introduction

“We were so German,” “we were so assimilated,” “we were so middle class” - these are the refrains one reads over and over again in the memoirs of German Jews who try to explain to us (and to themselves) what their lives were like before Nazi barbarism overpowered them. They stress how normal their lives were, how bourgeois their habits and attitudes. German Jews - a predominantly middle-class group comprising less than 1 percent of the German population - had welcomed their legal emancipation in the second half of the nineteenth century and lived in a relatively comfortable, secure environment until 1933. Between 1933 and 1939, however, they saw their economic livelihoods imperiled and their social integration dissolved. Inexorably, they were engulfed in the maelstrom that led to the Holocaust: impoverishment and ostracism for most; emigration for many; hiding for a handful; and ghettoization, forced labor, and extermination for the rest.

The calamity that hit German Jews affected them as Jews first, but Jewish women had gender-specific experiences as well. In addition to suffering the persecution that afflicted all Jews, Jewish women also had the burden of keeping their households and communities together. A gender analysis of the situation of Jews in Germany suggests that racism and persecution as well as survival strategies meant something different for women than for men - in both practical and psychological terms.