Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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

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Germans into Jews

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

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

Chapter One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By the time of the Weimar Republic, the family and its purported crisis had become at once a...