The Jews and Germans in Hamburg

The Jews and Germans in Hamburg
Author: John Ashley Soames Grenville
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Hamburg (Germany)
ISBN: 9780415665865

Toward the end of the 19th century, Hamburg Jews were deeply embedded within the society of the city, proud of its liberal spirit; they contributed greatly to its wealth and considered themselves Germans. Relates the story of the Jewish community, interspersed with stories of many Jewish and mixed families, as well as of some non-Jewish bystanders. Although even in pre-1914 Hamburg there were barriers between Jews and Christians on the private level, and anti-Jewish prejudices persisted, it was the growing common preoccupation with race and eugenics that spelled real danger for the Jews. In Hamburg of 1919-32 the Nazis were still an insignificant force, but it did not need Nazis to establish growing anti-Jewish sentiments. Describes Nazi policies toward the Jews of Hamburg, the "Kristallnacht" pogrom, concentration of the city's Jews in "Jewish houses", and then the deportations to Minsk, Riga, and Theresienstadt in 1941-42, as well as Jewish reactions to all of these. 7,500 Jews were in Hamburg in July 1941; only 674 Jews, 631 of them in mixed marriages, remained on 30 April 1945. Believes that the Germans knew much about the mass killing of Jews in the "East", in particular because many business people of Hamburg visited the "East" and could see it. The Holocaust of the Hamburg Jews was facilitated by the overall indifference of the city's population. It was not just a Jewish civilization that the Nazis destroyed in Germany, but German civilization, of which it was a part.

The Jews and Germans of Hamburg

The Jews and Germans of Hamburg
Author: J A S Grenville
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135745765

Based on more than thirty years archival research, this history of the Jewish and German-Jewish community of Hamburg is a unique and vivid piece of work by one of the leading historians of the twentieth century. The history of the Holocaust here is fully integrated into the full history of the Jewish community in Hamburg from the late eighteenth century onwards. J.A.S. Grenville draws on a vast quantity of diaries, letters and records to provide a macro level history of Hamburg interspersed with many personal stories that bring it vividly to life. In the concluding chapter the discussion is widened to talk about Hamburg as a case study in the wider world. This book will be a key work in European history, charting and explaining the complexities of how a long established and well integrated German-Jewish community became, within the space of a generation, victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

"Aryanisation" in Hamburg

Author: Frank Bajohr
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2002
Genre: Antisemitism
ISBN: 9781571814852

Published to wide acclaim in its original edition, this book shows how many ordinary Germans became involved in what they saw as a legally sanctioned process of ridding Germany and Europe of their Jews.

Germans Against Germans

Germans Against Germans
Author: Moshe Zimmermann
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2022-12-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253062314

Among the many narratives about the atrocities committed against Jews in the Holocaust, the story about the Jews who lived in the eye of the storm—the German Jews—has received little attention. Germans against Germans: The Fate of the Jews, 1938–1945, tells this story—how Germans declared war against other Germans, that is, against German Jews. Author Moshe Zimmermann explores questions of what made such a war possible? How could such a radical process of exclusion take place in a highly civilized, modern society? What were the societal mechanisms that paved the way for legal discrimination, isolation, deportation, and eventual extermination of the individuals who were previously part and parcel of German society? Germans against Germans demonstrates how the combination of antisemitism, racism, bureaucracy, cynicism, and imposed collaboration culminated in "the final solution."

The Jews of Germany

The Jews of Germany
Author: Ruth Gay
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 1992-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780300060522

This unique book provides a panoramic overview of a now extinct culture: the 1500-year history of the Jews in Germany. Through texts, pictures, and contemporary accounts, it follows the German Jews from their first settlements on the Rhine in the fourth century to the destruction of the community in World War II. Using both voices and images of the past, the book reveals how the German Jews looked, how they lived, what they thought about, and what others thought of them. Ruth Gay's text, interwoven with passages from memoirs, letters, newspapers, and many other contemporary sources, shows how the German Jews organized their communities, created a new language (Yiddish), and built their special culture--all this under circumstances sometimes friendly, but often murderously hostile. The book explores the internal debates that agitated the community from medieval to modern times and analyzes how German Jewry emerged into the modern world. The earliest document in the book is a fourth-century decree by the Roman emperor Constantine permitting Jews to hold office in Cologne. Among the last are poignant letters from Betty Scholem in Berlin, writing during the Nazi years to her son Gershom in Palestine. In between are accounts of a ninth-century Jewish merchant appointed by Charlemagne to a diplomatic mission to Baghdad, a thirteenth-century Jewish minnesinger, a seventeenth-century pogrom in Frankfurt in which gentiles helped to save their Jewish neighbors, and the nineteenth-century innovation of department stores, palaces of consumerism. The book tells a story--moving, terrifying, and exhilarating--that must be remembered.

The Woman from Hamburg

The Woman from Hamburg
Author: Hanna Krall
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2012-12-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1590516443

In twelve nonfiction tales, Hanna Krall reveals how the lives of World War II survivors are shaped in surprising ways by the twists and turns of historical events. A paralytic Jewish woman starts walking after her husband is suffocated by fellow Jews afraid that his coughing would reveal their hiding place to the Germans. A young American man refuses to let go of the ghost of his half brother who died in the Warsaw ghetto. He never knew the boy, yet he learns Polish to communicate with his dybbuk. A high ranking German officer conceives of a plan to kill Hitler after witnessing a mass execution of Jews in Eastern Poland. Through Krall's adroit and journalistic style, her reader is thrown into a world where love, hatred, compassion, and indifference appear in places where we least expect them, illuminating the implacable logic of the surreal. "It is precisely the difficult path [Krall] takes toward her topic that has made some of these texts masterpieces." -- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (on Dancing at Other People's Weddings) "Heartbreaking, strange . . . and marvelously told." -- Die Zeit (on Proofs of Existence)

A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945

A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945
Author: Michael Brenner
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2018-01-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253029295

A comprehensive account of Jewish life in a country that carries the legacy of being at the epicenter of the Holocaust. Originally published in German in 2012, this comprehensive history of Jewish life in postwar Germany provides a systematic account of Jews and Judaism from the Holocaust to the early 21st Century by leading experts of modern German-Jewish history. Beginning in the immediate postwar period with a large concentration of Eastern European Holocaust survivors stranded in Germany, the book follows Jews during the relative quiet period of the 50s and early 60s during which the foundations of new Jewish life were laid. Brenner’s volume goes on to address the rise of anti-Israel sentiments after the Six Day War as well as the beginnings of a critical confrontation with Germany’s Nazi past in the late 60s and early 70s, noting the relatively small numbers of Jews living in Germany up to the 90s. The contributors argue that these Jews were a powerful symbolic presence in German society and sent a meaningful signal to the rest of the world that Jewish life was possible again in Germany after the Holocaust. “This volume, which illuminates a multi-faceted panorama of Jewish life after 1945, will remain the authoritative reading on the subject for the time to come.” —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung “An eminently readable work of history that addresses an important gap in the scholarship and will appeal to specialists and interested lay readers alike.” —Reading Religion “Comprehensive, meticulously researched, and beautifully translated.” —CHOICE

How Jews Became Germans

How Jews Became Germans
Author: Deborah Hertz
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300150032

A “very readable” history of Jewish conversions to Christianity over two centuries that “tracks the many fascinating twists and turns to this story” (Library Journal). When the Nazis came to power and created a racial state in the 1930s, they considered it an urgent priority to identify Jews who had converted to Christianity over the preceding centuries. With the help of church officials, a vast system of conversion and intermarriage records was created in Berlin, the country’s premier Jewish city. Deborah Hertz’s discovery of these records, the Judenkartei, was the first step on a long research journey that led to this compelling book. Hertz begins the book in 1645, when the records begin, and traces generations of German Jewish families for the next two centuries. The book analyzes the statistics and explores letters, diaries, and other materials to understand in a far more nuanced way than ever before why Jews did or did not convert to Protestantism. Focusing on the stories of individual Jews in Berlin, particularly the charismatic salon woman Rahel Levin Varnhagen and her husband, Karl, a writer and diplomat, Hertz brings out the human stories behind the documents, sets them in the context of Berlin’s evolving society, and connects them to the broad sweep of European history.

Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618-1945

Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618-1945
Author: Marion A. Kaplan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 542
Release: 2005-03-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195346793

From the seventeenth century until the Holocaust, Germany's Jews lurched between progress and setback, between fortune and terrible misfortune. German society shunned Jews in the eighteenth century and opened unevenly to them in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only to turn murderous in the Nazi era. By examining the everyday lives of ordinary Jews, this book portrays the drama of German-Jewish history -- the gradual ascent of Jews from impoverished outcasts to comfortable bourgeois citizens and then their dramatic descent into genocidal torment during the Nazi years. Building on social, economic, religious, and political history, it focuses on the qualitative aspects of ordinary life -- emotions, subjective impressions, and quotidian perceptions. How did ordinary Jews and their families make sense of their world? How did they construe changes brought about by industrialization? How did they make decisions to enter new professions or stick with the old, juggle traditional mores with contemporary ways? The Jewish adoption of secular, modern European culture and the struggle for legal equality exacted profound costs, both material and psychological. Even in the heady years of progress, a basic insecurity informed German-Jewish life. Jewish successes existed alongside an antisemitism that persisted as a frightful leitmotif throughout German-Jewish history. And yet the history that emerges from these pages belies simplistic interpretations that German antisemitism followed a straight path from Luther to Hitler. Neither Germans nor Jews can be typecast in their roles vis à vis one another. Non-Jews were not uniformly antisemitic but exhibited a wide range of attitudes towards Jews. Jewish daily life thus provides another vantage point from which to study the social life of Germany. Focusing on both internal Jewish life -- family, religion, culture and Jewish community -- and the external world of German culture and society provides a uniquely well-rounded portrait of a world defined by the shifting sands of inclusion and exclusion.

The Jews in Germany, 1945-1993

The Jews in Germany, 1945-1993
Author: Michael Cohn
Publisher: Praeger
Total Pages: 152
Release: 1994-08-16
Genre: History
ISBN:

Ch. 4 (p. 55-70), "The Legacy of the Third Reich, " reflects on the barrier between Germans and Jews generated by the years of Nazism and the Holocaust. The German government has tried to overcome this barrier, using such means as reparations, official visits of former German Jews to their birthplaces in Germany, subsidies to Jewish organizations, reception of Jewish immigrants from the former USSR, and suppression of right-wing anti-Jewish activities. Ch. 6 (p. 81-90), "Jews and Germans, " reflects on the complicated process of reconciliation between Germans and Jews, and on attempts to return Jews, both physically and culturally, into German society and culture. Shows that the question of the degree and uniqueness of German guilt toward the Jews also remains a burning issue.