Between Mass Death and Individual Loss

The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany

Alon Confino, Paul Betts, Dirk Schumann, Alon Confino, Paul Betts, Dirk Schumann

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780857450517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly interest in the history of death. Increasing academic attention toward death as a historical subject in its own right is very much linked to its pre-eminent place in 20th-century history, and Germany, predictably, occupies a special place in these inquiries. This collection of essays explores how German mourning changed over the 20th century in different contexts, with a particular view to how death was linked to larger issues of social order and cultural self-understanding. It contributes to a history of death in 20th-century Germany that does not begin and end with the Third Reich.

Part III

SUBJECTIVITY

Chapter 8

A COMMON EXPERIENCE OF DEATH

Commemorating the German-Jewish Soldiers
of the First World War, 1914–1923

Tim Grady

Some four weeks after the Nuremberg Laws had irreparably altered the lives of Germany’s Jewish population, the Nazi regime turned its attention to the Jewish dead. In October 1935, Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry for Enlightenment and Propaganda issued a decree targeting the public commemoration of the Jewish soldiers killed fighting for Germany in the First World War. According to the ministry’s statement, the names of the Jewish war dead should no longer be displayed alongside those of non-Jews on German war memorials.¹ In some areas, but by no means all, the decree was rigorously applied and the names of the Jewish soldiers were carefully chiseled out of public remembrance sites.² After 1945, the effects of this officially sanctioned attack on the Jewish war dead were gradually reversed. Only in the early 1960s, however, were the first concerted efforts to restore the Jewish war dead to non-Jewish memorial sites undertaken in the Federal Republic.³

The Jewish war dead may have been reintegrated into Germany’s memorial culture, but they still remain largely absent from the historiography of the war. A boom in remembrance studies from the early 1980s onward has paid almost no attention to the commemoration of Germany’s Jewish soldiers of the First World War. The first historical studies to focus on the remembrance of the war, as opposed to the history of war itself, mainly explored the politics of war memory.⁴ Where these studies have considered the German-Jewish war dead, they have viewed them mainly as objects of German anti-Semitism.⁵ George Mosse’s path-breaking study of the myths of the war experience exemplifies this approach. Wartime accusations of Jewish shirking, argued Mosse, led to the exclusion of German Jews from veterans’ organizations and commemorative activity after the conflict. For Mosse, this agitation reached “its logical . . . conclusion” when the Nazi regime removed Jewish names from public war memorials in 1935.⁶

In the mid to late 1990s, a second wave of historiography began to view the remembrance process as being driven less by the political machinations of different interest groups and more by a fundamental need to mourn the war dead.⁷ Influenced largely by the work of Jay Winter, a number of these studies highlighted the centrality of personal grief to memorial practices.⁸ This conceptual shift, however, did little to alter perceptions of the Jewish war dead. They remained a separate, marginalized group. Winter, for example, suggests that during the interwar years, German veterans obscured the sacrifice of their Jewish comrades.⁹ It seemed that German Jews had no need to mourn their loved ones killed in the war. Even in the most recent historiography, which has sought to bridge the gap between political and psychological approaches to war memory, the German-Jewish servicemen of the First World War still remain separated from the non-Jewish soldiers killed in German uniform.¹⁰

Yet to ignore the German-Jewish soldiers killed in the conflict is to disregard the war’s very real impact on ordinary German Jews. This article argues, firstly, that the sheer scale of wartime death had a deep emotional impact on all sections of German-Jewish life. From a prewar population of 550,000 almost 100,000 Jewish servicemen fought for Germany, and some 12,000 of them were killed.¹¹ The death of every single Jewish soldier had a profound effect on a great number of people. Each soldier left behind friends and family who had to cope without a father, husband, son, or brother. German Jews, as with Germany’s non-Jewish population, were forced to try to transcend their horrific losses. They attended remembrance services, prayed for their war dead, and dedicated permanent war memorials. In many German cities, First World War memorials for the Jewish war dead can still be observed in Jewish burial grounds and communal buildings.¹²

By refocusing the history of the conflict onto the Jewish war dead, this article also provides an alternative narrative of the war’s impact on Germany’s Jewish communities.¹³ Its second and most significant contention is that in commemorating the war dead, relations between Jews and non-Jews initially remained close. Ironically, this becomes clear from the Nazi regime’s attempt to “Aryanize” non-Jewish remembrance sites in 1935. As Rudy Koshar rightly argues, the desecration of these memorials was a part of the regime’s policy of racial purification.¹⁴ Yet this is only half of the picture. For the regime to have taken this action, it must also imply that up until this point the Jewish and non-Jewish war dead had been commemorated together in the same remembrance sites. This argument runs counter to a set of historiographical approaches that suggest that the war marked a negative turning point in German Jewish/non-Jewish relations.¹⁵ As Paul Mendes Flohr maintains, for many Jews the conflict marked a “critical moment in the crystallisation of a new direction to their Jewish identity.”¹⁶ In the existing historiography, then, the turmoil of the First World War effectively led many German Jews to return to a separate Jewish subculture.¹⁷

Without dismissing the obvious social, cultural, and political changes that followed the First World War, this article challenges the notion that the conflict led to an immediate and complete turning point in Jewish/non-Jewish relations. Focusing primarily on the cities of Hamburg and Würzburg, it argues instead that in many areas Jews also crossed religious and ethnic divides to remember the war dead together with non-Jewish Germans. Although these two local case studies cannot possibly capture all facets of the German remembrance process, they do, nonetheless, reflect some of Germany’s regional, religious, and socioeconomic diversity. Besides the underlying structural differences of the cities—rural Würzburg was mainly Catholic, while industrial Hamburg had a predominantly Protestant population—there were also clear variances between the Jewish communities. For example, Würzburg’s Jewish population, at just over 2,000, was much smaller and far less influential than the 19,000 German Jews living in Hamburg.¹⁸

The mass mobilization of men that followed the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 laid the foundation for this entangled remembrance process. Although there were, of course, a multitude of Jewish and non-Jewish war experiences, many aspects of the conflict affected all sections of German society equally. In particular, as the war took an increasingly bloody course, almost all Germans, whether Jew or non-Jew, had to confront mass death. The process of transcendence brought people together into small communities of mourning. As these communities tended to be formed from small preexisting groups, such as schools, workplaces, or sports clubs, Jews and non-Jews often mourned their war dead together. After the war, this overlapping remembrance process continued. In many places, war memorials commemorated both the Jewish and non-Jewish soldiers killed in the war. It was only in the early to mid 1920s, as newly formed veterans’ organizations began to dominate remembrance activity, that this entangled commemorative process began to break down.

From the Burgfrieden to the Judenzählung

Recent studies into the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 have highlighted the diversity of German public opinion.¹⁹ Although some people gathered in Berlin, sang patriotic songs, and cheered the onset of war, not all Germans shared this initial euphoria. Support for the conflict differed between town and city, men and women, and age groups.²⁰ Understandably, for many people the outbreak of war brought with it fears of change, as well as uncertainty about the future. Nonetheless, as a total war, the conflict could not simply be ignored.²¹ From the start, it intruded into the everyday lives of all sections of Germany’s Jewish and non-Jewish populations: daily routines changed, men were mobilized for the front, and people died in battle.

On 4 August 1914, speaking before an assembled group of parliamentarians, Kaiser Wilhelm II sought to gain the support of the entire German population for the war. To great applause, he proclaimed that from then on he would no longer recognize parties, he knew only Germans.²² For many German Jews, the Kaiser’s famous Burgfrieden (civil truce) speech appeared to assure them of their position within a nation unified in defense against an external enemy. Cologne’s Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt declared optimistically that the dangers that had led to discrimination against Jews during the years of peace were now forgotten.²³ Convinced of the benefits that could be accrued from the war, and of course fearing the repercussions of not supporting it, the main Jewish organizations called on their members to fight for Germany. The largest of Germany’s Jewish associations, the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (CV) pledged its wholehearted support for the conflict, while even the main Zionist organization, the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (ZVfD), printed a call to arms.²⁴

A number of prominent Jewish intellectuals also added their own voices to this clamor of support for the war. The theologian and Zionist Martin Buber declared that in the conflict all soldiers would fight together for their Judaism, while in Berlin the philosopher Hermann Cohen argued that the war revealed the strength of a long-standing cultural symbiosis between Germans and Jews.²⁵ As with wider German society, however, a small minority of intellectuals openly expressed their reservations to the conflict. Albert Einstein became a committed pacifist, while the young Gershom Scholem argued that the Jews should not be concerned with Germany’s war.²⁶ Interspersed among German Jewry’s support of the conflict, then, were also a few prominent voices of dissent.

Nonetheless, as a total war, even those German Jews who opposed the onset of hostilities had to live with the conflict in their midst. As Scholem later recalled, the war profoundly affected everyone, including those like himself “who had an entirely negative attitude towards its events.”²⁷ The war intruded into even the most mundane aspects of daily life in various and unexpected ways. At Hamburg’s Talmud-Tora school, the directors proudly reported that its “pupils live and mingle with the daily events.” The classroom walls were festooned with maps of the main battlefields so that the pupils could follow the course of the conflict.²⁸ Jewish associational life was also disrupted by the outbreak of fighting. In Cologne, the city’s Jewish reading room was used as a temporary home for Belgian refugees, while the hall belonging to the Jewish gymnastics association was requisitioned for military training.²⁹

The mass military mobilization of men, of course, had a much greater effect on people’s everyday lives. The size of the army increased steadily until there were on average 6.3 million men serving in German uniform, a figure that included almost 100,000 German Jews.³⁰ With such large numbers at the front, almost all Germans had a personal interest in the course of the war. The fear that loved ones could be killed or injured dominated many people’s lives.³¹ Many newspapers, includin...