Forum: Feminism in German Studies

From Professor Wallach\u27s contribution entitled Jews and Gender : To consider Jews and gender within German Studies is to explore the evolution of German‐Jewish Studies with respect to feminist and gender studies. At times this involves looking beyond German Studies to other scholarship in Jewish gender studies, an interdisciplinary subfield in its own right. Over the past few decades, the focus on gender within German‐Jewish Studies has experienced several shifts in line with broader trends: an initial focus on the history of Jewish women and feminist movements gradually expanded to encompass the study of gender identity, masculinity, and sexuality. Historical and literary scholarly approaches now operate alongside and in dialogue with interdisciplinary scholarship in cultural studies, film and visual studies, performance studies, and other fields. [excerpt

Jewish Youth in the Minsk Ghetto: How Age and Gender Mattered

Explores how young Soviet Jews survived the German occupation of Soviet territories, specifically ghettoization and mass murder

Hitler's death squads : an historiographical and bibliographical analysis of the Einsatzgruppen : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History at Massey University

On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler became German chancellor. Hitler and the party Nazi's (or Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei) arrival in power ushered in a brutally repressive period in Germany history, especially for Jews. The Nazis began with the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws which classified the population, according to a three tier system. "Aryans", who were ascribed full German citizenship and rights, were at the top. "Mischlinge", or persons of mixed descent who did not practice the Jewish faith, received limited rights and formed the middle tier. "Jews" formed the bottom tier and had three Jewish grandparents, or had two grandparents who practiced the Jewish faith. They formed the bottom tier. They were deprived of German citizenship on the basis that only persons of German blood could be citizens. Over the next four years, the state forced Jews out of various vocations and professions and a series of decrees in 1937 resulted in the forced "aryanisation" of many Jewish businesses. The Kristallnacht followed this in 1938 when thugs destroyed and looted Jewish synagogues and shops. German Jews were fined for the resulting damage which effectively stripped many of their remaining assets. By the end of 1940, Germany had conquered most of Europe and took advantage of this to forcibly move large numbers of Jews from both Germany and occupied countries to Poland. With a seemingly endless need for Lebensraum. Germany began its ill fated Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941. This is generally believed to have marked the beginning of the "Final Solution" or extermination phase. The primitive part of the extermination phase is commonly accepted to have begun with special motorised units called Einsatzgruppen.. These units rounded up Jews, forced them to dig pits and then executed them with either single shots or automatic fire. Numbering approximately 3,000 personnel and divided into four units, they policed the Russian front from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Einsatzgruppen were ad hoc groups which bought together personnel from different security organisations and the Waffen SS. The psychological difficulties experienced by Einsatzgruppen personnel in killing women and children resulted in the use of gas vans. These gas vans are widely believed to be the precursor to the Polish extermination camps and their gas chambers. Thus, the Einsatzgruppen play a pivotal role in the Holocaust. The difficulties they experienced resulted in the setting up of the infamous camps in Poland

Beyond flight and rescue: the migration setting of German Jewry before 1938

The article portrays and analyzes the choices and challenges for German Jews regarding the question of emigration in the 1930s against the background of the global migration regime at that time. The main argument is that in the 1930s migration questions for German Jews were more complex than many studies on the subject have been suggested until today. In order to understand the predicaments of the Germany Jews, the topic of German-Jewish migration is analyzed within a larger setting of international migration problems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In a first step, the German-Jewish situation of the 1930s is presented as part of an even bigger crisis which affected Jewish centers as Poland, Palestine or the United States. In a second step, the responses of the German Jews to the Nazi onslaught are analyzed within the framework of the entire emancipation era. The argument is substantiated by 1. a cross-reading of secondary sources on Jewish history in different regions; 2. debates of the German-Jewish public as published in articles, books and pamphlets and 3. memoirs of German Jews

Page from Printing of Reich Citizenship Law

[Cover]: Typewritten page printed 207 Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash: German printed text from a law journal of the Reich Citizenship Law which had been passed in the Reichstag on September 15, 1935. This law was foundational for the Nazi persecution of the Jews, no longer considered German citizens but rather subjects of the state, stripped of their civil rights and professional employment. Under the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor”, the so-called “Blood Protection Law”, Jews were racially and socially isolated, prohibited from marrying or having sexual relations with non-Jews. Other laws followed, specifying professions, occupations, and educational opportunities from which Jews were expunged.https://digital.kenyon.edu/bulmash/2710/thumbnail.jp

Jewish Writers in Contemporary Germany: The Dead Author Speaks

The question I wish to address in this essay is really quite simple: Given the fact that there are Jews who seem to play a major role in contemporary German Kultur (at least that narrower definition of culture, meaning the production of cultural artifacts, such as books—a field which, at least for Englemann, was one of the certain indicators of a Jewish component in prewar German culture)—what happened to these Jews (or at least the category of the Jewish writer ) in postwar discussions of culture? Or more simply: who lulled the remaining Jews in contemporary German culture and why? Why is it not possible to speak about German-Jews in the contemporary criticism about German culture? And, more to the point, what is the impact of this denial on those who (quite often ambivalently) see (or have been forced to see) themselves as Germans and Jews, but not as both simultaneously

Review of Leonard Barkan\u27s Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion

Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion seems to be directed at an insider community of Jews who care about Jewish history, especially those considering a trip to Germany. The book\u27s meandering look at Berlin is broader and more nuanced than a travel guide, with close attention to how Jews of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries understood their own relationships to Jewishness. Still, it remains unclear who beyond a small subset of travelers will be interested in Leonard Barkan\u27s writing on Berlin. That the author is not an expert in either German or Jewish Studies has both merits and drawbacks. As a professor of comparative literature, art and archaeology, classics, and English, Barkan has written a type of memoir for a general audience that scholars in German or Jewish Studies might not venture or desire to write. The first two chapters use a cemetery in Prenzlauer Berg and a neighborhood in Schöneberg as windows into specific eras of history. Chapters 3 through 5 present Barkan\u27s own special Jewish pantheon of Berlin Jews: salon hostess Rahel Varnhagen, art collector James Simon, and writer Walter Benjamin, whose legacies are intertwined with the history, people, and places of Berlin. Barkan concludes with a brief discussion of Holocaust memorialization and tourism, with a few poignant pages on Jewish daily life in Nazi Germany. One highlight throughout is the book\u27s emphasis on architecture and works of art. [excerpt

Examining the German Public\u27s Response to the Third Reich\u27s Anti-Jewish Policies

The anti-Jewish policies of the Third Reich progressed from anti-Jewish legislation, stripping German Jews of their rights, to systematic mass murder. Deeply rooted antisemitism and Nazi propaganda serving as a vehicle for ideology fostered an environment of approval among most of the German public for certain anti-Jewish policies such as the Nuremberg Laws. The non-Jewish, German public responses to these anti-Jewish policies by the Third Reich shifted over the course of the Nazi’s rule and during World War II. Most of the German public supported anti-Jewish legislation such as laws removing German Jews from civil service occupations because it made positions available for “Aryan” Germans. However, most of the German public was repulsed by violent acts led by the Third Reich against German Jews. The German public’s abhorrence towards violent acts committed earlier during the Third Reich’s rule against Jews shifted by the end of World War II as they became ambivalent towards stories of mass murder. Concerns for the war effort and constant air raids from the Allies overshadowed any concerns that most of the German public could muster for the persecutions of a maligned minority group

A ‘Grooming Chamber’ For Antisemitism

If Jewish Bolsheviks could put an end to the imperial rule of the Romanovs, could they pose a threat to the vision of a Third Reigh? A question the German National Socialists are likely to have asked themselves before and on the eve of plotting the rise of the Nazi regime. After all, Europe had had a long-standing relationship with blaming the Jews for the world’s miseries. A relationship Germany was ready to refuel, as indicated by German Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, when he stated that ‘the most essential aim of war against the Jewish-bolshevistic system is a complete destruction of their means of power and the elimination of Asiatic influence from the European culture.’ But the German fears of Jewish interference with their great scheme for Europe’s future, must surely have been inspired by more than just the age-old conspiratorial allegation that Jews were the main forces behind world politics. As such, this essay will seek to inspect the apparent rise of antisemitic fears at the time, and put a case forward to show how religion played into all this