Till van Rahden. Juden und andere Breslauer: Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Großstadt von 1860 bis 1925. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000. 382 S.47 Tab. DM 78.00 (gebunden), ISBN 978-3-525-35732-3.
Reviewed by Richard S. Levy (Department of History, University of Illinois at Chicago)
Published on H-German (April, 2001)
What Could They Have Been Thinking?
What Could They Have Been Thinking?
Few would apply to modern Germany Tip O'Neill's famous dictum: "All politics is local politics." Leaving aside the question of just how true it is even of the U.S., the idea seems far too outlandish a description of German-speaking Europe, especially after Bismarckian unification. Histories of the parties and of parliamentary politics in the German states are not scarce. There is plenty of recent work on urban planning and urbanization in general; numerous classic treatments of Vienna, Berlin, and lesser metropolises also come readily to mind. Accounts of communal politics, however, are not abundant, nor is that subject given great weight in general interpretations of the German past. Understandable though it may be, this neglect is regrettable when dealing with relations between Germans and Jews, and good reason to welcome Till van Rahden's thoughtful, meticulously researched, and clearly written contribution to the remedying of this situation.
Perhaps others have had this experience, too, of being confronted by students and by far older individuals who express wonderment at the blindness, willful ignorance, and denial of the obvious that they attribute to German Jews. With much head shaking, they ask how it was possible that the victims could not have recognized the "willing executioners" all about them or the obvious signs of doom, long in advance of the catastrophe. Why did they refuse to know that they would never be safe, let alone accepted, in such a barbaric land? Implicit in all this retrospective wisdom is a high degree of self-certainty: they would never have been so dim. "They" need to read van Rahden's book. Pointedly, he refuses to write the history of German Jews as a simple rise and fall story of a doomed, overassimilated group. He sees them, not in the shadow of the Holocaust, but as Jews who broke with the past and were on the way to creating something new and viable.
Focusing firmly on Breslau, once the major city of Silesia, now Polish Wroclaw, the author argues that the essentials of a multicultural society were achieved there in the half century before World War I. The left liberals who dominated city politics from the 1860s were not conscious "pioneers of pluralism." Nevertheless, under their governance and often in the face of the bureaucratic antisemitism of the Prussian state, the Jews participated as equals in the life of the city. Remarkably, they were able to do so without sacrificing their Jewish identity, this in an era when even their liberal friends, as well as their conservative and Catholic enemies, would have preferred seeing the outward, and of course, the even more objectionable "inward" signs of Jewishness disappear.
This bold thesis rests on painstakingly analyzed data van Rahden has tracked down in Polish, German, Israeli, and U. S. archives: tax rolls, marriage records, city council and Landtag minutes, election statistics, address books, party and club propaganda, newspapers of every persuasion, and published and unpublished memoirs. It is hard to imagine that any sort of evidence has been overlooked in this impressive monograph (winner of a well-deserved Fraenkel prize in 1999). In five chapters, he examines the social structure of Jews, comparing them to Protestants and Catholics, Jewish participation in the rich associational life of Breslau, intermarriage, the politics of the school system, and the failure of pre-war antisemitism, organized and informal, to overturn the achievements of German liberalism, at least in this locale.
One of the great virtues of local history is that it affords a smaller testing ground for some of the well worn axioms of macrohistory. Van Rahden performs this task well, speaking with the voice of one who has the facts, knows the literature, and therefore need not shrink from criticizing--always politely, it should be said--the wrong thinking and often baseless suppositions of his elders. His findings ought to lead to some serious revision of the hoarier clich=E9s in the historiography of Germans and Jews. A few examples are in order. In his analysis of Jewish social structure--the twenty-four tables of this chapter make for demanding reading--the author demonstrates a surprising conclusion. Yes, the Jewish population, which hovered between four and eight percent of the whole, was considerably better off than its neighbors, constituting a good quarter of bourgeois professional groups. However, looking at tax rolls to measure income, not just occupation, alters the picture. The majority of the city's Jews could not afford a bourgeois lifestyle, and many lived below the poverty line, especially single women on their own. The firmly established truism that the great majority of German Jews were comfortably bourgeois from an early point in the Kaiserreich needs to be reexamined.
Van Rahden's exploration of the network of voluntary associations calls another piece of received wisdom into question. "That the 'evil odor of antisemitism' had thoroughly permeated all spheres of social life and had increasingly divided bourgeois society into a 'non-Jewish and a Jewish club system' is not borne out in Breslau" (139). Jews normally belonged to both sorts of groups and moved easily between them. Although from the 1880s attempts were made to oust Jews from certain clubs, and membership became a political issue, only a few of the city's eight hundred associations excluded Jews before the war.
Bringing the sources to bear on another subject that has suffered from airy generalization and not a little prejudice from all sides, van Rahden examines the high rate of mixed marriages in Breslau as a dimension of Jewish integration. Once again, he marshals the facts effectively and precisely. Those who would insist that these unions are no measure of integration because the "Christian partner was probably of Jewish descent" will have to explain why, from 1874 to 1920, the Breslau registries show that only twenty of the six hundred individuals in question were converts to Christianity. Contrary to still commonly held beliefs, these marriages were stable, did not inevitably lead to the wholesale abandonment of Jewish identity or conversion, were entered into on the Jewish side by about as many women as men, and did not, at least in Breslau, even once conform to the literary convention of the impecunious nobleman and "rich Jewess."
Much of what made Breslau a place that largely accepted Jews as Jews was reflected, and to a certain extent made possible, by communal politics. Viewing the Jews of Germany solely in a national context has accustomed us to seeing them as a negligible factor in political life, the consequence of their tiny numbers. As individuals, they could play notable roles in the liberal and Social Democratic parties, but when it came to pursuing group interests or defending rights, they were dependent on the good will of others. This was not so in Breslau where Jewish income levels and the three-class franchise made them an effective political force well beyond their numbers. On issues that related directly to their well-being, such as equal opportunity for Jewish teachers in the public schools and school policy in general, Jews fought in the city council and often won. This was obviously a matter of self-interest, but not an abuse of power, as the antisemites never tired of claiming. The attempt to implement constitutional guarantees and to honor laws already on the books, were principles also dear to the hearts of their non-Jewish left-liberal comrades in the struggle. It is ironic that what enabled them to accomplish so much in the direction of an open and fair society was an obviously undemocratic franchise. When the three-class system was abolished by the Weimar Republic in favor of a democratic suffrage, Breslau became far less hospitable, and not only for Jews.
But it was never a utopia on the Oder. Van Rahden dutifully reports the fault lines, limits of integration, and signs of future troubles that the historian can identify, even if contemporaries could not. He describes in an epilogue the quick unraveling of Breslau's spirit of inclusiveness during and after the war, its devolution from a place where two Jews could earn the sparingly bestowed title of Ehrenbuerger, to the big city that gave the Nazis their largest percentage vote in July 1932 (43 percent). Such a rapid fall from (relative) grace raises a basic question. How much did the prewar integration of Jews rest on the real but impermanent sources of their power, how much on the commitment to pluralist values in the general public?
A more basic question, one that all local history must deal with sooner or later, may not yet have a satisfactory answer. How typical was Breslau of the Jewish experience in the Kaiserreich? Can van Rahden's carefully arrived at conclusions regarding Jewish integration in one city be extended to the nation as a whole? By the end of the period, Jews generally lived in ten big cities, and the author draws illuminating parallels to the situations in many of them. Some of the same factors favorable to the situation of Breslau's Jews were to be found in other large cities, suggesting that a high degree of integration could be found elsewhere in Germany. If Breslau were truly so exceptional in this regard, surely contemporaries of all kinds would have remarked on it, either praising or condemning such liberality. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of studies of Jewish life in urban centers; many of these concentrate on antisemitism and are not truly comparable to this work. The state of current research does not allow for a more precise answer to the question of typicality, but the Breslau case ought to make us far less certain of the certainties.
About Van Rahden's larger purpose, to show "that neither a straight nor a 'twisted road' led from the relations between Jews and other Breslauer before 1918 to the anti-Jewish persecution of National Socialism," there is much less uncertainty. He makes a strong case.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-german.
Citation:
Richard S. Levy. Review of van Rahden, Till, Juden und andere Breslauer: Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Großstadt von 1860 bis 1925.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5099
Copyright © 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.