Download Michael A. Meyer, editor. German-Jewish History in Modem Times

Europe: Early Modern and Modern
general operations of the Nazi state. While Wetzell
demonstrates that most criminologists did not agree
with Nazi racist and anti-Semitic views on crime, his
focus on academie discourse and disagreement allows
him to avoid confronting fully the failure of German
criminologists, as members of the country's intellectual
and professional elite, to take a more critical stance on
ethical grounds against a regime that systematically
destroyed the lives of millions of people. As it is, he
argues that the fact that "mainstream criminological
research" was not in line with Nazi racism shows that
"normal science" (p. 205) was widely practiced in the
Third Reich. This is true, and Wetzell also rightly
observes at the end of his book that the practice of
"normal science" in Nazi Germany is a warning about
the dangers of modern science. But Wetzell confines
his criticism to those criminologists such as Arthur
GUtt, Ernst Rdin, and Robert Ritter who collaborated extensively with brutal Nazi programs to eliminate "racial undesirables." Unlike Proctor, Ulfried
Geuter, and others who have written on the history of
professions in Nazi Germany in institutional as well as
intellectual terms, Wetzell does not also criticize the
mainstream criminologists whom he holds up as a
model to their opportunistic and racist colleagues, for
their own indirect support of the regime, confining
himself to praising "the sophistication of psychiatrie
and criminological research [that] gave rise to serious
objections to the sterilization of criminals on the basis
of criminal behavior" (p. 305). Wetzell's book is solidly
researched and clearly organized and written. A
broader institutional focus, however, would allow for a
closer examination of the degrees to which scholarly
disagreement with Nazi attitudes and polities toward
criminals might—but also might not—have prompted
action against the regime and on behalf of at least
some of its victims.
GEOFFREY COCKS
Albion College
MICHAEL A. MEYER, editor. German-Jewish History in
Modern Times, Volume 4, Renewal and Destruction:
1918-1945. New York: Columbia University Press.
1998. Pp. ix, 479. $50.00.
The fourth and final volume of German-Jewish History
in Modern Times traces German Jewry from its highest
achievements of equality and acculturation in the
Weimar Republic to its destruction by the Nazis. Two
respected Israeli scholars, Avraham Barkai and Paul
Mendes-Flohr, synthesize more than fifty years of
research by dozens of scholars working in several
languages. The result is a clearly organized and lucidly
written summary that is accessible to all, including
those approaching the subject for the first time.
Throughout, the authors compare the Jewish communities in Germany proper with those in Austria and the
Czech lands, further enhancing the volume's usefulness. A succinct epilogue by Steven M. Lowenstein on
the German Jewish diaspora documents the emigrante'
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1487
preservation of the German language and German
cultural habits in various corners of the world for a
generation after the Holocaust.
Although the authors show that the reality of Nazi
rule came as a terrific shock to the German Jews, they
argue that developments during the republican period
to some degree prepared Jewry for the ensuing onslaught of discrimination and persecution. The chapters devoted to cultural issues, all by Mendes-Flohr,
argue that in the 1920s there was a deepening of
Jewish identities in reaction to anti-Semitism, Zionism, and contacts with Eastern European Jews. A
process of dissimilation was evident in renewed interest in Jewish studies, scholarly and popular publications, art and music, and theology. This renaissance of
Jewish culture prepared Jews to engage in spiritual
resistance after 1933 and enabled them to develop a
new sense of solidarity as their cultural life was
ghettoized by the German state. The argument is
plausible, but it is difficult to know how widely any
cultural rebirth was feit before 1933. In fact, its
greatest impact probably came later, when Jews sought
refuge from the storm in their religious communities.
It might be added that the very success of Jewish
culture in shielding the victims from the worst effects
of Nazi racism contributed to the ambivalente many of
them feit about the wisdom of emigrating. As the
authors point out, the Jews' illusory hopes for the
future were just as important as restrictions on immigration in slowing departure from Germany.
Barkai, who treats most of the other topics covered
in the volume, credits Weimar Jewry with elaborating
a system of communal institutions that proved invaluable during the dark years that followed. This was
particularly true of the Jewish schools and charitable
organizations established by local Jewish communities.
These at first enabled the Jews to cope with unfavorable economie trends and with anti-Semitism, which
Barkai (but not Mendes-Flohr) portrays as endemie
throughout the Weimar and Nazi periods. Less successfui is Barkai's analysis of the political culture of
the organized Jewish community that gave rise to these
institutions during the Weimar Republic. Although the
author clearly delineates the complex factionalism
within the various secular and religious groupings, he
glosses over ideological strife and privileges the position of the Zionists in his reconstruction of events.
From Barkai, one would never learn that German
Zionism strove militantly and consistently to alienate
Germany's Jews from their liberal and patriotic traditions. This both handed ammunition to the antiSemites and undermined self-defense programs, driving the liberal Jewish majority to distraction and
tearing German Jewry apart. In reducing this ideological confrontation to a chiefly political one between a
stodgy establishment and youthful progressives for
control of local community budgets and institutions,
Barkai drains much of the lifeblood from the interval
history of German Jewry during the Weimar years.
Under Adolf Hitler, political convergence among the
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Reviews of Books
1488
Jews was unavoidable once all hope for the future was
dashed. Even before that happened, leading Jews, for
the first time ever, came together to establish a central
organization representing most of their coreligionists.
In some of the finest passages in the book, Barkai
shows how the Nazis turned it into an instrument of
official policies aimed at isolation, deportation, and,
ultimately, destruction. He wisely refrains from condemning Jewish leaders who cooperated with Nazi
officials, both in Germany and in Theresienstadt. Most
of them were, he concludes, honorable men placed in
impossible circumstances.
Although the volume is, for the most part, factually
accurate, there are a few lapses. These include the
identification of the "black Reichswehr" as Weimar
Germany's legal army (p. 49) and of Franz Oppenheimer as expressing Zionist views well after his break
with Jewish nationalism (p. 160). It is also to be hoped
that the practice of translating the German word
völkïsch (meaning "populist," "racist," and/or "nationalist") as "Volkist" (meaningless in English) will go no
further.
DONALD L. NIEWYK
Southern Methodist University
GARETH PRITCHARD. The Making of the GDR 1945-53:
From Antifascism to Stalinism. New York: Manchester
University Press. 2000. Pp. ix, 244. $74.95.
Shortly before the unexpected opening of the Berlin
Wall in 1989, several researchers at Mannheim's Institute for the Study of East Germany admitted in
discussion that little could be added to their basic
outline of the German Democratie Republic's (GDR)
history. They nevertheless were impatient to get their
hands on inaccessible archives, because these might
shed light on the deeper dynamics of change in East
German history, especially the dialectics of rulersubject relations. Eleven years later, Gareth Pritchard
presents a work that accomplishes precisely what these
scholars hoped for: by using previously unexploited
materials—many culled from archives in the southern
working-class regions of Thuringia and Saxony—he
adds new dimensions to our understanding of East
German history, especially of the foundational period
1945-1953.
The deeper dynamic that Pritchard pursues is the
"interaction of the German and Sovjet traditions of
Socialism and the transformation of the labor movement from a representative organ of the East German
working class to an abject tool of the Communist
dictatorship" (p. 6). Although his primary sources
focus on workers, his narrative ranges broadly from
denazification to land reform to the reemergence of
political life, especially via antifascist committees and
workplace councils. Contrary to visions of spontaneous
worker activism in earlier Western treatments, Pritchard insists on the centrality of organization: the
German Communist Party (KPD) more carefully controlled worker councils than previously assumed (pp.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
48-49). In concluding chapters he depicts the Stalinization of the East German workers' movement, paying particular attention to the suppression of independent activity at the base. Dictatorship burgeoned in
order to counter popular resistance to the regimentation of economie and political life, and gradually the
antifascist idealism of the early postwar period yielded
to fear of denunciation. By 1950, the Socialist Unity
Party of Germany (SED) had become alienated from a
population in which it had once enjoyed genuine
support.
To reach these conclusions, Pritchard masterfully
interweaves materials from professional journals,
memoirs, interview protocols, diaries, Eastern and
Western historical interpretations, as well as a wide
range of state and party archives. Especially illuminating in the deployment of such sources are the book's
central sections on the fusing of the KPD and Social
Democratie Party (SPD) to produce the SED in April
1946. This was a time of complex and conflicting
sentiments in the rank and file of both parties, in which
determination to survive might lapse into opportunism, or hope bom of liberation rapidly give way to
resignation under the pressures of military occupation.
The one broadly held and unshakable conviction concerned the need for working-class unity after twelve
years of Nazi rule. Pritchard's approach thus explodes
the two dimensional "compulsion-free will" scheme
that characterizes even more nuanced work on the
subject, but his documents leave no doubt as to the
forces that ultimately assured "worker unity." Most
memorable are the unembroidered descriptions of
methods used to assure the Communist takeover: for
example, the systematic favoring of compliant SPD
politicians with better rations (p. 113), or the "use" of
compromising material against a Social Democratie
"enemy ... in order to put him under pressure." The
latter story is then connected to one Social Democrat's
recollection of a telephone conversation in which a
Sovjet officer threatened to "crush him like a piece of
dirt"(p. 114).
Pritchard's judgments appear solid and original
within the framework of East German history, but
difficulties arise when he attempts to embed them in
broader contexts of space and time. With little consideration of relevant sources, the author supposes that
limited purging in the upper ranks of the SED reflected greater "resistance" to Stalinism in East Germany, deriving from the fact that the "German labor
movement was the oldest in the world . . . and had
deeper roots and longer traditions than its Polish,
Czech or Hungarian counterparts" (p. 182). Of course
quite the opposite is the case: East Germany was the
one place where the party failed to produce a serious
challenge to Stalinism, even when that was explicitly
sanctioned by Moscow. Furthermore, the bloody purging in Poland was an index of native resistance, which
even took the form of civil war in the early postwar
period. Contrasts of this sort suggest that students of
resistance are better advised to examine the confron-
OCTOBER 2001