Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany

Marion A. Kaplan

Oxford University Press, 1999 - History - 290 pages

Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany.

Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; others went underground and endured the fears of nightly bombings and the even greater terror of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness.

Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - tess_schoolmarm - LibraryThing

The author's purpose for writing the book, imho, was to illustrate that the violence and anti-semitism that occurred in Nazi Germany began with the small things, not the violence that we normally read ...

BETWEEN DIGNITY AND DESPAIR: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany

User Review  - Kirkus

An exceptional Holocaust study from the vantage point of German Jewish women. German Jews in general have been accused of loving Germany too much and of suffering less than their Eastern European ...

Contents

• IN PUBLIC JEWS ARE TURNED INTO PARIAHS 19331938: 17
• Political Lawlessness and Economic Oppression: 18
• Food Shelter and Relationship with Other Germans: 32
• Jewish Social Life and Jewishness: 46
• IN PRIVATE THE DAILY LIVES OF JEWISH WOMEN AND FAMILIES 19331938: 50
• The Household: 54
• The Challenges of New Roles and the Tenacity of Old Ones: 57
• The Emigration Quandary: 62
• JEWISH AND MIXED FAMILIES: 74
• Mixed Marriages and Mixed Families: 83
• Divorce: 87
• THE DAILY LIVES OF JEWISH CHILDREN AND YOUTH IN THE THIRD REICH: 94
• Hostile Environment Beyond School: 106
• Jewish Teens: 109
• Children Leave Home: 116
• THE NOVEMBER POGROM AND ITS AFTERMATH: 119
• The Pogrom: 121
• Womens Roles and Reactions during the Pogrom: 125
• Emigration: 129
• WAR AND THE WORSENING SITUATION OF JEWS: 145
• Outbreak of War: 150
• Popular and Jewish Attitudes: 160
• Jewish Social Life in Wartime: 161
• The Odyssey of One Elderly Jewish Couple: 169
• FORCED LABOR AND DEPORTATIONS: 173
• Despair and Suicide: 179
• The Transition from Social Death to Physical Annihilation: 184
• LIFE UNDERGROUND: 201
• The Dilemmas of an Illegal Life: 203
• Jewish Resistance: 212
• Three Accounts of Hiding: 216
• CONCLUSION: 229
• German Perpetrators and Bystanders: 232
• Notes: 239
• Bibliography: 265
• Index: 275

About the author

Marion Kaplan is Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany, which won the National Jewish Book Award and the German History Prize and The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany. She lives in New York City.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany; Studies in Jewish history
• Author: Marion A. Kaplan
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999
• ISBN: 0195130928, 9780195130928
• Length: 290 pages
• Subjects: History / Holocaust; History / Jewish