Otto Dov Kulka (Hrsg.), Anne Birkenhauer und Esriel Hildesheimer (Mitarbeiter), Deutsches Judentum unter dem Nationalsozialismus. Dokumente zur Geschichte der Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden 1933- 1939, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), XXIV+ 614 pp.
As Holocaust historical research sways furiously between Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and those who consider Nazism no more than a “traffic accident” in German history, it is surely worth contemplating the history of that era from the ground up—from the sources themselves. This, however, may seem slightly puzzling at this stage of historical inquiry. After comprehensive studies have been published on so many problems of the Holocaust and after a wide range of generalizations have been propounded—let alone in an era in which the subjective voice in historiography is growing considerably—can one even suggest returning to the fundamentals? Why go back, as it were, to a “positivistic,” “conservative” historiography that believes in the ability to arrive at the truth? Would this perspective not overlook the questions that disturb research and postpone formulating a thesis about those fateful days in Germany of 1933–1945?
Otto Dov Kulka has assumed, it seems to me, an especially daunting task. In our days, research on Nazism and the Holocaust has taken on an additional burden of historiographical controversies—of which the latest is certainly not the last. Now, of all times, in such a period, Kulka stresses the supreme importance of documentation. The present volume is the first of two that aim to introduce the inner world of German Jewry through the prism of its internal organizational structure. This collection presents 120 documents, along with detailed introductions that place the sources within the broad context of National-Socialist policy and the behavior of German Jewry in view of the crisis of 1933. Detailed notes, with explanations of concepts, names, institutions, and other matters, allow readers to orient themselves through the torrent of internal events that riveted the Jewish community’s efforts to cope during those years.
Why, however, make such a monumental effort to revitalize these documents today? The editor seems to be stating—as echoed many times in this work, as well as in his previous studies—that, although the factual information attests to the contrary, the old hypotheses concerning the Jews’ organizational alignment against the National-Socialist system are being exhumed. Claims made in research and in public discourse imply that no evidence to contradict the previous hypotheses has been presented. Such hypotheses regard the actions of internal Jewish organizations as having been nothing but responses to the Nazi extermination “machine,” and their working assumption (not stated explicitly) avers that the Jews were threatened with extermination throughout the 1933-1945 period.
Kulka’s study is presented as a counterweight to the rising tide of hypotheses and counter-hypotheses. In contrast to their historiographical common denominator, it describes the inner world of German Jews from the standpoint of their profound confrontation with the historical past and the emerging reality as if two currents overarching wrestled with each other—the sense of the trivial on the one hand, the premenition of a fateful day on the other. Thus, Kulka strives to bring the Jewish experience under NationalSocialist rule to the center of Jewish history. Perhaps by so doing he wishes to respond meta-historically to remarks by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, which he uses (by citing them in various locations in his articles) as a sort of personal credo for the entire period. Here are Buber’s words from the introduction to a collection of his articles and speeches from 1933–1935, Die Stunde und die Erkenntnis, published in Berlin in 1936 by Schocken Press:
If the striking of the old tower-clock is so audible as if it had never struck before, then it is time to interpret the ringing and the clock itself. The interpretation does not have to be invented; should not be invented; one must simply recognize that which has existed since time immemorial, as the truth after all has, and pronounce it. Why pronounce it? In order that the bond, which has perceived its fate in that hour and its recognition, stays together although it is torn apart in space.
Whether it stays together as a community, nay, whether it becomes one. Whether it becomes one again, this will mysteriously determine the next ringing of the chimes. If it breaks up into isolated individuals then it, and perhaps more then it, is lost.
My sense is that Kulka is trying as it were, to retrieve these attenuated individuals for the community, for Jewish history, as a collective. His intent is to guarantee that these years not be lost and not fall captive to a historiographical view that obfuscates their intrinsic eternal truth until the bell tolls again.
A researcher’s worldview can be revealed even in a collection of sources, and here I address myself to the underpinnings of this study, which began in the 1960s. It was then that Kulka first discovered the archives of the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (National Representation of the German Jews), which had been preserved in the cellar of a half-destroyed synagogue in what was then East Germany. Before I explore the historiographical assumptions that, in my opinion, informed the selection of documents in this book—i.e., Kulka’s historical worldview—I preface my remarks with comments about aspects that reverberate in many different forms in the instructive introductions to these documents.
In a brief study on the SS deportation order for the Jews of Czechoslovakia in August 1939—a study that Kulka published many years ago—he presented a document from a debate among members of the Kehilla committee of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The debate was led by Dr. Kafka, chairman of the Prague Kehilla, and his remarks, although not presented in this collection, are astonishing. Kafka began by saying that, in view of the feeling that Czech Jewry is approaching its demise, he has a clear sense of historical connection with his forebears, who encountered a different fateful situation:
“This old Kehilla building, in which we have gathered today, has witnessed many events, good and bad. At the entrance to the hall, one encounters the picture of the head of the Prague Kehilla, Israel Spiro, . . . [who] headed the Kehilla at the time when Maria Theresa issued the famous edict banishing the Jews from Prague. The 20,000 Jews of Prague, including women, children, and meager belongings, were forced to leave their ancient residence in Prague in the midst of a fierce winter and to migrate to small rural communities in Bohemia. In their millennium-old history, however, the Jews of Bohemia have not experienced times as difficult as the present.”
Kafka mentioned neither the fate of German Jewry nor of Austrian Jewry in the Nazi era. Instead, he cited analogies with a more distant past, the eighteenth century—when Empress Maria Theresa sought to expel the Jews of Prague and Bohemia from their birthplaces. The year was 1744. Here, historical memory and historical context worked in a special way: the evident partnership in fate is with a different era in Czech Jewish history, not with the general, amorphous Jewish fate. This is a solid manifestation of Jews’ sense of belonging to a place and to history. In this construct, the past is not a sealed book but one that is still open and plays a substantive role in the consciousness of contemporaries.
The nexus is illuminating in itself, but it also lets us observe the realities of Jews, under the harsh conditions of 1933–1945, from a different point of view. The Jews’ behavior is construed not only as a “response” to National Socialism but also, and mainly, as a contemplation of the phenomenon from within, i.e., in the relationship of the community and its members to general and local Jewish history. Perhaps it is meant to express Buber’s purpose: “In order that the bond, which has perceived its fate in that hour and its recognition, stays together although it is torn apart in space.”
Anyone who reads about and researches the Holocaust period can probably imagine similar states of consciousness, which urge one to ponder the predicament differently and free oneself from the historiographical vise imposed deliberately or otherwise by the literature of guilt and polemics. When Jews sought an analogy between their lives and the lives of other Jews, far removed from them in time, place, and crisis, they did so in order to express a substantive affiliation with different worlds of consciousness, not necessarily in order to escape from their reality.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that the reader of this collection encounters personalities who allow us to peer into more profound inner worlds than those we are accustomed to encountering. Otto Hirsch, Leo Baeck, Julius Seligsohn, Arthur Lilienthal, Adolf Leschnitzer, Paul Eppstein, and, of course, Buber himself are no longer unidimensional figures, but people with complex personalities contending with various worldviews. Some have to deal with views that contradict their own—whether in Jewish society or, of course, outside it as well. These are people who in one fashion or another, capture the meaning of the community, the collective, the history, and the tolling bell. Indeed, this work is replete with efforts to recapture the individual and collective realities of life through the prism of the Jewish—not the Nazi— world.
Thus, when presented with documents describing the considerations of one personality or another in developing a curriculum—such as deliberations about teaching Hebrew in the Ashkenazi or the Sephardi pronunciation—they should be understood as important raw materials in the construction of the collective ego in a fateful period of time. (For example, Buber’s letters to Hirsch in 1934, pp. 130–134; also Hirsch’s reply to Buber and the introduction to that document, pp. 221–222.) Again, the trivial and the fateful interact in the conscious of these people.
However, my introductory remark is not meant to suggest that the figures discussed are flawless in the sense of being ideal. On the contrary. The purpose of my remark is to stress that they were flesh-and-blood human beings who fought for their views and ideologies even in the midst of crisis. Thus, these figures illuminate another major principle that guides the editor: German Jews tenanted a pluralistic, democratic society not only in 1933, but also at the end of the period, even as deportation and extermination were about to extinguish the community. Kulka and the late Esriel Hildesheimer (who wrote his doctoral dissertation under Kulka on this subject and was one of Kulka’s collaborators in this enterprise) showed that the Reichsvertretung had never amassed broad support and that various Jewish public figures had resisted it and opposed any attempt to make it the sole legitimate representative of German Jewry (see, for example, pp. 134-136, 293-298). This example, one of many presented in the collection, substantiates what the security service of the SS, the SD, discovered in 1934, and restated in 1938. However, many researchers refuse to accept the fact that the condemned Jews felt free to choose and were not only the servile tools of Gestapo commanders and their lackeys—in contrast to the image that has become entrenched.
Ideational, religious, economic, and political tensions remained a substantive part of the Jewish experience in Germany even as relations between the various organizations and the Reichsvertretung extended. The pluralistic complexion of the Reichsvertretung marked the continuation of a lengthy German-Jewish tradition. Kulka feels compelled to re-emphasize this matter in his selection and presentation of the documents. For example, he presents debates over the establishment of the Reichsvertretung (pp. 65–83) and a discussion held in August 1934 between this body and representatives of the large kehillot (pp. 167–171). Both the introductions and the texts emphasize the search for a middle path between keeping the kehillot autonomous in various senses yet maintaining their affiliation with the Reichsvertretung —a matter analogous to the economic support that non-Zionist organizations pledged to Zionist enterprises (e.g., pp. 217–219). In other words, although the Reichsvertretung did become the legitimate representative of German Jewry, it respected the German-Jewish tradition of the Emancipation by allowing groups and currents to struggle for their independent position without absolving them of responsibility for the collective in need.
These pluralistic and democratic fundamentals take on a significance that has almost a mystical quality to them, for while the Jews lived in accordance with these basic premises, the Nazi regime closed in on them and placed the conduct of the Reichsvertretung under strict control. Kulka does not regard pluralism and democratic character as an aberration or a “fool’s paradise” (to use Robert Weltsch’s expression in the introduction to the first Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, in 1956). Instead, he lauds them as evidence that the Jews adhered to their truth despite everything that was being done to them.
This is a different kind of history, one that yields neither to the accusatory writings nor to the unidimensional Zionist assessment. Instead, it praises the internal freedom that the Jews sustained at any price. Furthermore, the Jews’ preoccupation with the basic issues of life through debate and struggle looms as an accurate reflection of the history of German Jewry. Thus, the issues illuminated by the documents in this book and treated sympathetically by the editor—how much money to donate to this or that enterprise, how many hours to teach Bible, how to protest, etc.—are the very essence of Jewish history during the Holocaust era. The editor clearly ascribes no less historical value to the Centralverein’s (Central Union of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, the largest Jewish organization in pre-Nazi Germany) recommended reading list (pp. 278-279) and celebration of the 900th anniversary of the synagogue in Worms in 1934 (p. 150) than to protests by Jews, e.g., the Reichsvertretung’s response to the Nuremberg Laws (pp. 236-238). Kulka appends detailed introductions to the documents, repeatedly emphasizing German Jewry’s recourse to various forms of Jewish culture after the Nazi accession (e.g., p. 277) and provides detailed notes for readers minimally versed in the subject. German readers with only limited knowledge of Jewish history are the obvious audience.
However, this book sheds new light not only on the pluralism and democracy of Jewish society but also on the continuity of Jewish organizational life itself. Endeavoring to situate the Reichsvertretung within Jewish history and liberate it from the prism of National-Socialist schemes, Kulka makes a special point of noting that the Reichsvertretung was established as the last of innumerable attempts since the nineteenth century to bring German Jewry under one roof. Again, one wonders whether the book is making an apologetic attempt to respond to critics of the Jewish leadership, who allege that this leadership was but an administrative branch of the Gestapo, or whether it is trying to explain the Jewish leaders’ motives as attempts to cope with an acute totalitarian reality. Kulka is clearly guided by the desire to highlight the existence of two diametrically opposed worldviews—the Nazi worldview, which intended to apply its ideology to the Jews, and the Jewish worldview, which struggled to maintain human values anchored in the historical development of German Jewry. From Kulka’s standpoint, the Nazis failed to attain their most important goal—they did not obliterate the principles that the Jews, according to the Nazi ideology, represented, i.e., humanistic universalism. German Jewry did not abandon its principles. From this point of view, the Nazi failure is evident in the Jews’ ceaseless concern for their youth, assistance for the unemployed and for emigrants, and actions against the trampling of Jewish dignity, to name but three examples.
German Jews may have needed the tumultuous setting of the late Weimar period to establish the Reichsvertretung, but Kulka praises Arthur Lilienthal’s initiative back in 1932 to establish a central organization for German Jewry. And as if to try and guarantee that researches will reject previously maintained positions, Kulka repeatedly emphasizes that there was an “old and a new representation” (alte und neue Reichsvertretung)—just as he stresses at the end of the book (pp. 441-452) with respect to the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (National Association of Jews in Germany). His argument is emphatic — the establishment of these organizations was the result of internal decisions made by Jews in their drive to maintain their humanistic-universalistic principles even in the midst of the terrible crisis. In his detailed introduction to the texts on the establishment of the Reichsvereinigung, Kulka repudiates the approach of those who regard the formation of this organization as the outcome of a Nazi decision. He stresses, also citing Nazi documents, that the initiative was taken by the Jews themselves. Again Buber’s remarks reverberate loudly: the fact that Jewish society maintained its integrity in the face of totalitarian ideology is one of the most significant indicators of a unique phenomenon. Though this volume presents only a few documents about the establishment of the Reichsvereinigung, they anticipate the contents of the next one. The documents included here begin with the establishment of the new organization—the result of an internal decision by the Jews themselves—and end with the rising concern for the collective needs of the community after the devastation wrought by Kristallnacht in all fields of Reichsvertretung activity. The heads of the Reichsvertretung—Otto Hirsch and Julius Seligsohn, above all—stayed at their posts with boundless loyalty and courage. They continued to call for Jewish solidarity without displaying disrespect for other views among Jewish public figures and without denying autonomy to the kehillot that joined it.
Here is one of the most important contributions of this book and, at the same time, one of the challenges that it presents to scholars of this era. At first glance, Kulka has gathered documents and facts on “dry” matters with which every Jewish society has dealt since the Kehilla institution came into being. However, this infrastructure is not built on facts and documents only. To understand Kulka’s method in dealing with the Jewish community’s internal alignment, it is appropriate to quote what he said in his dispute with the functionalist trend in general and with Hans Mommsen in particular. “I believe,” he wrote, “that if we ignore the ideological background and are content with reconstructing the facts alone, this will cause the deeper meaning of the Holocaust to be lost in the future.” This statement by Kulka may also be said about his attempt to reconstruct the continuation of Jewish organizational activity in Germany in 1933–1945. If the facts are reconstructed from the copious documentation in this book and the ideational background is not addressed, the deep significance of the Holocaust may be lost.
What is the ideational common denominator? Kulka repeatedly mentions Yitzhak Baer’s remarks in his book Galut, published by Schocken in Berlin in 1936. He focuses on the section in which Baer states that a people’s fate cannot be understood unless one understands how the people perceives its own fate, its attitude toward God, and its history. However, in his persistent attempts to stress the continuity of Jewish activity in the face of totalitarianism and the democratic nature of this activity in contrast to the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung (“coordination” of society), Kulka alludes to a further observation by Baer. In an epilogue that Baer added to the English edition of Galut, published ten years after the German edition, he wrote: “Our place in the world is not to be measured by the measure of this world. Our history follows its own laws, maintaining its innermost tendencies in the face of the outward dangers of dispersal, disintegration, secularization, and moral and religious petrification.” Here, in my opinion, is the idea underlying the choice of facts and documents—the idea through which Kulka finds the deepest connection between the Jewish experience in the Holocaust and Jewish history. However, one can only regret that the editor has chosen to provide a brief (31 pp.) introduction instead of a lengthy account of how he would write the history of the era in view of these fascinating premises. In fact, Kulka gives us a tool for the reconstruction of this history but leaves the reconstruction itself to some future historian.
Nevertheless, to study the texts in this book from Kulka’s perspective is to read them in a new light. The reports of the aid and rehabilitation agencies will evoke a certain excitement. The reader will discover that even as these organizations concerned themselves with the ill and the elderly and attempted to assure the community’s physical existence, the Jewish organizations never, even after Kristallnacht, abandoned the aspiration to build a world for the younger generation. Those who study the 1935 financial statements of the Reichsvertretung (pp. 204-208) from Kulka’s historical perspective cannot but be impressed to discover that in its budget of 1,907,850 marks, it spent almost as much money on education and culture as on emigration and relief. This lends a different character to the historical debate. Even the sparse, “dry” statistics and details are presented from a perspective that links them to a broader view of the period. However, in addition to the historical perspective, the documents, and the introductions—presented to the reader in the best tradition of critical editions—the book includes fascinating information on how German Jewry on the brink of the war coped with its plight. This material will have to be digested and processed into the general conceptions of the scholarship on the period of the Holocaust.
Allow me to conclude with a personal remark. I have studied this book with a certain sense of exhilaration—if one may still use such flowery expressions in an academic environment and in a book review. Many years of toil were invested in this volume; much thought and care are evident in its subtle and accurate phrasings. The end product provides a work for posterity, which will become a benchmark for all who respect the historian’s craft. The work illuminates and collates obscure and scanty details and paves the way for contemplating the history of German Jewry under National Socialism from within the perspective of the evolution of Jewish history.
This review is based on remarks presented at the International Center for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem on February 19, 1998.
Translated from the Hebrew by Naftali Greenwood
Source: Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. 27, Jerusalem, 1999, pp 461-473
