankfurt am Main, he wrote of the incredible “atmosphere” when the groups were together “dancing, making music and singing.” But he also carefully let slip that “in those few days some little couples formed, which raised our spirits. But we’ll leave it at that.”137 These accounts suggest that young Jews living in the Federal Republic felt significantly more constrained by familial and communal pressures than earlier generations. As we have seen in previous chapters, numerous young Jews growing up in late Imperial and Weimar Germany believed that by choosing their partners freely, they were contributing to a freer and more multicultural German society. By contrast, during a period when many other Europeans thought that political revolution would occur once young people became more in tune with their desires, young Jews interviewed in the mid-­ 1960s described love as a threat that could distract them from their political goals.138 One young woman talked about how young Jews like her felt that their “roots” lay in Judaism, even if German culture constantly threatened to pull them away. Chief among the threats was love, which could be “a strong storm that tears out the roots.” A group of Gymnasium-­educated 18-­to 20-­year-­olds echoed this sentiment, identifying romantic love as an irrational force that would likely prevent them from assuming a respectable position in their communities. Indeed, one conceptualized Jewish susceptibility to falling in love with non-­Jews as “typical Jewish schizophrenia—­ being split between reason and feeling.”139 It is important to note that worries about mixed-­faith romances were no Jewish peculiarity in the postwar era. It was only during the Second Vatican Council (1962–­1965) that the Roman Catholic Church resolved to no longer excommunicate those Catholics whose mixed marriages had been consecrated by a Protestant minister. Rather than simply shutting down discussion about the issue of interconfessional marriages, this decisive change revived debates, leading to new versions of advice literature being issued, such as a Protestant text from the 1950s called Wenn Eva aber katholisch ist [What If Eve Is Catholic].140 We should also not assume that it was always religious institutions that were dictating the terms when children were warned not to

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date or marry outside the fold. The pressure was often imposed by parents who might not so much seek to keep their children safe from other Germans as simply want to hold on to them for their own sakes. This was a commonly voiced complaint from Jewish children, who found their parents to be so needy and lonely that they regarded any of their children’s friendships or romances as threats to their own centrality in their family’s life. Sons and daughters from the Kalman family interviewed by Y. Michal Bodemann addressed this issue, describing how difficult their parents had found it to build friendships and networks, either in Jewish milieus or in German society.141 One daughter particularly resented how her mother constantly competed to be the most important person in the lives of her children, even sabotaging friendships with girlfriends and slapping her for staying out late at a disco after she had attended a bar mitzvah.142 At least as typical were stories of Christian partners who were resented for taking away a “golden boy” or who found that such a “golden boy” might have gotten used to having everything done for him by overprotective parents.143 (As we have seen, it was usually Jewish men more than Jewish women who married non-­Jews.) Children who constantly asked themselves what they would have done in their parents’ places during the Nazi period could also be “hyper-­vigilant” to antisemitism, which affected how they confronted discord in their partnerships.144 For instance, when the daughter of a Viennese Holocaust survivor and Christian convert got married, she asserted her Jewish identity, much to the annoyance of her husband who turned out to be, according to the mother, an antisemite. The daughter’s growing antipathy toward her husband made her more generally suspicious of her Viennese neighbors, a number of whom she verbally accused of being Nazis. It was only when the daughter separated from her husband that her mother noticed she stopped being so hypersensitive to perceived antisemitic slights in her everyday life.145 Interactions between adolescents in Jewish youth organizations sometimes dramatized the push and pull that they felt between home environments and “outside” German or Austrian society. For instance, the members of the Munich-­based Maon Hanoar group who produced the magazine Atid during the early 1960s played with the many pressures they felt by teasing each

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other in such gossip columns as “Klatsch-­Tratsch-­R atsch” (Gossip, Gossip, Gossip) and “Pssssssst! Klatsch.”146 It is hard to know to what extent these youths were deliberately breaking taboos and shaming each other within a safe space, or whether they were simply internalizing the pressures exerted on them by their families. Certainly, any articles that dealt with romantic love tended to be full of irony and multiple meaning. For instance, the male and female members wrote to each other in columns that described the ideal boy or girl. To offer a flavor of the back and forth: The boys introduced one column by speaking as “respectable, well-­raised co-­citizens [Mitbürger] of our civilization.” They then went on to suggest that the ideal girl should be “poor as a beggar, but absolutely must have rich parents,” because although a dowry was “ridiculous,” still parental wealth “was reassuring.” When it came to looks, she should have “raven-­black hair with tinted platinum highlights, midnight blue [and] innocent eyes,” and “little, sweet, raspberry-­colored lips.” As for her figure, even though the boys said they did not want to be too prescriptive, they thought she at least had to fit into a “forty-­centimeter sized swimsuit.” She should also be a fine dancer and move like a “gazelle” but not have big feet like a piano.147 Such passages, while bearing heavy traces of sexism and evoking “Aryan” stereotypes, were written with a good deal of self-­awareness and amusement at social expectations. However, they did also refract the competing pressures that young German Jews felt themselves to be under. When it came to attitudes about gender and sexuality, some of the articles suggested that youth group members had internalized some of the double standards observable in families. For instance, although some young men were teased for being “Casanova[s],” more attention was paid to anyone who counted as a “female Casanova.” One such young woman was reported on for having “got herself a new admirer every two weeks,” and another female group member provoked the “very unsettling observation that [she] preferred skin-­ tight tops.” This “led [the authors] to conclude that she wants to be the SEX BOMB No. 1 of the Maon.”148 Clearly these (presumably male) authors were reacting to and aggravating the conflicted situation of young Jewish women, who were living through an era of youthful rebellion and changing fashions, yet whose sexuality was carefully guarded by wary parents.

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The pressures that such young women were under were much discussed in the oral history interviews that Lynn Rapaport conducted with second-­ generation Jews in the late 1980s. A large majority—­80 percent—­of an admittedly small cohort of forty had dated non-­Jewish men at some point, although they encountered more parental opposition than male counterparts, of whom 95 percent dated women from outside their religious group. The female interviewees reported that parents acknowledged they could not prevent their sons from dating outside the religion, but they did try to insist that their marriages be all-­Jewish affairs. By contrast, a stricter line against Jewish daughters dating was taken, no doubt because of the risk that these young women would become pregnant.149 Reflecting on how this affected her during the 1970s, one daughter from the Kalman family stated bluntly, “It was one thing for the boys, but I am the only daughter of five siblings. . . . I was not allowed to date non-­Jews, and basically I could not have any non-­ Jewish friends. I was totally, like in the worst Middle Ages, totally in the ghetto. . . . It was pretty awful, I’d say, being in a golden cage.”150 For this young Jewish woman, it was impossible to live the life demanded by her parents and to enjoy the autonomy in her personal life that members of her generation had come to expect. Having moved to Israel, she compared her fortunes with those of her two brothers, both of whom had been involved with non-­Jewish women but had not married them because of the ramifications for their family. They were apparently trapped between the past and the present in Germany, but she had come to a place that represented the Jewish future for many survivors’ families. As a result, she suggested that she and the Romanian husband she had found could bring the best of their European heritage with them and pass it on to their Israeli children, who were apparently not so burdened by the past. Interestingly, the Jewish associational life that had been so meaningful for other Jewish women, such as Charlotte Knobloch, was for the Kalmans’ daughter a sign of how limited Jewish women’s lives were in Germany. As she commented, “The ones that have remained in Germany, in Frankfurt or elsewhere, what a life! They go from a Keren Hayesod meeting to a WIZO meeting and so forth, just because they want to preserve a Jewish social life at all cost. I really pity these people. Just because they want to preserve a Jewish life they have no choice

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but to socialize with second-­rate people, with people they really would not otherwise want to be around. It is pitiful somehow, especially pronounced in Berlin. I look at that with a skeptical eye, the hysterical way in which they are forcibly trying to consolidate a flourishing Jewish life there.”151 This daughter, the self-­professed “Zionist pioneer” of her family, was addressing the predicament summed up by Y. Michal Bodemann when he argued that Jewish families in West Germany did not live in a place so much as a time—­that of an imagined future (in Israel).152 This was an issue also tackled by Henryk Broder in an essay entitled “Heimat? No Thanks!” Broder contended that whereas other Germans could have a sense of Heimat or being “at one with [their] surroundings,” Jews were more likely to gain their sense of belonging from living within a “tradition.”153 This was at least partly because Jews had learned that any geographic locale might become hostile territory at any point. But it also meant that, particularly in post-­ Shoah times, any story that German Jewish women and men told about themselves would be rooted in their tradition rather than in their belonging to any place—­unless that place was elsewhere, ideally Israel. As a result, falling for a non-­Jewish German did not allow one to construct the love myth of earlier generations, which was tied to dreams of assimilation; rather, it drew one away from what Broder regarded as a new myth of “next year in Jerusalem.”154 Other contexts are nevertheless also relevant in terms of explaining shifts in Jewish dating practices and emotional styles. For instance, how other outsiders were treated by the West German state and society no doubt affected Jewish citizens. If most foreigners were regarded as Gastarbeiter who were not expected to become German citizens or plan long-­term futures in Germany, this surely shaped how Jews—­two-­thirds of whom had been born elsewhere—­imagined themselves fitting into any future Germany.155 A further complexity has been noted by Rita Chin and Heide Fehrenbach in their study of racial politics in the Federal Republic. They argue that the apparent invisibility of race in West Germany not only made it more difficult for Germans to critically assess issues around the integration and exclusion of guest workers but also left Jews in a paradoxical situation.156 Although Jews could hardly forget how terrorized their ethno-­faith community had been in recent history, postwar taboos about race meant they could not receive

FIGU R E 7. Cover of Atid, June 1963. Source: Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, University of Heidelberg. Reprinted with permission.

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special consideration or support as outsiders who needed integrating into German life. Given that West Germany, however reluctantly, was becoming a land of immigration by the 1960s, Jews’ experiences after 1945 should not simply be presented as a narrative of how Jews existed alongside other Germans. It should also be contextualized within a broader history of how other outsiders fared. The Federal Republic absorbed at least 9 million expellees, who (unlike other immigrants) claimed and gained citizenship between 1949 and 1953 because of their status as ethnic Germans.157 By contrast, 11 million immigrants or “guest workers” came to West Germany between 1955 and 1973 from Spain, Italy, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, Turkey, and elsewhere but were not initially offered a pathway to citizenship. Purely quantitative findings based on microcensuses taken since 1960 suggest that, although interethnic marriages increased across all groups from 1960 to 2005, intermarriage was most prevalent among groups that had the least chance of marrying co-­nationals. Furthermore, in terms of their marriage choices, a “re-­ethnicization” may have taken place among children of certain immigrant communities.158 To tackle these issues adequately, a more qualitative analysis of various outsiders’ dating and marriage choices is necessary. But if we want to understand how Jewish love relationships worked in the Federal Republic, we need to be alert not only to the significant impact of the German Jewish past but also to the experience of other immigrants who lived alongside Jews and other Germans. Despite Eastern European Jewish displaced persons and German Jewish survivors’ very different trajectories into West German society, they may, at least by the 1960s, have come to form what Barbara Rosenwein has termed an “emotional community.”159 Members of this community shared an understandable wariness of non-­Jewish neighbors, signified by the widely circulated metaphor (and reality) of the suitcase that remained packed under beds, even as parents built businesses and saw their children succeed in German schools and universities. In many cases these families also shared the same hopes to eventually emigrate from West Germany to a society with a more thriving Jewish community, such as the United States or Israel. In the meantime, a commitment to reviving and preserving Jewish families

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was deemed paramount. To help with this endeavor, Jewish community organizations offered many kinds of medical, educational, pastoral, and financial support that strengthened solidarities between Jewish families and reinforced certain orthodoxies about family obligations, gender relations, and so on. It is, however, equally true that many Jewish women and men lived in mixed marriages and that most were not active members of religious communities. Compared with Jewish counterparts in most other Western countries, second-­generation children of survivors also continued to date and intermarry in relatively high numbers after 1945, although they rarely provided positive political justifications for their decisions and lifestyles.160 Indeed, by the 1960s, when many young Germans drew explicit links between a sexual and a political revolution, young Jews tended to be more skeptical that a politics of desire could deliver any beneficial social revolution—­at least in Germany.161 There was a gap, therefore, between the rhetoric and the reality of Jewish lives in the Federal Republic. Oft-­voiced hopes and fears pointed in one direction (out of Germany), whereas day-­to-­day interactions and entanglements anchored Jewish individuals and families more firmly in their present domiciles. In some ways this paradox was the exact opposite of the tension that existed between rhetoric and reality during earlier eras, when acculturation was a widely cherished goal in Jewish families. In the early twentieth century, especially German Jewish men had claimed that their freely chosen love matches showed how they were benefiting from the broader openness they believed existed in German society. Yet intermarriage did not become the predominant practice during this period.162 These intriguing gaps between rhetoric and practice are particularly interesting because they occurred during the “century of the self,” when the moral and emotional autonomy of the individual was apparently a motor of social and geographic mobility and the primary legitimation for democratic constitutions.163 In terms of Jews looking to strengthen their ethno-­faith community rather than seek some broader German political redemption, Jews in Germany may have actually shared the political outlook of other (West) Germans who lived through the Nazi era. Partly because of the recent past and partly because of early cold war imperatives, most West G ­ ermans

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welcomed a Christian democratic political culture that sharpened the divide between a more emotional private sphere and a public sphere where sentiments should be muted.164 This Christian democratic culture also encouraged a gendered moral conservatism that encouraged the “return” of women to traditional roles.165 It should be noted that this conservative rhetoric about a nonintrusive state ignored the ways in which certain types of nonconforming sexual behavior were policed as heavily as ever.166 And, as had been true before 1933, it turned out to be easier for Jewish and other German men to be romantics in this new world, where the consequences for acts of passion were milder than those for young women. But the absence of really convincing romantic scripts is the abiding impression left when reading young Jews’ discussions of their love lives after 1945. Little romance was attached to new and surviving mixed relationships, even though they suggest both the transience of the Third Reich’s racial ideology and the limited ability of any form of totalitarian government to enduringly alter human sympathies and desires. Although it was easier to romanticize Jewish partnerships, this romance worked best when it pointed toward the couple’s future outside Germany. Given the only limited emigration of Jews from West Germany after 1945, this script left numerous Jewish couples feeling somewhat stranded. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the character of Jewish life in Germany was transformed, not least by the migration of refugees from the former Soviet Union, whose memories of the twentieth century were often quite distinct from those of “veteran [Jewish] communities.”167 For both communities with deep German Jewish roots and communities primarily made up of former displaced persons from Eastern Europe, the central crisis in their collective lives had been the Third Reich, even if the German Jews had retained a collective memory of earlier versions of the German state. By contrast, former Soviet Jews could speak in more positive terms of a West German state that was economically prosperous and politically stable. For this reason among others, a new kind of romance has attached itself to the revival of Jewish life in the Federal Republic in recent years.168 These developments are discussed in the Conclusion, although to tell this story in full would take us beyond the scope of the present book.

 

Conclusion

At some point toward the end of a research stint at the University of Vienna’s Sammlung Frauennachlässe (Collection of Women’s Estates), I came across a memoir by Austrian Jewish artist Irma Rafaela Toledo. It was composed in fragments, like a collage. Scanning through the various poems, diary entries, and reminiscences that made up the text, I encountered Toledo’s summaries of her dreams from 1953. In one she spoke to the moon, which was her mother. Her mother told her that where she was, “there are many,” but she, her mother, was alone. A following dream saw Toledo in a dentist’s chair. Three men were present; two were holding her down. Then she saw a large white man with a straight razor. She thought she was going to be sacrificed but nothing happened. (She asked in brackets if the dream was about her father.) Finally, she found herself in a graveyard and watched a female figure walking away. This figure went into the earth, at which point the dead woke up. Toledo explained her reaction to the dream: “I am shaken by the dream and the resurrection becomes reality for me. When the living come to the dead, they wake them up. Sacrifice, conversion, resurrection as the result. From these dream visions I now understand the ritual of the Mass.”1 I learned a lot from reading about Toledo’s experiences living alone with her children in Nazi Austria while her non-­Jewish husband was away with 197

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the German army or consigned to a work camp. But I was not sure what to make of these passages. It turns out that just over a decade later Toledo converted to Catholicism, although she never attributed this to familial pressure or a desire to please her husband. Instead, in her psychoanalytically informed narrative, she described a long interior journey toward a Catholic faith that, she realized through dream analysis, had its roots in her early experiences of Catholicism as a schoolgirl.2 To what extent can, and should, a historian nevertheless try to offer a cultural reading of what Toledo understood as her very personal path to religious conversion? Toledo was a Jewish woman who had attended Catholic schools, entered into a mixed marriage, and lived a precarious existence in Nazi Austria, spending periods alone without the protection of her “Aryan” husband. During these difficult years her relatives and much of the Austrian Jewish community were murdered. It would therefore hardly be surprising if she longed for the dead to come back to life and found solace in the promise of resurrection offered by the dominant religion in her country. But other contexts may have been relevant too: two years earlier, Toledo recorded details from dreams that spoke of her husband having a girlfriend and her attempting suicide. Can we interpret Toledo’s embrace of Catholicism as a yearning for validation from the surrounding community at a time when she doubted her husband’s commitment to her?3 In 1964, the year of her baptism, she dreamed of being in Israel and seeing Jesus smiling and beckoning her—did this personal God offer her particular comfort after so many tribulations?4 Or was the context of her relationship with her father of particular importance? In a poem from 1930, Toledo writes in the first person as a figure who is beaten by her father. Her response was to make herself so “foreign” to him that she would only “be a body under [his] fists”—her mind would already be elsewhere.5 Could the dream about the dentist’s chair therefore plausibly be read as a distorted reimagining of the binding of Isaac, within which she identifies her ancestors’ religion with the violent father she describes in this poem? Clearly there is no straightforward way of interpreting the emotions that pulsed through these accounts. When I looked for broader patterns in the text, I found only a rather unpredictable element of syncopation between the really important hinges in Toledo’s life and the dramatic political and cultural shifts that took place around her.6

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Reading Toledo’s memoir was not the first but the second time in the Vienna archives that I confronted a compelling subject whose apparent idiosyncrasies proved hard to contextualize. Therese Lindenberg’s account of living with a Jewish husband in Vienna after the Anschluss (see Chapter 3) parallels Toledo’s: Both women provide fascinating details about their time spent in prayer, trying to come to terms with their own or their partners’ vulnerability. Lindenberg’s writings are no easier to decode than Toledo’s. One particularly bewildering file is titled “Transcriptions of the ‘Voices from Beyond,’ 21.12.1944–­3.2.1950.”7 In this file “characters” from Lindenberg’s life (her child who died young and a teenage friend, among others) spoke to her in transcendental conversations, offering her advice and reassuring her that she was a special individual with unique spiritual gifts and a God-­given calling. In Lindenberg’s case a plausible cultural context for her spiritual experiences can also be sketched out. Her inclination to create an inner world where individuals she had loved and lost kept her company is unsurprising when we consider that between 1938 and 1945 Lindenberg had been moved around between “Jews’ houses,” watched her husband repeatedly get harassed and arrested, and witnessed her daughter flee to the Philippines. Meanwhile she had little control over the day-­to-­day company that she would keep. It seems that both Toledo and Lindenberg were seeking to understand the trajectory of their lives as leading toward something, a revelation even, that made sense of the fears and desires they felt and the experiences they had undergone, no doubt in large part because in their recent past they had exercised little control over their destinies. If, as Lynn Hunt has argued, the self is a process rather than a thing, these women, who had lived through so much tumult, needed to know that this process led to some kind of meaningful telos.8 They were narrating their own history, not only in their diaries and memoirs but also in their prayers—­ their daily reflections and attempts to examine their actions and the world around them. Moreover, when interpreting their dreams and visions, these educated women—­one an artist, the other a trained singer and aspiring author—­were seeking to explain the meaningfulness of otherwise strange experiences in a way that had a certain cultural legitimacy in post-­Freudian Austria.9 Viewed in this light, experiences that appear to show them dissociating from the world around them might instead reveal these women’s

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attempts to repair their sense of self during a period when so many of the fundamental preconditions for exercising any agency were violated. Still, there is some internal tension between the drama I am describing and the one that these women narrated for themselves. I had to ask myself to what extent I, as a historian, should meet these writers on their own terms, or whether I should regard their utterances primarily as symptoms of trauma or the overwhelming cultural pressures bearing down on them. Their accounts also provoked the question of whether I should use sources that seemed odd or filter them out and use only what was more obviously reliable. It was a question not only of what was in the sources but also of how they were constructed. Particularly by dwelling on dreams that scrambled and dispersed episodes from across her life, Toledo did everything but process her experiences and emotions in an orderly, sequential manner. Similarly, although Lindenberg appeared to have kept voluminous diaries made up of conventional daily reports, closer inspection reveals that she often retrospectively revised particularly significant volumes.10 The idiosyncrasies in the texts made them maddeningly difficult to handle, but to discount them because of their problems also seemed an inadequate response. Surely the desires and fears that erupted in Toledo’s dreams offer crucial insights into her emotional states, as do Lindenberg’s repeated urges to redo her diaries to make them more accurate and/or perhaps more palatable for an outside audience. More broadly speaking, these decidedly nonlinear sources highlight the challenges and opportunities the historian faces when trying to construct a narrative about emotions that relies on fractured accounts that are often most useful precisely when they reveal how unsettled and how resistant to settling the feelings that they record remained. Whereas these two sources are at one end of the spectrum, what most of the other egodocuments and interviews offer is not a simple or immediate reporting either. Learning how to read these two particularly unusual sources therefore promised to offer more generally fruitful insights into how my other sources were constructed. Dreams and transcendental visions might not have featured in many other personal life histories, but plenty of other feelings and experiences that initially appeared disjointed and unfathomable certainly did. To explain them, the authors who lived through them had to translate them into more recognizable scripts, rather as Toledo was doing when she analyzed her own dreams.

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In tackling these sources, it was also hard to miss the parallels between what I was trying to do as a historian and what these individuals were attempting to do for themselves. In each case a writer was seeking to understand emotional experiences, including dreams, and to communicate them in an intelligible way. Although particularly traumatic emotional experiences may have become lodged in the memory like wreckage after an explosion, reassembling the fragments into something more familiar allowed individuals to feel that they were, at least to some extent, in control of their feelings. And, as I soon realized, this process of (self-­)narration was not just something that such individuals did retrospectively in memoirs. The women and men featured in this book tried to provide a continuous narrative about their emotions—­even if sometimes just for themselves and their lovers in thoughts and utterances only partly captured in diaries and letters—­in order to feel and understand them. In many ways these narratives work like a simultaneous translation of bodily affects into at least partly familiar sequences of thoughts. This process helped the individuals to establish a relationship between feelings and actions and thereby gain a sense of their own selfhood and agency.11 Love was an especially important emotion in this regard because it was expressed in a private realm where individuals who might feel disempowered in public affairs could believe they exercised some autonomy. Moreover, being able to act on one’s feelings of desire and love may have seemed like the ultimate test of one’s agency because the truly free individual did not have to fake or disavow their desires. Or, at least, this was the apparent promise of modernity: that, unlike premoderns whose subjection before political authority, parental decisions, or religious orthodoxy did not allow them to embark on such voyages of self-­discovery, “emancipated” women and men could act according to their inclinations and most profound feelings.12 At the end of writing this book, I therefore wonder whether Toledo’s and Lindenberg’s experiences were more typical and less quirky than they might at first appear. So many of the individuals who featured in the text sought to, or had to, turn ultimately unfathomable sensations and desires into recognizable and preformed narratives in order to experience and express them as a phenomenon worthy of their and their society’s attention. Romantic love was one such phenomenon. To the extent that German

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Jewish women and men were following cultural scripts and even buying into love myths, they were therefore not doing anything aberrant but something vital and intrinsic to the process of feeling and communicating love. There were, however, specific reasons that the love myths described in the book were particularly alluring to German Jewish women and men. By rooting their truest and deepest sense of self in the intimate relationships they carved out in the private sphere, they were providing themselves with a refuge from an outside German society that, at various times and in various ways, offered them rapid social and geographic mobility but also exclusion and persecution. Indeed, for all of my focus on ultimately inscrutable individuals and their unique personal histories, the reader may come away noting the elements of continuity and commonality in German Jewish love relationships across this dynamic hundred-­year period. At least until they had to survey the moral and social wreckage unleashed by the Shoah, many German Jewish women and men consistently believed that romantic love was not only possible but also socially beneficial, even if, in some cases, this was only because it offered particularly Jewish men solace from their daily struggles. One of the reasons that Jewish women and men “fell in love with love” in the modern era was therefore that, while they struggled for recognition and acceptance in German society, love promised to create a safe, private realm within which relationships were sincere and loyalties were passionately felt.13 In many ways it worked as the opposite of Bernard Mandeville’s “private

FIGU R E 8 (OPPOSI T E). These two images are numbers 9 and 10 in Irma R ­ afaela Toledo’s “Genesis” Cycle. Number 9 is accompanied by text taken from Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig’s translation of the Torah. It describes the encounter between Eve and the snake in the Garden of Eden, when the snake tells Eve that she and Adam will be able to recognize good and evil if they eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Number 10 depicts the Tree of Life. Alongside the image, passages from Buber and Rozenzweig’s translation refer to how humans went on to live a mortal existence outside the Garden of Eden once they gained this knowledge of good and evil. Reprinted with permission, © Bildungshaus Schloss Puchberg, Wels, Austria.

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vice, public virtue” theory: The love expressed and ­cultivated especially by Jewish wives was supposed to enable Jewish men in particular to make it in a tough German society—­without losing their souls.14 As we have seen, it was particularly at moments of great stress, such as during the upheaval of the interwar period or the years of Nazi persecution, that romantic stories managed to do the most work for couples. At these moments such stories appealed not only because they were conventional but also because they could generate new conventions in the midst of so much social and cultural tumult. Viewed with the hindsight of what happened after 1933, subscribing to the emotional script that a woman’s love could sustain her Jewish husband as they struggled to make it in German society may seem like an example of what Lauren Berlant termed “cruel optimism.”15 And yet this model of marriage was not so much overthrown as modulated after 1945. As we saw in Chapter 4, women were still the fulcrum of German Jewish families after the Shoah, only they were supporting their partners and their children until the family could find earthly fulfillment somewhere else. If, then, romantic love represented some kind of migration of the sacred (as I suggested in the Introduction), after 1945 this migration led not into but out of German society. This study therefore shows the incredible durability of a romantic emotional script and just how much horror was experienced before it was dislodged. What is equally striking is that this script did not always accurately determine or reflect how couples behaved. Love myths actually may have been particularly effective cultural resources insofar as they served to camouflage divergent practices and behaviors that would otherwise have proved problematic. As I suggested in the first two chapters, the ideal of the love marriage did not just allow young Jews who had moved to cities to potentially justify choosing an unfamiliar (and increasingly often non-­Jewish) partner. Just as important, this ideal allowed the majority of Jews who continued to marry co-­religionists to romanticize a union that otherwise risked looking all too conventional. Equally, the greater emphasis placed after 1945 on tying the love of a couple to love of the wider Jewish community allowed Jews in West Germany who had little alternative to falling for a non-­Jewish German to imagine a different, less conflicted future for their children. It was hoped that these children, with a keener sense of their Jewish identity,

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would have fewer problems finding a Jewish partner and moving to a country with a larger, more confident Jewish population. Throughout this book I have tried to follow the method advocated by Till van Rahden, which involves assiduously collecting odds and ends or rags and bones from the daily lives of a variety of individuals rather than relying on more familiar public sources. I have done so in the hope, expressed by Rahden, that this kind of historical work can spur new interpretive frameworks and enliven the field in which I work.16 In the case of the German Jewish experience in the modern era, there are a number of reasons to invite reappraisals by studying personal and private histories. One of the most important is the role played by gender, because so many of the broader processes in Jewish history—­acculturation, embourgeoisement, and so on—­have been the product of both women’s and men’s actions in the world, even though women’s activities in the private sphere have remained more hidden from the historical records.17 Indeed, as I have argued throughout the text, through their labors—­including their emotional labors—­as wives and mothers, Jewish women made their male counterparts’ integration into German society possible.18 Another reason for focusing on the everyday and the intimate is that, just as Toledo and Lindenberg’s psychological and spiritual experiences might appear as personal foibles that are in need of diagnosis, the entire experience of German Jews seeking assimilation before 1945—­perhaps best exemplified in their ever greater willingness to intermarry—­has been dismissed as a misguided response to European antisemitism by such prominent intellectuals as Gershom Scholem.19 Yet, viewing the experiences of German Jews before 1933 through the lens of what came after, makes it hard to avoid subjecting these individuals to the “enormous condescension of posterity,” as E. P. Thompson famously put it.20 Perhaps it made sense to offer these kinds of judgments between 1945 and 1990, when it appeared that German Jewish history had reached a tragic and decisive end point. But, given the remarkably rapid growth of the Jewish population in Germany after the end of the cold war, what appeared to be a closed chapter now invites reappraisal. As Gideon Reuveni has recently argued, because of the quite remarkable revival of Jewish communities in Germany since the early 1990s, the German Jewish past is now likely to enjoy a sustainable and open future.21 The Jewish

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population in Germany is Europe’s fastest growing and third largest, having risen 236 percent from 34,500 in 1980 to 116,000 in 2018. It is also made up of a majority of former Soviet citizens whose memories of World War II and the Shoah are quite distinct from the memories of those who were socialized in cold war era West Germany.22 What is more, the migration of Jews to Germany is by no means an isolated phenomenon. The Federal Republic has become a “land of immigration,” not only because of a landmark piece of legislation from 2005 but also because of the nation’s political leaders, who have in recent years proved much more hospitable to refugees than most of their European neighbors.23 As a result, 21 million of the 83 million people (just over 25 percent, compared with just under 18 percent in 2005) currently living in Germany are defined as “descended from immigrants,” and the “foreign[-­born] population” stands at 11.4 million (13.7 percent).24 The complexion of the German nation has therefore undergone a profound transformation. Should Jewish men and women date and marry outside the Jewish community in contemporary Germany, this does not necessarily mean committing to some kind of unitary Leitkultur (dominant or core culture) in the way that might have been assumed for the early part of the twentieth century.25 Although the idea of multiculturalism (as opposed to the concept of the melting pot) might be in “crisis” in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, it is also true that attempts to fashion “a new kind of we” based on a German identity that is flexible, dynamic, and open to all ethnicities are ongoing.26 To the extent that Germany has become a land of immigration and multiculturalism, it undoubtedly faces the challenges that go along with these processes: Both Jewish German and Turkish German authors have discussed the problem that Jews and those descended from immigrants seem to remain eternal foreigners in the Federal Republic.27 For this reason among others, the study of how an earlier version of Jewish acculturation and integration played out in terms of individuals’ everyday encounters and emotions is more relevant than ever. To open our eyes to the longings, loyalties, struggles, and achievements of “new Germans,” historians of the German Jewish experience can perhaps best provide inspiration by rendering comparable figures from the past that are truly three-­dimensional. That, at least, has been the goal of this book.

Notes

Introduction 1. Treitschke, Politik, 241–­48. 2. Luisa Passerini has discussed the ways that Jews were excluded from European conceptions of love. See Passerini, Europe in Love, 20–­21; and Passerini, Love and the Idea of Europe, esp. 225–­27. 3. For examples of plays that posed these questions, see Bayerdörfer and Fischer, Judenrollen. 4. Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte, 423. 5. Jensen, Gebildete Doppelgänger, 190–­219; Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum. Tyler Carrington has discussed how love and urbanity affected what it meant to be middle class; see Carrington, Love at Last Sight, esp. 2–­4. 6. See Johannes Scherr’s much republished Deutsche Kultur-­und Sittengeschichte, esp. 3. This kind of valuation of the middle classes also features in many influential historical studies of the German middle class. See, chiefly, Kocka, “Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit”; Hettling and Hoffmann, “Zur Historisierung”; Habermas, Frauen, esp. 7–­27; and Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion. 7. See Trepp, “Emotion,” 35–­39. See also Habermas, “Rituale des Gefühls,” 174–­77. 8. The foundational text is Lüdtke, History of Everyday Life. For everyday German Jewish life, see Kaplan, Jewish Daily Life. 9. Recent works on this topic include Carrington, Love at Last Sight; Cullen, Love, Honour, and Jealousy; Garloff, Mixed Feelings; McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism; Illouz, End of Love; Jeismann, Freiheit der Liebe; McLellan, Love in the Time of Commu207

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nism; and Rosenwein, Love. For an interesting take on intermarriage between various kinds of insiders and outsiders, see Moses, “From Faith to Race?” 10. See Eitler and Scheer, “Emotionengeschichte”; M. Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice”; and Prestel, Emotional Cities, 13–­15. For particularly interesting reflections on the connections between private and public spheres in the realm of emotions, see Langewiesche, “Gefühlsraum Nation.” Some of the most important other studies of other political emotions include Biess, German Angst; Frevert, Politics of Humiliation; and Jensen, Zornpolitik. 11. My thinking here is influenced by William Reddy’s concept of an emotional refuge. See Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 128–­36. 12. For an interesting recent discussion of the development of the modern self, see Brown, Mass Violence and the Self, esp. 5–­14. See also Hunt, “Self and Its History”; Mauss, “Category of the Human Mind”; Taylor, Sources of the Self; and U. Beck and Beck-­Gernsheim, Riskante Freiheiten. On the “creation of the Jewish individual” between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Wobick-­Segev, Homes Away from Home, 2. On a similar theme, see Schlör, Das Ich der Stadt. 13. Herzog, Sexuality in Europe, 45–­60. 14. For a general introduction into the historical study of aging, see Kertzer and Laslett, Aging in the Past, esp. 3–­80. See also Troyansky, Aging in World History; Ehmer, Sozialgeschichte des Alters; Bryant, “Von der ‘Vergreisung des Volkskörpers’ ”; and Thane, “Social Histories.” 15. See, for instance, Savage, Teenage; Gestrich, Geschichte der Familie, esp. 41–­46; King, Die Entstehung des Neuen in der Adoleszenz; and Baxter, The Modern Age. 16. The history of generations has expanded rapidly in recent years. See Weisbrod, “Generation und Generationalität”; and Jureit and Wildt, Generationen. 17. On the concept of emotional intelligence, see Salovey and Mayer, “Emotional Intelligence.” 18. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, esp. 124–­26. 19. For interesting discussions of the coercion versus consent debate, see Gellately, Hitler’s True Believers; Stoltzfus, Hitler’s Compromises; and Richard J. Evans, Third Reich in History and Memory. 20. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, esp. 1–­31. 21. Stearns, “Emotionology.” Thanks to Martin Conway for helping clarify my thoughts on this. 22. On “feeling rules,” see Hochschild, “Emotion Work.” 23. Ronald Berger, Surviving the Holocaust, 4. For more on history and the life course, see Hareven, Transitions; Alter, “Generation to Generation”; and Graff, “Interdisciplinary Explorations.” The distinction between life course and life cycle is not always clearly made by historians. See also Youngs, Life Cycle in Western Europe, esp. 1–­10. 24. See Sartre, Anti-­Semite and Jew; and Eisenstadt, “Philip Gillon,” 7. I encountered these definitions in Rapaport, Jews in Germany After the Holocaust, 25. For details regarding how American Jews’ self-­definitions have changed in recent decades, see also “A Portrait of

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Jewish Americans,” Pew Research Center, October 1, 2013, http:​/​​/​w ww​.pewforum​.org​/​2013​ /​10​/​01​/​jewish​-american​-beliefs​-attitudes​-culture​-survey​/​. 25. Ziemann, “Säkularisierung”; Weir, Secularism and Religion. 26. Saul Friedländer discusses how historians can combine a variety of public and private sources into an “integrated” polyphonic history of the Holocaust in the Introduction to his Nazi Germany and the Jews. 27. Fritzsche, Reading Berlin, esp. 12–­50. 28. See Wobick-­Segev, “Looking for a Nice Jewish Girl”; and Maurer, “Partnersuche und Lebensplanung.” For another interesting discussion of using personal advertisements for histories of love, see Epstein, “Advertising for Love.” 29. See J. M. Hess, Middlebrow Literature, esp. ch. 4. 30. For examples of how court cases have been used as sources for the history of emotions, see Roper, Witch Craze; Rabin, “Shame of the World”; and Ferguson, “Emotion.” 31. On emotional regimes, see Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, esp. 55. On emotional communities, see Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, esp. 1–­31; and on emotional styles, see Gammerl, “Emotional Styles.” 32. See, most famously, Goffman, Presentation of Self. 33. Fehr and Russell, “Concept of Love,” 436. 34. Naomi Seidman has also written of how, in the case of modern Jews, “falling in love with love” often went hand in hand with falling in love with stories. See Seidman, Marriage Plot. 35. For the importance of diary keeping for the honing of young women and men’s subjectivity, see Gleixner, Pietismus und Bürgertum, 124–­65. 36. On this, see Ben-­A mos, “Holocaust Diaries,” 366. 37. Frank Ankersmit offers a useful corrective to this perspective; see Ankersmit, “Transfiguration of Distance.” 38. Lejeune, On Diary, 201. 39. For more, see Liebersohn and Schneider, “My Life in Germany.” 40. Hämmerle and Gerhalter, “Tagebuch,” 13–­14. 41. See also Garbarini, Numbered Days, 1. 42. An example that will be discussed in Chapter 1 is Lotte Ginsburg’s diary. See Leo Baeck Institute, New York (LBINY), DM 201, Lotte Ginsburg, Diaries, p. 10. 43. G. Beck, Underground Life. 44. On the possibility that some of the stories were embellished, see United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), RG-­50.030*0361, “Oral History Interview with Gad Beck.” 45. Holm, “Montag ich,” 10; Martin et al., Technologies of the Self. 46. Lejeune, On Diary, 201. 47. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 9. 48. On letter writing, see I. Bauer and Hämmerle, Liebe schreiben; and Wyss, Communication of Love.

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49. My thinking here has been influenced by Honko, “Problem of Defining Myth,” 49; and Radin, “Basic Myth.” 50. Williamson, Longing for Myth in Germany, esp. 1–­10. 51. Williamson, Longing for Myth in Germany, 16. 52. See Garloff, Mixed Feelings, esp. chaps. 1–­2. See also Frank, Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, esp. 117–­23; Hallmark, Frauenliebe und Leben, 19–­20; and Hausen, “Family and Role Division.” 53. See Angenedt, Ehe, Liebe und Sexualität, 192–­95; and Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 43–­94. Anthony Giddens (Transformation of Intimacy) argues that, although men sought to gain their status through their public achievements, it was the love that women cultivated in the domestic realm that ultimately allowed them to develop their sense of self. This love gave married men the confidence to imagine sharing an “anticipated yet malleable future” (45) with a partner. See Giddens, Transformation of Intimacy, esp. 41–­64. 54. See Frey, Der reinliche Bürger, esp. 172–­82. 55. Grisko and Scheuer, Liebe, Lust und Leid. 56. See Bailey, “Nächstenliebe in the Age of Nationalism.” 57. For background to particularly Christian discussions, see Pearson, “Gender.” For a collection of Jewish writings on the topic, see H. Cohen, Der Nächste. 58. For more on the Durkheimian idea of the sacred migrating into “other domains of culture,” see Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia, 8. 59. For more on this formulation of trust, see Luhmann, Vertrauen. 60. On situational ethnicity, see Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, esp. 8–­9, 116–­20. 61. Slezkine, Jewish Century, esp. 1–­39. 62. On the history of Leistung as a concept, see Verheyen, Die Erfindung der Leistung. 63. For more, see Groppe, Im deutschen Kaiserreich, esp. 77–­79. 64. On purity laws, see Douglas, Purity and Danger. 65. See Weber, Protestant Ethic, 123. 66. For background on the “privatization” and “feminization” of Judaism, see B. M. Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture, esp. 5. For a thought-­provoking collection of essays on emotions and masculinity, see Borutta and Verheyen, Die Präsenz der Gefühle. 67. S. Stern, “Wandel des jüdischen Frauentyps,” 72. 68. The concept of an emotional refuge is taken from Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 128–­29. 69. Thanks to Barbara Rosenwein for help with this point. Chapter 1 1. S. Stern, “Wandel des jüdischen Frauentyps,” 127. 2. Giddens, Transformation of Intimacy, 42. On this concept of a second Sattelzeit, see Frevert et al., Emotional Lexicons, 10–­11. 3. Among the many studies of Jewish assimilation or acculturation, the following are merely a sample: Frankel and Zipperstein, Assimilation and Community; Liedtcke and

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Rechter, Towards Normality; Flores, German Jews; Maurer, Die Entwicklung der jüdischen Minderheit; Pulzer, Jews and the German State; Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer; and Sorkin, “Emancipation and Assimilation.” 4. May, Love, 6–­7. 5. On this concept of “whole men,” see Kessel, “The Whole Man.” 6. Richarz, “Jewish Women in the Family and Public Sphere,” 68–­73.  7. My thinking about social mobility versus social integration was influenced by Song, “Is Intermarriage a Good Indicator.” 8. For more on this “conversion,” see Biale, Eros and the Jews, ch. 7. 9. The examples are too numerous to cite. Perhaps the best introduction to the move from the ghetto to German society is J. M. Hess, Middlebrow Literature, esp. 117–­24. 10. For further details about Jewish children and German schools, see Richarz, ““Occupational Distribution and Social Structure,” 55–58; and Lowenstein, “The Community,” 135. 11. Kaplan, Jewish Daily Life, 193–­94; Lowenstein, “The Community,” 146. 12. See Kaplan, Jewish Daily Life, 175–­76. 13. Hertz, Jewish High Society. See also Hyman, Gender and Assimilation, 20–­21; and Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 40–­41. 14. For more on intermarriage (not just between Christians and Jews) in Imperial Germany, see Moses, “From Faith to Race.” 15. See Litvak, Haskalah; and Feiner, Jewish Enlightenment. 16. Biale, Eros and the Jews, 153. See also B. M. Baader et al., Jewish Masculinities, 2–­3; and Koltun-­Fromm, Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism, 124. 17. Meiring, Christlich-­Jüdische Mischehe, 43. 18. Trepp, “Emotion,” 51–­52. 19. On these studies, see Voß, “Yiddish,” 1–­3; and Jay, Songs of Experience, 78–­130. See also H. Cohen, “Über Würzel”; and Bailey, “Nächstenliebe in the Age of Nationalism.” 20. See Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 109–­10. 21. Leo Baeck Institute, New York (LBINY), ME 919, MM II 18, Rose Malachowski, “Aus meinem Leben,” p. 13. 22. LBINY, ME 919, Malachowski, “Aus meinem Leben,” p. 12. 23. LBINY, ME 919, Malachowski, “Aus Meinem Leben,” p. 13. 24. LBINY, ME 919, Malachowski, “Aus meinem Leben,” p. 7. 25. LBINY, ME 919, Malachowski, “Aus meinem Leben,” pp. 14–­15, 21. 26. LBINY, ME 1381, MM III 12, Vera Rosenberg-­Borchardt, “Erinnerungen an vergangene Zeiten,” p. 48. 27. LBINY, ME 1381, Rosenberg-­Borchardt, “Erinnerungen,” p. 42. 28. LBINY, ME 1381, Rosenberg-­Borchardt, “Erinnerungen,” p. 41. See also Blaschke, “Das 19. Jahrhundert”; and Steinhoff, “Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter.” 29. LBINY, ME 1381, Rosenberg-­Borchardt, “Erinnerungen,” p. 51. 30. See, for instance, this theme being tackled in the serialized novella Was Vater Wassermann auseinander bracht by Clemens Berg, which featured in the Israelitisches Familien-

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blatt between March and April 1908. Such anxieties were also expressed by a Bohemian shop trader’s daughter, Ottilie Koralek, who kept a diary. See Deutsches Tagebucharchiv (DTA), No. 70/2, Ottilie Koralek, especially the entry for March 31, 1889, for details of her family’s economic difficulties, and the entry for July 4, 1890, for insights into her insecurities about finding a respectable partner, given her lack of learning and social finesse. 31. J. M. Hess, Middlebrow Literature, 119. 32. Jonathan Hess discusses both of these novels in J. M. Hess, Middlebrow Literature, 133–­56. 33. Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae, 383–­84, 404. 34. Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae, 404. 35. On gender segregation in more elite schools, see M. Baader, “Die Kindheit,” 154–­55, 171. See also Speitkamp, Jugend in der Neuzeit, 156; and Langewiesche and Tenorth, “Bildung, Formierung, Destruktion,” 16. 36. Spurlock, Youth and Sexuality, 53. 37. Wyss, “Brautbriefe.” 38. Wyss, “Brautbriefe,” 89–­98. 39. Freud, Brautbriefe. See letters from June 19, 1882 (pp. 11–­12); July 14, 1882 (pp. 18–­19); and July 13, 1883 (p. 35). 40. Martha Bernays, August 8, 1882, in Freud and Bernays, Brautbriefe, 1: 266. 41. Freud, October 19, 1882, in Freud and Bernays, Brautbriefe, 1: 377–­80. 42. Bernays, October 21, 1882, in Freud and Bernays, Brautbriefe, 1: 380–­82. 43. Freud, October 22, 1882, in Freud and Bernays, Brautbriefe, 1: 384. 44. Freud, July 11, 1883, in Freud and Bernays, Brautbriefe, 1: 516–­17. 45. Freud, October 22, 1882, in Freud and Bernays, Brautbriefe, 1: 384. 46. Freud, November 15, 1883, in Freud and Bernays, Brautbriefe, 2: 425. 47. Bernays, November 17, 1883, in Freud and Bernays, Brautbriefe, 2: 431. 48. The poem is undated, but it is likely to have been written in January or February of 1897, when the couple were writing many “engagement letters.” See Leo Baeck Institute, Berlin (LBIJMB), MM49, Charlotte Hamburger-­Liepmann, “Geschichte der Familien Liepmann und Hamburger,” p. 94. See also LBINY, AR 7021, Liepmann Family Collection, 1/1 for original. 49. Quoted in LBIJMB, MM49, Hamburger-­Liepmann, “Geschichte,” p. 95. 50. LBIJMB, MM49, Hamburger-­Liepmann, “Geschichte,” pp. 96–­97. 51. Liepmann to Bleichroeder, February 22, 1897, LBIJMB, MM49, Hamburger-­ Liepmann, “Geschichte,” p. 99. 52. Liepmann to Bleichroeder, March 4, 1897, LBIJMB, MM49, Hamburger-­Liepmann, “Geschichte,” p. 101. 53. Liepmann to Bleichroeder, undated letter, LBIJMB, MM49, Hamburger-­Liepmann, “Geschichte,” pp. 103–­4. 54. Hopp, Jüdisches Bürgertum, 228. 55. LBINY, DM 201, Lotte Ginsburg, Diaries, Introductory Summary.

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56. Henk and Nitsch, “Helga Herz und Eva Seligmann.” 57. LBINY, DM 201, Ginsburg, Diaries, “Postscript” to diaries from “February, March, April, May, June, July 1914.” 58. LBINY, DM 201, Ginsburg, Diaries, September 16, 1918. 59. LBINY, DM 201, Ginsburg, Diaries, March 2 and 17, 1915. 60. LBINY, DM 201, Ginsburg, Diaries, May 26, 1918. 61. LBINY, DM 201, Ginsburg, Diaries, May 30, 1918, evening. 62. LBINY, DM 201, Ginsburg, Diaries, March 13, 1915. See also the original German for the code or secret language: LBINY, ME 1631, Tagebuch Lotte Ginsburg (second half), March 13, 1915. 63. LBINY, DM 201, Ginsburg, Diaries, February 6, 1915. 64. LBINY, DM 201, Ginsburg Diaries, February 26, 1918. 65. Richarz, “Demographic Developments,” 13. 66. LBINY, ME 919, Malachowski, “Aus meinem Leben,” p. 19. For Malachowski’s earlier experiences, see “Aus meinem Leben,” p. 8. 67. Victoria Harris offers a nuanced portrait of customers in the “sex trade” in her Selling Sex, 109–­12. 68. Dickinson, Sex, Freedom, and Power, 22 69. See, for instance, Blau, “Die Kriminalität der Juden,” 89. 70. On sexology as a “Jewish science,” see, for instance, Braun, “Ist die Sexualwissenschaft”; McEwen, Sexual Knowledge, 12; and Fuechtner, “Indians, Jews, and Sex,” 123. 71. Dickinson, “Dark Impenetrable Wall,” 472. See also Dickinson, Sex, Freedom, and Power. 72. Dickinson, “Dark, Impenetrable Wall,” 483. Lange’s position should not be understood as typical among feminists. For more on how feminist sexologists “redefin[ed] the female sex drive,” see Leng, Sexual Politics, chaps. 2 and 4. 73. Löbel, Von der Ehe bis zur Liebe, 25–­29. 74. On the lack of attention paid to female homosexuality in medical and sexological literature, see Matysik, “In the Name of the Law,” esp. 31. See also H. Bauer, “Theorizing Female Inversion”; Leng, “Sex, Science, and Fin-­de-­Siècle Feminism”; and Lybeck, Desiring Emancipation. 75. Marhofer, “Book Was a Revelation,” 77. 76. See Domeier, Eulenberg Affair. 77. See Beachy, Gay Berlin, 42–­119; and Dose, Magnus Hirschfeld. For the lack of attention paid to male homosexuality in Jewish moral literature, see Ruth Berger, Sexualität, 80–­84. 78. LBINY, ME 95, Ernst Collin-­Schoenfeld, “Auszug aus dem Tagebuch,” entries for January 13, 1901, April 7, 1901, and a poem written on July 18, 1901. 79. Collin-­Schoenfeld, Lieder eines Knaben. 80. LBINY, ME 637, Margarete Susman, “Ich habe viele Leben gelebt: Erinnerungen,” p. 21.

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81. LBINY, ME 974, Lotte Fairbrook, “Dear Family! Memoirs,” vol. 3, ch. 3, p. 19. 82. LBINY, ME 974, Fairbrook, “Dear Family,” vol. 3, ch. 3, p. 21. 83. LBINY, ME 974, Fairbrook, “Dear Family,” vol. 4, ch. 8, pp. 4–­5, and ch. 10, p. 6. 84. Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 6. 85. Pickus, Constructing Modern Identities, 62. 86. Kaplan, Jewish Daily Life, 203. 87. Richarz, “Occupational Distribution,” 56. 88. Pickus, Constructing Modern Identities, 142 89. Richarz, “Occupational Distribution,” 39. 90. See, for instance, an advertisement in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, March 13, 1877, p. 177. 91. See Fischer, Socialist Response to Antisemitism. 92. Bebel, Frau und der Sozialismus. 93. Engels, Der Ursprung der Familie. 94. See Bebel, Frau und der Sozialismus, ch. 8, sec. 3. 95. Meisel-­Hess, Die sexuelle Krise; Schlesinger-­Eckstein, “Über Arbeitslohne und Dirnentum.” For background, see Dickinson, Sex, Freedom, and Power, 137–­51. 96. Theilhaber, “Sozialismus und Judentum.” 97. Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 164–­66. 98. Richarz, “Occupational Distribution,” 39. See an alternative perspective in a recent article by Zwicker and Rose, “Marriage or Profession.” This argues that Jewish women were disproportionately able to get married and hold on to their careers. The authors do focus primarily on “marriage patterns among highly successful women” rather than investigating the marital and occupational status of a broader demographic cohort. 99. See, for instance, “Die jüdische Mutter” in the “Für unsere Frauen” section of the Israelitisches Familienblatt, June 25, 1908. 100. Baumann, Zerstörte Nachbarschaften, 79. 101. This was true of a young Jewish grain merchant from near Duisburg, Eugen Markus, who wrote a diary for his girlfriend while fighting during the last two years of the war. See Deutsches Tagebucharchiv (DTA), Das Tagebuch des Kanoniers Eugen M[arkus], entries for February 26 and June 6 and 12, 1917. For the broader context, see Crim, “Was It All Just a Dream.” 102. Rosenblüth, “Im Sturmangriff bei Gorlice,” 35.  103. A. Sachs, “Feldbrief,” 59. 104. On the Judenzählung, see Rosenthal, Die Ehre des jüdischen Soldaten; and Grady, Deadly Legacy. 105. F. Sachs, “Von deutschen Jüdinnen,” 662–­63. 106. This echoes a point made by Marion Kaplan about the division of labor in Jewish marriages in Imperial Germany. Although men might be too tired out by their work to thrive at leisure pursuits, women were supposed to be virtuosos at leisure. See Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 120.

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107. Krohn et al., “Von deutschen Jüdinnen.” 108. Krohn et al., “Von deutschen Jüdinnen.” 109. Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 206. 110. For details of how this theme was treated in late-­nineteenth-­century novels, see in particular Lezzi, Liebe ist meine Religion, 52–­54, 277–­323; Krobb,  Die schöne Judin, esp. 167–­222; and Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 103. 111. Felix Theilhaber talks of this kind of relationship in Theilhaber, Untergang der deutschen Juden, 129. Eugen Altmann also discussed both kinds of mixed marriage in the memoir that he wrote for the “My Life in Germany” competition arranged by Harvard University in 1938. See Houghton Library, Harvard University, My Life in Germany Collection (MLiG), bMS Ger 91 (5), Eugen Altmann, pp. 13–­14. 112. For more on the concept of ethnic identity, see Chandra, “What Is Ethnic Identity.” 113. Meiring, Christlich-­Jüdische Mischehe, 109; Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, 111. 114. Lowenstein, “Jewish Intermarriage,” 26–­29 115. Lowenstein, “Jewish Intermarriage,” 24–­26. 116. Lowenstein, “Jewish Intermarriage,” 27–­28. 117. Lowenstein, “Jewish Intermarriage,” 30. 118. On this, see Rahden, “Intermarriages.” 119. Karpeles, Trauungsreden, 53. 120. Karpeles, Trauungsreden, 6–­7, 13. 121. Karpeles, Trauungsreden, 9, 12, 31–­33. 122. LBINY, AR 1499, Lipstadt Family Collection. The wedding newspaper is called “Hochzeits-­Jüdische Presse: Organ für das Gesamtinteressen des Brautpaares.” 123. Karpeles, Trauungsreden, 43. 124. Brüll, Trauungsreden, 22. For background on the “feminization” of Judaism, see B. M. Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture; and Kaplan, “Priestess and Hausfrau.” 125. LBIJMB, MM49, Hamburger-­Liepmann, “Geschichte,” pp. 109–­10. 126. LBINY, AR 1499, Lipstadt Family Collection, “Hochzeits-­Jüdische Presse.” 127. LBINY, DM 324, Irene E. Newhouse, “Documents from the Wedding of Alfred Schueler and Hedwig Spitz, 28th June, 1915,” pp. 15–­19. 128. “Zeitungsnachrichten und Korrespondenzen,” Die Israelit 17/37 (September 13, 1876), 860. 129. LBINY, ME 772, Julie Aschaffenburg, [Eine alte Erinnerung], pp. 20–­21. See also LBIJMB, MM34, Julie Herzfeld, Meine Lebensgeschichte, pp. 16, 20–­23. 130. Michie, “Victorian Honeymoons.” See also Michie, Victorian Honeymoons. 131. Berg, “Prinzessin Sabbath.” 132. Borch-­Jacobsen, Freud’s Patients, 71 133. See, for instance, LBINY, ME 772, Aschaffenburg, “Erinnerung,” p. 22. 134. See Herzfeld’s account of visiting Dresden and Prague in LBIJMB, MM34, Herzfeld, Meine Lebensgeschichte, pp. 20–­23. 135. LBIJMB, MM II 36, Marta Appel, “Memoirs,” pp. 87–­88.

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136. Richarz, “Occupational Distribution,” 39–­51. 137. LBINY, ME 1292, Bertha Bach, “Memories,” p. 9. 138. See, for example, the accounts given by Hilde Koch and Helen Lange [pseud.] in Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (115), Hilde Koch, p. 28; and Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (127), Helen Lange, p. 10. 139. Frevert, Women in German History; Rowold, Gender and Science. 140. Ruth Berger, Sexualität, 290. 141. Der Israelit, March 17, 1884, p. 376. 142. Brunner, Liebe, 148. 143. See Pappenheim, “Frau im kirchlichen und religiösen Leben”; and Loentz, Let Me Continue, 159–­84. 144. On the broader context of motherhood and World War I, see Siebrecht, Aesthetics of Loss, esp. 104–­29. For depictions of Jewish motherhood during the war, see, for example, Eschelbacher, “Arbeit der jüdischen Frauen”; and W. J., “Familiensinn und Volksgeist,” Der Israelit, March 25, 1915, pp. 2–­3. 145. Kaplan, Jewish Daily Life, 188–­91. 146. See LBINY, ME 1213, Helene Eyck, “[Diary] 1876–­1898,” for example, the entry for March 9, 1882; and LBINY, ME 930, Jenny Wieruszowski née Landesberger, “Kindertagebücher,” p. 4. 147. Koselleck, Practice of Conceptual History. 148. LBINY, ME 636, Rahel Straus, “Wir lebten in Deutschland.” 149. LBINY, MS 613, Charlotte Hamburger, “History of the Bleichroeder and Liepmann Families,” undated letter, although likely from mid-­1905, given its position between other dated letters. 150. LBINY, MS 613, Hamburger, “History,” letter from May 1906. 151. LBINY, MS 613, Hamburger, “History,” letter of October 23, 1907. 152. LBINY, MS 613, Hamburger, “History,” letter of November 5, 1898. For further discussion of this issue, see p. 93 of the family history. 153. LBINY, MS 613, Hamburger, “History,” p. 94. 154. LBINY, ME 1213, Eyck, “Diary,” entry for April 25, 1883. 155. LBINY, ME 1213, Eyck, “Diary,” entry for July 24, 1881. 156. LBINY, ME 930, Wieruszowski, “Kindertagebücher,” entry for June 6, 1894. 157. For a perceptive recent discussion of relationship breakdowns in the modern era, see Illouz, End of Love, esp. 181–­218. 158. Blau, “Zur Statistik der Ehescheidung,” 87–­88. 159. See Wienfort, Verliebt, Verlobt, Verheiratet, 243. For more details on the perceived crisis in marriage around 1900, see the excellent study by Arni, Entzweiungen. 160. Blasius, Ehescheidung in Deutschland, 127–­54. 161. Blasius, Ehescheidung in Deutschland, 155–­56. 162. “Ehescheidungen in Preußen im Jahre 1905,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 3/7 (1907): 110–­11.

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163. Figures are recorded in “Ehescheidungen bei den Juden in Preußen, 1923–­1929,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 6/3 (1931): 50. For a critical reflection on how many divorces were due to men’s unfaithfulness, see the “Korrespondenzen” section of the Neue jüdische Presse/Frankfurter israelitisches Familienblatt, November 7, 1902, p. 3. 164. LBINY, ME 919, Malachowski, “Aus meinem Leben,” pp. 14–­15, 19–­23. 165. Wienfort, Verliebt, Verlobt, Verheiratet, 131–­36. 166. For data, see “Life Expectancy (from Birth) in Germany, from 1875 to 2020,” Statista, September 6, 2019, https:​/​​/​w ww​.statista​.com​/​statistics​/​1041098​/​life​-expectancy​ -germany​-all​-time​/​. See also Thieme, Sterben und Tod, 113, 121. 167. See, for instance, “Die Sterblichkeit der Juden in Wien,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 3/7 (1907): 107–­10; “Geburten, Eheschließungen und Sterbefälle in Bayern 1905 u. 1906,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 4/1 (1908): 15; and “Das Todesalter der Juden und Christen in Hessen,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 4/3 (1908): 46–­47. 168. Wienfort, Verliebt, Verlobt, Verheiratet, 280. The concept of the whole self is adapted from Kessel, “The Whole Man.” 169. Rawicz, Tractat Kethuboth, 44–­50, 113–­14, 236. 170. Stampfer, “Remarriage”; Knodel and Lynch, “Decline of Remarriage.” 171. Machtemes, Leben zwischen Trauer und Pathos, 117, 125. 172. Freud, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. II/III, 147. 173. Freud, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. IV, 79. 174. Dunn, Virtuous Victim, 207–­22. 175. Dunn, Virtuous Victim, 171–­98. 176. On the “woman surplus,” see Dollard, Surplus Woman. 177. Kuhlman, Of Little Comfort, 22. 178. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 61. 179. LBINY, ME 910, Agnes Weiler Wolf, “Notes from an Extinct Species,” p. 68. 180. LBINY, ME 636, Straus, “Wir lebten in Deutschland,” p. 37. 181. Quinn, “Inscribing Grief,” 255. 182. See, for instance, LBIJMB, MM30, Moritz Güdemann, “Aus meinem Leben, 1899–­ 1918,” pp. 49, 120; and LBINY, ME 19, Moritz Austerlitz, “1833–­1913: Aus meinem Leben,” pp. 42–­44. For details on an unusually moving widower’s account of his wife, see the chapter on Leopold and Adelheid Zunz in Schorsch, “Wives and Wissenschaft.” 183. LBINY, ME 1292, Bach, “Memories,” p. 3. 184. LBINY, ME 910, Weiler Wolf, “Notes from an Extinct Species,” p. 7. 185. [Reik], “Über die Wirkungen unbewußter Todeswünsche,” 328. 186. The term emotional labor comes from Hochschild, Managed Heart, 7. Chapter 2 1. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 261. 2. I am referring here to the concept of the “simultaneity of the non-­simultaneous”

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(Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen) that is most commonly associated with Ernst Bloch and his 1935 work “Erbschaft dieser Zeit.” The term is more accurately rendered the “non-­ simultaneity of the simultaneous” (Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen) and was found first in Wilhelm Pinder’s Das Problem der Generation in der Kunstgeschichte Europas (1926). See Schwartz, “Ernst Bloch and Wilhelm Pinder.” 3. Gillerman, Germans into Jews, 4–­5. 4. Here I am influenced by Annette Timm’s argument that turns the “personal is political” on its head. See Timm, Politics of Fertility. 5. The term epistemic elites is adapted from Peter M. Haas’s concept of an epistemic community. See Haas, “Introduction.” For background on the topic of sexual reform, see Grossmann, Reforming Sex. 6. G. Simmel, “Gesellschaft zu zweien.” 7. S. Stern, “Wandel des jüdischen Frauentyps,” 72. 8. See the section “From Weddings in the Gemeinschaft to Marriages in the Gesellschaft” later in this chapter. 9. The concept of self-­realization was an important aspect in German conceptions of Bildung that traced out the maturation of individuals throughout the life course. See Swales, German Bildungsroman. 10. For an expansive analysis of Jewish emancipation, see Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation, esp. 277–­88. 11. For more, see Geller, The Scholems. 12. See Leo Baeck Institute, New York (LBINY), ME 974, Lotte Fairbrook, “Dear Family: Memoirs—­Part I: Childhood and Background,” pp. 36–­37. 13. This theme emerges in Rudolph Stahl’s memoir. See LBINY, ME 1011, “The Memoirs of Rudolph Stahl/with Benjamin Pollock,” p. 18. 14. LBINY, ME 974, Fairbrook, “Dear Family,” pt. I, p. i. 15. LBINY, ME 974, Fairbrook, “Dear Family,” pt. II, ch. 6, p. 3 (journal entry for October 4, 1919). 16. LBINY, ME 974, Fairbrook, “Dear Family,” pt. II, ch. 6, p. 5. 17. LBINY, ME 974, Fairbrook, “Dear Family,” pt. I, p. ii. 18. Brenner, “Turning Inward.” See also Hotam, Deutsch-­Jüdische Jugendliche. 19. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (200), Oscar E. Scherzer, p. 10. However, Sonia Gollance has shown just how important a space the dance floor was; see Gollance, It Could Lead to Dancing. 20. Brenner, “Turning Inward,” 59. 21. Ziemann, “Weimar Was Weimar.” 22. For more on the nature of cabaret in the German capital, see Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, 154. The city symphonies genre of film emerged in interwar Europe and included, most famously, Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphonie einer Großstadt (1927) and Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer’s Menschen am Sonntag (1930). 23. Hung, “Bad Politics”; Hung et al., Beyond Glitter and Doom.

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24. Dinse, Freizeitleben der Großstadtjugend. See also Peukert, Jugend zwischen Krieg und Krise, 192. 25. Quoted in Peukert, Jugend zwischen Krieg und Krise, 196. See similar perspectives from textile workers about their workdays and weekends in Kaes et al., Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 208–­10. 26. Symonette and Kowalke, Speak Low, 21. 27. Schrekinger, Pilgrim Father, 15, 33. 28. Institut für Wirtschafts-­und Sozialgeschichte (IWSG), University of Vienna, Dokumentation lebensgeschichtlicher Aufzeichnungen (DOKU), Albert Schrekinger, pp. 180–­82. 29. Silverman, Becoming Austrians, 22–­23; Krutikov, From Kabbalah to Class Struggle, 95; Freidenreich, Jewish Politics in Vienna, 84. 30. IWSG, DOKU, Schrekinger, pp. 255–­60. 31. IWSG, DOKU, Schrekinger, p. 288. 32. IWSG, DOKU, Schrekinger, p. 289. 33. Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany, 24–­41. 34. IWSG, DOKU, Schrekinger, pp. 288–­90. 35. IWSG, DOKU, Schrekinger, pp. 294–­95. 36. Schrekinger, Pilgrim Father, 64. 37. Schrekinger, Pilgrim Father, 67–­68. 38. Schrekinger, Pilgrim Father, 70–­74. 39. Schrekinger, Pilgrim Father, 83–­88. 40. Schrekinger, Pilgrim Father, 63. 41. Schrekinger, Pilgrim Father, 28. 42. IWSG, DOKU, Schrekinger, pp. 331–­36. 43. The quote is taken from Friedrich Gottschalk’s autobiography. See Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (83), Friedrich Gottschalk, p. 12. 44. IWSG, DOKU, Schrekinger, pp. 368–­70. 45. See Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 138. 46. Hoffmann, “Sexualethik im Judentum,” 1. 47. Barkai, “Population Decline,” 35. 48. Freidenreich, Female, Jewish, and Educated, 118–­22. For more background, see Verheyen, “[ . . . ] mein Eheweib und nicht mein College.” 49. Freidenreich, Female, Jewish, and Educated, 122. See also Zwicker and Rose, “Marriage or Profession.” 50. Frankenthal, Jüdin, Intellektuelle, Sozialistin, 110. 51. Frankenthal, Jüdin, Intellektuelle, Sozialistin, 11–­15. 52. Frankenthal, Jüdin, Intellektuelle, Sozialistin, 7–­10. 53. Gillerman, Germans into Jews, 62. 54. Maurer, “Partnersuche und Lebensplanung,” 347, 353, 371. 55. LBINY, ME 550, Margarete Sallis, “Meine beiden 40 Jahren,” esp. pp. 147–­57.

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56. Barkai, “Population Decline,” 35. 57. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 45. 58. Barkai, “Population Decline,” 34–­38. 59. S. Stern, “Wandel des jüdischen Frauentyps,” 72. 60. S. Stern, “Wandel des jüdischen Frauentyps,” 136. 61. See Efron, Defenders of the Race; and Lipphardt, Biologie der Juden. 62. Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture; Brenner and Penslar, In Search of Jewish Community. 63. Barkai, “Jewish Life in Its German Milieu,” 61. 64. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers; Gillerman, Germans into Jews. 65. Barkai, “The Organized Jewish Community,” 79; Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture, 53. 66. See Tanner, “Protestant Revolt”; Hollerich, “Catholic Anti-­Liberalism”; and Pöpping, Abendland, 15, 66–­70, 171–­72. 67. Kriechbaumer, Großen Erzählungen der Politik, 314–­17. 68. Dowe, Auch Bildungsbürger, 120. 69. Centrum Judaicum Archiv, Berlin (CJA), 6.2, no. 1, Nachlass Fritz Selbiger, entry for July 6, 1928. 70. CJA, Nachlass Selbiger, page missing but entry written between April 6 and June 9, 1923. 71. CJA, Nachlass Selbiger, entries for December 10 and December 20, 1924. 72. CJA, Nachlass Selbiger, entry for February 23, 1930. 73. See Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie; and Gammerl, “Felt Distances,” 187. 74. CJA, Nachlass Selbiger, entry for March 3, 1929. 75. CJA, Nachlass Selbiger, entry for July 20, 1930. 76. CJA, Nachlass Selbiger, entry for April 10, 1928. 77. CJA, Nachlass Selbiger, entries for June 15, 1929, and April 11, 1930. 78. CJA, Nachlass Selbiger, entries for September 28, 1924, and February 25, 1929. 79. Wobick-­Segev, Homes Away from Home, 6. 80. Susman, “Frauenproblem,” 431–­36, 446. 81. Freidenreich, Female, Jewish, and Educated, 21, 54, 146, 154. 82. LBINY, ME 636, Rahel Straus, “Wir lebten in Deutschland,” p. 126. 83. LBINY, ME 636, Straus, “Wir lebten in Deutschland,” p. 105. 84. Thanks to Marion Kaplan for help with this point. See also Frevert, Women in German History, 315. 85. For more on Kohn, see the articles in the section “Hans Kohn (1891–­1971): The Multifaceted Contributions of a Political Philosopher,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 55/1 (2010): 251–­311; and Aschheim, Beyond the Border. 86. See Kohn’s letter stamped in September 1920, which is addressed to Wahl at the London Zionist Office. LBINY, AR 259, Hans Kohn Collection, Kohn-­Wahl Correspondence, Box 3, Folder 16.

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87. Wahl to Kohn, July 23,1920, LBINY, AR 259, Hans Kohn Collection, Kohn-­Wahl Correspondence, Box 3, Folder 16. 88. See, for instance, Wahl to Kohn, September 23, 1920; and Kohn to Wahl, September 24, 1920, LBINY, AR 259, Hans Kohn Collection, Kohn-­Wahl Correspondence, Box 3, Folders 16 and 17. 89. Kohn to Wahl, September 19, 1920, LBINY, AR 259, Hans Kohn Collection, Kohn-­ Wahl Correspondence, Box 3, Folder 16. 90. Kohn to Wahl, September 19, 1920, LBINY, AR 259, Hans Kohn Collection, Kohn-­ Wahl Correspondence, Box 3, Folder 16. 91. Kohn to Wahl, September 19, 1920, LBINY, AR 259, Hans Kohn Collection, Kohn-­ Wahl Correspondence, Box 3, Folder 16. 92. Wahl to Kohn, September 23, 1920, LBINY, AR 259, Hans Kohn Collection, Kohn-­ Wahl Correspondence, Box 3, Folder 17. 93. Gordon, Towards Nationalism’s End, esp. 36. 94. Weill writing to his brother in June 1919. Symonette and Kowalke, Speak Low, 28–­29. 95. Symonette and Kowalke, Speak Low, 29. 96. Weill to Lenya, December 1924 and 1925, in Symonette and Kowalke, Speak Low, 28–­29, 41–­43. 97. Weill to Lenya, April, 1925 (?) (Weill makes reference to “days of May”), in Symonette and Kowalke, Speak Low, 44. 98. See “Biographical Note” in “Guide to the Papers of the Rahn Family 1809–­2010,” LBINY, AR 25538, Rahn Family Collection. 99. Rahn to Bechmann, March 2, 1931, LBINY, AR 25538, Rahn Family Collection, 1/1. 100. Bechmann to Rahn, March 22, 1931, LBINY, AR 25538, Rahn Family Collection, 1/4. 101. Rahn to Bechmann, June 17, 1931, LBINY, AR 25538, Rahn Family Collection, 1/1. 102. Bechmann to Rahn, April 28, 1932, LBINY, AR 25538, Rahn Family Collection 1/8. Bechmann mentioned the attacks on Jewish students in a letter from May 30, 1932. 103. Bechmann to Rahn, May 26, 1932, LBINY, AR 25538, Rahn Family Collection, 1/8; and Rahn to Bechmann, May 19 and June 6, 1932, LBINY, AR 25538, Rahn Family Collection, 1/1. 104. Bechmann to Rahn, June 16, 1932, LBINY, AR 25538, Rahn Family Collection, 1/9. 105. Bechmann to Rahn, May 5, 1932, LBINY, AR 25538, Rahn Family Collection, 1/8. 106. CJA, 1, 75 E, wedding booklet titled “Der Kriegsruf: Sondernummer des Junggesellen.” 107. CJA, 1, 75 E, wedding booklet. 108. CJA, 1, 75 E, “Hochzeits-­K ladderdatsch,” marking the wedding of Herta Koppelowski and Siegfried Podbielski on June 24, 1924. 109. Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, Table 37. 110. M. Spektor, “Bettler-­Streik.” 111. See, for instance, Carlebach, Ratgeber für das jüdische Haus, 3, 36–­45.

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112. The photos had captions, and “Happy End” is the caption for the final image in the series here. 113. Leo Baeck Institute, Berlin (LBIJMB), MM24, Ernestine Drucker Freud, “Vignettes of My Life: [1899–­1979],” p. 12. 114. LBIJMB, MM24, Freud, “Vignettes,” p. 29. 115. Biale, Eros and the Jews, 155–­56. 116. LBIJMB, MM24, Freud, “Vignettes,” pp. 30–­47. 117. This was the subtitle of the first of the images in Model’s picture-­book collection. See LBINY, AR 6306, Elisabeth Model Collection. 118. LBIJMB, MM24, Freud, “Vignettes,” p. 31. 119. Straus, “Ehe und Mutterschaft im Judentum,” 3. 120. For more details, see Mouton, Nurturing the Nation, 36–­37; and Steglich, “A Crisis of Marriage,” esp. 3, 17–­20. 121. Mouton, “Rejuvenating the Family,” 60–­61. For details relating to specifically Jewish families, see Gillerman, “Crisis of the Jewish Family,” 181. 122. Harmat, “Till Death Do You Part,” 118–­22. 123. Symonette and Kowalke, Speak Low, 46. 124. Heydt, Mischehenot und Mischehepflege, 2–­5, found in Bundesarchiv Berlin-­ Lichterfelde (BA-­B), N/2203/601, Nachlass Reinhard Mumm. Although the publication is undated, the data presented cite statistics that run until 1919, suggesting that the pamphlet was written in the early 1920s. It is also located with other similar pamphlets that were definitely written in the 1920s. 125. See Loew, Wir Unsichtbaren, 92–­ 93; and Salzberger, “Jüdische-­ christliche Mischehe.” 126. Barkai, “Population Decline,” 32. For more background on intermarriage in especially Vienna, see Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 127–­46. 127. Meiring, Christlich-­Jüdische Mischehe, 109. 128. Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, 111–­13. 129. Usborne, Politics of the Body, 58. 130. Usborne, Politics of the Body, 57. 131. Mouton, Nurturing the Nation, 156–­57. 132. See Weissberg, “Jüdische Frauenbund,” 361–­64. 133. Meisel-­Hess, Bedeutung der Monogamie, esp. 45–­46, 164–­73. 134. Therborn, Between Sex and Power, 235. 135. E. Kahn, Internationale Geburtenstreik. See also Grossmann, Reforming Sex, 3–­5. 136. Segall, “Wirtschaftliche und soziale Lage der Juden,” 55. 137. For a review written at the end of the period, see Deutsch, “Mütterlichkeit und Sexualität.” 138. Straus, “Ehe und Mutterschaft im Judentum,” 4. 139. LBINY, ME 636, Straus, “Erinnerungen,” p. 377. 140. LBINY, ME 636, Straus, “Erinnerungen,” pp. 357, 376.

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141. Susman, “Frauenproblem,” 440. 142. For more, see Kessel, “The Whole Man.” 143. Roazen, Helene Deutsch, 135. 144. On emotionologies, see Stearns, “Emotionology.” 145. Abraham, “Äußerungsformen,” 443. 146. LBINY, ME 974, Lotte Fairbrook, “Dear Family! Memoirs. Part III: Married Life in Germany,” p. 51. See ch. 1 for her account of finding her partner. 147. Meyer-­Breuer, Frauentypen, 1–­13. 148. Blasius, Ehescheidung in Deutschland, 155–­58. 149. Blasius, Ehescheidung in Deutschland, 157–­58. For more on unemployment figures, see Dimsdale et al., “Unemployment in Interwar Germany,” 778. 150. Boak, Women in the Weimar Republic, 222–­23. 151. Trude to Clara, April 27, 1922, IWSG, DOKU, Daisy Koeb. 152. Trude to Clara, September 11, 1931, IWSG, DOKU, Koeb. 153. E. Simmel, “Zur Psychologie der Geschlechter,” 288; Meisel-­Hess, Bedeutung der Monogamie, 135–­36. 154. “Einrücken—­oder heiraten,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, July 18, 1920, p. 7. 155. “Wohnungsnot als Ehescheidungsgrund,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, March 15, 1922, p. 5. 156. “Tanzen—­keine Verletzung der ehelichen Treue,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, August 9, 1922, p. 7. 157. “Ehebruch ist Ehebruch,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, August 4, 1927, p. 7. 158. “Eignungsprüfung für die Ehe: Der Liebesmesser,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, April 22, 1927, pp. 5–­6. 159. “Ehescheidungs-­und Alimentationsversicherung,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, April 17, 1926, p. 6. 160. Grethe to Ernst, November 1, 1902; and Alfred to Grethe, February 6, 1919, IWSG, DOKU, Koeb. 161. Albert to Grethe, June 27, 1919, IWSG, DOKU, Koeb. 162. Grethe to Berthe, December 5, 1897, IWSG, DOKU, Koeb. 163. “Ehescheidungen bei den Juden in Preußen, 1923–­1929,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 6/3 (1931): 50. 164. Mouton, Nurturing the Nation, 72; Blau, “Zur Statistik der Ehescheidungen,” 88. 165. Blau, “Zur Statistik der Ehescheidungen,” 87. 166. Wittels, “Sakrament der Ehe,” 35. 167. Brunner, Liebe, 219–­24. Chapter 3 1. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, Transcript Freie Universität, Berlin (VHA-­FU), Fred Löwenberg, Interview 11319, pp. 18–­19. 2. See Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 87–89.

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3. Büttner, Not der Juden teilen, 57. Beate Meyer suspects that the proportion in Hamburg is higher, even over 20 percent, although she is working from the figures for all marriages in the city. In any case, she finds that the figures for Hamburg would be higher than the national average. See B. Meyer, Jüdische Mischlinge, 73. 4. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 75, 87–­88; Barkai, “Jewish Life Under Persecution,” 213, 235. 5. Baumann, Zerstörte Nachbarschaften, 79. 6. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 60–­72. See also Kaplan, “Gender,” 97–­110; Carey, Jewish Masculinity; and Huebel, Fighter, Worker, and Family Man. For broader studies of gender relations and family life during the Third Reich, see Vaizey, Surviving Hitler’s War; Pine, The Family in German History; Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland; Hagemann and Quataert, Gendering Modern German History; and Stargardt, The German War. 7. Jewish wives also took on public responsibilities, believing that the same violence would not be meted out to them as their husbands. See Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 17. 8. Meyer, Jüdische Mischlinge, 175–­78. 9. Houghton Library, Harvard University, My Life in Germany Collection (MLiG), bMS Ger 91 (47), Vera Deutsch, p. 15. 10. For more on this idea of self-­revelation, see Rosenwein, Love, 91–­92. 11. See Cocks, “Sick Heil,” 94. For more background, see Fritzsche, Life and Death, esp. ch. 2; and the chapters by Michael Wildt, Armin Nolzen, Sybille Steinbacher, Birthe Kundrus, and Beate Meyer in Bajohr and Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft. 12. See Himmler’s comments to an assortment of experts in Bundesarchiv Berlin-­ Lichterfelde (BA-­ B), R 1501/5518, “Mitschrift betreffend Fragen der unehelichen Mutterschaft.” 13. Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich, 41. 14. Herzog, Sex After Fascism, 29–­32. 15. Ness, “Mutterkreuz,” 591; Heineman, What Difference, 22. 16. For more details on the racial legislation passed by the National Socialists, see Burleigh and Wippermann, Racial State, 46–­50; and Lorke, “Shifting Racial Boundaries,” 30. 17. See Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 42–­46. 18. Przyrembel, “Rassenschande” Reinheitsmythos; Muggenthaler, Verbrechen Liebe; Röger, Kriegsbeziehungen; Waite, “Teenage Sexuality,” 435–­38. 19. Leo Baeck Institute, New York (LBINY), ME 1418, MM III 18, Werner Warmbrunn, “The Terrace Memoirs,” p. 28. 20. See, for instance, an advertisement placed by a man in his 50s who was seeking a wife in her 20s in Bayerische israelitische Gemeindezeitung, May 1, 1934. 21. See Beredt, Dritte Reich des Traums, 140–­41. 22. LBINY, ME 427, Martin May, “The First ‘Blitz, 1900–­1938,” pp. 191–­99. 23. LBINY, ME 427, May, “First Blitz,” pp. 210–­11.

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24. “Unsere Geschichte: Esra’s Rassengesetze,” Jüdische allgemeine Zeitung, November 21, 1934, p. 29. 25. “Unsere Geschichte,” p. 29. 26. E. Kahn, “Historischer Wendepunkt im Judentum,” 6–­7. 27. Lipphardt, Biologie der Juden. 28. See Völpel and Shavit, Deutsch-­jüdische Kinder-­und Jugendliteratur, 346. 29. See, for instance, H. Kahn, “Statistik und Leben”; “Die Schrumpfung einer jüdischen Großgemeinde,” Bayerische Israelistische Gemeindezeitung, March 15, 1934; Theilhaber, “Ende des deutschen Judentums”; and Theilhaber, “Jüdische Bevölkerungsbilanz.” 30. See Theilhaber, Untergang der deutschen Juden; and Efron, Defenders of the Race. 31. BA-­B, R 3017/3516, “Strafsache,” report from the regional court directors Mathey and Zündorf and federal prosecutor Brabeck, 1943 (?). 32. BA-­B, R 3017/3516, “Strafsache.” 33. See Lüdtke, Eigen-­Sinn. Lothar Orbach describes his intimate encounters with a factory colleague in Orbach and Orbach-­Smith, Young Lothar, 30–31. For details of sexual encounters in the factory where Gad Beck worked, see G. Beck, Underground Life, 39. 34. See, for instance, BA-­B, R 3001/186273, “Anklageschrift, 11 März, 1939”; and Waite, “Teenage Sexuality,” 444–­56, 449. 35. Orbach and Orbach-­Smith, Young Lothar, 83–95. 36. G. Beck, Underground Life, 127. 37. VHA, Ruth Nessel, Interview 32059, pp. 23–­25. 38. VHA, Nessel, Interview 32059, pp. 23–­25. 39. VHA, Margot Dränger, Interview 45468, pp. 21–­29. 40. For background on Zionism in the Third Reich, see Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-­Semitism. 41. Angress, Generation zwischen Furcht und Hoffnung, 18, 27; Dopp, Jüdische Jugendbewegung, 158–­69. Only the HeHalutz and those hakhsharah training centers that were preparing Jewish youths for emigration to Palestine were allowed to continue functioning until 1941. See Völpel and Shavit, Deutsch-­jüdische Kinder-­und Jugendliteratur, 378. 42. LBINY, ME 910, Agnes Weiler Wolf, “Notes from an Extinct Species,” pp. 208–­16. 43. G. Beck, Underground Life, 46. 44. Yad Vashem Archives (YVA), O.1/327, Manuscript prepared by Jizchak Schwersenz and Edith Wolff regarding Jewish youth and illegal work with youth under the Nazi regime, 1933–­1945, “Vorgeschichte,” p. 18. 45. YVA, O.1/327, Manuscript prepared by Schwersenz and Wolff, “Die Dualschule,” p. 11. 46. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 45–­47. 47. YVA, O.30/266, Documentation related to the wedding of Hermann Bondi and Erna Merkin in Karlsbad, June 2, 1935. 48. LBINY, AR 25408, Margot Malachowski Wertheimer Collection, Engagement and Wedding, 1935.

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Notes to Chapter 3

49. LBINY, AR 25205, Album, Wedding of Joseph Neuburger and Therese Guttmann, Telegrams, Letter, and Poem, May–­June 1937. 50. Spender, World Within World, 2–­3. 51. For a provocative theory of how self-­deception is a vital psychological survival tool, see Trivers, Deceit and Self-­Deception. 52. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 247–­48. 53. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, xxvi. 54. B. Meyer, Jüdische Mischlinge, 175–­81. 55. Buch, November Tales, 32–­34. 56. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, 8–­9, 34, 37–­38, 63, 128–­29, 134. 57. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, 128–­29. 58. Goffman, Presentation of Self. 59. Bukey, Jews and Intermarriage, 103. 60. Fraenkel, Dual State, xxiii, 71. For a lucid contextualization of this work, see Morris, Legal Sabotage. 61. See Steigmann-­Gall, “Neither Aryan nor Semite,” 275–­78. 62. B. Meyer, “Fragwürdiger Schutz”; Heim, Verfolgung und Ermordung. 63. For more details, see Burleigh and Wippermann, Racial State, 43–­51, 77–96. 64. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, xxvii; DÖW, Jüdische Schicksale, 215. 65. YVA, M.38/301, Testimony of Edeltrud Posiles, p. 1. 66. Grethe to Trude, May 23, 1934, Institut für Wirtschafts-­und Sozialgeschichte (IWSG), University of Vienna, Dokumentation lebensgeschichtlicher Aufzeichnungen (DOKU), Daisy Koeb. 67. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (52), Maria Donath, pp. 31, 39–­40. 68. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (52), Donath, pp. 27–­28. 69. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (52), Donath, p. 52. 70. See Der Stürmer, no. 5 (January 1935). The case also made it into the files of the Justice Ministry. See BA-­B, R 3001/20459, “Generalakten des Justizministeriums betreffend Mischblütige Ehen.” 71. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (250), Eva Wysbar, “Hours Before the Dawn,” pp. 7–­23, 39. 72. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, xxvii. 73. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 137–­38. 74. YVA, O.2/445, Memoirs of Vally Fink, “From Theresienstadt to London,” p. 9. 75. Karminski, “Zurückhaltung,” 1. 76. “Aus dem Gedicht ‘Lo sachiti baor min hehefker,’ von Ch. N. Bialik,” Blätter des jüdischen Frauenbundes (August 1935). Author’s translation from the German. 77. An example of this kind of message can be seen in “Kraft, Stolz, Geduld: Feierstunde der deutsch-­jüdischen Jugend in Frankfurt a.M.,” C. V. Zeitung, April 12, 1934, p. 2.

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78. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (200), Oskar E. Scherzer, p. 89. 79. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (200), Scherzer, pp. 99–­100 80. Blumenfeld, Jugend als Konfliktsituation, 53. 81. LBINY, ME 647, Helmut Krueger, “Der halbe Stern: Die Geschichte eines Mischlings ersten Grades im Dritten Reich und seiner Eltern, der Mischehe eines deutschbluetigen Theaterleiters und seiner juedischen Ehefrau,” pp. 57–­61. 82. Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 45. 83. Data taken from Blau, “Jewish Population of Germany,” 168–­71. 84. YVA, O.33/2399, Memoirs of Rut Pinkus, regarding experiences of her father Alfred Wieruszowski, p. 13. 85. YVA, O.33/2399, Memoirs of Rut Pinkus, pp. 45, 49, 52–­53. 86. L. Gross, Last Jews in Berlin, 127, 136–­37. 87. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 17, 60. 88. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (127), Helen Lange, p. 41. 89. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (93), Verena Hellwig, pp. 45–­60. 90. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 180–­82; Kwiet, “Ultimate Refuge,” 147. See also Goeschel, Suicide in Nazi Germany. 91. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (250), Wysbar, p. 14. 92. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (8), “Aralk,” p. 42. 93. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (127), Lange, pp. 49–­51. 94. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (127), Lange, p. 66. 95. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (127), Lange, p. 192. 96. Adamo, Zuckermann’s Tochter, 112–­15. 97. Adamo, Zuckermann’s Tochter, 131. 98. Adamo, Zuckermann’s Tochter, 136. 99. See Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust; Wiese, “Indelible Stigma”; Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent; Bergen, Twisted Cross; and Barnett, For the Soul of the People. 100. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MLiG, bMS Ger 91 (179), Lotte Popper, pp. 43–­44. 101. Doerry, My Wounded Heart, esp. 54–­92. 102. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, esp. 9–21. 103. Schaffer, Irma Rafaela Toledo, 10. 104. Embacher, “Doppelt ausgeblendete Frauenerfahrungen.” 105. Sammlung Frauennachlässe (SFN), Institut für Geschichte (IfG), University of Vienna, NL 164, Nachlass Irma Rafaela Toledo, pp. 26–­27 (July–­September 1941). 106. See Ellmauer et al., Geduldet, geschmäht und vertrieben; and Embacher, “Doppelt ausgeblendete Frauenerfahrungen.”

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107. SFN, IfG, NL 164, Nachlass Toledo, p. 25 (May 16, 1941). 108. See Christa Hämmerle, “Introduction.” 109. Hämmerle and Gerhalter, Apokalyptische Jahre, 72. 110. Hämmerle and Gerhalter, Apokalyptische Jahre, 72. 111. Hämmerle and Gerhalter, Apokalyptische Jahre, 74–­75. 112. Hämmerle and Gerhalter, Apokalyptische Jahre, esp. 69–­70. 113. For more background on mixed marriages, see, alongside Stoltzfus’s Resistance of the Heart, Wolf Gruner’s Widerstand in der Rosenstrasse. 114. For more on the term inner emigration and its application to German intellectuals during the Third Reich, see Donahue and Kirchner, Flight of Fancy; and Hermand, Culture in Dark Times. 115. See, for example, Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice”: and Eitler and Scheer, “Emotionengeschichte.” 116. YVA, O.64/64, Šalom na Pátek, no. 12, November 26, 1943. 117. For more, see Hájková, Last Ghetto. 118. Hájková, “Sexual Barter,” 511. 119. YVA, O.33/8521, Eva Rocek, “Shakespeare Saved My Life,” esp. pp. 38–­39. 120. J. Friedman, “Togetherness and Isolation,” 5–­6. 121. See also Hájková, Last Ghetto. 122. Hájková, “Sexual Barter,” 510–­18. 123. Hájková, “Sexual Barter,” 518–­19. See also Hájková, Last Ghetto. 124. For more discussion on whether it is appropriate to speak of female choice and agency, see Chatwood, “Schillinger and the Dancer,” 61; and Waxman, Women in the Holocaust, 44–­45. 125. Waxman, Women in the Holocaust, 78. 126. For more on men’s loss of social standing in the ghettos, see Hilberg, Perpetrators, 127. 127. YVA, O.33/8521, Rocek, “Shakespeare Saved My Life,” pp. 38–­39. 128. YVA, O.64/64, Šalom na Pátek, no. 14, February 18, 1944, “Die Überraschung.” 129. Thanks to Mimi Braverman for pointing out this literary allusion. 130. YVA, O.2/993, Testimony of Marta Mosse, senior member of Jewish Community in Berlin, pp. 6–­8. 131. LBINY, ME 1338, Margot Friedlaender, pp. 6–­8. 132. YVA, O.2/445, Memoirs of Vally Fink, p. 16. 133. YVA, O.2/445, Memoirs of Vally Fink, p. 17. 134. LBINY, ME 1024, Hirschfeld, “My Life Story,” p. 79. 135. See the example of how Vlasta Schönová and Benjamin Murmelstein’s marriage was discussed in Theresienstadt, in Hájková, “Sexual Barter,” 522–­25. 136. YVA, O.2/445, Memoirs of Vally Fink, p. 27. 137. YVA, O.2/445, Memoirs of Vally Fink, p. 20. 138. LBINY, ME 360, Nora Keizer, “Danse Macabre,” p. 22.

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139. LBINY, ME 360, Keizer, “Danse Macabre,” p. 30. 140. LBINY, ME 360, Keizer, “Danse Macabre,” p. 23. 141. LBINY, ME 360, Keizer, “Danse Macabre,” p. 35. 142. LBINY, ME 360, Keizer, “Danse Macabre,” p. 55. 143. LBINY, ME 360, Keizer, “Danse Macabre,” p. 99. 144. LBINY, ME 874, Herbert R. Ert, “The Diary of a Survivor [Samson Reichstein],” p. 16. 145. LBINY, ME 874, Ert, “Diary of a Survivor,” pp. 17–­18. 146. LBINY, ME 874, Ert, “Diary of a Survivor,” pp. 24–­25. 147. Sierakowick, Diary, 188, 219–­20, 230. 148. For more on the medical profession in the Third Reich, see Weindling (ed.), From Clinic to Concentration Camp; Aly et al., Cleansing the Fatherland; and Evans, Third Reich at War, 593–­613. 149. LBINY, ME 360, Keizer, “Danse Macabre,” p. 91. 150. LBINY, ME 360, Keizer, “Danse Macabre,” p. 126. 151. On the concentration camps, see Caplan and Wachsmann, Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany; and Wachsmann, KL. 152. Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive (VHSOHA), University of Michigan, Dearborn, Interview with Hermina Vlasopolos, April 9, 1984. For more on how women counseled one another in the camps, see Ringelheim, “The Unethical and the Unspeakable.” 153. Her account was recorded in DÖW, Jüdische Schicksale, 554. 154. YVA, O.33/1549, Otto Bernstein, “Abscheid von Lager DREI.” 155. Quoted from “Dachau Song.” To hear the song, see http:​/​​/​w ww​.ushmm​.org​/​ exhibition​/​music​/​detail​.php?content​=​dachau. 156. Quoted in Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, Buchenwald Concentration Camp, 80. 157. See the comments on interviewee Rachel G. in the Boder interviews in Niewyk, Fresh Wounds, 138. 158. LBINY, ME 360, Keizer, “Danse Macabre,” pp. 196–­97. 159. For lucid expositions of these theories, see M. Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice”; and Eitler and Scheer, “Emotionengeschichte.” 160. See Riley, “A Voice Without a Mouth.” My thinking on this was inspired by a talk that Shaul Bar-­Haim gave at the Columbia University Affect Studies Seminar in September 2019. 161. See Slezkine, Jewish Century. 162. Herzog, Sex After Fascism, esp. ch. 1. Chapter 4 1. Honigmann, Eine Liebe aus Nichts. Excerpts from the novel are also available in Lappin, Jewish Voices, 65–­79. 2. For more statistical data, see DellaPergola, “Jews in the European Community,” 47; and Richarz, “Juden in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” 27.

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3. W. Bergmann and Erb, Antisemitismus. 4. See, for instance, the arguments between Erika and Robert in Sichrovsky, Strangers in Their Own Land, 80–­95; and Varon, New Life, 214–­15. 5. Honigmann, “Love Out of Nothing,” in Lappin, Jewish Voices, 74. 6. For more information on Toledo’s Genesis cycle, from which two images are shown in Figure 8, see https://schlosspuchberg.at/kunst-im-schloss/toledo-zimmer. 7. For more, see Biess, Homecomings; and Goltermann, War in Their Minds. 8. Many histories of Jewish life in West Germany tackle this topic. For an accessible and insightful introduction, see Kauders, Unmögliche Heimat, esp. 164–­69. 9. Bodemann, Jewish Family, 6; Rapaport, Jews in Germany After the Holocaust, 207–­11.  10. Susanne Düwell discusses this theme in contemporary German literature in Düwell, “Politische hat jede Aussage angesteckt,” esp. 227. 11. Charlotte Knobloch describes how she played this kind of role in the chapter “Mamme—­und andere Ämter,” in the autobiography she wrote with Rafael Seligmann. See Knobloch, In Deutschland angekommen. 12. Wyman, DPs, 140–44. 13. See J. T. Gross, Fear. 14. For a description of the typical survivors, see Voices of the Holocaust (VH), David P. Boder Interviews, Jacob Oleiski, August 20, 1946, http:​/​​/​voices​.iit​.edu​/​interview?doc​=​ oleiskiJ&display​=​oleiskiJ​_​en. For early postwar census data, see also Brenner, After the Holocaust, 22. 15. Wyman, DPs, 132–33. 16. Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 132. 17. See, for instance, the reports of Miriam Warburg in YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Leo W. Schwartz Papers, 1945–­1949, RG no. 294.1, Folder 51. 18. Berkowitz and Brown-­Fleming, “Perceptions of Jewish DPs,” 174. 19. For insights into the difficulties involved in retracing sexual encounters between Jewish displaced persons and local Germans, see Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 229. 20. Waxman, Women in the Holocaust, 131. 21. See Seidman, “Elie Wiesel,” 6. 22. VH, David P. Boder Interviews, Oleiski. 23. Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 227–­28. 24. The figures come from Stone, Liberation of the Camps, 167–69. 25. Lavsky, “Experience of the Displaced Persons,” 243; Stone, Liberation of the Camps, 167–­69. 26. Zahra, Lost Children, 12. 27. Quoted in Patt, “Jewish DP Youths,” 108. 28. Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 205. 29. Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors, 110–­11. See also the attempts of humanitarian workers to “refeminize” women and girls in the DP camps in Zahra, Lost Children, 111–­12. 30. Stone, Liberation of the Camps, 115–19.

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31. Königseder and Wetzel, Waiting for Hope, 100–­101. 32. VH, David Boder Interviews, Benjamin Piskorz, September 1, 1946, http:​/​​/​voices​.iit​ .edu​/​interviewee?doc​=​piskorzB. 33. P. Friedman, “The Road Back,” 506. 34. Stone, Liberation of the Camps, 154. 35. Quoted in Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 187. 36. My thinking here has been influenced by M. Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice.” 37. On the concept of a “knowing body,” see M. Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice,” 199. 38. Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 195–­96. 39. VH, David Boder Interviews, Solomon Horowitz, September 12, 1946, http:​/​​/​voices​ .iit​.edu​/​interviewee?doc​=​horowitzS. 40. See, for instance, Rabbi Rosenberg to Gertrude Richman, Eli  Antoniu,  Lavy  M. Becker, Herbert Katzki, AJDC, Paris, AJDC, New York, Subject “The religious problems in Germany and the approach to their solution in Germany,” YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Leo W. Schwarz Papers, RG no. 294.1, Folder 51.  41. VH, David Boder Interviews, Joseph Ferber, September 8, 1946, http:​/​​/​voices​.iit​.edu​ /​interview?doc​=​ferberJ&display​=​ferberJ ​_​en. For more, see Doron, Jewish Youth. 42. See, for instance, Bettelheim, Children of the Future. 43. VH, David Boder Interviews, Horowitz. 44. Jacob Oleiski tackled these issues in his interview with David Boder. See VH, David Boder Interviews, Oleiski. 45. Ahonen et al., People on the Move; Ther and Siljak, Redrawing Nations. 46. Zahra, Lost Children, 17–­21; Doron, Jewish Youth, esp. ch. 2. 47. Atina Grossmann records a Jewish American GI being impressed by this phenomenon. See Grossman, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 90. 48. See Rosenberg’s report in YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Leo W. Schwarz Papers, 1940–­1954, RG no. 294.1, Folder 51. 49. Miriam Warburg to friends, September 24, 1945, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Leo W. Schwarz Papers, 1940–­1954, RG no. 294.1, Folder 51. 50. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Leo W. Schwarz Papers, 1945–­1949, RG no. 294.1, Microfilm no. MK488, “Report of Activities by Rabbi Alexander Rosenberg, as of 12 October 1945,” p. 4. 51. Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors, 132. 52. VH, David Boder Interviews, Oleiski. 53. Robert Schindel, “Memories of Prometheus,” in Lappin, Jewish Voices, 205–­9. 54. See Schissler, Miracle Years; and Bessel and Schumann, Life After Death. 55. Quoted in Lewy, Jews and Germans, 111. For Buber’s and Scholem’s positions, see H. Bergmann, “Juden und Deutsche,” 11–­12. See also Buber, “Ende der deutsch-­jüdischen Symbiose,” 150–­53; and Scholem, “Wider den Mythos,” 229–­32.

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Notes to Chapter 4

56. Oppenheimer, Jüdische Jugend, 67. 57. VH, David Boder Interviews, Oleiski. 58. For figures on Jewish populations in West Germany in the 1950s, see Brenner, After the Holocaust, 139. 59. Brenner, “Eastern European and German Jews,” 54. 60. Yehudai, “Doubtful Cases,” 31. See also Brenner, After the Holocaust, 43. 61. See, for example, Julius Dreifuss, representative of the Northern Rhine Jewish Communities, to Rabbi Eschelbacher, February 25, 1947, Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, University of Heidelberg (ZA), B 1/5/76. 62. Brenner, After the Holocaust, 48. 63. See letter to Synagoge Gemeinde Düsseldorfs (SGD), November 4, 1946, ZA, B 1/5/85. The husbands did not spell out the biblical passage in their letter, but I have, in order to bring out the meaning of what they wrote. 64. Letter to SGD, November 4, 1946, ZA, B 1/5/85. 65. See Bailey, “Nächstenliebe in the Age of Nationalism.” 66. Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 173, 234. 67. See, for instance, the testimony of Gabriele Laufer: Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, Transcript Freie Universität, Berlin (VHA), Gabriele Laufer, Interview 14523, p. 22. See also Anthony, Compromise of Return. 68. Oppenheimer, Jüdische Jugend, 42. 69. On the concept of “Germans plus,” see Plamper, Neue Wir, 12. 70. The term sojourners comes from Bodemann, Jewish Family, 7. See also Borneman and Peck, Sojourners. 71. Oppenheimer, Jüdische Jugend, 37–­38. See also R. Hess and Kranz, Jüdische Existenz, 34. 72. Bar-­on and Chaitin, Parenthood, 9. 73. VHA, Dora Skala, Interview 08108, pp. 7–­14. 74. VHA, Ilse Rübsteck, Interview 37452, pp. 25–­26. 75. Rapaport, Jews in Germany After the Holocaust, 207. 76. Levinson, “Religiöse Richtungen,” 159. 77. VHA, Rübsteck, pp. 22–­24. 78. Feinstein, “Jewish Observance,” 272. 79. See, for example, a number of letters requesting financial support and employment opportunities in ZA, B 1/5/11, Düsseldorf, A-­G, 1955–­57. For details of help with German-­ language instruction being provided, see Letter to the Oberstadtdirektor, June 15, 1960, ZA, B 1/5/179. 80. Concerning abuse from neighbors, see letter from Fritz C., December 15, 1947, ZA, B 1/5/76. 81. ZA, B 1/5/15. Letters dealing with this case range from February 1965 to January 1967. 82. Oppenheimer, Jüdische Jugend, 35–­36. Oppenheimer did not have completely accu-

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rate data to gauge how many of the divorced parents had been in mixed marriages but extrapolated his conclusions from the general proportion of mixed marriages among German Jewish survivors. 83. See, for example, letters from Yotzef D. from June 1962, ZA, B 1/5/15 and B 1/5/29. 84. Letter from Farnborough and Weisbeker, September 10, 1962, ZA, B 1/5/88b. 85. Weisbeker to Stadt. Jugendamt Düss., August 21, 1962, ZA, B 1/5/88b. 86. See Cohn to Frau P, December 14, 1960, ZA, B 1/5/38. 87. Hans David B. to J.G.D., January 22, 1963, ZA, B 1/5/29. 88. See the correspondence between Düsseldorf ’s rabbis and editors of local and Jewish newspapers, for example, Rabbi Sieradz to Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland, December 21, 1953, ZA, B 1/5/160. See also a letter to Rheinische Zeitung, December 19, 1965, ZA, B 1/5/147. 89. See also Waxman, Women in the Holocaust, 140. 90. See Biess, Homecomings, esp. 98–­109. 91. For more, see Moyn, Christian Human Rights. 92. For an interesting study of the role of personalism in postwar European politics, see Duranti, Conservative Human Rights Revolution, esp. 268–­76, 372–­75. See also Moyn, Last Utopia. 93. Knobloch, In Deutschland angekommen, 131–­58. 94. Knobloch, In Deutschland angekommen, 159–60. 95. Seckel, “Arbeitet das Jugendzentrum,” 5. 96. Knobloch, In Deutschland angekommen, 183–85. 97. Knobloch, In Deutschland angekommen, 193. 98. Bodemann, Jewish Family, 28. 99. VHA, Dina Dzialowski, Interview 15806, pp. 11–­12. 100. Oppenheimer, Jüdische Jugend, 47. 101. “Kultus und Kultur,” Für unsere Mitglieder (September 1957), 7. 102. Brenner, After the Holocaust, 70. 103. Undated letter, organized alongside other letters from the late 1940s, ZA, B 1/5/86. 104. See Brenner, After the Holocaust, 72. See also “Organisation im Bereich der Gemeinde,” Für unserer Mitglieder: Herausgegeben vom Vorstand der jüdischen Gemeinde Berlin (September 1962), 4. 105. VHA, Dzialowski, pp. 10–­11, 14–­15. 106. VHA, Eugen Herman-­Friede, Interview 10112, pp. 34–­37. 107. See, for instance, Emerich Elefant’s reflections on what love could mean in a world that had allowed the Shoah to happen. VHA-­FU, Emerich Elefant, Interview 09413, pp. 26–­27. Similarly pointed questions could be posed by young Jews with regard to contemporary events in the 1960s, such as the Vietnam War. See Broder, “Marmor, Stein und Eisen.” 108. VHA, Baruch Friedman-­Bleicher, Interview 28924, pp. 34–­35, 41–­44. 109. VHA, Harry Weber, Interview 31368, pp. 33–­35, 40.

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110. VHA, Uli Gurewitz, Interview 34600, pp. 64–­65. 111. See Häberlen, Emotional Politics. 112. Heuss, Mut zur Liebe. 113. On these discussions, see Foschepoth, “Im Schatten der Vergangenheit”; and F. Stern, Im Anfang war Auschwitz, esp. 267–­98. 114. See F. Stern, “Philosemitism.” 115. For the idea that Jews played an important role in defining a West German identity after 1945, see Bodemann, Gedächtnistheater. 116. Some of these issues are raised in Chin and Fehrenbach, “German Democracy.” 117. DellaPergola, “Recent Trends in Jewish Marriages,” 65–­66. 118. DellaPergola, “Recent Trends in Jewish Marriages,” 66–­70. 119. See the data presented by the Forschungsgruppe Weltanschauungen in Deutschland at https:​/​​/​fowid​.de​/​meldung​/​scheidungsquoten​-deutschland​-und​-welt. For more, see Kopp, Scheidung in der Bundesrepublik. 120. Oppenheimer, Jüdische Jugend, 36. 121. See DellaPergola, “Recent Trends in Jewish Marriages,” 72. 122. Quoted in Itonenu: Unsere Zeitung (Jugendzeitschrift des Sieg fried-­Klein-Jugend­ heims der synagogengemeinde Düsseldorf) 2 (July 1965): 4–­5. 123. Brenner, After the Holocaust, 68. 124. See, for instance, “Interview: Heinz Galinski,” Schalom: Zeitschrift für die jüdische Jugend Europas 15/2 (1969): 59–­61. 125. Maòr, “Über den Wiederaufbau.” See also von der Lühe et al., Auch in Deutschland. 126. See, for instance, details for the Düsseldorf community in ZA, B 1/5/20 and B 1/5/147. 127. Feibel, “Gefilte Fish and Pepsi,” 136–­37. 128. Rapaport, Jews in Germany After the Holocaust, 191. 129. Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, esp. ch. 3. 130. See Rapaport, Jews in Germany After the Holocaust, 15. 131. Korn, “Shock and Aftershock,” 36. 132. Levin, “Das geht uns alle an,” 4. 133. Rapaport, Jews in Germany After the Holocaust, 173. 134. Helga G. and Sylvia K., “Mädchensorgen,” Atid 6 (June 1963): 7–­8. Thanks to Marion Kaplan for help with this point. 135. Feibel, “Gefilte Fish and Pepsi,” 136–­38. 136. For examples of youth group members lacking enthusiasm, see Evi M., “Muss das so sein?” Atid 5 (November 1962): 8. 137. Moritz R., “Bericht über das dreitägige Zusammensein mit den Frankfurter Chawerim,” Regev [Jugendzentrum der jüdischen Gemeinde Frankfurt Main] 9 (1964): 12–­13. 138. On theories of how desire and political revolution fitted together in 1960s Europe, see Herzog, Sexuality in Europe, 133–­52. 139. Oppenheimer, Jüdische Jugend, 155.

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140. Lade, Wenn Eva aber katholisch ist. For more, see Kienzle, Mentalitätsprägung, 200–­204. 141. See, for instance, Ronnie’s and Esther’s accounts in Bodemann, Jewish Family, 108–­ 9, 192–­93. 142. Bodemann, Jewish Family, 192–­93. 143. This, at least, was the situation described in his household by Felix Rottberger in his oral history interview. See VHA, Felix Rottberger, Interview 27497, pp. 29–­31. 144. Rapaport, Jews in Germany After the Holocaust, 202. 145. VHA, Susanne Wolff, Interview 32292, pp. 52–­53. 146. “Klatsch-­Tratsch-­R atsch,” Atid 1 (June 1961): 11; “Klatsch-­Tratsch-­R atsch,” Atid 2 (July 1961): 15; “Pssssssst Klatsch,” Atid 5 (November 1962): 24. 147. See “Das Ideale Mädchen,” Atid 1 (June 1961); and “Vorstellung—­Mädchen—­ Ideal,” Atid 2 (July 1961). 148. “Klatsch-­Tratsch-­R atsch,” Atid 1 (June 1961): 11; and “Klatsch-­Tratsch-­R atsch,” Atid 2 (July 1961): 15. 149. Rapaport, Jews in Germany After the Holocaust, 207–­11. 150. Quoted in Bodemann, Jewish Family, 133–­35. 151. Quoted in Bodemann, Jewish Family, 136. 152. Bodemann, Jewish Family, 15–­16. 153. Broder, “Heimat,” 98. 154. Broder, “Heimat,” 99. 155. For more details, see Richarz, “Juden in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” 21. 156. Chin and Fehrenbach, “German Democracy,” 110–­25. 157. The figure that is more usually given for expellees who resettled in postwar Germany is 12 million, although this figure typically combines the number of expellees who settled in East and West Germany. I have chosen to use Andrew Demshuk’s more conservative estimate. See Demshuk, “What Was the ‘Right to the Heimat,’ ” 526. See also Zahra, “Prisoners of the Postwar,” 192. For details of expellees gaining German citizenship, see Demshuk, “Citizens in Name Only.” 158. Schroedter, Ehemuster von Migranten, 271; Skrobanek, “Perceived Discrimination.” 159. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, esp. 2. 160. See the statistical data compiled by Sergio DellaPergola, for instance, Reinharz and DellaPergola, Jewish Intermarriage. 161. See Herzog, “Pleasure, Sex, and Politics.” 162. For more on the earlier generation, see Reulecke, “Zur Geschichte der deutschen Jugendbewegung,” 103–­5. 163. The notion of the modern self as one that discovers its moral and spiritual purpose by emotionally appraising everyday experience and expressing one’s desires through everyday practices is found in Taylor, Sources of the Self. 164. I take this idea of “muted sentiments” from Conway and Depkat, “Towards a European History.”

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Notes to the Conclusion

165. See, for instance, Herzog, Sex After Fascism; Carter, How German Is She; Frevert, Women in German History; Heinemann, What Difference; Moeller, Protecting Motherhood; Moeller, West Germany Under Construction; and Schissler, Miracle Years. 166. See Gammerl, Anders fühlen; and Griffiths, Ambivalence of Gay Liberation. 167. I take the term veteran communities from Kotowski, “Moving from the Present,” 103. 168. See Schaum, Being Jewish; and Lezzi and Ehlers, Fremdes Begehren. Conclusion 1. Sammlung Frauennachlässe (SFN), Institut für Geschichte (IfG), University of Vienna, NL 164, Nachlass Irma Rafaela Toledo, 38–­39. 2. See Toledo’s interpretations of dreams from March 13 and 14, 1959, in SFN, IfG, NL 164, Nachlass Toledo, p. 40. 3. SFN, IfG, NL 164, Nachlass Toledo, p. 35. 4. SFN, IfG, NL 164, Nachlass Toledo, p. 46. 5. SFN, IfG, NL 164, Nachlass Toledo, p. 16. 6. Thanks to Hannes Schmeisser, who provided these details in an email of July 22, 2022. 7. SFN, IfG, NL 3/5, Therese Lindenberg, “Abschriften von ‘Weltraumstimmen,’ 21.12.1944–­3.2.1950.” See also Hämmerle, “Trost und Erinnerung,” esp. 53–­55. 8. Hunt, “Self and Its History,” 1583. 9. Thanks to Marion Kaplan for help with this point. 10. On this, see Hämmerle, “Trost und Erinnerung,” 2–­5. 11. An excellent explanation of what I am discussing here can be found in William M. Reddy’s description of the term emotives in Reddy, “Against Constructionism,” 332–­36. On self-­narratives reassuring writers of their agency in history, see Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 9. 12. See Giddens, Transformation of Intimacy, 184–­203. With regard to the promises of modernity from a Jewish perspective, see Litvak, Haskalah. 13. See Seidman, Marriage Plot. 14. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees. 15. Berlant, Cruel Optimism. 16. Rahden, “Lumpen sammeln.” 17. See Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 4–­5; and B. M. Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture, esp. 1–­8. 18. On the concept of emotional labor, see Hochschild, Managed Heart, 7. 19. Michael Marrus has discussed how Gershom Scholem advanced this view in his 1966 lecture “Jews and Germans.” See Marrus, “European Jewry.” In a recent essay, Moshe Zimmermann has argued that Scholem’s perspective has become mainstream, at least in Israeli society. See Zimmermann, “Does the German-­Jewish Past Have a Future,” 199–­200. 20. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 12. 21. See Franklin and Reuveni, Future of the German-­Jewish Past.

Notes to the Conclusion

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22. For statistics, see DellaPergola, “World Jewish Population,” 383, Table 8.6. See also Weiss and Gorelik, “Russian-­Jewish Immigration,” 408; and Peck, Being Jewish, esp. 54. 23. Stüwe, “Zuwanderungsgesetz.” 24. See the figures on the Statistisches Bundesamt’s website: https:​/​​/​w ww​.destatis​.de​/​EN​ /​Themes​/​Society​-Environment​/​Population​/​Migration​-Integration​/​​_​node​.html;jsessionid​ =​2D78B924D108A50C8502F8C3F91401A7​.live732; and “Migration History in Germany,” https:​/​​/​domid​.org​/​en​/​service​/​essays​/​essay​-migration​-history​-in​-germany​/​. 25. On the concept of Leitkultur, see Cattien, “What is Leitkultur.” 26. See Chin, Crisis of Multiculturalism, esp. 8–­22; and Plamper, Neue Wir. 27. Peck, Being Jewish, 104–­7.

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Index

Aachen, 180 Abortion, 65, 96, 151 Abraham, Karl, 102 Acculturation, 15, 23, 45, 47, 55, 62, 66, 75, 78, 84–­85, 159, 171–­2, 195, 205–­6 Adolescence, 5, 29, 34–­36, 67, 69, 82 Adultery, 57, 107–­8, 174, 198 Advertisements, personal, 9, 40, 75, 144 Advice literature, 9, 43, 54 Aging, 5, 22 Agunot, 168 Aliyah, 123 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, 25, 51 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 162, 164 Anschluss, 199 Antisemitism, 3, 11, 18, 27, 41, 44, 54, 56, 65–­66, 72, 79, 108, 131, 158, 161, 180, 189, 202, 205 Appel, Marta, 52–­3 Archives, 8–­9 Arendt, Hannah, 141

Aristocracy, 2, 45 Aryan, 8, 111, 115–­17, 120, 129–­30, 132, 135, 137–­138, 140, 141, 190 Assimilation, 15, 65, 76, 78, 82, 85, 100, 118, 121, 128, 160, 165, 176, 181, 184, 205 Atid, 185–­6, 189–­90 Auerbach, Philipp, 178 St. Augustine, 141 Auschwitz, 141, 148–­9, 151, 172 Austria, 19, 72, 97, 108, 134, 164, 180, 183–­4, 197, 199; Anschluss, 19, 134, 199; National Socialist Austria, 128 Autobiographies. See Memoirs Bach, Bertha, 53 Bais Yaakov, 178 Baptisms, 47, 198 Bebel, August, 41, 69 Bechmann, Lilli, 87–­89 Beck, Gad, 12, 119–­23 Beckett, Samuel, 154 Belgium, 177–­8 275

276

Index

Benjamin, Walter, 64 Bergen-­Belsen, 150; as DP Camp, 162 Berlin, 9, 12, 26–­9, 34, 52, 57, 68–­69, 74, 78–­9, 86, 89, 91, 119, 121–­3, 131, 135, 136, 147, 148, 157, 170, 178, 184, 192; and Berlin Wall, 196; during Weimar era, 68–­69 Bernays, Martha, 30–­2 Bernstein, Otto, 152 Bialik, Chaim, 133 Bible, 14, 48, 80, 103, 118, 171, 176, 202–­3 Biedermeier, 14 Birthrate, 100–­101, 118, 162–­3 Blau-­Weiss, 44 Bleichroeder, Agathe, 32–­24, 49, 55–­56 Bloch, Ernst, 65, 124 Blumenthal, Ernst, 149–­50 Boder, David, 153 Body, bodies, 4, 70–­71, 123, 163, 165, 169, 201 Bohm-­Schuch, Clara, 99 Bombings, 127, 132, 136 Bondi, Hermann, 124–­5 Bourgeois. See Middle classes Brautbriefe, 30–­33 Breslau, 34, 46, 91, 111, 184 Breslauer, H. K., 108 British Jewish Central Information Office, 167 Broder, Henryk, 192 Brüll, Nehemiah, 49 Brunner, Constantin, 54, 109 Buber, Martin, 44, 83, 122, 169, 202 Buch, Babette, 127, 134 Buchenwald, 152 Buchenwald Kibbutz, 162 Bund deutsch-­jüdischer Jugend, 122 Canada, 179 Capitalism, 14, 16, 21, 25, 41, 44, 79–­80, 88, 154

Career prospects, of women and men, wives and husbands, 15–­17, 23, 33, 40–­41, 43, 45–­46, 55, 62, 73–­74, 81, 93, 99, 104, 129–­32, 135–­8, 177–­8 Casual sex, 116, 119–­21, 161 Catholicism, 78, 98, 106, 119, 141, 188, 197–­8 Censorship, 118–­19 Central Committee of the Liberated Jews, 161 Central Council of Jews in Germany (Zentralrat), 176, 178 Charity. See Love: of neighbor Children; from mixed marriages, 47, 180;3, 22, 54, 156, 158, 176, 204; nurturing of 7, 166; and relations with elderly parents, 60, 80 Christ, 198 Christian democracy, 158, 196 Christianity, 1, 7, 115, 142, 156, 179, 182; churches, 8, 113; as established religion, 65; and re-­Christianization of Federal Republic after 1945, 175 Christian-­Jewish Societies, 180–­1, 186 Christian Social Party, 78, 97 Chug Chaluzi, 123 Civil Code 1900, 57, 97 Civil Registry Law, 25 Civil Society, 45, 75, 115 Cold War, 181, 195, 205–­6 Collin-­Schoenfeld, Ernst, 38 Communist Party, 99 Community of two, 167, 169, 175 Concentration camps, 144, 149, 153, 158 Confessionalization, 8, 27, 77 Confessing Church, 140 Conversions, 27–­29, 72, 173, 180, 189, 197–­8 Court cases, 10, 57, 105–­8, 119–­20, 128–­9 Courtship, 6, 16, 22, 26, 29–­30, 39, 68, 72–­ 73, 79–­81, 135, 145–­6, 182; and arranged situations, 90; and dating non-­Jews, 191

Index Dachau, 152, 169 Dancing, 24–­5, 73, 79, 92, 105, 124, 127, 162–­3, 184, 190 Death, 22, 58–­62, 197 Democracy, 181, 195 Deportations, 144, 148–­50, 173 Deutsch, Helene, 100–­1 Deutsch, Vera, 114 Diaries, 11–­12, 34–­35, 55, 142–­3, 199–­201 Diaspora, 180 Displaced Persons (DPs), 159, 161, 163–­4, 178, 182, 194; and DP camps, 159, 161; marriages and births in camps of, 162 Divorce, 22, 57, 103–­8, 129, 132, 174, 182 Dohm, Hedwig, 59 Dollfuss government, 72 Donath, Maria, 131 Dowries. See Marriage Dränger, Jurek, 121 Dreams, 116–­17, 164, 197–­200 Dreyfus Affair, 27 Dual society, 129–­30, 131–­2 Dual state, 129–­30 Düsseldorf, 171, 174, 178, 183–­4 Dzialowski, Dina, 177–­9 Eastern European migrants, 76–­77, 161, 165, 170, 171, 176, 196; fleeing persecution after the Holocaust, 172 Eckhart, Meister, 142 Education, 3, 5, 9, 11, 17, 23, 100, 123, 174; and Jewish educational achievements, 3, 40, 73, 194; and schools, 29, 34, 40, 69, 73, 184; and universities, 3, 40 Egodocuments, 8, 200–­1. See also Diaries; Memoirs Eigen-­Sinn, 119, 121 Emigration, 113, 123, 131, 137, 159–­60, 169, 184, 194, 196 Emotional communities, 6, 194 Emotional intelligence, 5

277

Emotional labor, 43, 62, 205 Emotional norms, 4, 89–­90, 113; and emotionology, 6, 102 Emotional refuge, 18, 158, 202 Emotional regime, 10, 155 Emotional script, 10, 23, 35, 134, 160, 200, 202, 204 Engagement. See Marriage Engels, Friedrich, 41 Ethnicity, 16, 46, 66, 77, 128, 161–­2, 167, 172, 184–­5, 194 Eugenics, 41, 119 Europe, 1, 11 Everyday life, history of, 4 Executions, 150 Fairbrook, Lotte, 39, 42, 67 Family, 4, 14, 103, 131, 148, 183, 185, 204; conflict within during and after Holocaust, 151, 158; different treatment of daughters and sons in, 191; and family life, 1, 3, 13–­15, 21, 25, 67, 133, 158–­9; influence over married couples, 29, 31, 33, 92–­93, 105; nuclear, 43, 62, 166, 167; and in-­laws 8, 33, 58, 61, 92–­93, 105, 130–­31, 132, 158; separation during Holocaust, 143, 150, 158–­9, 173–­4 Fatherhood, 54–­56, 175; and absence of fathers after 1945, 174–­5 Federal Republic, 7, 158–­9, 169, 172, 175, 192, 206; and National Socialist past, 181; as staging-­post, 169, 172, 194; Feibel, Thomas, 184, 186 Female doctors, 74 Fidelity, 3, 17, 105, 112 Films, 8, 16, 79, 90, 108, 132 Fink, Vally, 133, 147 Föhrenwald DP Camp, 162 Fontane, Theodor, 45 Forced labor, 133, 144, 150 Formstecher, Salomon, 28

278

Index

Fraenkel, Ernst, 129–­30 France, 174, 182 Frankenthal, Käthe, 74–­75 Frankfurt a.M., 75, 170, 172, 182, 184, 188–­9, 191 Freedom, 29, 34, 39, 78, 80–­81, 96, 114, 154, 173, 177, 201 Freud, Ernestine, 93, 96 Freud, Martin, 93, 104 Freud, Sigmund, 30, 52, 59, 199 Friedlaender, Margot, 147 Friedman-­Bleicher, Baruch, 179–­80 Friends, friendship, 14, 27, 29, 34–­35, 48, 82, 91–­93, 117, 138, 184–­5, 189, 191, 199 Future, attitudes toward, 27, 32–­36, 39–­40, 64, 71–­2, 80–­3, 85–­9, 91, 123–­4, 126–­7, 141, 144, 148, 151, 155–­6, 163–­4, 166, 171, 191–­2, 196, 204 Garden of Eden, 202–­3 Gastarbeiter (Guest workers), 192, 194 Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft, 89 Gender roles, 17, 205. See also Marriage Generational change, 5, 18, 64, 90, 177, 183, 186, 188 Gentile, 8, 129 German Democratic Republic, 157 German-­Jewish symbiosis, 169 Germany, definition of, 18 Gestapo, 132, 141, 148, 150 Ghettos, 143–­48, 151, 173, Ginsburg, Lotte, 34–­36, 38 Gleichschaltung, 5, 129 God, 48, 67, 101, 113, 122, 139, 155, 171, 175, 199; as father figure, 143; love of, 141–­2 Goebbels, Josef, 132 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 86 Great Depression, 104 Grief, 61, 150–­1, 153 Gringauz, Samuel, 162

Group sex, 120 Guilt, feelings of, 101–­102 Gurewitz, Uli, 180 Guttmann, Therese, 126 Hakhsharah, 123, 148 Halizah, 58 Hamburg, 127, 140, 170 Haskalah, 25 Heine, Heinrich 2 Heroism, 139 Hellwig, Verena, 137 Herman-­Friede, Eugen, 179 Heterosexuality, 8, 29, 37–­38, 119 Heuss, Theodor, 181 Himmler, Heinrich, 115 Hirsch, Paul, 79 Hirschfeld, Hans, 148 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 38 Holdheim, Samuel, 25 Holocaust, 3, 18, 141, 169, 184, 198, 202, 204; children of survivors of, 159, 168, 172, 176, 183, 185–­9, 195; survivors of, 3, 158–­9, 163, 170, 172 Homosexuality, 8, 12, 34–­35, 38, 119–­21; and Paragraph 175, 38 Honeymoon, 49–­53 Honigmann, Barbara, 157 Hope, 124, 156, 163, 204 Horowitz, Solomon, 165–­66 Humor, 49–­50, 84, 86–­8, 91–­2, 110, 126, 144, 189–­90 Husbands, 6, 22–­23, 155 Immigration, 192, 194; Germany as land of, 206 Imperial Germany 7, 22, 25, 55, 188; intermarriage rates during, 46–­47; divorce rates during, 57 Infidelity. See Adultery

Index In-­laws, 15 Inner emigration, 143–­44 Inner speech, 154 Interethnic romance, 162 Intermarriage and intramarriage. See Marriage Israel, 172, 175, 177, 180, 182–­4, 191–­2, 194 Der Israelit, 51, 54, 75 Israelitisches Familienblatt, 43 Jahn, Ernst and Lilli, 140 Jewish associations and organizations, 45, 58, 73, 81–­82, 176–­8, 191–­2 Jewish, definition of, 7 Jewish community, 18, 23, 66, 77, 85, 97, 101, 140, 192, 195; after end of cold war, 205–­6; relations with West German society, 178, 185, 188, 194; survival of, 26, 183, 194–­5; women’s role within, 23, 45, 159, 177–­9, 191–­2, 196; after World War II, 159, 170, 174, 176, 192 Jewish emancipation, 14 “Jewish homes” during Holocaust, 142, 199 Jewish identity, also Jüdischkeit, 19, 24, 27, 177, 189 Judaism, 24, 156; diversity within, 24, 65, 67, 75, 77, 91, 133–­4; gender relations within, 26; German-­Jewish and Eastern European communities in the Federal Republic after 1945, 170, 194; Orthodox, 24, 31, 51, 55, 65, 75, 77, 92, 113, 140, 165, 167, 170, 176, 178–­9; Reform/Liberal, 24, 67; Der Jude, 44–­5, 83 Judenberg DP Camp, 164 Judenzählung, 44 Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung, 118 Jüdischer Frauenbund [Jewish Women’s League], 81–­2, 99, 133; bulletin, 100, 133; after 1945, 174

279

Jüdischer Kulturbund, 147 Kaddish, 80, 178 Kahn, Ernst, 100 Kaiserreich. See Imperial Germany Kalman family, 189, 191–­2 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 39 Karpeles, Elias, 48 Keizer, Nora, 148 Keren Hayesod, 191 Klemperer, Victor, 3, 12, 29, 128, 132 Knobloch, Charlotte, 176–­7, 191 Koeb family, 104, 106, 130–­31 Kohn, Hans, 83–­85 Korn, Benjamin, 185 Kosher diet, 52 Krafft-­Ebing, Richard von, 37 Krakow, 121 Krieger, Helmut, 135 Kristallnacht, 126, 129 Landsberg DP Camp, 162 Lange, Helen, 137–­39 Lange, Helene, 38 Leisure, 51–­53, 70, 77, 81, 116, 123 Leitkultur, 206 Lenya, Lotte, 69, 85–­87, 97–­98 Leo Baeck Institute, 39 Lieblich, Margot, 121 Liepmann, Hugo, 32, 49 Life cycle, 5, 35–­36, 51, 64, 82, 120, 163–­4, 173 Life expectancy, 58, 60 Lindenberg, Therese, 142–­3, 198–­9, 205 Lipschütz, Lazar, 183 Lódź ghetto, 151 Löwenberg, Fred, 111 Lohner, Edgar, 119 Love: for a collective, 131, 165–­66, 204; as compensation, 84, 202; of country

280

Index

Love (cont.) (patriotism), 138–­9; as Eros 21–­22, 84, 92, 123, 141, 142; and falling in love, 13, 22, 27, 39–­40, 62, 64, 67, 73, 86, 90, 112, 114, 149, 154–­5, 164, 176, 188, 202, 204; and free love, 40–­1, 69, 103, 113–­14; inability to feel, 151–­2; letters, 11, 13, 82–­89 (see also Brautbriefe); and love myth, 13–­15, 17, 23, 156, 202; marriage, 15, 16, 43; of neighbor (Nächstenliebe), 14, 171, 179, 181; parental, 7, 16, 48–­9, 93, 109, 165, 178–­9; Platonic, 152 Löbel, Josef, 38 Malachowski, Rose, 26, 36, 57–­58 Mandeville, Bernard, 202 Maon Hanoar, 189 Marriage, 6, 17, 21, 26, 115, 124, 146–­7, 163, 167, 177, 182; and age when marriage took place, 36, 99; arranged, 15, 16, 26, 28, 41, 86; changing laws governing, 25, 57, 115; companionate, 32, 86–­87, 89, 96, 155, 179; dowries, 27–­28, 41, 45, 57, 75, 84; and engagement, 22, 26, 28, 31, 82–­89; gender roles within, 17, 21–­23, 32–­33, 48–­49, 51–­52, 55–­56, 62, 66, 75, 82, 84, 89–­90, 93, 96–­97, 101, 104–­5, 114, 130, 135–­6, 149–­50, 155, 202–­4; and intermarriage or mixed marriages 3, 7–­8, 15, 17, 25, 44–­47, 98–­99, 106–­7, 112, 118, 126–­7, 129, 131, 132, 135–­40, 141, 157–­58, 170, 171–­3, 177, 180, 188–­9, 191, 195–­6, 197–­8, 206; and intramarriage, 18, 75, 112, 126–­7, 170; and monogamy, 37–­38, 41, 54, 88–­89, 99–­100; proposals, 32, 84, 88, 149; rejection of, 74; and remarriage, 59; and wedding anniversaries, 143, 146, 179; and weddings, 27, 29, 33, 47, 89–­92, 98, 117, 124–­5, 131, 135, 148–­9, 164, 166, 167, 173;. See also Divorce; Adultery

Masculinity, 134–­5, 139, 149–­50, 155, 174 Mauthausen, 149 May, Martin, 117 Medical field, 99, 151 Meisel-­Hess, Grete, 41, 99, 104 Memoirs, 11–­13, 61, 117, 197, 199–­201 Memory, 11–­13, 18, 153–­4, 155, 164, 169–­70, 196, 201, 206; and post-­Holocaust taboos, 161 Merkin, Erna, 124–­5 Meyer, Rahel, 28 Meyer-­Breuer, Hannah, 102–­3 Middle classes, 2, 3, 7, 25, 62, 73; Bildungsbürgertum vs. Wirtschaftsbürgertum, 56, 76, 177; values of, 2–­3 Mischling, 129–­30, 135 Model, Elisabeth (Dittmann), 92, 94–­95 Modernity, 14, 85, 176, 201 Mosse, Marta, 147 Motherhood, 23, 47, 54, 90, 99, 101–­3, 159, 175 Multiculturalism, 113, 119, 173, 180–­1, 188, 206 Munich, 75, 122, 169, 176–­7, 184, 185, 188–­9 “My Life in Germany” Project, 11, 39 Myth, 13–­14. See also Love: and love myth National Socialism; 17–­18, 76, 88, 112–­13, 115, 119, 127, 129, 135, 154, 197, 204; and Gleichschaltung 5, 156; and propaganda, 161; as secular religion, 175 Nazism. See National Socialism Neighbors, 8, 14, 24–­25, 27, 56, 71, 78, 89, 91, 97–­8, 127, 129, 142, 152, 157, 161, 171, 174, 182, 186, 189, 194, 206. See also Love: of neighbor Nessel, Ruth, 121 Neuburger, Joseph, 126 Neue Sachlichkeit, 91 New Woman, 103 Newspapers, 1, 9, 16, 24–­25, 43–­45, 49, 83, 91–­92, 105, 118, 175

Index Nobility. See Aristocracy Novels, 28–­29, 43, 45 Nudism, 71 Nuremberg Laws, 115, 126, 129 Oleiski, Jacob, 161–­2, 168–­70 Ontological rootedness, 22, 89 Oral histories, 153, 165, 184, 191, 200 Orbach, Lothar, 119–­20 Oriental(ism), 1, 27, 90 Palestine, 76, 82–­83, 121, 128, 138, 166 Pantheism, 79 Pappenheim, Bertha, 54 Parents 15, 22, 26–­28, 197–­8; influence of on courtship and engagements, 30, 72, 90–­93, 117; and leaving to get married, 48–­50 Paternalism, 174–­5 Pedagogy. See Education Performative theories of emotions, 154 Philippines, 143 Philippsohn, Ludwig, 25 Philosemitism, 181, 185 Piskorz, Benjamin, 164 Poems, 126–­7, 133, 152, 168, 198 Pogroms, 172 Poland, 52, 121, 150, 165, 179 Popper, Lotte, 140 Posiles, Edeltrud, 130 Prague Circle, 83 Prayer, 51, 139, 199 Pregnancy, 151, 161, 167 Priests, 37, 161 Print media, 40. See also Newspapers Prisoners of war (POWs), 159 Prisons, 138–­39, 164 Private sphere, 4, 15–­18, 22, 48, 61, 65, 112, 114, 117, 120, 129, 147, 151, 156, 158, 166, 175, 178–­9, 181, 183, 196, 201–­2, 205 Pronatalism, 99

281

Prostitution, 37, 41 Protestantism 25, 47, 77–­78, 98, 140, 141, 188 Protestant Ethic, 2 Psychoanalysis, 59, 100–­103, 109, 198. See also Therapy, Psychology, 105, 164 Rabbis, 9, 25–­26, 28, 37, 48–­50, 91, 167–­ 8; lack of in Federal Republic, 178; providing families with support in Federal Republic, 174–­5 Racial war, 129, 131, 136 Race science, 77, 118 Racism, 17, 115 Rape, 146, 161 Rassenschande (race defilement), 111, 116, 119 Reich, Wilhelm, 71 Reichstein, Samson, 150 Reik, Theodor, 61 Reiner, Tamara, 152 Religious orthodoxy, 23 Resistance to Nazism, 121, 123, 138–­40, 143, 148, 156 Revolution, 64–­65 Risser, Gabriel, 25 Rocek, Eva, 145 Romanticism, 14, 21, 25 Romanticism, 14, 21, 25 Romantic script, 18, 35, 39, 53, 66, 89, 126, 149, 165, 196. See also Emotional script Romantic utopia, 17–­18, 53, 183 Rosenberg-­Borchardt, Vera, 27 Rosenstrasse Protests, 132 Rosenzweig, Franz, 202 Rübsteck, Ilse, 173–­4 Ruppin, Arthur, 118 Rural communities, 8, 52 SA (Sturmabteilung), 116, 117, 130, 134 Sabbath, 52, 65; for the heart, 17, 65, 77, 103, 108

282

Index

Sacred, 15, 67, 204 Sallis-­Freudenthal, Margarete, 75 Šalom na Pátek, 144–­5 Salons, 21, 25 Salvation, 15–­16 Sammlung Frauennachlässe, 197 Sattelzeit, 22 Schalom: Jüdische Jugendzeitschrift für Deutschland, 185 Scheler, Max, 79–­80 Scherzer, Oskar, 134 Schindel, Robert, 168 Schnitzler, Arthur, 59 Schrekinger, Albert, 69–­74, 81 Scholem family, 67 Scholem, Gershom, 169 Das Schwarze Korps, 115, 132 Schwarzes Fähnlein, 116 Schwersenz, Jizchak, 123–­4 Seckel, Schoschana, 177 Second Vatican Council, 188 Secularization, 8, 24–­25, 27, 77, 98 Seipel, Ignaz, 78 Selbiger, Fritz, 78–­81 Self, Selfhood 4, 13, 18, 22–­24, 37, 39, 85, 89, 114–­15, 121, 128, 152, 156, 165, 168, 195, 199, 201–­2; and self-­revelation, 115, 199 Sermons, 48–­49 Sex drive, 109, 146 Sex education, 73 Sexism, 190 Sexology, 37 Sexual barter, 120–­21, 145–­6 Sexual desire, 36–­38, 59, 102–­3, 109, 115, 117, 145 Sexuality, 8, 68 Sexual revolution, 180–­1, 188, 195 Sexual therapy, 9 Sex work, 37 Shoah. See Holocaust Sierakowick, Dawid, 151

Simmel, Ernst, 104 Simmel, Georg, 65, 83, 166–­7 Situational ethnicity, 16, 47 Skala, Dora, 172 Socialism, Social Democracy 40–­41, 69, 71–­72 Social mobility, 19, 34, 45, 76, 109, 112–­13, 128, 130, 135, 154, 174, 202 Society of two, 64–­65, 83, 85, 90, 103, 109, 167 Soldiers, 44–­45 Soviet Union, 151 Spender, Stephen, 127 SS (Schutzstaffel), 115, 134, 174 Die Stadt ohne Juden, 108 Stern, Selma, 17, 21, 65, 77 Straus, Rahel, 55, 60, 81–­82, 96–­97, 100 Student years, 39 Der Stürmer, 131 Stuttgart, 180 Suicide, 137, 198 Susman, Margarete, 39, 81, 101 Synagogues, 27; men’s attendance at in Federal Republic 178; rebuilding of in Federal Republic, 184 Talmud-­Torah Commission, 126 Tauchers, 119 Theilhaber, Felix, 41, 119 Therapy, 5, 9, 71. See also Psychoanalysis; Sexology Theresienstadt, 133, 144–­8, 152 Third Reich, 4, 17, 110, 112, 129, 134, 141, 144, 159, 170, 173, 177, 183, 196. See also National Socialism Thompson, E.P., 205 Toledo, Irma Rafaela, 141, 197–­203, 205 Torah, 176, 202–­3 Totalitarianism, 175, 196 Trauma 7, 200–­1 Treitschke, Heinrich von 1, 2

Index Trust, 15 Turkish Germans, 206 Unemployment, 66, 136 United Nations, 167 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, 164 United States, 11, 166, 173, 183, 194 Universities. See Education Urbanization, 4, 7–­8, 16, 24, 154; effects on family life and gender relations, 44, 69 Van de Velde, Theodoor Hendrik, 92 Varnhagen, Rahel, 21, 28 Veterans, 68, 104, 116, 117, 131, 135 Vienna, 19, 69, 73, 74, 88, 93, 124, 130, 142, 197; Jewish contribution to Social Democracy in, 69–­70, 114 Visual History Archive, 172, 179 Vlasopolos, Hermina, 151 Volk, 115, 129, 170 Wahl, Jetty, 83–­85 Wall Steet Crash, 80, 88War, 3, 5, 11, 52–­53; and World War I, 7–­8, 24, 44–­45, 49, 52–­54, 59, 63, 64, 75, 116, 117, 131; and World War II, 3, 11, 119–­20, 126, 129–­32, 136, 141–­44, 159–­60, 167, 176–­77, 198, 206 Warmbrunn, Walter, 116 Weber, Max, 2 Weddings. See Marriage Weill, Kurt, 85–­87, 97–­98 Weimar Republic 7, 74, 77, 90, 97, 118, 176, 188; and continuation of Imperial-­

283

era marriage regulations, 66, 97; intermarriage rates during, 46–­47; Jewish youth in, 68 West Germany. See Federal Republic Westerbork, 148–­9, 151 Widows, 58–­60 Widowers, 60–­61 Wiesel, Elie, 161 Wilde Ehe, 135 Will, Liesl and Heinrich, 139–­40 Wittels, Fritz, 109 Wives, 6, 21–­23, 33–­34, 61, 155, 202–­4; changing roles of during Third Reich, 130, 137; domestic duties of, 33, 43, 47, 82, 178; roles of after World War II, 160, 178 Wolf, Agnes Weiler, 122 Wolff, Edith, 123–­4 Woman surplus, 59 Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO), 177, 191 Women’s movement, 55 Working classes, 8, 41 World Jewish Congress, 169, 176 World Union of Jewish Students, 183 Wysbar, Eva, 132, 137–­8 Yibbum, 58 Youth groups, 24, 29, 67–­70, 123, 177, 184, 186–­7, 189–­90 Zionism, 24, 27, 35, 41, 44, 55, 67, 69, 76, 82–­83, 85, 113, 121–­4, 148, 156, 159–­60, 167, 169, 170, 171, 177, 180, 183, 191–­2

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STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Editors This series features novel approaches to examining the Jewish past in the form of innovative work that brings the field into productive dialogue with the newest scholarly concepts and methods. Open to a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, from history to cultural studies, this series publishes exceptional scholarship balanced by an accessible tone, illustrating histories of difference and addressing issues of current urgency. Books in this list push the boundaries of Jewish Studies and speak compellingly to a wide audience of scholars and students. David Biale, Jewish Culture Between Canon and Heresy 2023 Alan Verskin, Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah: The Sixteenth-Century Journey of David Reubeni through Africa, the Middle East, and Europe 2023 Aomar Boum, Illustrated by Nadjib Berber, Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa 2023 Dina Porat, Nakam: The Holocaust Survivors Who Sought Full-Scale Revenge 2023 Matthias B. Lehmann, The Baron: Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century 2022 Liora R. Halperin, The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past 2021 Samuel J. Spinner, Jewish Primitivism 2021 Sonia Gollance, It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity 2021 Julia Elsky, Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France 2020 Alma Rachel Heckman, The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging 2020

Golan Y. Moskowitz, Queer Jewish Sendak: A Wild Visionary in Context 2020 Devi Mays, Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora 2020 Clémence Boulouque, Another Modernity: Elia Benamozegh’s Jewish Universalism 2020 Dalia Kandiyoti, The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture 2020 Natan M. Meir, Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 2020 Marc Volovici, German as a Jewish Problem: The Language Politics of Jewish Nationalism 2020 Dina Danon, The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History 2019 Omri Asscher, Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation Between Jews 2019 Yael Zerubavel, Desert in the Promised Land 2018 Sunny S. Yudkoff, Tubercular Capital: Illness and the Conditions of Modern Jewish Writing 2018 Sarah Wobick-Segev, Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in Twentieth-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg 2018 Eddy Portnoy, Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press 2017 Jeffrey Shandler, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices 2017

For a complete listing of titles in this series, visit the Stanford University Press website, www.sup.org.

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