Germans into Jews: Remaking the Jewish Social Body in the Weimar Republic (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture)

G e r m a n s i n t o Je w s

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture edited by

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

Germans into Jews Remaking the Jewish Social Body in the Weimar Republic

Sharon Gillerman

sta nfor d u ni v ersity press sta nfor d, ca lifornia

For my parents

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of the Koret Foundation. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gillerman, Sharon, 1960– Germans into Jews : remaking the Jewish social body in the Weimar Republic / Sharon Gillerman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-5711-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Jews—Germany—History—20th century. 2. Jews—Germany—Social conditions—20th century. 3. Jews—Germany—Charities—History. I. Title. ds134.25.g55 2009 305.892'404309042—dc22 2008041873 Typeset by Westchester Book Group in 10.5/14 Galliard

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 1

1.

“As the Family Goes, So Goes the Nation”

17

2.

Constructing a Jewish Body Politic: Declining Fertility and the Development of a Jewish Population Policy

53

“A Little State Within a Larger One”: The Expansion of Jewish Welfare During the Weimar Republic

78

3.

4. 5.

Rescuing “Endangered Youth”: Youth Welfare and the Project of Bourgeois Social Reform

107

Trauma and Transference: War Orphans Shape a New Jewish Nation

136

Conclusion

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List of Abbreviations

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Notes

175

Select Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

I have accrued an inestimable number of debts to many individuals and institutions during the years I have worked on this book, and it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to acknowledge them. Most importantly, I want to acknowledge the teachers who have taught and inspired me. In his remarkable way, Amos Funkenstein introduced me to the exhilarating study of Jewish history, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Satmar Rebbe, and led me to an interest in the relationship between uniqueness and universality in the self-perception of German Jews. My dissertation advisors, Saul Friedlander and Steve Zipperstein, were active, generous, and patient guides who offered me their own example of scholarship that was at once breathtaking and humbling. Steve Zipperstein’s consistently critical insight and careful reading offered me a model for thinking deeply, complexly, and boldly about Jewish history and I am enormously grateful for his patience, wit, generosity, and continued help. Saul Friedlander’s incisive reading of my work has always turned my attention back to the big questions. His comments have been a spur for the rethinking of this book, and I remain deeply appreciative of his kindness, generosity, and continued interest in my work. I could not have written this book without the generous funding of my research from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), Leo Baeck Institute, National Foundation for Jewish Culture, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, UCLA Department of History, and the Interuniversity Fellowship Program for Jewish Studies. I am particularly indebted to the 1939 Club for the generous support I received through my graduate career. Its members were more than anonymous benefactors; the opportunity to get to know them, and their

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personal interest in my work, gave added meaning to my project. I am also deeply appreciative of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at the Harvard Divinity School for offering me a peaceful and stimulating year to write, the Hebrew Union College (HUC) for research leave, and the Koret Foundation for a grant to underwrite the publication of this book. Navigating the murky netherworld of the archives and libraries was eased considerably owing to the patience and professional assistance of the staffs of the following institutions: the UCLA Research Library, particularly David Hirsch for bibliographic guidance; the Leo Baeck Institute, in particular Frank Mecklenburg and Diane Spielman, who were generous guides in the earliest stages; the Bundesarchiv at Potsdam and Coswig and later, the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin; the library and archive of the Bibliothek des Diakonisches Werkes and the Staatsbibliothek, also in Berlin; the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, the Central Zionist Archives, National Insurance Institute Dr. Giora Lotan Documentation Center, and the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem; Widener Library at Harvard, YIVO Library and Archive in New York, and my colleagues at the HUC library, who have been most gracious in helping me locate materials in their collection. One of the most pleasurable parts of research and writing was the friends and colleagues who made the time I spent on both sides of the Atlantic so fruitful and enjoyable. Marion Kaplan embodies the warmth and collegiality of scholars in the fields of German, Jewish, and gender history and has been incredibly gracious in giving feedback, advice, and encouragement. Deborah Hertz and Michael Berkowitz have read earlier versions of this manuscript, and I have benefited enormously from their extensive comments. Anne Goldberg, John Bormanis, and Jim Lichti are friends and colleagues whose friendship, insight, critical reading, and advice I have relied on through the many iterations of this book. I have profited immensely from the comments on papers and chapters I have received from Ben Baader, Ruth Bloch, Michael Brenner, Kathleen Canning, Atina Grossmann, Karin Hausen, Sandie Holguín, Paul Lerner, Brie Loskota, Steve Lowenstein, David Myers, Derek Penslar, Todd Presner, Gideon Reuveni, Monika Richarz, David Sabean, Stefanie Schüler-

Acknowledgments

Springorum, Eugene Sheppard, Marla Stone, Despina Stratigakos, and Ulrike Weckel and my colleagues at the Women’s Studies in Religion Program, Kecia Ali, Ana Maria Bidegain, Anne Braude, Kelly Chong, and Hanna Herzog; Adina Stern, Eva Maria Thimme, and Henryk Broder have always made my stays in Berlin a delight. My wonderful colleagues at HUC have helped make my home at HUC one of great warmth and intellectual richness. Ellen Healy was a friend in graduate school who helped shape this work. A phenomenon unto herself, Ellen was the brightest light among us, with a brilliant mind and an ability to synthesize other people’s work better than they could their own. She had a seemingly limitless capacity for strength, suffering, theory, humor, and the absurd. I mourn her loss together with her other friends and family. I am happy to thank Indiana University Press for permission to include a version of the first chapter that previously appeared as “The Crisis of the Jewish Family” in In Search of Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1933, ed. Michael Brenner and Derek Penslar (1998). The editors at Stanford University Press, Norris Pope, Judith Hibbard, and Melody Negron have most patiently and skillfully shepherded me through the production process, and to them I express my deepest gratitude. Many thanks to Jim Lichti and Raphaelle Steinzig for research and editorial assistance, and to Andrea Namaste for help formatting the manuscript. I have looked forward to being able to thank Mark Quigley for his love, emotional presence, and intellectual engagement with this project. All of his gifts have enormously eased the burden of writing this book. He often sees much that I do not and he has encouraged me to move in directions that I may not otherwise have gone. He is also a masterful editor and by now quite an insightful observer of GermanJewish history. His mark is very much in this book. To my parents, Joe and Roberta, who have displayed perhaps more patience than anyone as they have watched me move slowly forward with this book, sometimes lurchingly, sometimes painfully. They have been my great supporters, cheering squad, and source of inspiration. A small part of what I have learned from them became clear in the making of this book: the pursuit of a passion is realized only through slow,

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plodding work. I deeply appreciate their love, support, and ability to tolerate years of anticipatory naches. And finally to Maya, for whom I give thanks every day, and whose arrival has given me the best reason of all to move this manuscript off my desk so I will have more time to go to the bookstore, the park, and Peets.

Introduction

In 1929, four years before Hitler would assume the chancellorship of Germany, Siddy Wronsky, a founding figure in German social work and leading Jewish social reformer, warned her co-religionists of the impending catastrophe facing German Jewry. In her opening remarks at a conference on Jewish population policy, her words bore a prophetic tone, warning of the increasingly acute “danger of extermination or atrophy of those already born and yet unborn.”1 Rather than predicting the extermination of the Jews at the hands of a genocidal regime, however, Wronsky aimed at drawing attention to the wounds of the Jewish social body inflicted by the twin processes of modernization and assimilation and the broader social and economic crises of the Weimar Republic. Wronsky urged Jewish leaders to tend the Jewish population as the body of a people, whose “life-germ” was mortally threatened by the “unhealthy” social, political, and economic conditions of the postwar era.2 Neither Wronsky’s sense of urgency nor her physiological metaphors were unique to German Jews. She relied on a discourse that took shape during the nineteenth century as European social thinkers had created a biological vocabulary to address the nation’s demographic, social, and moral concerns. The alchemy of World War I, however, changed what had previously been seen as a source of general concern into a full-blown historical crisis. Across the continent, the war had decimated the adult male population, subjected extensive sectors of the home front population to severe malnutrition, and paralyzed already declining fertility rates. The massive displacement and disillusionment of the postwar period created a widespread sense of popular disorientation.

2

Introduction

By conceptualizing the nation as an organic bodily entity, social thinkers created an image that could look the immediate catastrophe in the face at the same time that it provided a diagnosis for recovery. In Germany, too, what observers had once viewed as the social pathologies of prewar society, were amplified by the devastating impact of the war. The wrenching disruptions of family life, a continuing decline in fertility rates, a swelling population of war orphans, and a rising rate of juvenile delinquency led many Germans to take these as symptoms indicative of a crisis of biological and social reproduction. Yet even as the Weimar Republic was born amid the catastrophe of German defeat, the ensuing social and political crises opened up the way for imaginative and far-reaching interventions into German social life. Accordingly, the end of the war signaled not only collapse but also a new beginning and presented social reformers, physicians, and feminists with an unprecedented opportunity to reimagine and reconstruct the German national body (Volkskörper). Indeed, this pairing of “crisis and renovation,”3 the anticipation of impending doom accompanied by ambitious designs for radical renewal, constitutes the truly unique “paradox of Weimar.”4 This book is about the Weimar Jewish paradox. It traces how social workers and physicians, lay people and religious leaders transformed the postwar Jewish crisis into an opportunity for Jewish revitalization. In the overlapping realms of family, welfare, and reproduction, Jewish reformers saw not only the threat of social disorder and potentially dangerous instability but also the prospect for enlisting those very institutions in the drive to reconstitute a strengthened and more vibrant Jewish population. Within the framework of the larger public debate on gender roles, reproduction, work, and the family, Jewish social reformers placed the bodies of biologically and economically unproductive Jews, once on the margins of Jewish society, at the very center of the project of rejuvenating German Jewry. In their efforts to strengthen the social body while simultaneously providing support to a whole new class of Jews in need, Weimar Jews undertook something that was more than simply an expansive program of social relief. Their attempts to remake the social represented an act of self-defense not, as the term is normally used, in reaction to antiSemitism but in the face of what they understood to be the modern plagues of individualism, infertility, and degeneration.

Introduction

With their recasting of this crisis as a social illness, Jewish social reformers also set in place their prescribed course of action: the introduction of modern social policy interventions and a more intensive regulation of social life. A scientific emphasis and rationalizing approach, combined with an unbounded sense of possibility, led Jewish communal leaders and social experts to pathologize the social and reproductive behaviors of men and—to a much greater extent—women in ways that construed the Jewish social body as an organism in significant need of a new and decisive regime of treatment. As such, they reclassified individual behaviors and even attitudes—the choice of marriage partners, changing views of sexuality, women’s employment, or young men’s lack of it—in terms of the risk they posed to the health and stability of the entire organism. Jewish social experts and lay leaders thus sought to strengthen and normalize the population in ways that would maximize its productivity in the service of both the Jewish community and the German nation. Put in Foucauldian terms, Jewish leaders were acting on the biopolitical imperative through promoting the health, reproduction, and welfare of the Jewish population.5 While Wronsky approached the task of improving the Jewish population as a Zionist, Weimar Jews held competing visions for potential social remedies as well as the ultimate appearance of a reinvigorated Jewish community. Would a revitalized Jewish entity in Germany resemble a densely textured ethnic component of the German nation or its own nation? Would it embody an expansion of Liberal Jewish religious values or create an altogether new kind of Jew?6 For their part, nonorthodox and non-Zionist Liberal Jews regularly employed such terms as Gemeinschaft, which by the 1920s already implied a community bound by organic ties. Moving away from a notion of the Jewish collectivity defined strictly in the liberal sense of an assemblage of autonomous individual citizens, Liberal Jews increasingly invoked the notions of the community in its totality (Gesamtheit, Volksganze) bound by fate (Schicksalsgemeinschaft). By contrast, but in some respects parallel to Liberal Jews, Zionists tended to refer to their ideal Jewish community in terms that directly paralleled the German national ideal of “national community” (Volksgemeinschaft) or “national body” (Volkskörper). Though differences between Zionist and non-Zionist visions of the Jewish future certainly remained, these new articulations of community

3

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Introduction

nevertheless bore a surprising degree of similarity. To capture this commonality, I use the term social body to include the variety of visions Jews held for a new kind of community that bound the individual body in dynamic relation with a larger social one. Through organic metaphors, reformers across the religious divide understood a society that functioned as a social organism, with needs and interests that extended well beyond those of the atomized individual.7 Equally important, they linked the health of the individual body with that of the Jewish community. Thus, in contrast to what one historian of Weimar Jews has labeled the “divisive landscape of German Jewry,” the notion of a Jewish social body calls attention to a heretofore neglected dimension of German-Jewish selfperception: that among a degree of ideological disunity, there existed an overarching unity of intent not merely to relieve social distress but to reorder Jewish society and manage it as a coherent whole.8 The idea of a Jewish social body that was subject to intervention and treatment was taken directly from social and medical discourses about the health of the nation. Against this background, this book shows how Jews, many of whom had gained knowledge and expertise as professionals in the fields of social welfare and medicine, mobilized discourses devised to strengthen the German nation on behalf of the Jewish community. What is particularly striking in this regard is that social reformers’ impulse for a new expression of Jewish particularism did not depend on the surrender of their Germanness. Instead, through a dialectical dynamic of Jewish assimilation, Weimar Jews forged a new notion of Jewish difference out of the raw materials of German culture. Thus, rather than viewing assimilation as an appropriation of external elements to some kind of essential Jewish culture, Jews also expressed their uniqueness “in an idiom always acquired from their environment,” as Amos Funkenstein has argued.9 Like other Germans, Jews who worked in the social and medical professions viewed the strengthening of the family, the attempt to increase reproduction, the need for expanding welfare, and the rehabilitation of orphaned and delinquent youth as a crucial means of redeeming the German nation and restoring its national spirit. But in this process, self-identified Jews, who were deeply rooted in non-Jewish middle-class German society and culture and saw themselves as fully “German,” utilized the ideas and methods of contemporary social pol-

Introduction

itics as a means of significantly expanding the scope, authority, and distinctiveness of the Jewish community. Thus, we see in this period not only the evolution of “Germans into Nazis,” to use Peter Fritzsche’s notable formulation, but a simultaneous development of Germans into Jews.10 This dynamic of dialectical assimilation led Jewish social reformers, together with lay people, to work toward the creation of an increasingly separate sphere of Jewish social, philanthropic, and educational engagement, even as these Jewish interpretations in some ways disrupted the promotion of a specifically German national solidarity and social cohesion that discourses about national health were intended to produce. Accordingly, Jewish medical and social welfare experts transformed notions of the ideal German family, healthy bodily and reproductive practices, and the relationship of these practices to the shaping of community while subverting their integrative function. I argue that in doing so, they reinforced the demarcation of the Jewish people as a social entity distinct from the larger German polity both on the level of the individual embodied Jewish subject and on the level of an incarnation of a new Jewish body politic within the boundaries of the state itself. In its concern with the question of assimilation, this work builds on a body of literature that has substantially reassessed older notions of assimilation by examining the emergence of what the Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld first identified as a post-assimilation Jewish identity.11 Until fairly recently, the concept of assimilation in Jewish historiography had become nearly synonymous with a unilinear process of identity loss. Because earlier histories of Weimar Jewry tended to emphasize anti-Semitism and communal dissolution as a prelude to the Final Solution, Weimar had assumed a generally negative image in Jewish historiography.12 In this oncedominant historical narrative, Weimar symbolized the last full bloom of a decadent assimilationism before German Jewish history was to wither and die. Read often through the lens of 1933, Weimar becomes the final denouement at the end of a one-way trajectory of assimilation that began with Emancipation, peaked in Weimar, and was tragically repudiated with National Socialism. More recent works in Jewish historiography have thus sought to avoid the pitfalls of hindsight by attempting to consider Weimar on its own

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Introduction

terms. Without denying the existence of either anti-Semitism or internal disintegrative trends such as disassociation from the community, intermarriage, and conversion, historians have nonetheless begun to uncover and document a strong impulse for the renewal of community, including perhaps most significantly what Michael Brenner has called a renaissance of Jewish culture.13 But this newer literature on the Weimar Republic has still largely overlooked Jewish activities taking place outside the purview of politics, religion, and culture as they have been traditionally defined.14 Given the remarkable productivity of the Jewish social realm, this neglect is particularly unfortunate. Within the fourteen years of the Weimar Republic, the Jewish community created a stunning array of welfare programs and social institutions addressed to the needs of nearly every stage of life. Founding innovative national organizations, convening conferences, and generating scientific studies, Weimar Jews significantly expanded the network of welfare provision and opportunities for social intervention carried out by representatives of both state and community. While for some Jews, the attraction to modern social work reflected a more secular Jewish undertaking, for others, social work remained informed by religious commitments yet refocused attention on the bonds of Jewish ethnic attachment.15 In both cases, the pragmatism of the social sphere by no means desacralized the task at hand. Central to this book’s argument is that an engagement in improving, normalizing, and regulating the social sphere not only helped to bring a unity of purpose to the community but also constituted a new kind of holy work for Weimar Jews.16 Despite this shift away from the dominant focus on “high culture” and intellectual production, a sustained analysis of Jewish communal activity in the social realm still calls for a reconsideration of the relationship between Jewish self-perception, liberalism, and Bildung. George Mosse’s argument that Bildung—usually translated as self-education or self-cultivation—had become the religion of newly emancipated German Jews was critical for refocusing as well as complicating our understanding of assimilation and identity formation. Because Jewish Emancipation coincided with the period of the German Enlightenment, Mosse demonstrated how Jews infused their Jewish frameworks with the substance of (liberal) German culture. Following Mosse, by the time of the Weimar

Introduction

Republic, German Jewry’s hold on the classical Enlightenment ideals associated with Bildung was far firmer than the rest of German society: while Christian Germany slid into irrationalism and xenophobia, Weimar Jews still held on to nineteenth-century notions of liberalism. As a community of Jews “beyond Judaism,” Weimar Jews had become the “sole custodians of Humboldt’s ideal of Bildung.”17 The importance of Mosse’s thesis for German-Jewish history is evident in the number of productive revisions that have been subsequently introduced by other scholars.18 Germans into Jews reconsiders Mosse’s rather dichotomous conceptualization of Weimar’s anachronistic, though in his view highly desirable, Jewish Bildungsbürgertum (cultivated bourgeoisie) on the one hand and Romantic counterreactions to liberal ideals, including Zionism and the Jewish youth movement, on the other.19 In contrast to these two poles, the Jews discussed in this study forged a synthesis of Jewishness and Germanness that neither abandoned reason and science nor lost an optimistic faith in human nature. In fact, it drew from another body of liberal social thought that included the disciplines related to social reform that were gaining influence as they became allied with, and institutionalized by, the welfare state. Hence, there was another face of liberalism in the Weimar Republic that allowed Jews to remain true to their liberal ideals even as their version of liberalism drew from discourses of national improvement and stressed the collective over the individual and the organic Gemeinschaft over the mechanistic ties characteristic of modernity. Not only Zionists, as is normally assumed, but increasingly also Liberal and religious Jews held visions of a new Jewish social body that was propelled by a sense of both cultural pessimism and utopian optimism. Thus, unlike Mosse’s Bildungsbürgertum, who reputedly sought to transcend all differences in nationality and religion, these Jews consciously sought to reassert a Jewish ethnic particularism within the framework of the Weimar welfare state. The underexamined spheres of family, welfare, and reproduction also bring into focus the important gender dimensions of this study. Consistent with contemporary feminist notions of “social motherhood,” middle-class Jewish women employed the idea of maternalism to expand their role in the Jewish public sphere through the professionalization of social work. As the primary agents of social work, women became

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Introduction

key practitioners in the increasingly valued arena of social policy by bringing their “motherly” qualities to bear upon the problems of other families within the Jewish community and the nation as a whole. This expanded the “women’s sphere” to include the elimination of social ills and the revitalization of the Jewish social body; Jewish women were thus assigned—but also took upon themselves—a set of social duties that combined biological and social motherhood. Thus, to the degree that the social sphere had become an increasingly important arena for the Jewish social and religious engagement during the Weimar Republic, this new sphere was founded on a clear gendered division of private and public labor. The merging of the tasks of social and biological motherhood placed women at the very center of the postwar project of remaking both the German nation and the Jewish community.20 In addition to reassessing the nature of assimilation from the vantage point of the social realm, this work also seeks to redress the invisibility of German Jews as a collectivity in German historiography. That historians of Germany have underplayed Jewish difference should hardly be surprising since the weight of German history virtually crushes any notion of “Jewish difference.” The Nazi policy of defining the Jewishness of its victims without regard to their own sense of identity has made scholars wary of attributing Jewish identities to historical actors. As a consequence, however, anti-Semitism became the prime signifier of Jewish “difference” within narratives of German history. Despite the valuable contribution of a significant body of literature on anti-Semitism, we know much less about the social processes by which Jews negotiated the challenge of trying to remain at once fully German and deeply Jewish. Jews are conspicuously absent, for example, in the recent German literature on gender, the body, and the Weimar welfare state, surfacing first, it seems, as the post-1933 victims of Nazi racial policy.21 In the otherwise rich and nuanced discussions of Weimar social policy, a highly visible and conflict-ridden sector of Weimar political and social life in which Jews played an active role, historians have relegated Jewish welfare work to the margins. Though Jews as individuals may be readily included in accounts of the period, Jewish collective existence is all but excluded from the larger narratives of postwar Germany. The end result is that in Weimar scholarship, at least within the broad domain of social policy, Jews have

Introduction

achieved the mythic assimilation that they never fully attained during the Weimar period. Because of the relative invisibility of the Jewish community within recent Weimar histories, the absence of Jews as Jews adds to the urgency of reintegrating Jews as a collectivity into German history. The contributions of such prominent German-Jewish figures in Weimar social work, sex reform, and social hygiene as Siddy Wronsky, Felix Theilhaber, Gustav Tugendreich, and Henriette Fürth are well known, but their rendering of German social policy within a specifically Jewish sphere of social life produced new and particularistic meanings that have yet to be explored.22 By 1933, of course, Jews had become marginalized by the Nazi state and were the targets of combined racial and social policies that originated in the late nineteenth century. But for the period before the Nazis came to power, this work restores Jews to their position as agents in German history and not simply as victims. The grand plans and visions for the social and biological regeneration of Jewish society proposed by these otherwise well-known figures does not, then, merely comprise a chapter in the history of Weimar Jews but belongs within the larger history of German social welfare and social policy.

Biopolitics and the Social Just as this study of Weimar Jews is situated within both German and Jewish historiographies, it also forms part of a growing corpus of work that has focused on the social as a concept and object of science in European history. Appearing in the early nineteenth century with the first dislocations of the modern industrial economy, the “social” represented an inherently problematic realm, populated by collectivities—among them, women, adolescents, and workers—that posed a disturbance to the existing bourgeois order.23 In Germany, the social quickly emerged as the locus for middle-class anxieties over poverty and its manifestations in the form of crime, poor sanitation, youth delinquency, family dissolution, and the immorality that was believed to be associated with these. Although there have certainly been social and economic upheavals prior to the modern period, the “social,” as it was invoked in the

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Introduction

nineteenth century, implied a state of enduring crisis.24 In its very definition, the social came to designate, according to Gilles Deleuze, “a new terrain, a ‘particular sector’ in which, in the course of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of problems came to be grouped together, a ‘sector’ comprising specific institutions and an entire body of qualified personnel.”25 The social realm was thus defined as much by crises as it was by the ability of experts to design far-reaching solutions to address them. In this connection, Foucault’s theory of governmentality or biopolitics provided a crucial spur for the production of scholarly works examining the social realm. Biopolitics refers to the entire sphere of activity devoted to promoting the health, reproduction, and welfare of the population. As many works since Foucault have come to demonstrate, the state sought to manage the social through “the politics of life” as a way to maximize the strength and efficiency of the population.26 The social realm thus became the locus for monitoring the physical and social health of the population and, as a result, the chief site for biopolitical interventions. Although many Jewish histories have dealt in one way or another with topics that are encompassed by biopolitics and the social—poverty, economics, welfare, reproduction, assimilation, and the family—historians have often neglected to consider the “social” and the surrounding discourses as a distinctly modern construct embedded with pessimistic diagnoses of disorder and prescriptions for social intervention. In place of historicization, many scholars have instead uncritically accepted the trope of decline and the accompanying portraits of social and demographic problems as “actual” problems to be either confirmed or rejected rather than as new conceptualizations of modern society elaborated by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jews. Even today, some scholars continue to draw upon the same arguments that Jewish communal leaders formulated over a century ago, either basing their research on statistics produced in the nineteenth century or relying on similar uses of statistics to “prove” how dire the circumstances of modern Jewry have become. I certainly do not mean to argue that all constructions of social problems, statistics, or the social realities derived from them have no meaning but rather that they did, in fact, have specific meanings, as new forms of knowledge that were produced at a particular historical moment.27 A key aim of this work, therefore, is to historicize assumptions

Introduction

about the social and social decline that were shared by Weimar Jews and non-Jews across the political and social spectrum, to illustrate the degree to which crisis is indeed in the eye of the beholder.28 It is the Jewish engagement with constructing a specifically Jewish social realm in parallel with the German one that is of greatest interest in the larger context of biopolitics and the social in Germany. For although biopolitics is fundamentally bound up with the development of the modern state, this study explores how a minority group within such a state utilized biopolitical discourses and institutions to execute the state’s work yet, at the same time, distinguished itself from the rest of the population. At one level, Jewish biopolitical discourses and practices mirrored the actions of the state, where Jewish experts utilized a variety of sciences to help ensure the long-term interests of the state through stabilizing their community. Hence, biopolitics exercises its coercive dimension at the hands of Jewish reformers, who attempted to mold human material by resocializing deviant youth, raising Jewish women’s fertility, and changing Jewish occupational and marriage patterns. It is also important, however, to recognize the noncoercive side of biopolitics, to consider, for example, those practices and discourses that social actors drew upon because they offered the very real possibility for social relief and material improvement.29 But Jewish communal leaders and social workers did not intervene in the social sphere solely on the state’s behalf; they were also pursuing an agenda independent of it. Thus, at the broadest level, we may think about Jewish biopolitics as an important strategy employed by Weimar Jews to address the modern concern with sustaining the Jews as a viable and distinct group. Indeed, if biopolitics represents one of the fundamental categories by which scholars now understand modernity, as Edward Dickinson has suggested, then we can discern from the case of Weimar Jews how biopolitics and the social have become central to the shaping of Jewish modernity.30 A reconsideration of German biopolitics that renders Jews its agents, and not only its victims, also addresses the scholarship that concerns the relationship between the fractured Weimar democracy and the ascent of the Nazis. Much of the recent literature on welfare, family, and reproductive policy during the Weimar Republic has sought to identify the

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Introduction

intellectual and institutional continuities between Weimar social policy and Nazi racial policies. In this context, the work of Detlev Peukert was centrally important in setting the stage for this focus.31 Peukert’s examination of youth welfare policy during the Weimar Republic shows that the utopian plans of youth welfare experts to reform wayward youth through an ambitious application of new social pedagogical methods gave way, at the end of the 1920s, to increasing pessimism about the possibility of reform. Coinciding with the period of rationing and want accompanying the Great Depression, the ambition to remake youth led to prioritizing those seen as most worthy of the investment of resources and paved the way for the exclusion—and eventual murder—of entire subgroups of the population.32 Increasingly, however, historians have begun to challenge the assumption of such direct lines of continuity from Weimar to Hitler, insisting on the importance of distinguishing ruptures as much as continuities and demonstrating the crucial differences between liberal and conservative uses of social, racial, and eugenic discourses and practices.33 Incorporating some of the specifically Jewish uses of biopolitics brings another voice to this discussion, reinforcing the need for the construction of a layered and nuanced narrative of the relationship between Weimar racial and social policy and its relationship to Nazism. The book begins by examining how the “crisis of the family,” as it was called in the 1920s, was closely bound up with concerns for the health of the nation. The absence of fathers during the war, challenges posed by the “New Woman,” generational conflict, and what was called the “wilding of youth” led observers to conclude that the strength and continuity of the family was seriously under threat. As the locus of biological and social reproduction, the family was held up as the ultimate basis for national fitness. In accordance with the prevalent biological metaphor of the family as the “cell of the nation,” many Weimar Jews drew a parallel conclusion that the Jewish family was the foundational unit of the Jewish people. Chapter 1 analyzes how Jews reworked the widely accepted notion of a postwar crisis of the family to reflect their concerns about the continued strength and viability of the Jewish community. Like other Germans, Jews viewed their efforts at strengthening the family as a contribution to German national regeneration, but they also considered the

Introduction

family to be the most promising means by which to revive the Jewish people from what many predicted would be German Jewry’s precipitous and inevitable decline. The interrelationship between the German and German-Jewish notions of family crises serves as a starting point for considering the tensions between assimilation and dissimilation and the ways in which these connect with the broader reinterpretation of national and communal affinities. Chapter 2 turns from the broader social context of the family to the biological discourses informing and inflecting the family’s central position in Weimar Jewish self-perception. In particular, Chapter 2 examines a Jewish vision of pronatalism that sought to harmonize the broader German imperatives of reproductive policy with an emphasis on specifically Jewish religious values. Long-standing anxieties about declining national birthrates and changing social mores in Germany led social commentators during the Weimar Republic to conclude that the emancipated “New Woman” was on a “birthstrike” that threatened to diminish the strength and health of the German population. If Weimar epitomized the modern belief that a scientific approach could provide solutions to even the most intractable social problems, then the rational assessment of the social and reproductive functions of mothers necessarily bestowed upon women, as “mothers of the nation,” a central role in rebuilding German and Jewish society. With a new emphasis on biology and reproductivity in the postwar period, Jewish women’s bodies became important sites for potential reform and intervention. Feminist leaders joined rabbis and eugenicists in calling for an increased Jewish birthrate, thus often harmonizing the bionationalist dictates of pronatalism with those of Jewish tradition. Traditional religious laws for the regulation of sexuality, for example, were reinterpreted by both traditional and nonpracticing Jews as the key to Jewish survival and the foundation of a new Jewish sexual hygiene. In a similar way, they invested biblical teachings with new moral authority. Indeed, the very question of the survival of the Jews as a group, once a matter of religious faith, had become, by the twentieth century, a biological one. Through the combined application of social engineering and social control, I show how this new form of Jewish survivalism, one that collapsed biological and moral “truths” into a

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Introduction

kind of Jewish biomorality, represented a nascent biologically inclined Jewish social imagination. In the Jewish communal drive to produce a physically and socially distinct social body that established the bodily boundaries of Jewishness, both male and female commentators often cast women as both the problem and solution, embodying the threat of a barren future and the promise of collective renewal. Chapter 3 turns to a broader examination of social welfare as a means of facilitating the social and biological rejuvenation of German Jews. Following the war, the entire spectrum of religiously and politically defined welfare organizations viewed the welfare sector as a potential means for molding a new German national community. In response to the acute social and economic crises affecting broad sectors of the German population, modern Jewish social work provided not only a response to genuine need but also a basis and a blueprint for expanding the scope and authority of the Jewish community. As the government and private welfare organizations expanded both their influence and cooperation, social work became an instrumental part of the state apparatus and remained part of a larger scientific vision that foresaw the rational reorganization of society according to the most modern methods. Utilizing contemporary concepts from national economy and the social sciences, Jewish social workers enlisted the concept of “social policy” (Sozialpolitik) to justify the expansion of the parameters that demarcated the extent of the community’s interests, extending its authority into spheres previously held to be beyond its purview. The founding of German Jewry’s first national Jewish welfare organization in 1917, the Central Welfare Agency for German Jews (Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden [ZWSt]) best exemplifies the institutionalization of this new Weimar communitarian spirit. Pivotal to the operation of this sphere of state and communal activity were Jewish women. As the public realization of women’s “natural calling,” social work was thus not limited merely to ministering to the needy but functioned to transform a more narrowly conceived religious community into an expansive network of social institutions. From a consideration of social work in the broadest terms, the last two chapters shift their focus specifically to youth welfare. Considered the most important of all branches of welfare work, youth welfare was also a leading sector in the development of welfare policy more generally.

Introduction

Because youth welfare was intimately bound up with larger social and political concerns, I examine how social workers projected both their bourgeois ideals of Jewishness and their aspirations for creating a new kind of Jew onto those young people under their care. For Jews in particular, the subpopulation known as “endangered youth” appeared to offer the greatest potential for being transformed through social intervention and thus presented the possibility of reinforcing a Jewish community in decline. Chapter 4 thus takes as a case study the pupils that were incarcerated and subjected to strict regimes of discipline at two institutions created specifically for “endangered” Jewish youth—the boys’ home at Repzin (which later moved to Wolzig) and the girls’ home at Köpenick. I compare the gender- and class-specific social norms that determined how the violations committed by girls and boys were defined and how their “social therapy” aimed at bringing about their investment in middle-class norms and ideals. Though the institutions were Jewish, as evidenced by their adherence to ritual observance, the goals for the rehabilitation of these young people were virtually identical to those of non-Jewish youth welfare programs: the creation of economically and socially productive members of society. While institutions such as Repzin/Wolzig and Köpenick sought to reform “endangered youth” along the lines of Jewish bourgeois respectability, other approaches endeavored to create a new kind of Jew who was at once deeply nationalist and strongly opposed to the bourgeois model. Chapter 5, therefore, focuses on several youth welfare experiments that were designed to transform a traumatized orphan population into the cadre of a new Jewish nation. In contrast to the goals of correctional education, which aimed to make “endangered youths” into useful members of German, middle-class society, the programs discussed in Chapter 5 set as their goal the transformation of Jewish society itself. The Jewish educators discussed in Chapter 5, most significantly Siegfried Bernfeld and Siegfried Lehmann, consciously positioned themselves outside the rubric of the Jewish communal welfare establishment and were deeply influenced by the youth movement and a radical spirit of communitarianism. Employing psychoanalysis as a means by which to heal the psyches of troubled Jewish youth, these educators believed that the absence of emotional bonds to the family would allow orphans to fix their emotional

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Introduction

attachments more powerfully to the Jewish Volksgemeinschaft. At the heart of these programs was the goal of socializing young Jews, in settings outside their families, in the service of the Jewish collectivity. The educators sought to counter the alienation of the city with the intimacy of community and labored to transcend the fractious nature of Jewish communal life by placing Jewish social bonds above partisan differences. Chapter 5 thus illustrates how the efforts to heal the social body of German Jews continued to be marked by simultaneous engagement with discourses of German social reform and a revivified Jewish particularity. In all of these chapters, it is my intention to span the often unnatural divide between German and German-Jewish history. While a study of Jewish communal attempts to strengthen the family, expand welfare, and increase reproduction most certainly forms part of the history of Jewish communal life in the Weimar Republic, it also bears significance for German history more broadly by bringing into sharper relief the relationship between the periphery and center in German social life, as well as highlighting the unintended consequences of normative discourses when they are applied by social groups that were situated, at least in some ways, on the margins. This book thus represents an attempt to restore the open-ended, dynamic—even paradoxical—historical moment of Weimar into narratives of Jewish history. In doing so, I have consciously avoided brandishing Jewish birth and intermarriage rates as sure evidence of “decline” or pointing to the rise of Nazism as the definitive measure of the success or failure of Weimar Jewry. Only when we recognize the coexistence of progressive and conservative forces, acknowledge the deep and genuine impulse for collectivist solutions at a time of advancing integration, and begin to reflect anew on the simultaneity of Jews’ insider and outsider status can we hope to gain a richer and more complex understanding of Jewish communal existence during this period.34 In this way, we can begin to restore to German history the portrait of a vibrant and evolving Jewish collectivity, one whose presence in Weimar has been largely effaced. In the broadest sense, then, this is a reflection on the interpenetration of German and German-Jewish identities, and it is my aim to trace some of the complex ways by which Germanness came to constitute Jewishness at this crucially important crossroads in German and Jewish history.

O n e “As the Family Goes, So Goes the Nation”

In 1925, Thomas Mann described the perspective of one of his protagonists, Thomas Buddenbrook, as entailing a “return to the orgiastic freedom of individualism.” A second-generation patriarch in Mann’s chronicle of three generations of a bourgeois family, Buddenbrooks, Thomas abandons the dream of a vicarious immortality in his own posterity as “blind, childish folly!” and throws off the mantle of fatherhood to revel in an indulgent egoism: What can my son do for me—what need have I of a son? Where shall I be when I am dead? Ah, it is so brilliantly clear, so overwhelmingly simple! I shall be in all those who have ever, do ever, or ever shall say “I”—especially, however, in all those who say it most fully, potently, and gladly!1

In this arresting assertion of a new order of social affiliation, Mann brilliantly illuminates the conceptual changes that were transforming Weimar society. Rather than the traditional emphasis on family or blood relations, Thomas Buddenbrook finds meaning and vitality in an assertion of a sort of collective individualism with the result that the past, present, and future collection of “I’s” becomes his new family and the ultimate basis for his or any legacy. Through Thomas Buddenbrook’s transitional position as the middle figure in the threegeneration chronicle, and the one perched on the edge of a profound reevaluation of the value and bases of kinship, Mann captures perfectly the sense of exuberant potential and concomitant anxiety that at turns animated and haunted the contemporary imagination of the Weimar family.

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Many observers and critics of Weimar social life echoed sentiments similar to those of Mann. A seemingly indiscriminate discarding of accepted social norms, coupled with a growing sense of individual autonomy, had “made middle-class marriage appear more than ever a questionable institution,” according to another literary chronicler of middle-class German life, Jakob Wassermann.2 Observers interpreted the inability of individuals to sustain a commitment to anything larger than themselves, to place the collective interest above the fulfillment of individual desire, as a malignant growth within the German social body, an underlying cause of its threatened disintegration. In tones still more ominous than Mann’s and Wassermann’s, Oswald Spengler predicted in The Decline of the West that the selfishness of urbanites in limiting their offspring would lead not only to their quantitative decline but ultimately to their extinction. Spengler’s conviction that urban man had forsaken the instinct to perpetuate himself through the institutions of family and race was indeed quite reminiscent of Mann’s. For both Spengler and Mann, urban civilization represented an “essentially metaphysical turn towards death.”3 The notion that the institution of the family was being undermined by the destructive spirit of modernity was part of a larger perception of decline accompanying social transformations that began in the nineteenth century. At the very heart of the interrelated set of social problems and cultural changes that social scientists, welfare experts, and religious leaders identified as the Weimar crisis of the family was the sense that the family failed to carry out many of its traditional social functions. The central transformations of modern society, social changes ensuing from industrialization, changing labor patterns, and the increasing role of the state to intervene in family life were factors that together contributed to the long-term changes in the role and functions of the family. More immediately, the social destabilization that took place in the wake of World War I further served to disrupt traditional patterns of family formation. During the war, 1.6 million men were lost, leaving nearly 2 million unmarriageable women to be counted among Weimar’s “surplus women” (Frauenüberschuss). The addition of 600,000 war widows to this situation rendered an ever-clearer verdict

“As the Family Goes, So Goes the Nation”

for Germans of all stripes that the family and its reputed ill health were in severe crisis and jeopardized the health of the nation. But there was no single Weimar crisis of the family any more than there was one Volksgemeinschaft. Catholics, Protestants, Socialists, and feminists rendered distinct though often overlapping diagnoses and prescribed various treatments for healing the German social body. The particularly Jewish version of the German crisis of the family represented a response to a similar set of social, cultural, economic, and political changes that were faced by other middle-class Germans. Jews, therefore, experienced, lived through, and perceived what they called the crisis of the family in a manner that reflected larger German middle-class concerns. But at the same time, Weimar Jews elaborated a particularly concentrated and discrete version of the crisis, one that joined many strands of the current debate with modern Jewish communal traditions concerning the Jewish family. Indeed, as Jewish historians have now established, the family had assumed a new significance for modern Jews: as a gendered means of embourgeoisement, as a defense against anti-Semitic charges of Jewish moral degeneracy, and as a potential source of attachment to Judaism or Jewishness that existed apart from formal participation in organized Jewish life.4 During the bourgeois nineteenth century, when the family had become the object of fascination and idealization for middleclass Germans, Jews’ preoccupation with the family laid the groundwork for the emergence of a post-religious Jewish identity. By the time of the Weimar Republic, the family and its purported crisis had become at once a symptom and symbol of the crisis of modern Jewry. Although the perception of crisis was undoubtedly a function of the real social distress experienced by Jewish families, an analysis of the collective reflections of Weimar’s Jewish communal leadership on the family suggests that, even beyond the social dislocations of the 1920s, there emerged a strong emphasis on the family and family ideal as a means of safeguarding Jewish group distinctiveness in the face of German-Jewish integration. If the internal crisis of Weimar Jewry was based on the idea that modernization and assimilation were leading to the disappearance of Jewish group difference, the crisis of the Jewish family debate served as an opportunity to accentuate and frame in new

19

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terms the uniqueness of the Jews. Paradoxically, perhaps, this ideology of Jewish uniqueness grew in significance precisely at a time when the fear of losing group distinctiveness was greatest. But what is perhaps most instructive about the sense of the crisis of the family for Weimar Jewry is how the categories of analysis were formed primarily by the non-Jewish world. Indeed, this ideology of the family illustrates particularly well what Katharina von Ankum has described as an important part of the overall Weimar Jewish project that was, in her words, to “construct a discourse of Jewish difference that would not contradict dominant German culture.”5 Weimar Jews argued that the family was unique precisely for its embodiment of contemporary German middleclass values. Thus, in addition to its almost universally resonant symbolic function as an object of nostalgic longing, the family represented for Jews one of the final markers of Jewish difference within the larger society, one of the last remaining areas of Jewish group distinctiveness. For Jews who had relinquished attachment to Judaism as a religious system, the family had become a proud standard-bearer for Jewish ethnic values. In a new age of nationalism, the family was becoming something of a homeland for the modern Jew. Looking at the interrelationship between the German and GermanJewish notions of family crises constitutes a perfect starting point for considering the tensions between assimilation and dissimilation in Weimar and the ways in which these connect with the broader reinterpretation of national and communal affinities. Exploring the ways in which Jews within the Jewish community experienced and responded to the perceived crisis of the family in a manner that at turns paralleled and diverged from the broader German experience shows how the struggle between communal and individual identities played out in multiple overlapping dimensions. Middle-class Germans linked their concern about the German family to the future strength and viability of the German nation. For their part, many Jews affirmed, even celebrated, their place within this new, more inclusive German nation while they simultaneously reserved their greatest concern for the crucial role the Jewish family would play in renewing German Jewry both in numbers and in the vitality of Jewish tradition.

“As the Family Goes, So Goes the Nation”

The Jewish Population in the Weimar Republic Like much that has characterized the history and culture of the Weimar Republic, Jews’ entrance into the new state was accompanied by a contradictory set of developments. At one level, Germany’s first true democracy promised greater opportunities for the cultural and social integration of Jews than ever before and propelled Jews into the center of Weimar culture and politics. Indeed, in the Republic, where “outsiders” became “insiders,” as Peter Gay formulated it, Jews were highly represented, though not dominant, in theater, music, modern art, literature, and cultural criticism.6 The granting of legal and fiscal equality to the Jewish community was a further legal indicator of Weimar’s promise. As we will see, German Jewry’s national welfare organization also became integrated into the infrastructure of the state and assumed equal footing with other nonsectarian and confessional organizations. But the potential and actual achievements of Weimar democracy were simultaneously called into question by the renewal of anti-Semitic activity that began in wartime and became even more entrenched during the early years of the Republic.7 With the prolongation of the war, the promise of acceptance that came from the Kaiser’s famous call for national unity that had given Jews hopes for genuine integration with the war effort quickly proved hollow. Beginning with the second year of the war, Jews were increasingly depicted as economic exploiters and profiteers, betraying the sacrifices of German men at war by amassing profit and enriching themselves on the home front. Recent research has added to this picture by tracing how such accusations extended to Jews’ purported exploitation of women and children on the domestic front as well. Belinda Davis has shown how Jews were blamed for food shortages on the home front and, in particular, Galician Jews for holding back valued food products from the rest of the population.8 The infamous Jewish census of 1916 symbolized the strong anti-Semitic sentiment being resurrected in German society that had permeated high government offices as well.9 Before and during the revolutionary period of 1918–1919 and in its aftermath, characterizations of the Jew as destructive revolutionary bent on destroying German society from within helped dampen many of the hopes Jews

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initially had at the outset of the war. Jews continued to be seen as the bearers of a decadent and threatening modern culture, and the “flood” of unwanted east European Jewish immigrants (Ostjudengefahr) was blamed for creating the conditions of Germany’s postwar poverty, unemployment, and crime. Thus, while anti-Semitism lost its force as a political and organized movement as it was during the imperial period, it became a potent social and cultural force during the Weimar years and there was a marked increase in anti-Semitic outlooks in broader sectors of the population.10 Two years into the Republic’s existence, the popular novelist Jakob Wassermann captured the painful predicament of the acculturated German Jew: “The unfortunate fact is that the Jew today is outlawed. If not in the juridical sense, at least in the popular mind.”11 If Weimar Jews had sufficient reason to be concerned about their social and economic position as the result of renewed anti-Semitism, Jews within the community entered the Republic with an already developed sense of crisis in relation to both declining population size and the potential for long-term communal sustainability. In 1918, the relative size of the Jewish population within the overall population of Germany had declined, reflecting a long-term downward trend in growth that had preceded the Weimar Republic but that would only be heightened in the ensuing fourteen years. At the beginning of the Republic, the Jewish population numbered approximately 550,000, roughly 0.9 percent of the population.12 While social scientists had begun to trace the decline in family size and the birthrates among Jews in the late nineteenth century, the most pronounced changes had taken place in the two decades prior to the Republic. Although we will see in the next chapter how Jewish leaders often attributed this decline to the moral and physical degeneration of the Jewish population, these changes must first be analyzed in relation to Jews’ status as a distinctive population subgroup consisting of overwhelmingly middle-class urban dwellers. The unique demographic and occupational group profile of the Jews meant that the Jewish population experienced many of the social changes associated with modernization earlier and with greater intensity than the rest of German society. Jews became the preeminent exemplars of excessive or hypermodernity, with their demographic contraction, high degree of mobility and urbanization, early use of birth control, altering of birth patterns, and embrace of urban

“As the Family Goes, So Goes the Nation”

values.13 By 1933, over half of the Jewish population lived in ten large cities of over 100,000 inhabitants, with nearly a third living in Berlin.14 One of the chief causes of this overall demographic contraction was the decrease in the birthrates of Jews, a change that had been set in motion in the previous century. Since the early 1880s, the Jewish population registered annual birthrates that were significantly lower than those of the rest of the population. In the 1880s, there were 27.9 births per thousand Jews, while the national birthrate in Germany overall was 37.1 per thousand. The period 1910–1913 saw a drop in the Jewish rate to 15 births per thousand, and this rate continued to obtain between 1920 and 1925.15 During the peak crisis period in 1930–1931, the Jewish birthrate plummeted to 7.2 per thousand, versus 16.2 in the general population.16 In contrast to the impact of these developments on the size and structure of the Jewish population, the impact of conversion to Christianity and the withdrawal of dissident Jews (Austritte) from the Gemeinde was relatively marginal during the years of the Weimar Republic.17 In 1921, for example, while 259 Jews converted out, 162 non-Jews, most of whom were women, converted to Judaism, rendering a net loss of 117 per year. The prime motivations for conversion by Jewish women appear to have been for the sake of entering a marriage with a non-Jew; for Jewish men, the reasons appear more varied: marrying out was sometimes a motive, but so were career advancement and a desire to avoid paying taxes to the community.18 Far more significant than conversion or Austritte for overall potential losses to the Jewish population during the Republic were interconfessional marriages. As opposed to anti-Semitism, which threatened, and to some degree succeeded, to roll back the hard-won achievements of Jewish integration, intermarriage symbolized its opposite: the loving embrace of Jews by non-Jews. The problem of intermarriage thus came to stand for the inherent contradiction faced by the predominant group of native-born acculturated and liberal Jews in Germany. Reflecting the successful social integration of the individual, intermarriage was a success that threatened to diminish the overall strength and integrity of an endogamously based Jewish collective existence. An important factor that shaped the constitution of the Jewish community in its demographic development, occupational profile, class

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structure, welfare activities, and political and religious orientation was the population subgroup whose members had most recently immigrated to Germany from eastern Europe. Arriving during the war either as forced laborers or laborers for hire, their already growing wartime numbers—35,000 according to some estimates—swelled immediately after the war as thousands more Jews fled eastern Europe in the wake of pogroms in Poland and the Ukraine.19 According to the 1910 census, 79,000 Jews from eastern Europe lived in Germany; by 1925, some 108,000 Jews were of foreign origin, the vast majority of whom came from eastern Europe. Jews from eastern Europe now constituted 19.1 percent of Germany’s Jewish population.20 Population experts noted, however, the importance of the east European Jewish immigrants, because of their higher fertility rates, in helping slow the demographic downturn of the native German-Jewish population. As a group that tended to immigrate to large cities, the east European population also increased German Jewry’s already disproportionately high concentration in metropolitan areas. In Berlin, for example, Jews from eastern Europe made up more than a quarter of the total Jewish population. Beginning in the late 1870s, German-Jewish leaders had been forced to contend with the presence of east European Jewish immigrants on German soil, and the record of the encounter between these two communities was one marked with ambivalence. As the Jewish community began to create institutions to deal with the problem of the Jewish migratory poor, a succession of Jewish communities initiated policies that offered support for east European Jews but also tried to direct them to find a permanent home elsewhere.21 Such ambivalence continued to characterize Jewish responses during the Weimar years as Ostjuden (east European Jews) made up a large proportion of Jewish welfare recipients and became an increasingly visible target for antiSemitism. But as was true also in earlier periods, east European Jews provided an important focus for Jewish solidarity, and during the 1920s, they became objects of policies that sought to transform and revitalize the Jewish community.22 For this reason, east European Jews occupied an important place in the operation of the welfare system, whose many institutions served this population in disproportionate measure.

“As the Family Goes, So Goes the Nation”

As the result of Jews’ distinctive occupational structure and economic profile, the economic crises that beset the Republic tended to exert their impact in ways that were distinct from that of the larger population as a whole. Jews continued their traditional concentration in commerce; in 1933, 61.27 percent of Jews held jobs in the commercial sector, compared with 18.4 percent of the general population.23 In the 1923 inflation, small and medium-size business owners were hit particularly hard, which, given Jews’ overrepresentation in this group, suggests they also suffered disproportionately.24 Although Jews were self-employed at a much higher rate than non-Jews, the dramatic rise in the number of Jewish white-collar workers represented a significant exception to this pattern. Between 1907 and 1933 the number of Jewish white-collar workers in Germany increased 133 percent, doubling from 10.8 to 21 percent of all Jews in the economy.25 This subgroup of white-collar workers, of which 34 percent were women, suffered a higher rate of unemployment than non-Jewish workers overall and at an earlier point in time.26 Among these white-collar workers, women were also losing their jobs at a higher rate than men.27 Old-age pensioners and the self-employed were also overrepresented in the Jewish population, and they too were affected more than other groups as they watched the value of their fixed incomes decline. While this book considers welfare and its significance for the project of remaking the Jewish social body in the following chapters, it is worthwhile to note at this juncture the role and significance of Jewish welfare services in helping mitigate the widening scope of need in the 1920s. Even though Jews had been generally better off than average Germans owing to their predominance in the middle class, twice as many Jews as non-Jews in 1925 received some form of welfare, amounting to 0.06 percent of the population receiving aid as opposed to 0.03 percent of the German population overall.28 This was probably the result of the Jewish community’s more extensive network of welfare services, the significant number of impoverished east European Jews, the higher number of selfemployed Jews, and the higher percentage of older and retired Jews living on fixed incomes. In Berlin, 30 percent of the entire budget of the Gemeinde was devoted to welfare.29 In many Jewish communities, the number of Jews receiving help from the local welfare office increased even in the period of relative economic stabilization, with applicants

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coming increasingly from the middle classes. While Rabbi Leo Baeck estimated that native German Jews accounted for approximately one third of all Jewish welfare recipients since 1918, in some communities the numbers were notably higher.30 In Mannheim, for example, 144 families in 1928 came from impoverished circumstances, whereas 135 came from the middle classes.31 Overall, then, the indicators outlined above point to the erosion of the standard of living of the Jewish middle classes as well as the eastern European underclass. Thus, as Monika Richarz has shown, in light of Jews’ remarkable ascent into the middle class during the Imperial period, German Jews entered the tumultuous Weimar years with an already articulated crisis consciousness, focused on concerns about their ability to sustain their social and economic ascent and about the survival of the Jews as a group.32

The Weimar Crisis of the Family The impact of World War I, together with the military defeat and revolution that followed, served to transform the notion of the family in crisis into a major social and political issue. The idea that the “loosening bonds of modern family life” were responsible for Germany’s unraveling social fabric had its roots in the larger sense of social crisis that had begun long before the Weimar period. Nevertheless, what became known as the “crisis of the family” during the period of the Weimar Republic represented an acceleration of these long-term developments that were exacerbated by the economic and social changes of these turbulent years. The overriding concern driving the Weimar crisis of the family was the idea that “traditional” values were in the process of being overturned. Much of what had once been routine and ordinary appeared to have been called into question, as accepted values appeared to become increasingly relativized.33 Events such as the inflation of 1923, for example, rendered the traditional values of thrift and delayed gratification meaningless and blurred class distinctions.34 Postwar cultural changes, as displayed particularly among the new urban class of white-collar workers and the revolutionary activity of a minority of young people,

“As the Family Goes, So Goes the Nation”

led to a widely recognized “generation gap,” and some of the new values of young people appeared to threaten parent-child relationships and traditional bases of authority. One of the most important areas in which there was the sense that traditional values were being overturned was the organization of gender roles. Because both middle- and workingclass families were organized by gender, any analysis of the crisis of the family must pay particular attention to actual and perceived changes in the organization of gender. The most dramatic changes to affect the structure of family life and the functioning of traditional gender roles had already begun during the war. Family life had been disrupted on the home front by the prolonged absence of fathers and older brothers and, in many cases, by the illness or incapacity of the mother. With the wartime absence of fathers alongside their postwar absence due to death or disability, mothers who were not already part of the workforce frequently had to leave their children while seeking temporary employment. To many observers, the prolonged wartime absence of fathers and the ensuing collapse of traditional institutions of authority were responsible for a rising trend of youthful insolence known as the “wilding of youth.” Perhaps most striking in this context was the claim by the Viennese psychoanalyst Paul Federn that World War I had brought about a “fatherless society.”35 The combination of absent fathers and mothers joining the workforce led observers to note a rise in male and female juvenile delinquency during and immediately after the war. By the early 1930s, over 60 percent of the national population of teenagers deemed “endangered youth” by the courts and placed in correctional education institutions came from families affected by divorce, separation, or the death of at least one of the parents.36 The case files of two correctional education homes for wayward Jewish youth founded by the German Jewish League of Communities (Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund) yield similar findings. In this regard, the circumstances of Jewish families in distress appear to have mirrored the situation in Germany as a whole. The social background of many Jewish families who sought to have their children admitted to Jewish welfare institutions for wayward youth illustrates this constellation of factors. The family profile of the young people admitted to these institutions often reflects the convergence of an

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absent or nonfunctioning father, a larger-than-average number of children, impoverished economic circumstances, and the poor health of the mother. One mother, a war widow with seven children, wrote to Jewish welfare authorities to request the admission of her daughter to the Jewish home for girls at Köpenick. In her letter, she described the problem behaviors of her daughter, explaining that she was “not in the position, either financially or health-wise, to educate and supervise such a difficult girl.” The health problems that prevented her from caring for her daughter were quite typical for women, especially for Jewish women: her nerves, she wrote, were “totally shot.”37 As payment, she planned to rely on another daughter’s wages. In the case of another family, a mother from Leipzig, writing in 1922 in reference to her sixteen-year-old son, analyzed the causes of her son’s delinquent behavior in accordance with the prevailing ideas associating delinquency with an absent father. “My husband died in 1918 when the boy was 12 years old. He was just at that age where he was most susceptible to all the positive and negative influences around him. At that crucial time, he had to do without the guidance and rearing of his father. I myself am so busy with the household responsibilities that are involved with caring for my large family that the boy is almost always left to his own devices. I do not know his friends, nor can I control what he does when he’s out with them.”38 Fathers also became single parents, although they did so less frequently than mothers. A contemporary study of the correctional education population of Wuppertal indicates that 14 percent of children lived with their mothers, whereas 2 percent lived with their fathers.39 Herr B., writing from Kattowitz in 1919, sought to have his son admitted to the Jewish educational institute at Ahlem, which specialized in training boys for agricultural work. When Herr B. learned that the fourteen-year-old Hans was not eligible to enter an institution for “normal” children, he was told that his son needed more “basic care and rearing” given that his influence on his son was lacking during his years of military service. Herr B. noted that his wife, who had since died, suffered at the time from a chronic illness and could not care for Hans.40 In the case of Herr B., even as the father assumed full care of his children, education professionals attributed the son’s poor behavior to the result of the father’s wartime absence, not to the loss of his mother.

“As the Family Goes, So Goes the Nation”

The recognition that changing gender roles within the family constituted a crisis of the family led social scientists to make the family into an increasingly frequent subject of scientific study. In 1925, leading members of the bourgeois women’s movement founded the German Academy for Social and Pedagogic Women’s Work, which, in addition to training social workers, also produced scholarly research that included a series entitled The Condition and Decline of the Modern Family. The thirteen individual monographs, appearing between 1930 and 1932, analyzed in sociological and psychological terms the economic and moral factors contributing to the weakening of the German family. The investment in the unquestioned superiority of the bourgeois family and its typical gender organization in the work of scholars associated with the academy is quite striking. In the introduction to her 1930 monograph Family Life Today, Alice Salomon, the founder of modern social work in Germany, relates the loss of family stability to the decline of the patriarchal family model. If family cohesion was compromised in any way, it meant, in Salomon’s view, that the educational influence of the parents had failed and that “the children have not been taught to recognize the authority of their parents, as was the norm in the patriarchal family.”41 The monographs reflect the nearly universal consensus concerning the need for the shoring up of the patriarchal family in accordance with bourgeois ideals in which mother and father had equally important but distinct gender roles. Exacerbating the postwar concern about the loss of parental authority, particularly that of men, was the fact that the economic crises of the postwar period often left fathers unable to fulfill their prescribed role as breadwinners. There was much vilification of “double earners,” that is, married women who worked outside the home. Yet with such a volatile job market, many women realized they could no longer rely on their husbands’ income. As one woman, writing in the newspaper of the middle-class feminist League of Jewish Women ( Jüdischer Frauenbund), asked, “How do we know today whether our husbands will be able to support us tomorrow?”42 Others made the case that mass unemployment contributed to the erosion of a father’s influence over his children. “When a father is unable to fulfill his duty as provider,” noted one observer, “his authority within the family is at risk.”43 The absence of

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the mother, too, who sometimes helped support the family, was also believed to negatively affect the rearing of the children and, in turn, to contribute to the declining cultural authority of men. If men were unable to exercise the authority associated with their role as breadwinners within the nuclear family, the perception of changes in women’s roles at home and in the workforce were often portrayed as the heart of the problem. The two most potent images reflecting popular anxiety and resentment about female employment were the “New Woman” and the “double earners.” Much research has shown that, despite widely circulated images of the new female white-collar worker, women’s economic roles did not fundamentally shift during the Weimar Republic.44 Women’s participation in the workforce certainly became more visible as they moved out of the agricultural sector into more visible positions as clerks, salesgirls, and switchboard operators in the public sector.45 Making their presence still more conspicuous was their increasingly visible role in the new rationalized workplace. But even in light of these changes, female employment rose only slightly. By 1925, 35.6 percent of all women were working, in comparison to 31.2 percent in 1907, while two thirds of white-collar workers were single women under the age of twenty-five.46 Despite the relatively small increase in the proportion of women working outside the home, the absolute number of working women contributed to the sense of a changing gender bourgeois order and the social relations that it was supposed to guarantee. Moreover, the high visibility of small numbers of women within academia, politics, and the welfare bureaucracy of the state changed popular perceptions of women’s status and called attention to the range of possibilities that were becoming open to women.47 Nevertheless, the deteriorating economic situation and the rise in male unemployment led to a resurgence of latent ill-feeling against married working women, particularly during the peak periods of economic crisis. The inflation of 1923 even led single women to join men in the call for the dismissal of employed married women.48 The iconic power of the figure of the New Woman, who, according to her image in popular media, was independent, assertive, and in control of her body, triggered the fears of conservatives, for whom she symbolized the collapse of the patriarchal system and traditional sexual mores. As part of the new female genera-

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tion to emerge after the war demanding civil and sexual rights, the New Woman pioneered a lifestyle that indeed challenged traditional roles. The image of the new, emancipated, single, and sexually liberated woman, for both her detractors and supporters, symbolized the rapid social and ideological changes taking place after World War I.49 Within the Jewish community, the provocative image of the New Woman lurked behind the most heated discussions about women, work, and the family. Many of the most fundamental middle-class critiques of the New Woman appeared in internal communal critiques of Jewish women: the Jewish woman was viewed as being particularly selfindulgent, failing to consider the greater communal good when making personal decisions, indulging her own desires for personal fulfillment and sexual activity, and abandoning traditional sexual morality. More socially conservative Jews invoked her as the counter-ideal to the selfsacrificing and maternal Jewish woman, projecting their concerns about the excesses of individualism onto her. A key charge uniting such critiques of the Jewish woman was that she had surrendered her responsibility for the family and had thus abandoned the Jewish community. Indeed, the most extensive scholarly study done of central European Jewish “New Women,” by Harriet Freidenreich, confirms this impression of the Jewish New Woman as being, for the most part, uninterested in Judaism and Jewish life.50 How much more ironic, then, that while Jewish community leaders denounced the (Jewish) New Woman as rejecting Judaism, non-Jewish contemporaries in the larger German cultural sphere often read the bobbed hair, bold fashions, and sexual assertiveness of the New Woman as dangerously Jewish. But despite the communal critiques of Jewish women, many Jewish women themselves appeared to have resisted such polarized notions of the New Woman, indicating that the reception and meaning of the New Woman was hardly monolithic. Claudia Prestel makes the case that many married Jewish women combined intellect and motherliness, seeking to contribute to society both from within and outside the home. She even suggests that an ideal of the “New Jewish Woman” was emerging, who was committed to Judaism and the Jewish people and showed herself capable of significant self-sacrifice even as she displayed a modern attitude toward marriage, family, and sexuality.51 The New Woman was thus by

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no means a figure whose character or characteristics were at all agreed upon. What she was for certain was a vehicle by which various contending groups endeavored to articulate their vision of the impact of changing gender roles in the home and society as a whole. As a result, the New Woman proved a crucial touchstone for the diagnosis and treatment of Weimar’s perceived crisis of the family. If the New Woman generally appeared as a single, childless woman who lacked a commitment to Judaism, it is clear that a newly articulated ideal of the “New Jewish Mother” was emerging within the Jewish community that combined some of the liberated features of the New Woman while retaining her commitment to Jewish community and certain middle-class values. Since the late nineteenth century, in fact, the call for “proper” childrearing had been advanced as part of the attempt to professionalize motherhood. In many ways, this approach can be seen as an expression of the same emphases on rationalization and the reconceptualization of female roles that gave rise to the New Woman. Childrearing formed a complex but crucial area of female expertise that, by this time, was supposed to be based on more than simply a mother’s “natural instinct.” Merging modern, antiauthoritarian notions of childrearing with ideas about the traditional Jewish mother, many modern Jewish young women saw in the cultivation of both the “modern” and “Jewish” aspects of motherhood an important antidote to the deepening sense of social crisis that overshadowed the Jewish community and the German nation as a whole. One important aspect of the “New Jewish Motherhood” was to avoid authoritarian childrearing practices in favor of more egalitarian relationships. By the 1920s, prescriptive literature in Jewish newspapers reflected a new readiness to grant adolescents the independence they demanded.52 “Youth today,” noted the Berlin pediatrician and social hygienist Hermann Stahl, “force their parents to understand them. If they don’t, they risk becoming alienated from their children.”53 Jewish women’s newspapers exhorted mothers to cultivate close friendships with their children as a way of bridging the differences of life experience.54 The thoroughly modern Jewish mother was thus responsible for ensuring effective and loving communication with her children, even to the extent of becoming her child’s best friend.

“As the Family Goes, So Goes the Nation”

While one of the traditional responsibilities of Jewish mothers had been to help arrange and facilitate the marriage of their daughters, Jewish women who witnessed firsthand the uncertain economic conditions during the Republic expanded their notion of motherly responsibilities to include helping their daughters find a profession.55 Jewish women thus became, more than before, mediators between the domestic and professional identities of their daughters. While mothers were advised to help ease their daughter’s path into professional life by helping make a career choice best suited to her specific personality and skills, one of the key means by which Jewish feminists and welfare experts sought to help young women find viable livelihoods also served, not coincidentally, to educate young women to be professional mothers. Placing a renewed emphasis on training young women in the field of “domestic science,” Jewish feminists sought to secure their daughters’ financial future while reforming German Jewry’s skewed occupational distribution by steering Jews away from commercial professions. At the same time, these women went to considerable lengths to demonstrate that domestic science was neither a demeaning nor a lower-class job (which it had traditionally been), emphasizing the intellectual challenge inherent in managing a household, learning the science of nutrition, and mastering bookkeeping. In choosing this path, feminists identified the important contribution that young Jewish women would be making to the cause of managing and improving the Jewish population as a whole, aiding the cause of population policy by assuming the task as protector of health, furthering the well-being of the population, and being an educator of her people.56 With more young women working in the field of domestic science, feminists also directed a new generation of Jewish women to focus on women’s roles as responsible consumers. The image of the New Woman as consumer in Weimar Germany converged with older critiques made within and outside the Jewish community of Jewish women’s ostentatious displays of wealth and led to a renewed emphasis on the role of Jewish mothers to counteract the negative association of Jewish women with excessive consumption. In this connection, male Jewish commentators in particular revived a gendered critique of assimilation that focused specifically on women, arguing that increased secularization

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had led Jewish women away from traditional Jewish values of modesty toward materialism and empty displays of excess. Earlier in the century, Martin Buber had already linked the decadent Jewish “luxury woman” (Luxusweib) with the degeneration of Jewish women, family life, and community, explaining that, in the modern period, “the Jewish woman’s [once] royal desire for beauty became distorted into tasteless and unhealthy gaudiness, as if one turned a beautiful national dress into a flashy carnival costume.”57 The lead article of the journal of the League of Jewish Women in August 1932, entitled “The Jewish Woman and Luxury,” authored by the Zionist rabbi and poet Emil Bernhard Cohn, revisited this idea, arguing that “Jews have always been a modest people, and the highest virtue of Jewish womanhood was what the Sages called in Hebrew Z’nius [modesty].”58 Although less harsh in tone, numerous Jewish women nevertheless advocated a reemphasis upon modesty and simplicity as serving the twofold goal of combating antiSemitism and accommodating new economic realities. “In this area in particular, we women have much to do,” noted the socialist feminist activist Henriette Fürth. “The circumstances of our times call for us to present ourselves in a simpler way and more modestly than was necessary before. By giving up household help and doing housework themselves, Jewish women would prove that it is efficiency and ability, not possessions, that can guarantee security in life.”59 Thus, in the face of a resurgent anti-Semitism, both men and women viewed the “restoration” of modesty and frugality as an important strategy for self-defense. Contrasting the flamboyance and immodesty of the New Woman and her soulless display of consumer goods, the responsible middle-class Jewish mother, by contrast, was to represent Judaism by returning to a set of traditional Jewish (gender) ideals. Standing in marked contrast to the prescriptive ideal of the new (middle-class) Jewish mother was a type of real Jewish mother whose growing presence in Weimar Jewish life presented both an increasing problem and a new opportunity for improving the quality of families and quantity of Jews within the Jewish community. The existence of unmarried mothers, like other aspects of the Weimar crisis of the family, was not a phenomenon entirely unique to Weimar. The rate of unwed motherhood had been increasing in Germany since the turn of the cen-

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tury, and among Jews, it began to increase significantly after 1905. In Prussia, births outside the bounds of marriage increased from 6.5 per 10,000 Jews in 1905 to 8.8 in 1925, indicating an increase of about 25 percent.60 In the eyes of some Jewish social reformers, the growing number of children born outside the bounds of marriage represented yet another symptom of the decline of the family: the weakening of Jewish values, moral weakness, and the unraveling of the social fabric. Perhaps equally important, it also signified a decline in the uniqueness of the Jewish family. As modern Jews had prided themselves on the unique moral qualities of the Jewish family, they often pointed to the low rate of outof-wedlock births within the Jewish community as a sign of Jewish family values and moral strength. Jewish communities did, in fact, boast historically low rates of out-of-wedlock births, owing, most likely, to the tradition of early marriage and religiously ordained sexual laws. But at least in the modern period, lower rates of out-of-wedlock births were likely more a function of the class location of the Jewish population than of an inherently Jewish set of family values.61 Jews in general occupied a higher social position and belonged to the better educated classes than average Germans, and these classes in general registered far fewer nonmarital births than the lower classes. In particular, a large proportion of the unmarried women with children in the general German population came from the ranks of industrial workers, waitresses, domestic servants, and agricultural servants—occupations that were quite uncommon among Jews. A 1925 study of the socioeconomic position of Jewish unmarried mothers in Berlin indicated that the majority of children were born in poorer neighborhoods, where the rate of nonmarital Jewish births reached as high as 18 percent.62 In Berlin, at least, the majority of such children came from the east European Jewish population.63 Whereas in Berlin such births were primarily taking place in the proletariat, the residents in the League of Jewish Women’s home at Neu Isenburg for single mothers and their children came primarily from the petty bourgeois, who lived in midsize cities and smaller towns and villages.64 One factor in the increase in the number of nonmarital births during the Weimar Republic may also have been the increasing number of single women migrating to the cities who found it more difficult finding marriage partners because of the so-called surplus of women.65

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But while children born out of wedlock represented a growing social concern, it became a salient issue for Jews who, even before Weimar, began to view the issue in the context of the larger Jewish population decline. Whereas in the past children born out of wedlock were not admitted to orphanages or other communal institutions for fear they would corrupt other children, Bertha Pappenheim’s founding of Neu Isenburg in 1907 marked a new attempt to bring these children into the Jewish community with the aim of adding to the strength of German Jewry.66 By the 1920s, saving illegitimate children became an explicit means for strengthening Jewish population policy, and in light of this goal, rabbis began to reconsider the legal status of such children.67 The Central Welfare Agency appealed to Jewish communities to take care of nonmarital children for the sake of “preserving the Jewish community.”68 Increased communal engagement with this issue led Jewish communities to create a Jewish collective guardianship office (Sammelvormundschaft) modeled on the new German institution of the same name. Centralizing legal support and educational care for children born to single mothers, the collective guardianship office represented not only nonmarital children but also orphans and other children classified as endangered by youth welfare courts. In 1913, the Berlin Jewish community created its own collective guardianship office. Out of 1,009 wards in Berlin in 1925, 672 were nonmarital, and 411 were east European.69 By 1930, the guardianship office operated with 2,700 children under its auspices.70 The sum total of changes that observers noted in social norms, family constitution, gender roles, and sexual behavior among young people led (older) contemporaries to declare the existence of a generation gap.71 Dr. Arthur Czellitzer, a Berlin opthalmologist and founder of the Society for Jewish Genealogy (Gesellschaft für jüdische Familienforschung), decried the rift between the generations that he saw as characteristic of all German families in the postwar period. The same processes that gave rise to the New Woman, notably the rapid migration to the city and the privileging of professional and economic goals over an earlier emphasis on domesticity, caused a geographic and affective distancing between family generations that Czellitzer saw as a threat to the maintenance of a coherent social order. Because Jews experienced a proportionately higher degree of geographic and class mobility than other Germans, entailing a greater

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disruption of traditional social relationships, he concluded that Jewish children and parents, more than others in Germany, ceased to share common life experiences and attitudes. Indeed, Czellitzer’s was a commonly held view. Observers commented that the “lack of respect” in the attitude of youth to their parents was a characteristic “sign of our times.”72 “Unfathomable, downright hurtful expressions of youthful insolence cannot be explained simply as part of the normal course of puberty,” noted Fritz Lamm, the head of the Berlin community’s guardianship court.73 The psychologist Hugo Rosenthal lacked the statistics to confirm the general perception of a rise in criminality and Verwahrlosung (neglect or degeneration) among Jewish youth but noted how widespread was the general impression of a dramatic rise in the number of “problem children” (schwererziehbar) among Jews. “No one can deny the incredible overindulgence of Jewish children by their parents,” noted Rosenthal. More specifically, his observations of Jewish childrearing practices led Rosenthal to conclude that girls displayed more narcissistic and antisocial behavior than boys—a phenomenon that was much discussed in the youth movement.74 Exacerbating the perceived fracture within families and between generations was the comparatively intense political engagement of the younger generation that contrasted with the more cautious orientation of their parents. Many observers attributed the growing assertiveness among teenagers, at least in part, to the influence of the youth movement. No longer prepared to blindly transmit the ideals, values, and norms of the older generation, idealistic young people sought, in the words of one historian, “to heal the wounds of the Volkskörper and to return German self-confidence to at least its pre-war level.”75 In the Jewish community, while Jewish leaders and educators praised the salutary effects of the Jewish youth movement on Jewish identity, some parents also blamed its influence for the widening chasm growing between them and their children. Such parents feared that the generationally specific experiences cultivated by the youth movement threatened family harmony. In this connection, the well-known memoir of Gershom Scholem is illustrative of the depth of such conflicts. In Scholem’s family, each of the four sons pursued a different but fervently held political path, leading in Scholem’s case to his expulsion from his father’s house.76

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Youth movements indeed provided young participants with a newly found generational consciousness that was often quite militant, as is evident in the words of a young woman writing in a journal for Jewish youth who called upon her readers to realize their authentic selves through seeking out a new, young Gemeinschaft and conducting a holy war against their parents.77 While some Jewish young people who were swept up in the cult of youth carried on a crusade against their elders, parents and psychologists worried that Jewish children suffered from a type of social alienation that arose from growing up in an increasingly anti-Semitic environment.78 Discussing the psychological impact of anti-Semitism, parents worried that while young Jews spurned the isolation of their middle-class family lives and repudiated the compromises made by their parents, they were also faced with a social environment that was becoming increasingly inhospitable to Jews. The question of how to handle Jewish children’s encounters with anti-Semitism in school was a frequent topic in the Jewish press, particularly in advice columns.79 Mothers discussed appropriate responses to children’s anti-Semitic classmates, and Jewish psychologists explained the predicament of the Jewish child as one in which sustained social pressure led to a permanent “inferiority complex.” Experts claimed that the Jewish child had a unique psyche, which, in keeping with the spirit of the times, they identified as having both organic and sociological roots.80 Dr. Hugo Rosenthal, for example, argued that the “well-known” early onset of puberty in Jewish girls represented a compensation for feelings of inferiority.81 According to Dr. Erich Stern, a psychologist who specialized in the psychological problems of Jews, “the Jewish child is more agitated, troubled, more sensitive and thin-skinned, because he is permanently on the defensive, owing to the perpetual tensions existing within him. He has the sensitivity and nervousness of one who is threatened.”82 The idea that Jewish children exhibited a higher degree of nervousness than their peers led to the inauguration by Jewish Aid for Children ( Jüdische Kinderhilfe), a national organization that raised money for existing educational institutions and also directed its work toward improving the health of east European children and young people, to offer special office hours for nervous children. Under the auspices of its

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Educational Advice Bureau, two Adlerian psychologists were employed by Berlin’s Jewish community to offer care and coordinate their work with other welfare institutions. Among their goals were the improvement of the children’s adjustment in the community, school, and family and preparing them for entering the workforce.83 In 1923, the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jews (OSE) (Die Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsschutz der Juden) also established a “medical-pedagogic” clinic for the treatment of children with moral and psychological problems, as well as those designated as “difficult” aimed at east European Jewish children and led by Professor Fischel Schneersohn.84 Like his colleagues, Schneersohn also believed the Jewish child’s problems were rooted in Jews’ particularly sensitive nervous systems.85 Like other middle-class Germans, Jews found themselves forced to confront and to renegotiate relations between the sexes as well as the generations. Inaugurated in the presence of acute political upheaval and economic dislocation, the Republic was distinguished simultaneously by radical social experimentation and a desire to recover clear gender boundaries. As these circumstances converged with the general sense of social malaise after World War I, Jewish and non-Jewish observers, noting the impermanence of the times, reckoned they were living through a period of great transition:86 “Not only have we experienced a vast political revolution and are still in its stress,” noted Jacob Wassermann, “but we have passed through an intellectual one of similar dimensions and importance. The main result is that the old ties have disappeared, and new ones have not yet been forged to take their place.”87 In this way, Wassermann essentially recapitulated the sense conveyed by Mann through the character of Thomas Buddenbrook; old notions of filiation and posterity were no longer operational, and what might come to replace the ruins of the old world, as Rabbi Leo Baeck noted, “appears not yet to have assumed a visible form.”88

The Family as the Cell of the Nation Although preoccupation with the family and the traditional gender order was common to political and ideological worldviews that otherwise

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may have been sharply divided, it should not be surprising that the normative family that served as the implicit model in these discussions was an idealized, middle-class one. Indeed, the very notion of a “crisis of the family” originated among members of the middle classes who saw the working-class family as proof of the disintegrative effects of industrialization and thus as an inherent threat to the social order. Increased mobility, poor living and hygienic conditions, and the “loosening of family bonds” among the urban underclass all contributed to the middle-class perception that the proletarian family was unstable and in need of reform. Where such deviants from the model were deemed to be in need of expert intervention, the sensibilities, values, and habits of the middle classes were viewed as both normal and healthy. One of the chief areas of concern for eugenicists, for example, was the declining reproduction of the “better classes” and the concomitant rise in the number of births among those of lower origins. But while “the crisis of the family” bore the distinct imprint of middleclass visions of society, it also offered an ideology of integration to the nation as a whole. Love of the home, of the fatherland, and of mother lent a unifying power to the ideology of the family and was consistently accompanied by hopes for producing a genuine Volksgemeinschaft.89 The jettisoning of class antagonisms and political differences offered a compelling means for restoring a sense of security to contemporary social relations in a manner that transcended the divisiveness and seemingly entrenched character of public politics. If unity through class harmony had proven an elusive goal, the ideology of the family offered a vision of unity through the common culture of the family and the ensuing restoration of traditional gender relations. Commentators often represented the family as an institution of natural origin that superseded the artificial divisions derived by men. Rhetorically and symbolically, the idea of the family as a natural social unit operated as a unifying force in German political and social discourse. Indeed, the most common metaphor used to describe the family was a biological one, as the cell unit of the nation.90 Just as the cell forms the essential building block of the organism, so the family was represented as the fundamental social unit comprising the nation. The family, according to Friederich Zahn, the president of the Office of

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Statistics for the Province of Bavaria, was the “nursery of our future nation the cell of the state and bearer of the national plasma.”91 As an emblem of national unity and symbol of communal and national regeneration, the idea of the family thus served as a great leveler. The idealized family, drawn from a collection of a pastiche of backward-looking fantasies of preindustrial life and nineteenth-century formulations of bourgeois family life, existed well above the fray of divisive, day-to-day politics. In its capacity as the state’s basic constituent, each family became an equal member within the national organism, rendering all citizens of the state equal contributors to the overall strength of the nation. Conversely, the moral and physical “illness” of the family spread to Volk and the economy and consequently was believed to endanger the existence of the state. The family was the holy matrimonial and educational community, the divinely ordained foundation of human society and substructure of the state. “When the family is in need,” read the entry in a respected encyclopedia of politics and government from the period, “the nation and fatherland are too.”92 If the family was enlisted as an emblem of German national unity, it should not be surprising that Jews also built on an already existing concept of the Jewish family as the fundamental constituent of Jewish collective existence. Jewish social experts clearly understood the family as functioning to buttress the German state. But while affirming the role of the Jewish family for the strengthening of the fatherland, Jewish leaders directed the overwhelming focus of their social reform efforts and rhetorical energies toward the transcendence of the isolated nuclear family and a view of the family as the foundation for the remaking of the community or nation as a whole. The idea of the family as the cell unit of the Jewish people conformed to a range of Jewish ideological positions. Like Germans across the political spectrum working to strengthen German nationhood, some Zionists put forth the idea of the family as the basic unit of the revived Jewish nation. Martin Buber clearly articulated this connection in the 1901 lecture “The Jewish Woman’s Zion.” In 1930, Buber continued to hold that no future communal existence was possible “without the rebirth of the communal cell, of the family, whose members are related by blood and destiny and who live in close togetherness.”93 For Buber, the family was the

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fundamental cell of communal existence, but it had entered a state of decay in which its own members had stopped living up to the ideal. The writings of Buber and, as we will see, later Weimar Zionists suggest that, in addition to the much discussed ideal of egalitarian relationships in Zionist thought, there were still those who placed the patriarchal family at the center of the process of national revival. In this connection, as Allison Rose has shown, the Zionist ideal of the “New Jewish Man” must be seen as existing in tandem with that of the traditional domestic Jewish woman, who together, it was thought, would overturn the skewed shtetl gender order that allegedly consisted of weak men and dominant women.94 Like Buber, Eliahu Rappaport was a Zionist who maintained that the rebirth of the Jewish nation in Zion would be founded in the family, not the individual.95 Writing in the Zionist periodical Der Jude, Rappaport proposed that a renewed emphasis be placed on the family-community bond, in contrast to perpetuating the isolated existence of the bourgeois family. Like his conservative German counterparts, Rappaport wanted to roll back what he saw as the corrosive social effects of individualism by building a new society in which the basic social unit was formed not by individuals but by a small community of individuals. Going beyond Buber’s emphasis on the blood ties of the family, he foresaw the realization of the Zionist project as consisting of a transcendence of what he called “family egoism”—selfishness at the familial level—by expanding the institution of the family beyond relations of blood and marriage to include friends, orphans, and the needy. “The family in Zion is not defined narrowly as a community formed by parents and children alone,” wrote Rappaport, “but as a Gemeinschaft of friends and even all those included in its economic circle.”96 While Rappaport’s final aim was to see this reconfigured Jewish family issue forth in the still-unborn Jewish state, his non-Zionist German-Jewish contemporaries shared his desire to transcend the atomization of modern life by reinvigorating the bonds of family and community on German soil. Like the Zionist Rappaport, Liberal Jewish social commentators argued that the family was more than a discrete social entity existing for its own sake but that the family functioned as a microcosm of the community. They foresaw that, over time, the family would expand to include other

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families and eventually all of Jewry not as a nation, as the Zionists saw it, but as a strengthened religious and social community. Such critics argued that Jews should reduce the artificial divisions between public and private by conceptualizing community more along the lines of an extended family. In this spirit, Jewish social workers frequently criticized in particular what they saw as Jewish women’s narrow “family egoism,” arguing that women should consider extending the boundaries of their own families to include the adoption of needy children in the community.97 In this way, the essential idea of the family not only encompassed the Gemeinschaft of parents and children but also was imagined as drawing many others into the family circle without it breaking up. Thus, inherent in the desire to deepen the individual-familycommunity bond among Zionists and non-Zionists alike was the suggestion of eliminating the strict divisions between public and private spheres, which backward-looking prophets of community held to be one of the tainted fruits of modernity. Since the severing of this bond was associated with the rise of the modern bourgeois family, the reinstatement of this more expansive notion of family and filiation now became the most effective way to reestablish some of the most positive aspects of premodern Jewish communal life. In this way, Zionist and Liberal Jews alike believed that the best way to restore the bonds of communal sociability and to produce a more coherent, “authentic” social community was by reducing the sharp divide between the community and the family.

Toward an Ideology of the Jewish Family While representations of the Jewish family reflected the shared categories of analysis and middle-class values of Jewish and non-Jewish Germans, discussions about the Jewish family, as we have seen, also had a strong particularistic character to them. Such analyses invariably stressed the Jews’ anomalous history and the uniqueness of the Jewish family. An analysis of the specifically Jewish aspect of the “crisis of the family” suggests that it was more than merely a Jewish gloss on the general debate. Rather, it demonstrates how claims of Jewish uniqueness had become a veritable article of faith among modern Jews attempting to reconcile

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Jewish particularity and universality. Moreover, this central impulse underlay Jews’ redefinition of their collective existence since Emancipation.98 This impulse to harmonize Jewish and national identities was one that transformed the traditional theological idea of Israel’s chosenness into modern secular terms. As Amos Funkenstein has shown, until the nineteenth century, Jews understood the concepts of uniqueness and universality to be completely antithetical. Historically, Jewish existence was considered to be unique precisely because it was not normal. As an aberration from history, the stubborn persistence of the Jews was deemed exceptional, even miraculous. The notion of Israel’s chosenness was thus closely tied in with its anomalous historical existence.99 With Emancipation, however, Funkenstein demonstrates how western Jews began to recast uniqueness and normality as potentially complementary categories. Seen in this light, we can trace how the programs of the Jewish Enlightenment, Wissenschaft des Judentums, and Zionism all aspired to transform the uniqueness and eternity of Israel into secular concepts. In all of these culturally creative enterprises, Judaism’s uniqueness was understood to lie in its universality.100 Perhaps the best-known example of this is the nineteenth-century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz’s interpretation of Jewish history as the embodiment of the idea of pure monotheism. Israel’s distinctive tradition was thus reconceived as a highly refined filter for the values of Western culture. Representations of the Jewish family during the Weimar Republic thus reflect the ongoing effort of German Jews to reconcile the competing claims of uniqueness and normality. The Jewish family was seen as unique because of its anomalous history, but it was also set apart from the German family by the sum total of “universal” values that Weimar Jews ascribed to it. The “universal” values believed to be embodied by the Jewish family were, not surprisingly, decidedly time-bound. At the outset of the nineteenth century, for example, the unique qualities of the Jewish family had once served as proof that Jews possessed the civic virtues necessary for becoming full subjects of the state. Jewish publicists had argued that the Jewish family embodied stability, thrift, industriousness, and moral conservatism.101 Now, a full century later, the terms of the debate, as well as the actual socioeconomic and political position of German Jews, had shifted dramatically. An analysis of discussion about

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the family among Jews in the 1920s thus reflects some of the distinct social concerns of the period. These included the emphasis on individual health for the well-being of the whole, the creation of ethnic identities in an age of exclusive nationalism, and the quality of emotional relationships within the family. In these new concerns, we can detect signs of a new twist in the dialectic of universalism and uniqueness. Whereas the emphases on civic virtue had previously signaled a desire for greater acceptance and assimilation into the German social and political bodies, these latter concerns suggest a degree of success in such endeavors that had in turn produced the need for more differentiation. Although most Jewish commentators considered the desire for family to be biologically rooted, the family was generally spoken about more in relation to the laws of history than nature. In contrast to Catholics and Protestants who portrayed the family as a “natural” social unit, Jewish commentators writing for a Jewish public generally portrayed the family as a social form that evolved out of their unique history.102 By showing how the modern Jewish family was the direct descendant of biblical families, commentators called upon the family to showcase Jewish authenticity and antiquity both to Jews and Gentiles. Popular representations typically portrayed the Jewish family as a static and unchanging institution, one that had unwaveringly sustained the Jewish people since antiquity. Rather than stressing adaptation and change, Jewish commentators instead emphasized unity and sameness. As such, they identified the Jewish family as the most important force for the preservation of Judaism. In these accounts, the family was assigned a sustaining power comparable only to that of strict religious adherence to the past. For those who promoted the idea that the family was the secret of Jewish survival, that idea offered the appeal of stasis in light of social change. Interestingly, the idea of the family as preserver of Judaism superimposes a decidedly secularized view back onto the Jewish historical experience, producing a new sustaining myth that was at once sacred and secular. The attempts of Weimar Jewish commentators to take refuge in history and find contemporary meaning in it suggest that, for the most part, the categories with which they were conceptualizing their past were consistent with their historical-centered tradition. Even Arthur Czellitzer, himself an enthusiastic champion of eugenics, rendered a picture of the

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Jewish family that stressed historical development rather than racialbiological explanations. It would thus appear that the views of this cadre of leaders had avoided being usurped by a racial-biological mindset that overtook many Catholics and Protestants during this period.103 In this, we can see another successful assertion of Jewish particularism, even if biology may in other instances be seen to be deployed by Jewish reformers in the service of this historically determined Jewish family. A significant component of the uniqueness narrative addressed the social and cultural functions of the Jewish family. German-Jewish commentators portrayed the family as having played an unparalleled role in the history and culture of the Jewish people. In large part, this historical understanding of the Jewish family arose from a sense of Jews’ deracination and dispersal. The family, as Buber had formulated it, had “replaced the lost young green of the homeland.”104 For a nation without a land, noted the feminist Zionist physician Rahel Straus, “it was the only source of security and calm that the Jew knew.”105 According to the non-Zionist Arthur Czellitzer, the non-Jew drew life-sustaining strength from the nurturing soil of his homeland, and his nation’s survival was secured through a migratory influx from the countryside that delivered “fresh blood into the veins of every people, fructifying and maintaining its culture.”106 The Jews, on the other hand, had lost possession of their land and lacked a comparable source of sustenance. Without a land to nurture Jewish creativity and reproductivity, the secret of Jewish survival would have to be found elsewhere. By the twentieth century, the answer to the age-old conundrum of Jewish survival was no longer a matter of divine intervention, as suggested by religious commentators from earlier periods.107 Rather, the key to Jewish survival was now seen to reside in the family.108 Having supplanted attachment to the holy land and faith in divine Providence, the Jewish family was understood, in Czellitzer’s words, as “the native soil which nurtured the ability to weather the fury of persecution, to brave the daily battles throughout the ages. Today for this people without its own land or language, at least for many who are alienated from ritual and dogma, it is the only support that connects them to their roots and to Judaism.”109 As part of an emerging ideology of the family during the Weimar years, the Jewish family also became prized for its function as a haven in

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an anti-Semitic world. Dwelling within an increasingly hostile Volkskörper, some Jews put forward the idea that Jewish families were increasingly important for providing its members respite and comfort. Even the religious education of children, according to some, should be pursued with a survivalist aim, serving not only to transmit a set of transcendental values but also as a means of providing children with “more strength to resist the difficulties [with non-Jews]” that they might encounter in their lives.110 Equally important, the family represented the last barrier against collective disintegration, the final Jewish institution encountered by Jews before they contemplated a leap into the abyss of assimilation. But while Czellitzer and others saw the family as an institution that helped Jews endure persecution, the family has also served apologetic functions in warding off the attacks of anti-Semites. Paula Hyman has shown how supporters of the Jews in early debates on Jewish Emancipation pointed to the Jewish family as a sign of Jewish moral fitness.111 Similarly, Ismar Schorsch also demonstrated how Jews enlisted the virtues of the Jewish family in the defense of Judaism in the nineteenth century.112 Even well into the twentieth century, the reputed strength and stability of the Jewish family served to answer anti-Semitic charges of Jewish moral and physical degeneracy. In an article emphasizing the importance of providing preventive health care for Jewish children, the Berlin physician Fritz von Gutfeld stated what had by then become a very popular sentiment: Our Jewish family life is something very special; this is well-known and recognized by all non-Jews. Even the worst Jew-hater, who would otherwise have absolutely nothing good to say about the Jews, and who would deny the great contributions made by many Jews in all areas of life—even he would say: one thing you have to give the Jews, their family life is exemplary, something we non-Jews can look to as a model. If we want to know what the chief foundation of our Jewish family life is, it is this: children’s reverence of their parents and parents’ love for each other and for the children.113

It is particularly instructive to note the specific qualities ascribed to the Jewish family that were held up as a positive model for the non-Jews. For von Gutfeld as for many other Jewish commentators, Jewish uniqueness was seen to reside in the special relationship between Jewish parents

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and their children. Not coincidentally, the question of defining what constituted healthy family relations preoccupied social reformers, psychologists, and educators who took particular interest in parent-child relationships in the “century of the child.”114 By the close of the Weimar Republic, the ideas of love in place of authority, self-education instead of education, and encouraging the development of the child’s creative capacity had all been embraced as cardinal principles for healthy childrearing.115 In light of these general concerns, it is interesting to see how Jews claimed these emotional qualities as their historical inheritance. A rabbi writing for the female readership of Die Jüdische Frau (the Jewish Woman) claimed that Jews were keenly interested in current pedagogic thinking because “our children and their education are particularly close to our hearts. God, in his Holy Scripture, has specifically enjoined us in this holy task.”116 Likewise, in her cultural historical sketch of the family, Hilde Ottenheimer insisted that the intense love felt by Jewish parents for their children was, if not a Jewish invention, then at least a distinctively Jewish trait traceable to antiquity: “The education of children is a parental affair, not a public matter as it is with the Greek polis. The love of a father and mother for their children was something so primordially Jewish, that it would later appear in the mouths of the biblical prophets as a metaphor for God’s love of Israel and Juda.”117 On the question of marital relations and the balance of power between the sexes, Jews also claimed to maintain better relationships in comparison to those of non-Jews. Some Jews believed that Jewish marriages were based on greater mutual respect than those among Gentiles. In accounting for some of the legal obstacles that prevented more marriages in the Weimar Republic, the lawyer and women’s rights advocate Margarete Berent surmised that the loss of economic independence might explain Jewish women’s reluctance to marry. Pointing out the inequity of the law that forced married women to surrender control of their property to their husbands, Berent noted that women in contemporary marriages were forced to enter into relationships of dependence that did not correspond to their independence in other areas of their lives. For Jews, however, Berent suggested that this problem was less significant than for the rest of the German population because “the inner

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relationship of the man toward the woman is better.”118 Selma Stern described Jewish husbands as both more egalitarian and more sensitive, noting that Jewish women never suffered in patriarchal marriages like other German women because of Jewish men’s gentle dispositions.119 Not all Jews viewed these unique emotional characteristics favorably, however. The socialist feminist Henriette Fürth characterized Jewish parents as being beset by “enormous fearfulness and an almost pathological, exaggerated feeling of responsibility towards the children.”120 Dr. Hans Lubinski, the director of the newly established Jewish boys’ reformatory in Wolzig between 1929 and 1933, concurred with Fürth and pointed to “excessive motherly love” as a particularly characteristic parenting flaw of German Jews.121 From the opposite perspective, a teenage girl faulted Jewish parents for excessive narcissism and claimed that the excessive attention parents paid their children explained why Jewish children yearned for the simplicity and Gemütlichkeit (intimacy) of Aryan families.122 To avoid some of the most damaging effects of Jewish mothering, some women suggested that, by pursuing their own careers, mothers could become less overinvolved with their children and thus ultimately improve the quality of the relationship.123 Thus, in addition to countering authoritarianism and placing emphasis on friendship and respect of the children, a modern form of Jewish mothering was also supposed to reduce the negative effect of Jewish mothers on their children as their sole emotional focus. A further trait attributed to the modern Jewish family was its apparent concern with health. As an issue of general social concern in Germany since the late eighteenth century, health was, from the beginning of this period, closely associated with bourgeois culture and its values. Good health implied discipline, success, good morals, and social integration. While the value of “good health” was hardly a new idea, the notion that health was subject to human control was popularized during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Doctors and social workers increasingly emphasized the idea that the individual could control his or her health in both positive and negative ways.124 In a social and political context that equated national strength and health, these socially active Jews transformed the idea of Jews’ “traditional” investment in their children into the practical issue of maintaining good health. Given its importance

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for national regeneration, promoting an active Jewish investment in health also served an apologetic function. One observer noted the importance of maintaining healthy Jewish bodies “so that the Jewish religion’s high regard for caring for children as a holy task will be made evident through him. [Healthy Jewish bodies] will also let future generations know that, in a period of difficult economic depression, we found the means and time to care for our offspring.”125 In a similar vein, Paula Ollendorff, chairwoman of the League of Jewish Women, called on rabbis to sermonize about why it was “un-Jewish” for parents to neglect the health care of their children.126 At the peak of German and German-Jewish preoccupation with the family, a new Jewish organization was founded in Berlin to celebrate the Jewish family in all its uniqueness. In 1924, the Berlin ophthalmologist Dr. Arthur Czellitzer established the Society for Jewish Genealogy to serve as a central bureau for Jewish family historical research.127 As part of an interest in genealogy that had gained popularity in Germany around the turn of the century, Czellitzer’s organization offered a response to the perceived decline of the Jewish family. In the year of its founding, the society claimed five hundred individual members and thirty corporate ones.128 Its journal published records of genealogical interest alongside articles on genetic research and eugenics, and the society also convened well-attended evening lectures where members exchanged ideas on related themes. Czellitzer’s idea in founding the Society for Jewish Genealogy is relevant for our purposes as it offered Jews a way to recover a connection to a vanishing Jewish past. In the view of the society’s founder, demographic mobility and the decadent culture of the metropolis had diminished the quality of cross-generational ties, depriving Jewish children of their best opportunity to gain a positive picture of Jewish history. In addition to these considerations, Jewish families faced the added problem of conversion and attrition through baptism or religious indifference, which, Czellitzer maintained, widened the cultural divide between modern Jews and their ancestors. Czellitzer’s project aimed to restore the Jewish family to its former place of glory so that Jews would again feel themselves to be part of the unbroken chain of the Jewish tradition:

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All of our actions and strivings will only be successful if they manage to lead German Jews back to the once self-evident highly esteemed family, and all the ethical and moral values which flow from it. . . . He who lovingly deals with the history of his ancestors and is aware of the inner connection of his own feelings and thoughts to them, will himself feel the desire to have offspring. He will want to affix a new link to the chain, since he himself temporarily at least, forms the final link! To place the Jewish family back in the center of the Jewish worldview—and to ease the future forming of families through measures of economic support—this synthesis is our slogan and our future!129

Czellitzer’s interest in resituating the Jewish family “in the center of the Jewish worldview” reflected one important means by which Weimar Jews tried to maintain a connection with a modernized, secularized, and domesticated version of the Jewish tradition. They sought to find new relevance in the idea of the family at a time when the national identity of non-Jewish Germans was increasingly being moored in another more remote and hostile past. Writing in 1938, Hilde Ottenheimer assessed the important cultural function of the Jewish family for Jews of her generation by locating the contemporary fascination with the Jewish family in its post-Emancipation context.130 According to Ottenheimer, the family had become an anchor for modern Jewish self-consciousness at the moment that Jews began to face the unprecedented changes accompanying modernization and Emancipation: While the life force of the family was extinguished, announced, as it were, as an obituary—people from all quarters recalled its worth. The corpus of Jewish scholarship praised its meaning for the continuity of Judaism, they extolled it as the keystone of the entire moral world order. The competing factions of Orthodoxy and Liberalism joined together in their admiration of the family. . . . Jewish literature is particularly partial to portraying the family, family life, family connections and family separation in a romantic, sentimental spirit. Finally, the family has also become an object of research; there are family chronicles, family histories, and family trees now being made which trace the fate of individual families through history.131

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The impulse to simultaneously eulogize and glorify the Jewish family reflected a growing nostalgia for a seemingly stable and coherent Jewish past. The proud belief in progress at the beginning of the nineteenth century gave way at the end of the 1920s, according to Ottenheimer, to “a historical, backward-looking consciousness” that reinserted the selfconscious Jewish individual back into the chain of generations. Jews feared becoming too much like the Gentiles precisely because of their remarkably successful integration in Germany. In this important sense, these Weimar Jews appeared to share a version of Mann and Spengler’s pessimistic view of modern civilization as doomed to self-destruction by its own success.132 In such a context, the family came to represent the seemingly last pillar of stability in a rapidly changing world. And yet, despite representations of the family as an eternal and unchanging institution, the content of what Weimar Jews put forward as a unique Jewish possession included nothing that would conflict with liberal middle-class German values. In fact, quite the opposite was true. The Jewish family was unique in the eyes of many Jews for the way it was supposed to embody the most current, in some cases progressive, values of the specifically liberal, middle-class milieu in which most German Jews lived. In this way, we can see how the Jewish family and the perception of its crisis at once bound Weimar Jews more fully to the values and concerns of the nation while simultaneously providing a means for developing a renewed sense of Jewish difference. In this manner, the notion that “as the family goes, so goes the nation,” as articulated by Friedrich Zahn, could be read by many Jews as referring to not one collectivity but two. It is thus in the overlapping anxieties about the family that we may begin to discern the processes in Weimar by which Germans are made into Jews.

T w o Constructing a Jewish Body Politic:

Declining Fertility and the Development of a Jewish Population Policy

While many Jewish social reformers saw the decline of the social unit of the family as a potential site for the recovery of Jewish ethnic uniqueness, their reformist visions extended dramatically beyond the realm of family relations and practices. An increasing number of social critics during the Weimar Republic felt that the resounding success of Jewish acculturation, particularly in major urban centers such as Berlin, threatened an even more foundational element of the Jewish community in Germany: the biological continuity and distinctiveness of the Jews. As a result, key Jewish policy makers promoted the development of a national Jewish population policy as a far-reaching solution to the maintenance of a distinct Jewish existence and an opportunity to reverse the destructive impact of modernity on the bodies of Jews. If “the assimilatory nineteenth century had witnessed the loss of Jewish uniqueness, helping the Jewish people gain equality but lose its quality,” as Siddy Wronsky, one of the most prominent reformers in this arena, maintained, then the task for twentieth-century leaders, Wronsky argued, was to save “the sick and ailing Jewish Volkskörper from the stifling effects of decades of infertility.”1 Population policy thus emerged as a means for rebuilding both the quantity and the quality of Jewish stock. Addressing the question of Jewish fertility was not simply a matter of building numbers but a means of countering the debilitating effects of modernity, urbanization, and assimilation. Population policy thus connected with the larger emphases on the Jewish family and encompassed questions of fertility, marriage, and the response to the influx of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Uniting these questions under the single rubric of population management lent them an added material

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concreteness and physical urgency, as Wronsky’s metaphor of the “sick and ailing Jewish Volkskörper” suggests. In evaluating the importance of efforts to improve the birthrates and thus the “biological capital” of the Jewish community, it is important to locate these Jewish efforts within the larger context of biological thinking that was ascendant in the 1920s. In the aftermath of the war, German proponents of a new biopolitics sought to make reproductivity a matter of compelling national interest by drawing a powerful linkage between the individual female body and the well-being of the Volkskörper.2 The welfare state, with physicians serving as its key emissaries, turned the management of the procreative and sexual behaviors of women into a legitimate sphere of government interest and intervention. In their own efforts to manage sexuality for the sake of the collectivity, Jewish leaders, although still divided at times over their ultimate vision for the Jewish community, invested considerable energy in reconciling the principles of social hygiene and population policy with the Jewish religious tradition. Population experts as well as rabbis routinely mined religious texts to harmonize some of pronatalism’s central imperatives with traditional Jewish values. Armed with religious sources, feminists, social workers, and lay people—some of whom maintained little attachment to the Jewish religion itself—nevertheless sought to transform religious institutions as part of an effort to gain popular support for modern scientific agendas in pursuit of a rationalized population policy. As social experts took the vital statistics of the Jews as an indicator of the health of German Jewry, the very survival of the Jews as a group, a matter that had once been seen to hinge upon religious faith, had increasingly become, by the early twentieth century, a biological issue. These tendencies suggest the degree to which Jews, and by extension Judaism itself, drew from what historians have called “the biologization of the social.”3 But while their Protestant and Catholic counterparts’ attempts to rationalize reproduction were taken in the name of God and the German state, the Jewish focus on improving the Jewish birthrate instead centered largely on the regeneration of the Jewish people. This chapter thus explores how discourses of biological reproduction within the Jewish community functioned as a new and particularly modern means of constructing Jewish difference and proceeds to trace how Jewish social

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experts and lay leaders sought to anchor these differences in a variety of social institutions and policies. Because social institutions and policies endow discourses with their social power, I also outline those institutions that were either created or envisioned for the purpose of managing the potential reproductive resources of the Jewish population. German historians have by now richly documented the trajectory of German biopolitics, fiercely debating its role in informing the ideology and practice of Nazi racial ideology. They have shown that commitments to biopolitics—the attempt to harness the resources of the population for the betterment of the state—did not simply align themselves in ways that were either for or against the ends of Nazi racism but instead existed on a spectrum that was not solely determined by the ultimate emergence of Nazism. One result of this overdetermined emphasis on Nazism is that discussions of such issues almost invariably frame the Jews only as a potential group of victims. Such analyses thus fail to consider German Jews as a community that consciously and thoughtfully attempted to create an ethnically inflected program of biopolitics aimed at cultivating the Jewish population both as a valuable human resource and as the realization of an age-old religious tradition.

Demographic Decline in Germany For most of the nineteenth century, German political economists had advocated the control of reproduction for the purpose of limiting population growth. This concern with population management intensified and took on a starkly opposite character, however, as Germany’s rapid transformation from a predominantly rural to a largely urban society began in the 1880s, bringing with it a dramatic decline in fertility rates. By the 1890s, large families with high infant and child mortality rates began to give way to smaller families with lower infant mortality and birthrates. While Germany’s population grew from 41 million to 65.3 million between 1871 and 1911, the decline in fertility that had commenced during this period nevertheless began to curb the nation’s growth rate.4 Thus, virtually overnight, Malthusian warnings of a crisis of overpopulation were superseded by sharp admonitions against the suicidal “one and

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two-child family system.”5 German birthrates, once the highest in Europe at 40.6 births per 1,000 in 1876, had fallen as low as 14.7 per 1,000 by 1933.6 The alarm bells sounded much earlier, however, than the beginning of the Nazi period. By the turn of the century, the “birth decline” seemed to threaten both Germany’s national strength and moral condition. Lending the matter an even greater urgency was the fact that rapid modernization coincided with a surge of international competition for overseas colonies and imperialist supremacy. As the demand for industrial manpower increased, only nations with fast-growing populations appeared capable of maintaining their competitive edge. Medical and social interventions aimed at the improvement of infant and maternal health were thus incorporated into the drive for national ascendancy, forging a link between reproductive practices and German military might.7 The politicization of human health marked a shift from the traditional notion of political economy to an emergent “human economy.” Indeed, the terms child-poor for small families and child-rich for larger ones expressed the growing inclination to view a community’s biological resources in economic terms.8 Despite the establishment of various commissions and proposals for the enactment of a proactive birth policy, however, the Imperial government generally declined to intervene actively and instead focused primarily on banning birth control.9 Though the outbreak of World War I imparted a new urgency to the issue of German population decline, the war years produced little in the way of actual incentive-based programs.10 By contrast, the establishment of the Weimar welfare state represented a high point in the state’s engagement with the question of depopulation. The Weimar constitution expanded the Wilhelmine policy of state intervention in the private sphere by committing itself to the promotion of population growth and the protection of the family. This was particularly apparent in the state’s framing document, the newly drafted Constitution of 1919, which granted equal rights to male and female citizens but which especially “protected” women in their role as mothers. Though the state recognized women as full and complete citizens and endowed them with equal rights, most importantly the right to vote, conceptions of womanhood inscribed in the constitution specifically linked women’s citizenship to their functions and capacities as mothers.11 In its encouragement of childbearing,

Development of a Jewish Population Policy

for example, the constitution guaranteed social insurance for all citizens, but for mothers in particular, and promised housing priority to large families as well. It also guaranteed an end to discrimination against children born out of wedlock. Additional incentives for reproduction introduced throughout the 1920s—combined with disincentives for birth control and the criminalization of abortion—illustrate the extent to which the state’s interest in women focused more on the fruits of their womb than on their cultural and political contributions to the nation. Given the almost constant state of political and economic crisis and the rapid turnover of coalition governments, it is not surprising that the Weimar state never evolved a comprehensive population policy. Yet despite the uneven treatment of the depopulation issue by national and local governments, the fact that it continued to be a pressing question for successive governments suggests the extent to which depopulation remained an important symbolic issue during this period. More than this, the Republic did create a considerable number of policies and programs that went beyond mere symbolic gestures. Among various efforts, the expansion of prenatal and maternity benefits and the establishment of marriage counseling centers to encourage eugenically “responsible” marriages were among the more notable measures undertaken to improve both the quantity and quality of Germany’s future progeny.12 For German Jews, ominous predictions of Jewish demographic decline prompted a particularly visceral reaction. In a way that directly paralleled the broader German sense that demographic decline could foretell a reduction in national power, many Jews interpreted their allegedly weakening demographic condition as inextricably interwoven with the survival of the Jewish people itself. Although Jewish communal leaders had warned of threats to Jewish survival as early as the middle of the nineteenth century, the gathering of statistical data on the Jewish population in Germany began in earnest in the 1880s with the emergence of Jewish social science and the founding of the Bureau for Jewish Statistics, led by Arthur Ruppin and Albert Nossig. Their journal, Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden (Journal for the Demography and Statistics of the Jews), published articles not only on the

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demography and vital statistics of the German-Jewish population but on Jews the world over. The interest in collecting specifically Jewish statistics can be traced to the growing sense of population peril among Jewish social analysts. German population statistics predating 1904, however, showed that the drop in the natural growth levels of the Jewish population predated those of the general German population developments by at least two decades. From a 1.05 percent share of the German population in 1880, the Jewish population in 1925 accounted for only 0.9 percent.13 By 1933, that rate had reputedly declined to 0.76 percent, although these figures, like many in this debate, can be somewhat misleading. The June 1933 census, for example, the first to be taken by the Nazi regime, reflected an 11 percent decrease in the Jewish population, a shift that was at least partly a function of the outmigration of Jews in the years leading up to Hitler’s ascent to power and the emigration of some 25–30,000 Jews during the first six months of the Nazi regime.14 The decline in Jewish birthrates, an important though not exclusive indicator of population growth, probably began in the early 1880s. At that time, the Jewish birthrate was documented at 27.9 births per thousand people, while the national birthrate in Germany overall was 37.1 per thousand. By the period 1910–1913, the figure had dropped to 15 and 28.6, respectively.15 Significantly, the situation appeared even more dire among the Jews of Berlin. In 1924, Berlin had earned the dubious distinction of registering the lowest birthrate in the world, with a reported rate of 9 births per thousand. Even compared to the notoriously infertile French, the Berlin rates stood at almost half the French rate of 17 to 18 births per thousand.16 According to contemporary sources, Jewish Berliners reflected this trend with estimates ranging from 8 to 10 births per thousand Jews annually. This close correlation in Berlin rates is notable because of both what it suggests about the effects of urbanization and the extent to which population experts saw Jews as one of the most vulnerable population groups within the broader national trend of birth decline. Because Jews began to limit their fertility earlier than other Germans, non-Jewish policy experts paid close attention to developments within the Jewish population since they held up the Jewish experience as emblematic of the

Development of a Jewish Population Policy

modernization process and as the bellwether for Germany’s inevitable future course.17 A crucial factor in the calculation of Jewish population size was the presence in Germany of Jews of east European origin. Significantly, the demographic profile of these Jews also contrasted sharply with the native Jewish population. Because reproductive behavior among Jews of east European background was more consistent with traditional patterns of early marriage and high marital fertility, the east European Jewish population had a higher number of children under ten than did the aging native German-Jewish population. East European Jews thus became an important group for Jewish population policy makers (and, as we shall see later, the broader field of social work) as both a revivifying source for a biologically moribund Jewish population and a means for forging a distinct alternative to the perceived path of excessive assimilation trod by Jews of German origin. Changes in Jewish population growth also reflected declining marriage rates, which were decreasing more rapidly among Jews than the overall decline in German marriage rates. Within the framework of marriage, Jewish contemporaries also paid particularly close attention to the question of Jewish intermarriages as a leading cause of the Jewish population decline. Indeed, most studies of intermarriage have described the phenomenon as one of steady and then explosive increase during the Weimar Republic. The recent work of Steven Lowenstein, however, suggests that while there was a general trend toward higher rates of intermarriage, the apparent number of Jews intermarrying was far less dramatic than statistical formulations in use at the time suggested. Thus, for example, although 1912 registered quadruple the percentage of intermarriages when compared to the Imperial period, only 12.8 percent of all Jews marrying that year actually married a non-Jewish partner. Hidden among the statistics of what appeared to be skyrocketing intermarriage rates was a declining number of Jewish marriages during the war and the Weimar Republic overall. Thus, the precipitous decline of marriages generally was the more salient issue than the question of intermarriage, despite the crisis rhetoric that attached to this topic.18 Indeed, the intermarriage rate and the homogenous Jewish marriage rate were inversely related. The highest

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reported intermarriage rate, 34.2 percent in 1915, was also the year of the fewest homogenous Jewish marriages. Similarly, the period of the postwar marriage boom, just five years later, registered a low intermarriage rate of 12.8 percent. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that both issues of marriage and intermarriage were easily folded together under the rubric of population policy.

The Impediments to Jewish Reproduction How did Jewish social reformers explain the seeming infertility of the Jewish population? Within the Jewish community, Jewish physicians and social scientists were the first to pose this question, and they became the first to produce and interpret demographic data warning that the Jewish people were physically, mentally, and morally deteriorating.19 Singularly instrumental in introducing the issue to the Jewish public was the 1911 publication of a provocative volume entitled The Decline of the German Jews (Der Untergang der deutschen Juden) written by the dermatologist and leading sexologist Felix Theilhaber.20 Theilhaber’s culturally pessimistic treatise, sometimes compared to Spengler’s The Decline of the West, argued that the corrosive impact of modernity on German Jews led to the overrationalization of Jewish sexual behavior and thus prepared the way for the degeneration and even eventual disappearance of German Jewry. Theilhaber is a particularly interesting figure because of the contradiction that seemed to exist between his professional work in sex reform and the more conservative attitude he took within the Jewish community. Theilhaber’s professional skills and social commitments were typical of sex reformers of his day. He opened his Berlin private practice specializing in sexually transmitted diseases and in 1913 helped found the Society for Sex Research (Gesellschaft für Sexualforschung), which sought the legalization of abortion and the easing of restrictions regarding the accessibility of contraceptives.21 Two years later, he authored a prize-winning essay for a contest sponsored by the Society for Racial Hygiene (Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene) on the subject of degeneration, taking Berlin Jews as a case study. He also allied himself closely with the League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz),

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whose dual aims were the protection of mothers’ and children’s health and furthering the goals of racial hygiene.22 As part of his sexual reform activities, Theilhaber also helped found and publish the Zeitschrift für Sexualhygiene (Journal for Sexual Hygiene). Having developed an active commitment to the Zionist cause at the turn of the century, he blended his professional interest in sex reform with an attempt to steer the Jewish communal agenda in a nationalist direction.23 It was in the service of his nationalist agenda that he participated so actively with Jewish demography and population policy. Theilhaber asserted that Jewish moral and physical decline was closely associated with expanding urbanization, unbounded individualism, the growing incidence of chronic diseases, and a reduction in the number of births among the healthy, productive strata of the population. Although Theilhaber’s book was much criticized and some of his basic assumptions challenged by the time the second edition of The Decline of the German Jews appeared in 1921, his work nevertheless had become a standard point of reference in communal discussions, and many of his assumptions about decline were accepted even when his calculations were disputed. The explanations that both Jews and non-Jews offered for the birth decline were in many ways quite similar. The salient feature of all reproductive discourse, whether left or right, Orthodox or Liberal, was the conflation of private reproductive behaviors with social and national well-being. Jewish commentators often interpreted declining birthrates as signifying a deficient commitment to the Volk. Outright opponents of birth control, who were relatively few in the Jewish community, viewed contraception as a selfish act “which aids and abets the individual’s fruitless attainment of sexual pleasure and his disregard for the future of the Volk.”24 Both Jewish and non-Jewish eugenicists and advocates of population policy saw such blind self-indulgence and individualism as by-products of the impersonal social order of the metropolis and also as being at the root of postwar social breakdown. Calling upon the authority of a premodern, idealized Jewish community, Jewish leaders across the religious and political spectrum portrayed the premodern era as one in which the connection between family and community had existed

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undisturbed by the intrusive modern boundaries between public and private. They sought to characterize the essence of this imagined organic community as one in which individuals possessed a “healthy instinct” to sacrifice selfish interests and to act for the sake of the totality.25 Like their non-Jewish counterparts, many Jewish middle-class cultural critics attributed changing reproductive behavior to the increasing materialism that was considered to be a hallmark of modern urban life. Within the context of health-centered critiques of bourgeois society that rejected materialism and promoted erotic attraction for the sake of racial improvement, Jewish social commentators issued scathing indictments of the calculated financial motives that lay behind many Jewish marriages.26 These critiques stemmed from the social realities of the Jewish middle class, for whom marriages were, until World War I at least, based on financial considerations.27 Citing the existence of a distinct Jewish marriage economy, observers noted that for Jewish men, the income of the female marriage candidate was far more decisive than her beauty and her figure, whereas for the majority of non-Jews, erotic instincts led them to marriage without regard to economic consequences. “Nowhere do girls from poor or modest backgrounds have such poor prospects for marriage as among Jews,” lamented Freidrich Ollendorff, founding member and chairman of the Central Welfare Agency for German Jews. Ollendorff noted that “the increasing value placed on the material side of things has led young men to make even greater demands [of Jewish women]. Any glimmer of a romantic-idealism among our boys is quickly stripped away and replaced by cool, rational calculations.”28 Even after the crash of 1923, when many middle-class families lost the means to provide dowries for their daughters, young men registering with the Frankfurt Jewish Marriage Bureau ( Jüdische Eheanbahnungsstelle) still reportedly sought out women whose families were able to offer dowries. Wilhelm Hanauer, professor of Social Medicine at the University of Frankfurt, helped found the Jewish Marriage Bureau to increase the number of “pure Jewish marriages” by assisting Jews in finding suitable marriage partners.29 Hanauer reported that four times the number of women as men registered with the bureau in search of a mate. This imbalance gave men the pick of the lot, which usually resulted in their choice of women of means. In addition, the glut of women emboldened

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men to make fantastic demands—one man reportedly demanded a dowry of 200,000 marks.30 Accordingly, Jewish women faced real difficulties in finding Jewish partners. Echoing anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jewish materialism, Hanauer urged marriage-age Jews to recognize that “the taking of matrimonial bonds does not require possession of a six-room house.”31 The most thoroughgoing critique of social behavior that impeded Jewish reproduction, however, was aimed at the individualism and selfcenteredness inscribed on the bodies of childless young women. Increased female employment, together with the social danger embodied in the image of the “New Woman,” led social conservatives and eugenicists alike to conclude that the young, emancipated woman was on a birthstrike that threatened to culminate in women’s forsaking of hearth and home for the “dreadful delights” of the city.32 Advocates of an aggressive pronatalism argued that the modern woman had lost her desire to have children and that it was the task of population experts to help her recover it.33 Experts alleged that Jewish women were forgoing work experience that would help prepare them for their mothering roles in favor of paid work outside the home.34 In line with the more general conservative critique of women, “the enticements of the city,” concluded Theilhaber, had led “young Jewish women to become alienated from their calling as housewives and mothers.”35 Some Jewish critics also held women’s employment responsible for the postponement of marriage, a trend that accelerated in the postwar period among Jews even more than non-Jews. Overall, both Jewish and non-Jewish doctors deemed “late marriages” the most significant reason for the declining birthrates. According to the results of a 1928–1929 Jewish population survey sponsored by the Prussian Federation of Jewish Communities (Preussischer Landesverband jüdischen Gemeinden), Theilhaber noted that half of all Jewish women married after the age of twenty-seven, which meant that “fifty percent of female Jews have been excluded from motherhood during the first decade of their child-bearing years.”36 Not only did later marriages reduce the number of years women had to bear children, but more years of singlehood also suggested that premarital sex would be much more prevalent. The increased incidence of venereal diseases was, according to such leading eugenic thinkers as Alfred Plötz and Ernst Rüdin, not only responsible for bringing on a

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whole range of pathological characteristics that damaged the quality of the nation’s hereditary stock but also held to be a major cause of sterility.37 Indeed, Jewish physicians such as Linna Berg-Platau reported that Jews were contracting sexual diseases more frequently than they had in the past.38 Thus the prevalent medical view was that late marriages proved the foremost impediment to the continued production of healthy and numerous offspring. Parallel to their non-Jewish counterparts, Jewish physicians, both male and female, identified late marriage as the key not only to German Jewry’s quantitative decline but also to its qualitative one. Inasmuch as Jewish men were criticized for worshipping money, many critics, either explicitly or implicitly, castigated Jewish women for pursuing the false idol of career. The argument, most vehemently articulated by Theilhaber but expressed by many others, was that the emancipation of women had led them to develop expectations for personal satisfaction that lay outside the domestic realm. Accordingly, Jewish women too easily gave up motherhood and careers that would help prepare them for their mothering roles in preference for paid work outside the home. Many, however, and not only feminists, took issue with the assertion that Jewish women opted for career over family. From his work with marriage-age women at the Jewish Marriage Bureau, Hanauer reported that women were seeking outside employment out of necessity, not choice. The economic crises meant that young people could no longer rely on their parents to get them started in their marriages. And given the overall financial insecurity, young women could no longer expect to anchor their economic existence in marriage.39 Even critics of working women quietly conceded the necessity for women to enter the workforce. Although little evidence was evinced to prove whether men or women actually bore more of the responsibility for postponing marriage, one of the pathologies alleged to have been caused by the growing instance of late Jewish marriages was an increase in nervous disorders.40 This elevated state of nervousness among Jews had already been documented widely by Jewish and non-Jewish medical researchers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the 1920s, Jewish nervousness was also held to be one of the causes of the suicide epidemic among Jews.41 That Jews possessed “great mental capacities but fewer

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muscle cells” was a commonly held view reflecting the alleged Jewish emphasis on the mind at the expense of the body.42 What is particularly significant in the association made between late marriage and nervousness is how matters of reproductivity were understood to be at the root of so many of the illnesses inflicted on Jews by modernity. Although concerns about late marriage were central in both Jewish and non-Jewish discussions, discourses about Jewish reproduction also had their distinctive aspects that stemmed from German Jews’ status as a minority community. Like late marriage, intermarriage was viewed as a social force that sapped the collective Jewish vitality. Considered within the community as the ultimate act of social betrayal, it was also viewed as an assault on the reproductivity of the Jewish collective, as a “serious illness,” according to Rabbi Eschelbacher, “on the body of our Jewish Gemeinschaft.”43 “Mixed marriage,” opined Ernst Kahn, who authored a book on the “birth strike” in which he devoted a chapter to the German Jews, “devours that remaining essence of Jewry after [the resulting diminution from] birth control.”44 Since children born of mixed marriages were excluded from Jewish birth statistics, we might expect the objection to intermarriage to have been based on qualitative considerations, that is, the consequence of children not being raised as Jews. Interestingly enough, however, interconfessional marriages were also disapproved of as being largely infertile. “They are almost all childless,” noted Professor Eugen Wolbe, “and thus signify no gain for Jewry, even when the women [converts to Judaism] . . . adhere zealously to their new religion.”45 The fact that marriages between Jews and Christians produced the fewest offspring of all marriages concluded in Germany was reported by leading researchers on the subject and repeated in virtually all commentary on intermarriage suggests how closely the question of intermarriage was bound up with communal concerns about fertility. The sex reformer Max Marcuse reported that 34.2 percent of marriages between Christian men and Jewish women produced no children, while 36 percent of marriages between Jewish men and Christian women remained childless.46 In this connection, the issue of mixed marriage was also often said to be of lesser quality. According to the rabbi and social scientist Aron Tänzer, children of interconfessional marriages possessed a greater-than-average

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tendency toward criminality, and Werner Sombart observed how the appearance of beautiful and talented children of mixed marriages often belied serious moral degeneration.47 While rejecting racial scientific arguments about the biological incompatibility of Jewish and non-Jewish types, Marcuse still assumed that most Jews who entered such unions were neurotic and attributed the problems of the offspring to a Jewish predisposition to nervous illnesses combined with a conflict-ridden home life among parents of different faiths.48 Reporting on higher divorce rates in Christian-Jewish marriages, Marcuse, for example, also concluded that interconfessional marriages were not as strong as those involving two Jewish partners and that the partners lacked a commitment to family and the idea of leaving a legacy through one’s children.49 More sober explanations for this lower fertility rate among intermarried couples pointed to the generally advanced age of individuals who tended to enter mixed marriages.50 If the decline in the number of Jewish births as a result of intermarriage was a function of Jews’ status as a minority group, the influx of Jews from eastern Europe seemed to offer a ready-made antidote. The demographic characteristics of east European Jews were more consistent with traditional patterns of early marriage and high marital fertility and functioned to offset the declining birthrates of native German Jews.51 Their adherence to more traditional religious behaviors as well as the relative infrequency of intermarriage was also taken as an expression of a higher level of commitment to the community. Indeed, the east Europeans were often the object of western fascination, symbolizing the embodiment of a “premodern unfragmented ‘wholeness.’ ”52 But there was a darker side to the “cult of the Ostjuden,” as Steven Aschheim termed it.53 The same difference celebrated by Jewish intellectuals such as, for example, Franz Rosenzweig and Arnold Zweig became, in the hands of the state and Jewish welfare authorities, the basis for designating east European men, women, and children as “asocial” in disproportionate measure. Even the greatest champions of the Ostjuden, for example, noted their “lack [of ] modern European concepts of hygiene” and thus their need for improvement.54 East European men who remained jobless in the German economy fell into the category of “work-shy” and “unproductive,” while women were criticized for the

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unhygienic households they kept and their inability to create suitable domestic conditions for the proper conduct of family life.55 The infusion of younger and more fertile east Europeans into the German Jewish community thus represented an ambivalent bequest to German Jews. While east European Jews brought into modern Germany the fecundity of a premodern social formation, they also constituted an undisciplined mass of bodies in need of modernization. In the domestic sphere, east European women’s mothering practices and sexual behaviors were similarly subject to scrutiny during home visits made by social workers. Indeed, within an expanding network of institutions for orphan care and juvenile delinquency, the offspring of east European Jewish mothers were highly overrepresented. While east European Jews made up about one fifth of the German-Jewish population, they accounted for anywhere between 15 and 50 percent of the inmates within Jewish institutions for “wayward youth.”56 In fact, social workers considered the reeducation of mothers almost as important as reeducating the children in Jewish institutions. “The mothers of our [east European] children . . . often come late to appointments, are demanding, disorderly, and taught to schnor from private charities by appealing to the ‘good Jewish heart,’ ” noted Hilde Hochwald at a 1928 conference of Jewish social workers.57 Interestingly, Hochwald’s explanation for the immoral and disorderly behavior of east European Jews as the product of oppression, poverty, and fear, together with the belief in their improvability, recapitulated almost verbatim the arguments advanced by non-Jewish champions of Jewish Emancipation over one hundred years earlier. At the same time, it was primarily middle-class women who made up the newly professionalized core of social workers responsible for countering the bad food they received at home and the uncleanliness of the east European Jews populating Jewish welfare institutions during this period.58 An increase in the biological reproduction of east Europeans thus depended on an equally concerted effort to bring about their social and moral improvement. Having identified both the class-specific and the particularly “Jewish” factors impeding Jewish reproduction, population experts next turned to the problem of facilitating its increase. In keeping with their notion of Jewish reproductivity as a resource to be administered and supervised,

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Jewish population experts sought to harmonize the bionationalist dictates of pronatalism with those of Jewish tradition. In doing so, they also began to recast Jewish difference from its traditional significance as a theological category into an overarching social one that fused together religious and moral teachings with biological imperatives. Having once formed what Theilhaber called Judaism’s categorical imperative, the biblical commandment to “be fruitful and multiply” came to be regarded not only as the key to the survival of Judaism and Jewry but, rather paradoxically perhaps, as a measure of the subordination of individual desire to the general good.59 Through the combined application of social engineering and social control, this new form of Jewish survivalism collapsed biological and moral “truths” into a kind of nascent Jewish biomorality. Advocates of Jewish population policy regularly invoked the “be fruitful and multiply” precept in support of a traditionally religious collectivist ethos that they hoped would reawaken a maternal instinct and, ultimately, reinvigorate the community. Theilhaber, himself a leading advocate of sex reform and birth control in Germany, nevertheless mirrored in his writings about Jews the general conservative and Christian attacks on the “new sexual ethic” and its separation of sexuality from reproduction. Judaism, in Theilhaber’s view, placed erotic life in the service of the higher interests of the nation. “The right to freely determine one’s sexual relations,” he argued, “had always been subordinated to the aims of a Jewish generative policy.”60 Consistent with his Zionist leanings, Theilhaber stressed the authority of the Jewish Volksgemeinschaft over that of religion: The [medieval social] system was based upon the correct presupposition that every member of the community participated in a racially most expedient manner with absolutely no regard for his own interests. All aspects of the sex life of Jews accorded with the overarching conception of the nation whose potential for survival lies within its very being. The fertility and safeguarding of the individual family is indeed the foundation for the ultimate realization of a nation.61

Theilhaber endeavored to shape a secularized, nationalized vision of the once intimate and organic relationship between the Jewish individual and the religious community. But in place of the religious motive, which called upon the individual to subordinate his own will to that of

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God, Theilhaber viewed the sovereign Jewish people as the greatest good. Just as the institution of the family was represented in the rhetoric of population policy as the “cell of the nation,” the biological existence of the Jewish family offered to Theilhaber, and other leaders, the hope for strengthening the Jewish nation. The manner in which theology was yielding to biology also became evident in the ways in which both religious and nonpracticing Jewish commentators subjected Jewish sexual regulations to eugenic scrutiny and evaluated their merit from the standpoint of public health. From such a modern “scientific” perspective, Jewish survival was often presented as being contingent upon the fulfillment of biblically ordained ritual purity laws that imposed the rigid physical separation of a menstruating woman from her husband.62 Contrasting the survival of the Jews with the disappearance of the nations of antiquity, Theilhaber identified “sexual hygienic institutions and habits of the Jews” as both the moral and biological foundation for Jewish continuity through the ages.63 Dr. Max Eschelbacher, a Liberal rabbi in Düsseldorf, cited the biblical text of Leviticus to make a similar argument. Eschelbacher took the public recitation of the Torah passage enumerating forbidden sexual acts on Yom Kippur to indicate not only that the Torah placed sexual life at the center of its commandments but that “the entire life of the nation is dependent on its health. When a nation’s health is hopelessly degenerate,” noted Eschelbacher, “that Volk will inevitably decline.”64 Concurring with his Zionist and Liberal colleagues about the relationship between Jewish survival and sexual practices, the Orthodox physician Dr. Jakob Levy emphasized birth control as the primary source of Jewish moral and physical degeneration. Levy saw marriage as having ceased to fulfill the reproductive needs of the community when it merely served to satisfy individual sexual desires. Once the sexual drive no longer required the marital bond for its fulfillment, wrote Levy, “the decline of the entire culture is the inescapable result of such degeneration. Greece, Rome, and the German Jews!”65 Levy also objected to companionate marriage on eugenic grounds, since such marriages were generally characterized by what eugenicists called “the fear of having children.” Favoring neither quantitative nor qualitative eugenics exclusively, Levy instead maintained that only their combined application would lead to

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the production of higher-quality offspring. He thus sought the production of an increased number of healthy, genetically untainted Jewish offspring as a means of expanding the number of Jewish “geniuses” who would uphold Jewish civilization. The scientific foundation of the population debate required that neither Liberal nor traditional conceptions of the Jewish religious mission be eclipsed in order to be harmonized with medical scientific sensibilities and an emphasis on quantification. Both Liberal and Orthodox Jews demonstrated their concern about the population decline while upholding the central principles of their beliefs. The Liberal Jewish writer Professor Eugen Wolbe, promoting family values, population increase, and early marriage, argued for the compatibility of Liberal Judaism, the improvement of eugenic fitness, and increasing Jewish numbers. Wolbe decried the Jewish community’s complete disregard for cultivating its human resources and argued for the necessity of healthy Jewish bodies to carry on Judaism’s religious teachings. “What has hitherto been done to secure the future of our religious community?” Wolbe asked. “What means have we found to anchor our teachings and ideals in a well-populated and faithful confessional community for all time?”66 For him, Jewish survival was necessary to ensure that the message of Judaism would be conveyed to future generations. The population issue was the most important issue to face German Jewry for years, perhaps centuries. “In the face of this challenge,” he noted, “all other issues are no longer relevant.”67 Wolbe advocated the introduction of eugenically minded Jewish schools in the countryside and proposed the establishment of Jewish marriage bureaus that would cater to young, educated, and still unmarried men by giving them formal entree to rich families wishing to marry off their single daughters. Zionists like Theilhaber may have set out most deliberately to shift the focus from Judaism as a God-centered religious system to a form of social organization that invested in the social body the highest authority. But, as we have seen, this tendency was by no means limited to those with Zionist predilections. Liberal, Orthodox, and Zionist conceptions of Jewish sexual hygiene reveal a seamless fusing of physical and spiritual health, of biological and moral truth. They demonstrate that, as Paul Weindling shows, health had indeed become an ideology of social cohesion.68 Discourses that emphasized the Volksganze over the sum of its parts resonated

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compellingly with modern critiques of individualism shared by proponents of Orthodoxy, Zionism, and Liberal viewpoints. By placing reproductivity at the center of a new sociobiological order, therefore, otherwise ideologically divided Jews could faithfully maneuver within the Jewish interpretive tradition while remaining true to their own modern scientific sensibilities. Taken together, eugenic health, subordination of the individual will to the communal good, and the restoration of a distinctive Jewish sexual ethic were to be the means by which a regime of rationalized sexuality and reproduction could come to heal the Jewish body social.

Implementing Jewish Population Policy By the end of the Weimar Republic, the Jewish community won significant praise from some non-Jewish advocates of sex reform, eugenics, and pronatalism for “implementing an active population policy.”69 Following the war, the Central Welfare Agency made reproduction a top priority, but it was not until 1926 that such efforts became even more closely coordinated with the creation of German Jewry’s first representative body, the Prussian Federation of Jewish Communities. At the urging of Bertha Pappenheim, the welfare committee of the Prussian Federation appointed a commission for Jewish population policy, presided over by Siddy Wronsky.70 As one of its first public acts, the commission published an appeal to its “comrades in faith” in the major Jewish community newspapers during the high holiday season of 1927. The purpose of the appeal was to generate support for communal efforts to more systematically manage the growth and sustenance of the Jewish population as well as realign its occupational and geographic distribution. Urging Jews to heed all questions regarding Jewish population policy with increased vigilance, “since no issue can be more pressing than raising a new generation strong in body and vigorous in mind,”71 the appeal crafted by the population policy commission delineated the following areas for increased public awareness and communal action: the establishment of early marriage funds and marriage bureaus, support for mothers and encouragement of breast-feeding, and support of all movements that seek the physical strengthening of

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Jewish youth. In addition, the appeal emphasized the occupational restructuring of the Jewish population and the promotion of new rural Jewish settlements to correct the negative effects on the Jewish population that resulted from Jews’ overconcentration in cities. In February 1929, the committee convened its first and last national conference on Jewish population policy in Berlin. Sponsored jointly by the Prussian Federation and the Central Welfare Agency, it was attended by representatives of major Jewish organizations and experts from across the religious and political spectra. The conferees mapped out a program to stimulate the desire for children while reducing the obstacles impeding early marriages and family formation.72 The physicians Felix Theilhaber and Arthur Czellitzer championed the most outspoken pronatalist position. Both men were staunch advocates of eugenics and favored the introduction of a Jewish communal “birth policy” that would grant subsidies to “child-rich” families. Theilhaber proposed that the Jewish community pay a stipend of 500 Reichsmarks to families with more than two children. Insisting that babies rather than buildings represented the more cost-effective investment in the Jewish future, Theilhaber calculated that in “sterile Berlin,” as the city was known to pronatalists, such a subsidy would help support the approximately 120 families per year that had “third” children.73 Czellitzer proposed a “child-tax” according to which “child-poor” families would subsidize the “child-rich.” On the basis of such a graduated tax, single people were to be assessed in full, childlessmarrieds three quarters, while families with three children would be exempt and families with four children would receive a stipend.74 But while scarcely anyone at the conference opposed boosting the Jewish birthrate, few regarded pronatalism alone as a sufficient basis for social policy. Skeptics doubted that an annual sum of 500 Reichsmarks could convince families to undertake the sacrifices entailed in supporting an additional child. The pronatalist position on its own, therefore, received little endorsement from the assembled Jewish social welfare experts. In fact, the conferees passed a resolution anchoring their support for pronatalism within a broader social policy that would extend social, economic, and medical support to families in need. For a community in the midst of acute economic crisis, read the resolution, “the imperative for self-preservation through increased propagation can only

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be permitted if it is prepared to do its utmost to ensure the economic security of those already living.”75 The proposal to direct funds to promoting early marriage, therefore, won universal support from the delegates. The overwhelming consensus on the virtues of early marriage made the early marriage fund an important social policy innovation, not least because it resembled an institution that could claim a long and noble Jewish lineage. Within the early modern Jewish community and through the nineteenth century, the Hachnasat Calah society, or bridal fund, had been a highly esteemed organization with the purpose of providing dowries to poor brides. By the early twentieth century, this traditional institution had been conscripted into the service of eugenic health. Young, modern-minded, socially active women saw themselves implementing “social policy” at the same time that they reinterpreted the traditional offering of mutual aid. Traditionalists could thus continue practicing old-style philanthropy while social welfare professionals dressed up the Hachnasat Calah society as a social institution with eugenic merit. The feminist League of Jewish Women operated the most extensive early marriage fund within the Jewish community. Conceived as a means to both reverse the population decline and curb the demand for prostitutes and premarital sex, local chapters dispensed cash gifts to enable couples to marry at a young age “before their best energies were spent.”76 League of Jewish Women clubs also subsidized the furnishing of homes and collected trousseaus, helped arrange loans, and offered free insurance for newly married young couples.77 The League also negotiated a “population-political” agreement with the Phoenix insurance company in which the company would provide insurance to needy Jewish children in exchange for business referrals by League of Jewish Women members.78 But a sufficient supply of quality partners was necessary in order for early marriage patterns to take hold. At the end of the war, there were calls for the establishment of a network of marriage bureaus to match and screen applicants with references and impeccable qualifications.79 The establishment of marriage bureaus, the modern, impersonal incarnation of the traditional matchmaker, was viewed as an attractive way to rationalize the haphazard process of finding a mate as well as to mitigate some of the social causes of the marriage crisis.80

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Indeed, the Jewish Marriage Bureau in Frankfurt had already become a model for communities across Germany in its attempt to increase the number of “pure” Jewish marriages and births.81 Alongside financial incentives to boost the birthrate and the expansion of economic support and social services, the third pillar of a national Jewish population policy called for the provision of medical assistance to Jewish mothers and children. The Jewish community of Berlin was one of many communities that offered special clinics at neighborhood synagogues for Jewish mothers and their children.82 Medical assistance was understood broadly to extend to the social sphere since, according to Dr. Hermann Stahl, pediatrician at the highly regarded Jewish Aid for Children in Berlin, physicians were executors of social policy and “educators of children and parents in the Jewish sense.”83 In Stahl’s view, Jews required special medical services because their physiology differed from that of non-Jews. Specifically, the Jewish nervous system was said to function differently than did its Gentile counterpart, and Jews reportedly suffered disproportionately from nervous disorders. Because their muscular system also reputedly differed from that of non-Jews, physicians like Stahl were avid advocates of Jewish sports organizations. “If we can fulfill this duty [of promoting health],” wrote Stahl, “we shall create a healthy spirit and body which itself will form the basis for a revival of Jewish life.”84 For these reasons, the dispensing of medical care to east European Jewish children was a central focus of the organization Jewish Aid for Children. In their capacity as educators, physicians also dispensed advice to promote an understanding of eugenic considerations in marriage. Both male and female Jewish physicians were called upon to field questions and offer advice on sexual issues. For married couples, these counseling bureaus were to assist couples in resolving marital differences, thereby helping to lessen the likelihood of divorce. During puberty, young people could also turn to physicians with questions about sex.85 For activist physicians such as Stahl and Berg-Platau, this kind of sex counseling represented “the most urgent demand of our time.” As Berg-Platau argued, Bringing about a clear and urgent understanding of the blessing of a practical reproductive hygiene amongst our self-conscious Jewish youth—hand-in-hand with an awareness of the grave dangers intrinsic

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to an ill-advised rationalization of sexual life—this is what I hold to be the most important path for reviving and increasing the desire to reproduce, and in so doing, maintaining our Jewish Gemeinschaft.86

Though by no means opposed to birth control, Berg-Platau held an ill-advised rationalization of sexual life to consist of any use of birth control that endangered women’s future reproductive capacity. Thus, she was particularly concerned about the dangers of abortion and sexually transmitted diseases that might be the result of sexual activity outside marriage. Berg-Platau claimed that the separation of sexual activity from reproduction marked the moment when the existence of a Volk became dependent not only on its reproductive capacity but first and foremost on its will to reproduce. For Berg-Platau as for other of her medical colleagues, this will to reproduce could best be nurtured through the doctor-patient relationship. In this way, doctors would guide their young Jewish “patients” to cultivate an inner spiritual commitment to the community by helping them acquire, among other things, a practical knowledge of eugenics. Despite the degree of attention devoted to the devising and promotion of remedies for the crisis of Jewish depopulation, however, most young Jews remained either so enamored of the pleasures and possibilities of modern life or so attuned to Weimar’s harsh economic realities that they were unwilling or unable to respond to the call of this new Jewish biomorality. As reproduction came to be regarded as an essential element in the revival of a healthy Gemeinschaft during the 1920s, German and German-Jewish social experts identified the female body as the crucial vehicle for the continued survival of the national and religious community. A “motherhoodeugenics consensus” that spanned the political spectrum was founded on the assumption that the bearing of healthy children was a crucial social task.87 The female body had thus come to symbolize in two contradictory but interrelated ways the nation’s challenge and its future capacity as a vital and productive organism: the independent New Woman, who, by indulging her momentary and bodily desires while disregarding the needs of the community, symbolized both the nation’s diminished moral fiber and the decline in its birthrate, and the domesticated, procreative mother,

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who affirmed her “natural” calling to reproduce and thus embodied the true promise of national rebirth. It is clearly for this reason that the 1927 population policy appeal published in Jewish newspapers throughout Germany addressed itself “above all, to mothers.”88 For population experts working within the Jewish community, the disciplining of the female body thus came to represent the last best hope for securing a viable Jewish future in post-Emancipation Germany. In their attempts to move Jewish women to think differently about the collective implications of reproduction, we can identify a particularly modern impulse to sustain Jews and Jewishness as a viable and physically distinct entity within the German nation. In the postwar context, Jews active in developing and seeking to implement population policy thus understood the persistence of Jewishness not simply as the survival of a group bearing distinct religious or cultural characteristics but as an irrefutable corporeality. At the same time, historical-religious notions of Jewish uniqueness were transformed from being viewed primarily as a set of moral-religious attributes into an understanding of Jewishness as a distinct bodily reality. These new, more corporeal understandings of Jewishness, however, were deeply embedded in the larger project of remaking the German nation. The interpenetration of these two identities thus reflects the complex interplay of German and Jewish identities, institutions, and ideologies that makes Weimar population policy such an important site for the history both of Germany and of biopolitics. For rather than a straightforward history of minority resistance and coercion at the hands of a rapidly modernizing state, we begin to discern the lines of a much more complex picture in which the Jewish minority seeks to apply state policy initiatives in the service of its own distinct ends even as it adapts itself more fully to the demands of the state and nation. In an important sense, this chapter in the history of Jewish population policy represents a continuation of the Jewish Enlightenment project aimed at the civic improvement of the Jews. With their innovative emphases on the body, twentieth-century discourses of reproduction in many ways furthered eighteenth- and nineteenth-century regenerationist efforts to counter characterizations of Jews’ lack of fitness by demonstrating the moral improvement of the Jews as a group. Responses to the depopulation “crisis” of Weimar showed how Jews’ moral and

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physical improvement could be brought together in a way that served both German and Jewish interests. At the same time, the beginnings of an organized Jewish population policy—one that was abruptly brought to an end in 1933—also marks a continuation of Jewish assertions of difference that have now begun to be documented in modern GermanJewish history. What emerges during the Weimar Republic, then, is a new intellectual framework and accompanying system of ideas for asserting that notion of difference in particularly physical terms. Jews applied contemporary notions of population policy in a way that displayed their commitment to German national regeneration while simultaneously working toward the cultivation and sustaining of a unique physical manifestation of Jewishness. As with attempts to revision the Jewish family, these claims of Jewish difference originated in the categories from the non-Jewish world. Perhaps most remarkable of all, Jews cultivated this distinctiveness with the blessing of non-Jewish social experts and government agencies whose prime interest lay in facilitating the strengthening of the German national body. We thus see here the truth of Ernst Kahn’s observation in The International Birth Strike that “German and German Jewish fate are bound together as never before.”89

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T h r e e “A Little State Within a Larger One”:

The Expansion of Jewish Welfare During the Weimar Republic

Beyond their focus on reproduction and the individual female body, Jewish reformers also addressed the full range of material concerns that faced the community in order to minister to the Jewish social body. The acute need affecting broad sectors of the German population in the Weimar era converged with the establishment of the welfare state, transforming the social sphere into a central focus of postwar politics and social policy. As discussed in Chapter 1, the social dislocation engendered by the war and the ensuing economic crises created vast new populations of citizens in need. War orphans and war widows lost their primary means of subsistence at the same time that demobilized soldiers, east European workers and immigrants, and large sectors of the formerly stable middle classes now found themselves having to rely on extrafamilial sources of support. Welfare in general, and Jewish welfare in particular, assumed unique importance during the Weimar Republic not only because of the unprecedented scale of need but also because welfare reformers expanded the definition of need to include new subgroups of the population that were targeted for social interventions and treatment. The establishment of the Republic marked a crucial turning point for the conceptualization of welfare and its practice, since the constitution now guaranteed the right to welfare for all German citizens. Moreover, the government greatly expanded its provision of social services. For its detractors and defenders alike, the Republic came to embody the ideal of an expansive modern rationalized and professional welfare system. In contrast to the nineteenth-century notion of “poor relief,” which provided no more than subsistence-level assistance only to the desperately poor, modern

Jewish Welfare During the Weimar Republic

welfare denoted a planned and systematic program of care that sought to root out problems before they had a chance to materialize. This approach, known as preventive or constructive welfare, gave social workers and the institutions they represented greater latitude to preemptively intervene in the private lives of individuals. The Weimar experience thus illustrates particularly well how welfare systems have come to represent perhaps the most important institutional framework for managing the social. In helping to redefine the role of the state in attending to the physical, social, economic, and educational needs of the population, bourgeois reformers also had as their goal the integration of the individual back into a revitalized national community. Through a combination of state and private efforts, social work sought to mobilize new sources of energy and vitality that would help bring about the regeneration of German social and national life. Thus, while ministering to those in need, welfare in the postwar period was intimately linked to an even larger goal: the strengthening of the German Volksgemeinschaft through helping fortify its constituent parts.1 Jewish social reformers within the Jewish community, many of them professionally trained in social work, the related fields of social science, national economy, and medicine, undertook the creation of new institutions and services geared specifically to the newly defined needs of the postwar Jewish population. Indeed, the increasingly expansive and vibrant social domain that Jews created during the Weimar Republic resembled nothing less than what the social worker Gertrud Ehrmann described as “a little state within a larger one.”2 Interestingly, this image of an unassimilable Jewish entity in the heart of the state has historical resonance, hearkening back to eighteenth-century anti-Semitic accusations that the Jews constituted a “state within a state.” More than this, the notion of a “little state” evokes both a suggestion of political authority and a distinctly autonomous Jewish communal entity, images that certainly further undermined the nineteenth-century ideal of a “pure” Religionsgemeinschaft. Ehrmann’s seemingly unselfconscious assertion in the monthly newspaper published by the moderate League of Jewish Women is intriguing for its apparent lack of concern with such historically laden associations. Although Zionists were the most natural supporters of this project to transform the Jewish community into an

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encompassing and autonomous entity with some kind of political authority, Weimar Jews across religious and ideological divides engaged in welfare work in a manner that at once expanded the boundaries of a distinctly Jewish social sphere and led to a redefinition of the notion of Jewish Gemeinschaft itself. Thus, although Jews were by no means retreating from participating in a renewed German national community, the expansion of Jewish welfare mirrored the larger German project of renewal as they now sought to construct a new Jewish (Volks) gemeinschaft at the very same time. In a manner that parallels Jewish attempts to strengthen the biological existence of Jews, Weimar Jewish men and women also believed that women were most suited to managing and solving the Jewish community’s social problems. Despite its avowal of equal rights for men and women, the constitution included women into the political community only on the basis of sexually differentiated values.3 Indeed, scholars have shown how, within the bourgeois feminist movement as well as social work, women invoked sexual difference both to preserve traditional gender roles and to justify empowerment in political life. Thus, the female ideal of selfless care taken from the domestic sphere and expanded to address the needs of the broader social body illustrates how the revitalization of the Jewish social body relied on an expansion of female responsibilities and, at the same time, the further development of an ethic of female self-sacrifice. Conceived as the quintessentially female occupation, social work reflected, in the words of Ernestine Eschelbacher, “an awakening of women to a full consciousness of their social mission.”4 Constituting the vast majority of the social work labor force, social workers utilized the language of motherhood to define their place in both German and Jewish society.

Jewish Social Work and the State The single most decisive turning point for the development of welfare in Germany after World War I was the nationalization of social welfare.5 From calling for civil peace (Burgfrieden) on the one hand to its enlistment of civilian workers for armaments production on the other, the

Jewish Welfare During the Weimar Republic

state intervened during the period of the war in nearly every sphere of social life.6 Until the war, private and confessional social welfare organizations (Freie Wohlfahrtspflege) managed their programs and institutions alongside the traditional public poor relief (Armenfürsorge), retaining their independence while sometimes relying upon public subvention. The Jewish community, like its Protestant and Catholic counterparts, oversaw a network of private charitable organizations that remained generally free from state influence. But as state support for new social groups increased during the war, public assistance was being redefined to encompass new groups of recipients including dependents of servicemen, war-disabled soldiers, war widows, orphans, and even sectors of the middle class that were particularly hard hit by the war. For the first time, public assistance expanded into a comprehensive and more centralized welfare system. With the growing attempt at centralization of welfare at the national level, momentum had begun to build within the ranks of Jewish social welfare organizations to consolidate existing agencies and associations that had existed largely independent of one another. Faced with the impoverishment of growing sectors of the Jewish population and the influx of Jewish refugees from czarist Russia, leaders from among the numerous and sometimes competing Jewish welfare organizations recognized that postwar social work would require the same degree of mobilization and cooperative work as had taken place during the war itself. Bertha Pappenheim, founder and president of the League of Jewish Women, published a plea for Jewish communities across Germany to join forces to coordinate the social welfare activities of private and communal institutions.7 In what became the clarion call for a new and modern Jewish welfare policy, Pappenheim’s 1916 article “Woe to Him Whose Conscience Sleeps” appeared in a number of major Jewish newspapers across Germany. In the article, she decried the divisions within Jewish communal welfare, sharply criticized the absence of women in organizational and administrative roles, and pressed for the formation of a central organizing body that would harness the modernizing forces of Jewish social work to achieve a level of progress comparable to that of their religious and secular colleagues outside the Jewish sphere. The organizational restructuring of Jewish social work, according to Pappenheim, represented

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a momentous communal undertaking that aimed at nothing less than averting the decline and disappearance of German Jewry. Pappenheim’s call provided a major impetus for the founding of the first central welfare agency for German Jewry.8 In September 1917, three major Jewish organizations that devoted substantial resources and energies to the advancement of social welfare, the B’nai Brith fraternal organization (Unabhängige Orden Grossloge Bnei Briss), the German-Jewish League of Communities (Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund), and the League of Jewish Women joined forces to found German Jewry’s most important national organization during the Weimar Republic, the Central Welfare Agency of German Jews.9 The years 1918–1921 proved decisive for the Central Welfare Agency’s centralizing initiative as the young organization succeeded in securing the affiliation of nearly every large community in Germany. By 1919, seventy-one Jewish communities had joined the Central Welfare Agency; in 1927, the Central Welfare Agency boasted a membership of two hundred Jewish communities, a figure that did not even include communities affiliated by way of membership in provincial welfare federations.10 According to the Central Welfare Agency’s first managing director, Jakob Segall, by the time of its first national conference held in 1921, the Central Welfare Agency was considered to be the legitimate representative of Jewish welfare by both German Jewry and state authorities.11 The founding of the Central Welfare Agency took place in the context of a new and changing relationship between the state and the social welfare sector. With the collaborative efforts that had developed during the war between the state and private organizations, the stage was set for a new system of relations that subordinated the private welfare sector to the public.12 Now, as part of its broad commitment to the health, education, and welfare of every individual, the new state steadily assumed more of the functions and responsibilities that had previously been the domain of the private welfare.13 Because the expansion of the state’s welfare bureaucracy threatened the autonomy of private confessional and nonsectarian groups, most of these groups actively resisted the nationalization of welfare. As a result, the private confessional welfare organizations engaged in ongoing turf battles to protect the autonomy of their operations. In response to their initial fears of the socialization of the private social welfare

Jewish Welfare During the Weimar Republic

sector, and in an effort to maximize their influence, the leading confessional, political, and humanitarian umbrella organizations (Spitzenverbände) joined together to form the League for Private Welfare (Liga für freie Wohlfahrtspflege) in 1924 to promote their common interests.14 An important part of the Central Welfare Agency’s mission, therefore, entailed the formulation of a response to these changes by forging strong, mutually beneficial bonds with other private welfare organizations and with representatives of the new republican government. The Central Welfare Agency also actively participated in helping shape the new government’s ambitious legislative agenda, seeking to secure a degree of influence as well as ensuring that the equal status of Jews guaranteed in the constitution was translated into real progress on the ground. The formerly isolated Jewish welfare sector now established contact with official government departments, which, in turn, exerted considerable influence on the legislation of social policy. As a full member of the Federal Association of the Principal Organizations for Private Welfare (Reichsgemeinschaft von Hauptverbänden der freien Wohlfahrtspflege), the Central Welfare Agency helped prepare the Youth Welfare Law of 1922 out of particular concern that Jewish representatives be called into the newly formed youth welfare offices when the cases of Jewish clients arose.15 As the umbrella welfare organization for the Jews, the Central Welfare Agency was entitled to receive government funds for social institutions that were dedicated to rebuilding the social fabric of Germany. Supplied to all umbrella organizations, these monies were designated for specific programs of individual organizations. Because the Jewish community had a higher proportion of institutions relative to its population size, the Central Welfare Agency accordingly received a higher percentage of funds. Indeed, it was largely the result of ongoing state financing that the Central Welfare Agency was able to support many of its institutions that were in danger of collapse during the inflation years. The Central Welfare Agency also encouraged Jewish communities to contribute to the statesponsored organization German Aid for Children (Deutsche Kinderhilfe), and funds from this collection were distributed to Jewish institutions, with Berlin alone receiving over 200,000 marks.16 The Central Welfare Agency was also represented in the Central Committee for Foreign Assistance (Zentralausschuss für die Auslandshilfe), which distributed money

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to Jewish institutions as well. Closely monitoring its relations with state agencies, the Central Welfare Agency concluded that in most instances the Jews were well represented.17

The Scope of Jewish Welfare Work in the Weimar Republic Jews’ involvement in charity and welfare work represented an important and growing form of intra-Jewish activity in Imperial Germany. As historians of Jewish welfare have shown, the separate systems of welfare maintained by Jewish communities represented an important strategy for the preservation of the group and served to reinforce Jewish identity.18 Several national organizations that facilitated welfare work were founded before World War I, including the German-Jewish League of Communities (1872), Independent Order of B’nai Brith (1882), and the German Jewish Women’s League (1907). At the same time, the period saw the rapid growth of local associations devoted to charity and welfare during German Jewry’s “golden age” of associational life. The intensive involvement of the Jewish public in welfare activities continued into the Weimar period and points to the importance of the social-communal realm as a source of Jewish identification. Indeed, in 1925, out of a population of little more than 500,000 Jews, there were 175,000 members of one or more Jewish welfare organizations.19 Although the size of the Jewish population was small relative to other Jewish populations in Europe, German Jews were particularly proud of the extensive system they operated. Jakob Segall and Frieda Weinreich, who edited a published guide to Jewish welfare institutions, noted that when compared to other European countries, “Germany was the only country in which its Jews operated a systematic, well-organized welfare system.”20 The range of Jewish social welfare organizations and activities that engaged one out of three Weimar Jews consisted of a mixture of more traditional charitable activity with newer forms of care. While much of the welfare activity arguably remained within the realm of traditional charitable frameworks and was thus continuous with earlier forms of

Jewish Welfare During the Weimar Republic

charity, these models of organization were being supplemented and, in many cases, transformed by new rationalized and systematized approaches to care that were increasingly carried out by trained professional staff. Thus, alongside organizations dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that included such institutions as the chevra kadisha (Jewish burial society), orphanages, old-age homes, and associations to assist the poor, newer ones took shape during this period which emphasized preventive, constructive, and therapeutic care and embraced an encompassing definition of social aid that addressed the needs of Jewish society’s most vulnerable groups. It was this emphasis on new goals and methods that increasingly attracted young Jews into the ranks of the social work profession. Speaking about postwar Jewish welfare enterprise as a whole, Rabbi Leo Baeck noted that “there are few realms of life within the Jewish community where one encounters something new as in the realm of social work and its organization.”21 Included among these new kinds of institutions were a national system of youth welfare offices, advice bureaus, employment and job retraining bureaus, marriage counseling and matchmaking bureaus, psychological counseling, health clinics, occupational (re)training centers for girls, and shelters for homeless and unemployed young men and women. The presence of needy east European Jews and the reconceptualization of welfare services in light of postwar circumstances provided the prime impetus for the expansion of welfare after the war. While postwar youth welfare focused, to a great extent, on providing services for Jews of east European origin, another significant emphasis of welfare work for the east European population addressed the problems of economics, employment, and immigration. After World War I, communities throughout Germany opened Worker Welfare Bureaus, resulting in the creation in 1923 of a national system of Worker Welfare Bureaus (Arbeiterfürsorgeamt der jüdischen Organisationen Deutschlands) headed by Fritz Mordechai Kaufmann. These bureaus embodied a system of rationalized measures for east European workers. Not only did they locate jobs for unemployed Jews, but they also provided shelter, helped immigrants deal with legal issues, and offered occupational retraining and apprenticeships. Most importantly, perhaps, these bureaus sought to integrate immigrants into the job market in “productive work.” Although

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Worker Welfare Bureaus were founded with the aim of helping east European Jewish youths, after the inflation and into the Depression, it increasingly served youth and adults from non–east European backgrounds as well.22 The renewed interest in occupational restructuring (Berufsumschichtung) that was reflected in Worker Welfare Bureaus was shared by nearly every movement and organization in the Jewish community during these years and exemplifies the far-reaching goals, if not successes, of Jewish social welfare work during this time. The aim to restructure the occupational pyramid of German Jewry was historically associated with the process of emancipation and the associated demand for the “civil improvement” of the Jews. Conceived as a means of transforming what was considered as the unhealthy occupational structure of the Jewish population and its overrepresentation in trade and commerce, occupational restructuring offered a program of internal Jewish regeneration with the dual goals of reducing Jewish poverty and reducing anti-Semitism alike. But because the economy was expanding in the commercial sector, the program failed largely because Jews stood to profit most from the expansion and diversification of the commercial sector of the economy. The idea of occupational restructuring was thus economically “dysfunctional” in that it did not stand to benefit the Jews economically.23 Occupational restructuring in the nineteenth century was thus fundamentally more apologetic than practical, characterized by one contemporary as the “efforts by rich people with good intentions who wanted the children of other people to enter the crafts and agricultural professions.”24 But by the twentieth century, the concept of occupational restructuring offered a response to longer-range economic and social changes. This new emphasis on the role of occupational redistribution as an instrument to secure the economic and social existence of the Jews critiqued the existing Jewish occupational structure but placed the project within the framework of social work and its broadest goals of strengthening the population.25 Moreover, as it was discussed in the 1920s, such social interventions were now to be directed not only toward the poor but also to the rich, with the aim of stabilizing and productivizing the entire organism.26 Social experts believed occupational restructuring, by attacking one of the root economic causes of the de-

Jewish Welfare During the Weimar Republic

clining Jewish birthrate, could also make young people both more marketable and more marriageable, improving the likelihood of Jewish reproduction as well.

What Made Jewish Social Work Jewish? The development of Jewish social work in Germany followed a distinctly different course from that of the Protestant and Catholic communities. Protestant social work was conceived as a religious reform movement, which, with the founding of the Inner Mission (Innere Mission) by Johann Heinrich Wichern in 1848, was enlisted as an instrument of missionary work.27 In contrast to the Inner Mission, the Catholic Caritas organization, founded in 1897, was part of the Church. Because of this, it aimed not so much to reform the Catholic Church as to centralize and professionalize charitable work. Within the Jewish community, the organization of charity and self-help organizations formed part of a long tradition of Jewish communal life in the Diaspora. Until World War I, Jewish welfare work in Germany exhibited a lesser degree of centralization and technical specialization owing to the unique organization of the Jewish community and its independent tradition of charity.28 The impulse to modernize the social welfare system in Germany stemmed from a desire to address deficiencies in both the public poor relief system and privately administered and religiously motivated charity work. Emerging in the late nineteenth century in conjunction with the social reform and the women’s movement, the drive to modernize welfare made the “scientification” of social work a primary goal. Social reformers sought to effect a change to the existing, decentralized system of care by rationalizing the administering of support to those in need through creating a welfare system grounded in the sciences of national economy and hygiene.29 The modernization of social work also aimed at shifting attitudes toward welfare recipients by treating the circumstances of the poor neither as the result of God’s will nor as the fault of the poor themselves.30 Armed with an understanding of poverty as a complex of social problems, social reformers foresaw solutions that could be executed only through rational social and political policies and

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whose expression lay in an organized systematic framework for welfare that accorded with scientific principles. As part of this new model, modern social work also formulated new methods of caregiving. Social workers no longer promoted the repressive and punitive treatment of the poor. In its place, reformers introduced a model of care that was at once rational and scientific but that, at the same time, accorded with the need of each individual client. It replaced the mere dispensing of economic support with pedagogic understandings of treatment drawn from psychology, social science, and medicine. The modernization of social work thus also depended on a professionally trained workforce. Through the introduction of the two-year Social Women’s School (Soziale Frauenschule) at the turn of the century, the schools soon became an important site for the professional education and training of a new generation of social workers. Within the Jewish community, the shift toward the professionalization of social work did not proceed without strife. In particular, the new social work methods engendered conflict between the modern reformers and religious traditionalists. The Central Welfare Agency’s championing of modern, professional social work, in fact, pitted it against more popular lay attitudes toward social welfare, which were rooted in a long and venerable tradition of religiously inspired charity. Most important, the defenders of the old order did not want to lose the opportunity to perform individual acts of charity as mandated by Jewish law only to be replaced by what they charged was overly technical, bureaucratized, and impersonal care. Indeed, the critics of the new order, such as the Liberal Zionist rabbi Joachim Prinz, charged that modern social work was replacing religiously motivated good works.31 Rabbi Leo Baeck, by contrast, sought to build bridges between both camps. As the chairman of the Central Welfare Agency between 1926 and 1939 and an advocate of modern social work, he nevertheless acknowledged the concerns of the traditionalists when he noted that “the danger of rationalized social policy is that doing good deeds will cease to be something done by people and for people.”32 But traditionalists were ultimately fighting an uphill battle. While old-style welfare work certainly continued to exist alongside the newer one, the balance of power during the 1920s was shifting against private, local organizations as the state en-

Jewish Welfare During the Weimar Republic

couraged the work of the Central Welfare Agency, lending it support while reducing state patronage of smaller, local, traditional philanthropy.33 The tension between the modern impulse within social work and its reputed rejection of traditional religious motives and methodology was not the only cause for dispute between traditionalists and modernizers. Despite the Central Welfare Agency’s claim that social work served as a unifying force among the Jewish people, the expansion of welfare institutions in the Jewish community also led to renewed emphasis on, and disagreement over, the end goals and underlying assumptions of social work. Addressing a week-long gathering of young Jewish social workers, Friederich Ollendorff, the director of the Central Welfare office for the city of Berlin between 1920 and 1927 and the director of the Central Welfare Agency from 1927 to 1933, noted how an individual’s Jewish affiliation shaped not only his vision of social work but also his views about what methodological and organizational form it should take.34 Since, according to Ollendorff, the Orthodox perspective viewed individual acts of charity as a religious commandment, Orthodox Jews often opposed strong organizational expansion, favoring local and individual initiative that would not eclipse the direct involvement of lay people. Liberal Jews, by contrast, shared a commitment to general and Jewish ethical values that could find their expression in social work. But Ollendorff noted that some Liberal Jews remained uneasy about the increasing scope and autonomy of Jewish welfare work, since such innovations would seem to go against strict notions of Religionsgemeinschaft. For Zionists, who often rejected both Orthodox and Liberal viewpoints, organizational autonomy was the necessary first step toward realizing a national Jewish community. Zionists, therefore, tended to be most comfortable with the expansion of Jewish communal powers that modern social work advocated. Despite such ideological differences, however, the generational factor appears to have been a powerful force for uniting otherwise diverse social work efforts. Young people, many of whom were part of the Jewish youth movements, studied at the Lehrhaus, or were committed Zionists, were drawn to social work as a profession because they were interested in the collective fate of the Jewish people.35 Thus, while

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ideological differences should certainly not be overlooked, Liberal, Zionist, religious, and previously unaffiliated young Jews often felt themselves engaged in a common project of community work that was transforming their notion of community, the bonds of Jewish peoplehood, and the meaning of Jewish fate. Because of its distinctive functions within Jewish communal life, modern Jewish social work contrasts in important ways with various forms of Christian social work. In addressing the relationship between religion, welfare, and the state, the work of Young-Sun Hong, JochenChristoph Kaiser, and Edward Dickinson has charted the tensions and competing claims that were made by religious organizations and the state-administered welfare sector.36 According to Hong, both Protestants and Catholics tended to view issues such as declining birthrates as signs of “spiritual distress” that could be best addressed by religious solutions.37 Hong cites the leading youth welfare activist for Inner Mission, Joachim Beckmann, who identified the struggle in the welfare sector as a chief battle site in the Republic’s culture wars. Social work, according to Beckmann, had become “the great, decisive area of cultural conflict, a violent struggle for hegemony and dominance between the Christian confessions and the irreligious, anti-ecclesiastical worldviews.”38 That Beckmann so confidently conflates the non-Christian perspective with an “irreligious” worldview obviously speaks volumes about his view of the divergence between Jewish welfare and its confessional cousins. While Beckmann’s comments suggest the consolidation of Christian power and authority to be the ultimate aim of Christian social work, Jewish welfare groups were more concerned with the development of a robust social infrastructure within the bounds of the German state. Like Hong, Dickinson also focuses on the conservative Christian character of confessional welfare, drawing the portrait of an ideological divide that distinguished religious approaches to welfare from what he calls the “social managerial” agenda. The “social-managerials” included those bourgeois social and progressive organizations whose rationalized, scientific approach to welfare ran counter to a more traditional, personal, and individualized approach. In Dickinson’s schema, religiously inspired welfare was completely at odds with social liberalism. But if we include

Jewish Welfare During the Weimar Republic

Jewish welfare organizations in these examinations of confessional welfare, we gain a very different picture of religious-based welfare in the Weimar Republic. At the most basic level, Christianity would no longer be considered the only form of confessional welfare in the Republic. Moreover, although the Jewish counterpart to the Inner Mission and Caritas was comparable neither in size nor in influence to the Christian organizations, the fact that Jewish welfare transcends this religious / conservative, secular / progressive divide suggests that Jews navigated a very different path in negotiating the relationship between state, nation, and religion in Germany than did representatives of Catholic and Protestant social welfare. Even in light of such important differences, the leaders of the Central Welfare Agency of German Jews did share many assumptions about the nature of the social crisis with their bourgeois Christian counterparts. Along with conservative Christians, the Central Welfare Agency critiqued the family from a moral-social standpoint, blaming the loss of (male) authority for the postwar social crisis. Indeed, the majority of middle-class Jews who shaped Jewish social policy held conceptions of the moral and healthy family, class- and gender-specific notions of normalcy and deviance that may not have differed substantially from those held by their non-Jewish counterparts. Yet the cultural goals and the kind of national community envisioned by Jewish and Christian welfare organizations could not have been farther apart. While Jews were united with Catholics and Protestants in opposition to the socialist Workers’ Welfare emphasis on class struggle, its goals in many other key respects were more closely aligned with Dickinson’s nonreligious “social-managerials.” Not surprisingly, Weimar Jews did not dream of the restoration of a conservative authoritarian government as did many Protestants connected with Inner Mission who were hostile to the Republic. Alongside other nonsectarian bourgeois groups, Jewish social work was committed to upholding a liberal political and social order. Indeed, the work and commitments of Siddy Wronsky is instructive, for her professional activity illustrates this overlapping domain of Jewish and “social-managerial” approaches to social work. As a leading Social Democratic welfare reformer, Wronsky helped found the middleclass women’s organization Humanitas, whose goal was to cultivate

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universalistic humanism and offer a democratic response to Catholic and Evangelical worldviews.39 While essentially working to oppose the influence of Catholic and Evangelical welfare organizations in the general welfare arena, Wronsky saw the highest goal of Jewish welfare as the “strengthen[ing] and cultivat[ing] of the [Jewish] population to ensure its sustenance and further development.”40 Thus, in opposition to Catholics and Protestants, many Jews working in both their Jewish and secular capacities cultivated a vision of welfare that was at once liberalprogressive and particularistically / ethnically Jewish. The role of religion in shaping the orientation and practice of welfare thus differed considerably among German confessional groups, even as all viewed their social work as the realization of a crucial religious imperative. Activist Jews understood social work as an outgrowth of the religious commandment for zedakah, literally, “doing justice,” though it was often used as synonymous with “charity.” But because the expression of this religious imperative took place in the form of social engagement, participation in social work also served as a means of Jewish community-building. Thus, if the highest aim of social work within the Inner Mission and Caritas can be understood as a mission to save souls, the practitioners of Jewish social work, by contrast, much preferred to win Jewish bodies and integrate them into the larger Jewish social body. This entailed, on the one hand, promotion of pronatalist and sexual hygiene policies that would increase the Jewish population and, on the other, the reform of “delinquent” and other “diseased” Jewish bodies that were perceived as having an antisocial effect. Accordingly, whereas Christian social work sought to shepherd its flock back to God, Jews sought to return Jews back to their communal base.

Beyond Religionsgemeinschaft If Jewish social work did not primarily seek to bring Jews back to the Jewish religion, how did leaders of modern Jewish social work justify the existence of a unique Jewish social welfare sector for problems that typically beset all Germans? The answer can be found in part to lie in Jews’ particular use of the concept of Sozialpolitik, a term difficult to translate

Jewish Welfare During the Weimar Republic

but that implied a systematic, comprehensive, and professionalized system of social aid. Sozialpolitik, while literally translated as “social policy,” connoted particularly industrial or labor policy and encompassed a broad set of issues relating to social and economic questions, the state’s role in enacting social policy, and the expanding aims of social work as an instrument of that policy. In use as early as the 1850s and popularized through the prestigious Union for Social Policy (Verein für Sozialpolitik) that was founded in the 1880s, the idea of Sozialpolitik enjoyed something of a revival after World War I with the establishment of the Weimar Republic. Though its meaning had shifted with changing economic and historical circumstances, Sozialpolitik usually signified the sum of actions taken by the state to improve the social and economic well-being of the working classes and, as such, was closely linked with the Worker Question. Proponents of Sozialpolitik recognized that the best-conceived individual aid programs were insufficient if they failed to address the economic conditions that caused individuals within particular economic positions to remain more vulnerable to weaknesses in the system. In order to justify the development of a unique Jewish Sozialpolitik, Jewish social experts identified Jews as occupying a unique class or stratum (Schicht) within German society. For some, this uniqueness lay in the set of distinctive social characteristics of Jews as a group—their “weak” demographic profile, occupational concentration in commerce, overurbanization, and the alleged physical and mental weaknesses that resulted from these. Other attempts to define the Jews as a unique stratum of the population, such as that of Rabbi Leo Baeck, focused more narrowly and identified the distinctiveness of the Jews as residing in the atypical position they occupied in the German economy. In Leo Baeck’s view, the postwar economic conditions produced a distinctive Jewish subsector of the population: an entire stratum of middle-class, propertyless German Jews.41 In their effort to find a definition of Sozialpolitik flexible enough to fit the particular situation of German Jews, some commentators conceded that German Jews did not entirely conform to more typical understandings of economic class. According to Max Kreutzberger, Jews had not formed a discrete Jewish economy with a specific set of employer-worker relations, nor did they possess a public Jewish authority endowed with the power to take decisive measures of a

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social-political character.42 But though they did not form an economic class comparable to the working class, they did constitute a unique subgroup in the German economy.43 In spite of the inexact fit of the concept Sozialpolitik with the Jewish population, the majority of Jewish social experts still strongly argued for cultivating a specifically distinctive Jewish Sozialpolitik. In order to anchor the new ideals of Sozialpolitik within a traditional Jewish framework, social reformers sought to show how the new social methods did not constitute an innovation but in fact represented the true realization of biblical ideals. A common feature of such arguments was the grounding of modern social work in biblical dictates and ethical principles articulated in the Talmud. Pappenheim, for example, argued for the Jewish origins of Sozialpolitik. Accordingly, she claimed that the advent of modern social legislation in Germany was not revolutionary but that modern social policy actually was already present in ancient Jewish law. Moreover, social ideals usually credited as being Christian in origin, that is, Sabbath observance, the protection of mothers, and family welfare, were demonstrably Jewish. For this reason, she urged local Jewish communities to take up a constructive Jewish social-political agenda without fearing that it went against Jewish tradition. In this way, Pappenheim hoped to incorporate the social methods that had been energizing German society for the purpose of revitalizing a Jewish community that was already “oriented to its social body and social spirit.”44 Taken at its broadest, Sozialpolitik included virtually the entire domestic policy of a state. In any case, Sozialpolitik also normally implied a policy of state intervention. The fact that Sozialpolitik was associated with policies originating with the state could only have lent the Central Welfare Agency a degree of authority as it tried to build support among local communities across Germany. For this reason, the notion of Sozialpolitik had another important resonance for Weimar Jewish social experts in the construction of their “little state.” Its preference of the term Sozialpolitik over social reform, for instance, reinforced the image of the Central Welfare Agency as a central Jewish communal authority at a particularly vulnerable moment when the powers of the Jewish community and private welfare groups were defending their turf in the face of the encroaching powers of the centralized state.

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The implicit association drawn between a Jewish communal authority and the authority of the state also served the Zionist cause. A central Jewish authority that paralleled the state helped create the impression that Jewish state-building—the end goal of political Zionism—had begun. In his postwar recollections, Georg Lubinski noted this intended association in the Central Welfare Agency’s choice of a new name for its journal. “The adding of the word Sozialpolitik to the [journal] name of the Zeitschrift für jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege [Journal of Jewish Welfare] . . . implied that Jewish welfare should not only help and heal but should seek to work constructively.” Moreover, he explained, the “high sounding name Sozialpolitik which was commonly used only in connection with activities of the state, was an indication of the ‘national’ character of the Jewish community as object and subject of ‘social policy.’ ” A community that offered youth rehabilitation, vocational guidance, vocational retraining, loans and credit, and work opportunities for immigrant laborers, all in the service of a constructive Jewish social policy, reflected particularly well the Zionist approach to social work as a point that lay somewhere between Religionsgemeinschaft on the one hand and a fully autonomous Jewish state on the other.45 The intentions of Zionist-oriented social workers to expand the social infrastructure in the direction of a state-in-the-making are particularly significant when viewed in the larger context of the shifts taking place in Weimar Jewish communal politics overall. After the war, the influence of the Jewish national movement, the encounter with the east European Jews, the organizational restructuring of Jewish communities, the separation between Church and State, the rise of anti-Semitism, and the postwar economic catastrophe provided Weimar Jews an opportunity for reevaluating the traditional options of Zionism, Orthodoxy, and Liberalism.46 The electoral successes of the Jüdische Volkspartei (The Jewish People’s Party), which represented a kind of Diaspora nationalism that emphasized the ethnic character of Judaism, offers important evidence of a broader communal turn to the social and ethnic—without necessarily a full embrace of Zionism.47 No doubt, Zionist interests penetrated the larger communal sphere of welfare. But it is too simple to argue that Zionism had co-opted Jewish social work as some Zionists claimed. It may be more useful to suggest that the core aims of social work often

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transcended the traditional Liberal/Zionist split as welfare came to focus increasingly on the construction of community, Jewish unity, and the ultimate interdependence of Jews. The figure of Eugen Caspary perfectly exemplifies this transformation of welfare into a social space that rose above traditional ideological divisions. As the president both of the Central Welfare Agency and the head of the Berlin Jewish Community Welfare Office, he has been called the most important man in Jewish welfare during the Republic.48 Caspary came from a bourgeois liberal milieu and was not an adherent of Zionism. Yet his work with east European Jews and his commitment to Sozialpolitik convinced him that the task of social welfare was to fundamentally reform the Jewish population in demographic, occupational, geographic, economic, and physical terms. Certainly none of his contemporaries would have argued that Caspary was co-opted by Zionist ideology. What we see in fact is that Caspary’s desire for expanding the breadth and reach of communal social action coincided quite closely with Zionist representatives of Jewish social work, who, like Lubinski, supported this expansion for ideological reasons as well.

Toward a Gendered Social Healing The nineteenth-century idea that women were uniquely positioned to ameliorate social misery and to bridge social divisions was taken up with renewed fervor by Jewish and non-Jewish women alike after World War I. In creating a denser and more expansive web of social institutions, women continued to view themselves and be viewed as key practitioners in this increasingly important field of action and intervention. Seeing themselves as particularly suited for bringing about social healing, middle-class women in particular believed their unique female nature, derived from their biological capacity as mothers, obligated them to apply their nurturing skills to society as a whole. Feminists’ conceptions of citizenship, rooted in distinctly organic notions of German citizenship, emphasized duties over rights and tended to define individual self-fulfillment in the context of community. In Germany, the idea of “social motherhood” provided the intellectual foundation and political

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justification for the emergence of modern social work and animated the German feminist movement from its early years until its collapse and co-optation under Hitler in 1933. Even before the dramatic events surrounding the war and its aftermath, bourgeois social welfare experts had come to view welfare as a means to heal the problems of modern urban society. Well into the 1920s, as David Crew has observed, many bourgeois welfare workers continued to try to “heal the wounds of society with welfare alone,” seeing it as their class-specific duty to help bring about social reconciliation.49 The Berlin social worker Else Wex described social welfare as “a means of restoring the often lost collectivity, a new way of binding together not only individual human beings but also classes and estates.”50 Beyond tending to the needy, a particularly “female” expression of social work aimed at healing a “wounded collectivity” by forging new and stronger social bonds that were shattered by the war and the social and economic crises that followed. For newly professionalized Jewish social workers, as well as for women who continued to work within the Jewish community in a voluntary capacity, an engagement in social work also became a means of managing urban problems and the Volksganze.51 Indeed, social workers in the Jewish welfare sector expressed views about the healing powers of social work that were identical to those expressed by non-Jewish female social workers. Accordingly, Frieda Weinreich, a social worker in the Jewish community of Berlin, argued that “the [female] welfare workers bridge the gaps between the haves and the have-nots, laboring to eliminate illnesses and epidemics and the underlying causes that disturb the spiritual equanimity of the individual.”52 Weimar Jewish social workers thus also conceptualized welfare as a crucial means by which to mitigate the impact of the negative effects of postwar social conditions in order to sustain Jewry and further its development.53 In this way, the “biological” approach to defining and sustaining Jewishness can be seen to coincide with a larger material shift within Weimar Jewry’s efforts to reimagine and revitalize itself. Beyond the social services they provided, Jewish social reformers saw social relief as an important means by which to both stabilize and resuscitate the Jewish community. For Bertha Pappenheim, the veritable “mother” of Jewish social work in Germany, the idea of extending

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woman’s motherly nature to radically remake Jewish society was at the center of her life’s work. Neu Isenburg, the home she founded for single Jewish mothers and their children that existed between 1904 and 1938, and the founding of the League of Jewish Women were the instruments she set in place to carry out this goal. To build a family is to create a Gemeinschaft, wrote Hannah Karminski, social worker and president of the League of Jewish Women from 1926 to 1942, and Pappenheim and other Jewish feminists contended that both married women and those women who remained single because of the “oversupply” of women should realize their maternal duties within the Jewish community itself.54 Social work was thus considered the quintessential Frauenberuf (female profession); neither simply a job nor merely a profession (Beruf ), social work was for many who practiced it a true calling (Berufung). If social work was a calling, then Jewish women appear to have been called to this work at a much higher rate than non-Jewish women. Wronsky noted that the demand among Jewish women for training in the “social profession” was extraordinarily high.55 She estimated the percentage of Jewish women enrolled in Social Women’s Schools to rest somewhere between 3 and 9 percent. Attributing the preponderance of Jewish women in social work to a traditionally “Jewish” interest in social and political matters, Wronsky also believed that women had a natural aptitude for such work. In her assessment, women who trained as social workers found greater personal satisfaction working with people than they would in business, the most common occupational path pursued by Jewish women. Particularly significant in this connection was the fact that in both the public and private sector, social work was a field that was open to Jewish women.56 Nevertheless, professionally trained female Jewish social workers by the mid-1920s faced increasing difficulties finding jobs in the field.57 Jewish women not only embraced class- and gender-specific notions of social work that ascribed to women a mediating role between private and public; some, including Alice Salomon, Bertha Pappenheim, and Siddy Wronsky, were instrumental in creating and disseminating these ideas. But Jewish social workers also found particularly Jewish justifications for expanding their private familial roles into social and even political ones, carefully presenting them as conforming to, and not revising,

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women’s traditional participation in Jewish community life. One such formulation of this idea can be found in the writing of Ernestine Eschelbacher, who represented the older generation of women working in traditional Jewish charity organizations. Eschelbacher argued that women facilitated Jewish survival throughout Jewish history by helping Jews manage the experience of persecution and loss.58 In Palestine as in exile, the Jewish woman always understood the necessity of alleviating the pain of humiliation, worry, need, and grief through “the strength of her essential being.” Eschelbacher believed Jews could not have sustained themselves were it not for the “wonderful flexibility of the spirit and the will to life that constantly unfolded and was revived through the work of the Jewish woman.”59 Other women, such as Gertrud Ehrmann, made the case that Jewish women’s work had always taken place in the social arena and that Jewish texts and traditions call upon women to help bring about healing in Jewish society.60 Whether arguing for an essential nurturing female presence in Jewish history or for the extension of women’s participation in the contemporary social realm, women active in Jewish welfare work conceptualized women’s participation as a “natural” way to strengthen the Jewish community and address its contemporary social problems. Social motherhood thus insisted on the unity of women’s motherly roles in public and private and, in this way, profoundly reshaped twentieth-century Jewish ideas about the form and nature of Jewish community. As a gendered sphere of communal engagement, the social became a venue for producing a new kind of Jewishness in a way that not only assisted those in need but also promoted solidarity and cohesion among those who worked for the common cause of Jewish survival. Though women’s involvement in these programs can certainly be read as a capitulation to a restrictive notion of female social agency, such activity also entailed the articulation of the importance of female social agents and provided a crucial training ground for women to negotiate the complexities of governmental bodies and bureaucracies, gaining experience in organizing large-scale social actions. Social work thus was not only a site for female politics but was also viewed by many Jews as the most important means for bringing about Jewish communal regeneration.

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A comparison of two leading figures in Jewish social work, Bertha Pappenheim and Siddy Wronsky, helps illuminate how each of these women attempted to expand female politics through her engagement in social work. At the same time, their shared commitment to social work illustrates once again how social work often transcended the Liberal/ Zionist divide. Although the two disagreed on a number of key issues—Pappenheim vigorously opposed replacing volunteers with paid workers, for example, something that Wronsky had devoted her career to promoting—the Zionist Wronsky and the anti-Zionist and religiously observant Pappenheim nevertheless both advocated a reformulation of Judaism and a transformation of the public sphere in which women would assume central and nonsubordinate roles. Placing great emphasis on the decline of the Jewish community since the nineteenth century, both Pappenheim and Wronsky enlisted Jewish history in the service of their social visions by looking to the Middle Ages as a high point of Jewish historical development and as a model for Jewish communal life. This admiration of the Middle Ages contrasts sharply with the positions taken by religious reformers in the early nineteenth century as well as with later Zionist thinkers, both of whom had portrayed the Middle Ages as a time of degeneration and dispersion. Isaak Jost and Leopold Zunz recounted the degeneracy of the Jewish masses and the declining quality of Jewish leadership.61 Consistent with their Emancipationist strivings, religious reformers and scholars of the Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) more generally sought to remove any historical vestiges of a politically autonomous Jewish community. Yet during the 1920s, as nationalist Jewish historians such as Yitzchak Baer and Julius Guttman began to turn their attention to the medieval Jewish community as a positive example of autonomous Jewish existence, their choice of subject clearly had implications for the political character of Jewish life. Thus, the nineteenth century, having once embodied Jewish hopes for successful integration, had, at the hands of both Pappenheim and Wronsky, become a picture of cultural decay and degeneration. For these social workers cum cultural critics, the nineteenth century represented an overwhelming loss of group cohesion, uniqueness, and social responsibility. This image of the late nineteenth century as one of progressive social degeneration re-

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flected the prevalent idea about the social costs of modernization in general and a disillusionment with Jewish Emancipation in particular. Indeed, the very roots of social work itself lay in late-nineteenthcentury cultural criticism.62 But the portrait of a degenerate past served as the perfect backdrop for laying out their social-political agenda. Both Pappenheim and Wronsky depicted the contemporary moment as being on the threshold of a new era, with social work standing ready to marshal the human resources and institutional infrastructure required for this new post-Emancipation period of Jewish history. Pappenheim explained Jews’ declining sense of social responsibility as the result of religion’s diminished authority in the eyes of postEmancipation Jews. When religious law had still functioned as the decisive element in Jewish life, Pappenheim argued, the social and religious aspects of the law were inextricably joined together; keeping the commandments was accompanied by the expectation that individuals met their larger social obligations to the community.63 Moreover, in contrast to the current factionalization of the community into divisive camps, the Middle Ages and ghetto period reputedly represented a high point in Jewish social cohesion. While locating the decline of social responsibility in a waning sense of religious devotion, Pappenheim, however, did not call upon her fellow Jews to return to the religious faith of the past, despite her own religious commitments. Rather, she saw the renewed engagement of Jews in the social sphere as a significant metamorphosis of the traditional religious motive into social work and as offering potential for the regeneration of Jewish society. Thus, engagement in the social reconstruction of the community not only would heal those in need but also offered a path back to the Jewish Gemeinschaft for those who had been far removed from its orbit. Refusing to give up on marginal Jews who no longer felt connected to the Jewish religion, Pappenheim believed that these Jews could recover a commitment to the Jewish Gesamtheit on the basis of the social aspects of Judaism. With this in mind, Pappenheim envisioned a nationwide commitment to social work as a means to draw in disaffected Jews. In this way, Pappenheim argued, “every Jew and Jewess, even those barely connected to Judaism, can find an interesting, important and sympathetic field of activity and involvement.”64 In her vision for a new kind

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of public sphere that joined the nonreligious and believers and that stressed unity over the intense factionalization of public life, women were to play the pivotal role. Through their naturally endowed harmonious natures, Jewish women would effect the true goal of Jewish unity and so, too, the realization of a new social religion. In her writings and lectures on Jewish social work, Siddy Wronsky spoke in even stronger terms about the regenerative quality of social work for the Jewish collectivity.65 The decline in the birthrate, the rise in the incidence of diseases specific to Jews, and the altered psyche of the Jewish child all signified that the most delicate organs of the Volkskörper were being destroyed. For Wronsky, Jewry had reached its hour of need. And it was precisely at such dramatic moments in the history of a people that the interdependence of its members came into sharpest focus. When the illness of one part of the Volkskörper threatened the entire body with serious danger, Wronsky argued, it became clear that the fate of the collective depended upon the health of each individual Jew. Conversely, every failure to offer up help and support for those in need undermined the strength and health of the whole. In the chaos of the present moment, when a new community form had yet to take shape, Wronsky spoke of the need for dramatic, innovative social measures: “The summons to save the Jewish Gesamtkörper requires a transformation of our social welfare methods.” 66 By this Wronsky meant to suggest that the social arena represented a new force that inhered with the potential to reinvigorate all of Jewry.67 Like Pappenheim, Wronsky evoked both the Middle Ages and the ancient Jewish state as periods in which Jews possessed both a far-reaching social community and a considerable degree of autonomy. Accordingly, she saw both the administrative system of the ghetto and the independent, ancient Jewish state as having operated in accordance with the aims of the modern Sozialpolitik. But whereas the modern state was charged with cultivating the national strength (Volkskraft) of its people in the political sense, the historical Jewish Gemeinschaft protected the health and strength of its members to be the bearers of the monotheistic idea.68 Within this interpretive context, Wronsky portrayed the historical role of the rabbi as the predecessor of the modern social worker, whose chief

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goal was essentially as the upholder of population policy, that is, to sustain the individual for the sake of the community. Since, for Wronsky, only physically robust and economically stable individuals could actively serve the Gemeinschaft, “the aims of rabbis had always been chiefly social ones, for only healthy community members would be in the position to form a vital religious and Volksgemeinschaft.”69 Imposing twentiethcentury categories on ancient and medieval Jewish communities, Wronsky showed how rabbis had always included the promotion of “health and hygiene, youth education, work welfare and population policy” along with their ritual responsibilities.70 For Wronsky, as for her less Zionistic counterparts, the individual’s relationship to the community remained the eternal organizing principle of Jewish social life. Unlike that of his detached, university-educated, nineteenth-century counterpart, the function of the premodern rabbi had, according to Wronsky, been “to go among the people.”71 The knowledge he needed in order to safeguard the social well-being of his community extended well beyond that which he could derive from the Torah; he was also to possess an intimate knowledge of the living conditions within his community, the biological potentialities and vulnerabilities of its members, and their foundational psychology. Being part of the social world of the Jews he served, he was also better equipped to respond to their social needs. The modern German rabbi, by contrast, was estranged from the social conditions of his congregants and maintained little contact with members of his congregation outside the synagogue, and this limited his ability to render another important rabbinic function: the exercise of compassion. Concurring with Kreutzberger, Wronsky considered Sozialpolitik a relevant social strategy only insofar as it was directed toward an explicit and distinctive social group. Thus, she explained that over the course of the nineteenth century, while Jews had been busy shedding their unique group characteristics, they surrendered any claim for a comprehensive Sozialpolitik.72 Because of this, the constructive methods of modern German Sozialpolitik had found little resonance within the contemporary Jewish community. Modern social methods were more suited for “authentic” forms of Jewish community life, such as those that had existed when Jews lived in their own land and enjoyed the status of an

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autonomous community. In the forever altered postwar society, Wronsky called upon Jews to restore a Jewish Sozialpolitik, and with it, a centuries-old tradition.73 Like Pappenheim, Wronsky did not see religion as the cure for Jewish degeneration. Instead, she envisioned a renewed emphasis on the social aspects of Judaism along the lines of the “social religion” of the Middle Ages that she had outlined. What is particularly striking about Wronsky’s social vision of Judaism is how much she seems to assume the function of the social rabbi herself. Harking back to the prophet Michah, Wronsky “preached” the ideals of justice, love, and humility before God but invested them with specific meanings and obligations for contemporary Jews. Pursuing justice, for example, meant “saving the sick and ailing Volkskörper from the stifling effects of infertility, where the realization of the idea of love would be manifest in genuine ideas of community.”74 Wronsky’s rabbinic style of exegesis was clearly suggestive of the new model of the social rabbi she envisioned. Indeed, both Pappenheim and Wronsky staked a claim for fundamentally reshaping the nature and function of the Jewish community through social work. Even more remarkable, they sought to recast Judaism itself in a manner that would empower women to play central roles in its definition and operation. Thus, for both Pappenheim and Wronsky, social policy and social work offered the most promising means for reconstituting a new Jewish public sphere. Without the easy division between the male public sphere of religion and the female sphere of the social, there could no longer be a valid justification for excluding women from the heart of Jewish religious leadership and practice. Through social work in the broadest sense of the term, then, both Pappenheim and Wronsky hoped to see women take their place not only at the center of the project of reimagining and rebuilding Gemeinschaft but as principal actors in a refashioned postEmancipation, postdenominational Jewish public sphere. What united Jews like Pappenheim and Wronsky with the “socialmanagerial” as well as Christian conservative approach to social work was the way that gender structured conceptualizations of welfare and the family. Indeed, women’s claim for empowerment on the basis of essentialized arguments captures the fraught nature of Weimar gender

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politics. “The language of social policy created a definite space of recognition for women,” note Atina Grossmann and Geoff Eley on the larger Weimar social field, “while at the same time constraining their possibilities and setting limits to their interventions.”75 Jews and nonJews alike thus contended with this fundamental ambiguity of Weimar social work, laboring within a conceptual framework that offered the hope of shaping a new social order while remaining ultimately limited in their ability to promote radical change. Though neither Pappenheim nor Wronsky succeeded in radically redefining Judaism, their work enormously invigorated what, during the Republic, had come to be a central sphere of engagement for Jewish men and women. Gendered feminine, the social sphere served as a site not only for female politics but also as a new locus for Jewish communal regeneration. In this way, the idea of regeneration itself was predicated on the further cultivation of “female” virtues and values. Women’s claim to spiritual and biological “motherhood” took on a uniquely important meaning at a time when the regeneration of the Jewish social body had become such a central focus of attention and concern. Thus, what began in the nineteenth century as a gender-specific definition of women’s place gave shape in the twentieth to the idea of an altogether new Jewish Gemeinschaft. Accordingly, we can see how the rebirth of the Jewish community was being imagined along gendered lines. As we have seen, Jewish regeneration was predicated on dispensing with the standard ideological categories that had been a staple of Jewish communal discourse. The idea of an overarching Gemeinschaft of Jews bound to one another in culture and fate now appeared to be a crucially important means of Jewish identification and self-understanding. But this notion of Jewish regeneration was, as we have seen in the last two chapters, conceived largely from a familiarity with, as well as a facility with, German social policy ideals. Jewish social workers enlisted the concept of Sozialpolitik to justify the expansion of the boundaries demarcating the extent of the community’s interests, extending its authority into spheres previously held to be beyond its purview. The emerging vision of a more encompassing Jewish community was devoted, as the sociologist Werner Cahnmann has described in another context, to “restoring the flesh back on the

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Jewish body” and presupposed an expanding meaning of Jewishness defined by feelings of solidarity with the whole.76 The notion of a community that could offer care and protection to its weakest members, create constructive economic policies and lending institutions for its unemployed, reshape the occupational distribution of its members, and improve the quality and quantity of its offspring clearly offered a potent counterimage to the ideal of the purely confessional Jewish community envisioned, though never fully realized, by nineteenth-century religious reformers.77 With the important exception of Zionism, never before in the modern period had an intellectual, social, or political system of ideas offered German Jews the kind of wholesale legitimation for augmenting the powers, autonomy, and scope of Jewish communal existence. In a paradoxical manner, it is evident once again how these social interventions to reassert a new Jewish particularism also functioned to reinforce Jews’ Germanness, as Jews proselytized the lower classes through the promotion of middle-class normative economic, moral, and sexual norms and values. In Chapter 4, we will see how middle-class Jews sought to strengthen the community by reforming those who did not fit within its existing structure. From the optimistic belief that “human material” was malleable and amenable to a variety of social therapies, Weimar Jews sought to make Jewish insiders out of former outsiders, and in so doing save the Jewish Gemeinschaft from impending decline. Nourished by Jewish tradition, committed to modern social policy, and impelled by the Weimar communitarian impulse, Jewish welfare workers envisioned the realization of Judaism’s religious objectives in the creation of a more harmonious and biologically and socially productive Jewish social community.

F o u r Rescuing “Endangered Youth”:

Youth Welfare and the Project of Bourgeois Social Reform

In June 1918, the Jewish art collector Salli Kirschstein and Bernhard Timendorfer, the director of the fraternal organization B’nai Brith solicited support for one of the first endeavors undertaken by the Central Welfare Agency of German Jews on behalf of Jewish children. Laying out the rationale for what they articulated as the Central Welfare Agency’s most crucial task, Kirschstein and Timendorfer argued for a series of comprehensive programs to promote the welfare of Jewish children, “in particular, those who are orphans, illegitimate, abandoned, endangered and neglected.”1 Whatever final form these specific measures would take, they contended, youth welfare must pay particular attention to the physical nurturing of needy children, tend to their spiritual and moral education, discern their legal interests, “and energetically ensure that the next generation will be preserved for the sake of Judaism and Jewry.”2 Kirschstein and Timendorfer might have appealed to potential donors by invoking the Jewish religious obligation for charity. Instead, they anchored their proposal for establishing constructive aid programs for Jewish children and teenagers in the drive to fortify the Jewish social body against a looming existential threat. Indeed, it was youth welfare’s potential for replenishing an aging and declining population that secured its singularly important role in Jewish social welfare during the Weimar Republic. From a population policy perspective, the loss of valuable “human material” during the war, as Professor Eugen Wolbe, a Liberal Jewish writer and teacher termed it in a 1919 essay, meant that the rehabilitation of troubled youth could serve both to reinforce German Jews’ diminishing ranks and to manage and regulate a social problem that experts agreed had grown increasingly severe as a result of the war.3

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Within the broader field of youth welfare, social workers viewed “wayward” youths as simultaneously posing the greatest danger to society but also offering the surest hope for transformation. Precisely for this reason, “endangered” adolescents, whom experts saw as embodying the greatest risk of degeneration, figured as the most important subspecialty within youth welfare. Within a Jewish context, Jewish social workers, Zionist and Liberal alike, envisioned the creation of a more efficient social body that would serve, as one Liberal Jew put it, “the interest of the Jewish totality” by cultivating the biological, moral, and economic improvement of this group of young people.4 In the postwar context of crisis and possibility, the regeneration of socially marginal and economically unproductive workers who had once been on the margins of society now seemed, in theory at least, to promise the fulfillment of Jewish communal goals for both the biological and social renewal of Weimar Jewish society.5 But, of course, the question of how exactly Jewish social work professionals defined the “interest of the collectivity” is a complicated one. As representatives of a fundamentally middle-class enterprise that sought to restore key components of the prewar social and gender order, social work experts applied the norms and standards of the profession to a growing Jewish underclass they saw as their own, seeking to refashion its members in their own image of bourgeois propriety. Of particular significance in Jewish welfare work during the Weimar Republic were youths who came from east European cultural backgrounds. Constituting a considerable proportion of the Jewish youth deemed to be in need of “constructive” intervention—50 percent by some estimates—young east European Jews became crucially important subjects of an accelerating project aimed at “civilizing” Jews perceived as “wayward” or “endangered.” In this regard, the particular concentration on east European youth helps make clear the extent to which the various efforts of youth reform relied upon a vision of Jewish respectability equally inflected by class and nationality. For the “waywardness” of the east European Jewish youth was ultimately a diagnosis of their divergence from German social norms as much as from those of bourgeois respectability. Or, to put it differently, their lack of bourgeois respectability was in no small part a result of their east European origins and the lack of sufficient German and German-Jewish acculturation. To “reform” them, therefore,

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was primarily to address what might be termed a “national” deficiency rather than simply a “Jewish” or even a “class” deficiency, even if it were one that might find expression in terms of a perceived class identity that gave rise to “endangerment.” As a result, though the youth reform projects might be seen to operate under the aegis of a broader program of German-Jewish revitalization, they were at root equally projects of middle-class and national reform and immigrant assimilation. Thus, we can see how Jewish and German reform efforts intertwine in significant ways and once again discern the manner in which the path to Jewish renewal passes through Germanness and the categories of nation. This chapter turns to correctional education as a case study of bourgeois youth welfare work because it represented the most extreme form of intervention into family life for dealing with those designated by the state as “endangered youth.” Whether “endangered” or “endangering” is a more apt term is worth considering, as the youths targeted were almost always those on the margins of society who might be seen to threaten its stability. In response, wayward youths were incarcerated in institutions that were generally governed by an authoritarian pedagogy meant to inculcate “productive” middle-class values more conducive to social order. For this reason, this analysis focuses largely on the socialdisciplinary dimension of these institutions. In ways that partly mirror the policies of reproductive management discussed in Chapter 2, these reform institutions became integrated into the framework of social intervention encouraged and enabled by the Weimar constitution. Like their non-Jewish equivalents, Jewish correctional educational institutions carried out their social disciplinary functions in the service of both the state and their confessional community. Indeed, there was little to distinguish the means by which Jews carried out these disciplinary functions. This becomes especially apparent as one considers the class- and gender-specific understandings of what constituted disturbances to middle-class German society. In this way, Jewish organizations’ norms and methods were entirely consistent with other German counterparts even if the achievement of such norms might be perceived as coinciding with goals particularly important for the Jewish community. The case of correctional education is also instructive because its trajectory illustrates the direction in which understandings of welfare projects

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were moving during the Republic. Its development charts the shift from traditional welfare practices to the more far-reaching “constructive” or “productive” welfare. Although correctional education did not begin in 1918, it assumed renewed importance as a means of carrying out the charge of the constitution to—involuntarily if necessary—guarantee every child a right to education. But while demonstrating the extent to which Jewish social policy and class norms coincided with those of the broader German society, the unique arc of correctional education ultimately serves to highlight the divergent paths that began to distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish youth welfare practices as the Republic began to enter the final phase of its beleaguered existence.

The Expansion of Jewish Youth Welfare During the Weimar Republic There may be no better example of the Weimar Jewish paradox than the dynamic expansion of postwar Jewish Youth Welfare programs. The situation of youth presented a compelling locus of attention, pairing a sense of profound crisis with the promise held out by the era’s cult of youth. It was this peculiar blend of anxiety and vision that fueled the rapid proliferation of Jewish commissions and agencies designed to heal and promote the thriving of the social body. The increasing urbanization of German Jewry, especially GermanJewish youth, was seen as an important aspect of the problem. The “degenerating” influence of city life was compounded by the impoverished conditions and cramped dwellings of the lower classes. The overall insecurity of wartime and the immediate postwar period, which included the absence of even basic foodstuffs, were believed to contribute to the profound changes in morality evidenced among broad sectors of the population.6 Not surprisingly, then, given the impossibility of maintaining anything approximating a typical bourgeois existence, Jewish social workers found extremely high rates of “endangerment” among the youth they examined shortly after the war. To be sure, German social reformers and the German state shared this perception of the nation’s youth in crisis. In response to the social catas-

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trophe wrought by the war, the Reichstag legislated increased state intervention with passage of the Reich Youth Welfare Law (RJWG) in 1922. This legislation characterized the German Fatherland as in “a state of collapse” and foresaw only a “dark future with little hope.” Nonetheless, it charted a course of dramatic expansion to forestall the realization of this dire prediction. Using the Weimar constitution’s proclamation of every child’s “right to education,” the RJWG handed the state the coercive power to remove children from home environments that fell short of guaranteeing that right. Youth welfare now gained the prerogative of intervention, as one social worker put it, “wherever children and youth were orphaned, abandoned, or not enjoying proper care and rearing due to poverty or ‘the inability of parents.’ ”7 While the perception of crisis legitimated state intervention, it was the vision of youth as guarantors of the future that fueled a newly energized national youth policy. In response to both the crisis and the promise of youth, an explosion of activity characterized the founding years of the Central Welfare Agency, particularly in Berlin. The veritable proliferation of youth welfare programs, organizations, and commissions founded immediately after the war attests not only to the severity and scope of postwar social problems that Jewish communities perceived themselves to be facing but also to the sense of possibility and purpose within the burgeoning field of Jewish social work. Their publications emphasized the fundamental importance of youth welfare to their entire program of social works while Central Welfare Agency annual reports proclaimed youth welfare the most important branch of Jewish welfare.8 Consequently, the Central Welfare Agency steered the bulk of its resources in this direction.9 The sense of urgency occasioned the Central Welfare Agency’s formation of its first two working task forces: the guardianship and orphan commissions. The guardianship commission was specifically charged with reforming the organization of collective guardianship and strengthening institutions of closed and open welfare institutions.10 As a first step toward ensuring prompt and appropriate care for needy Jewish children throughout Germany, the guardianship commission advocated the creation of a centralized system organized on the model of the Berlin Gemeinde which would register all orphans and illegitimate children

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within individual communities.11 The same commission also assembled leading Jewish youth welfare experts for the purpose of determining the state of institutional development and the scope of youth welfare work being conducted within individual communities and, to that end, undertook countless nationwide surveys to assess the availability of services throughout the Reich.12 The Working Group for the Welfare of Endangered Jewish Youth (Arbeitsgemeinschaft jüdischer Gef ährdetenfürsorge), affiliated with the Central Welfare Agency, was also established immediately after the war to deal exclusively with institutions for “endangered youth.” Their work focused particularly on correctional education and, eventually, its pedagogic reform. The national organization Jewish Aid for Children represented an important innovation in Jewish welfare provision. Cofounded in 1920 by the Central Welfare Agency and the League of Jewish Women, it was fashioned along the lines of the new German organization German Aid to Children (Deutsche Kinderhilfe). Its primary purpose was to raise the level of financial support and provision of care for existing youth welfare institutions.13 In Berlin alone, eight closed institutions for wayward and orphan children, two of which had been founded since the war, immediately affiliated with the new organization. The organization made its most important contribution in offering substantial medical care to needy east European Jewish children. In conjunction with this goal, social workers and physicians worked closely with the mothers of these children to improve sanitary and “moral” conditions in order to prevent the children’s removal from their homes.14 In 1929, doctors affiliated with the organization conducted 8,760 consultations with 3,537 children, a level of activity that seemed to remain consistent throughout the period.15 Spurred by the work of the first two commissions, the Union of Orphanages and Reformatories (Vereinigung von Waisenhaüsern und Erziehungsanstalten) was soon called into being to deal with issues of educational and institutional reform. In 1922, the Committee for Child and Youth Welfare (Fachausschuss f ür Kinder und Jugendwohlfahrt) extended the work of the original two commissions on orphans and collective guardianship to the whole of Germany; its tasks included the provision of material support and health care.16 Around this same time,

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the Jewish Teacher’s Organization also founded the first agency for foster and adoption placement in the country, which was followed by the League of Jewish Women’s Central Agency for Jewish Adoption and Foster Care (Zentralstelle für jüdische Adoptionsvermittlung und Pflegestellenwesen).17 In the increasingly important realm of Jewish settlement activity, the Jewish Settlement Cooperative ( Jüdische Siedlungsgenossenschaft), founded in 1919, was organized to purchase land to establish colonies for youth and others who had suffered the harmful effects of the war. Numerous other organizations established during these years labored to arrange recuperative care (Erholungsfürsorge and Verschickungsfürsorge) by sending urban children to live in rural areas during vacation time. New youth homes and orphanages were established that addressed newly evolving diagnostic categories: children with tuberculosis now had their own institution, as did the increasing number of youth being diagnosed as “psychopathic” during the 1920s. Some social workers as well as a local youth welfare committee in the Schöneberg district of Berlin proposed the establishment of a group home for the offspring of mixed marriages in order to prevent the children from being brought into Christian families or non-Jewish youth welfare homes. Such a home would thus provide these children the opportunity to recover or form for the first time a Jewish identity.18

Youth Degeneracy and the Construction of Deviance In addition to the Weimar paradox that juxtaposed great potential and even greater need, this welter of activity must also be understood as emerging from the shifting legal framework of Weimar society. The constitution’s declared right of every German child to a proper education legitimated greater state intervention into family life. Indeed, correctional education was designed specifically to offset deficiencies in the socializing function of the family, parents, school, and other social institutions. Insofar as social workers could document a family’s negligence in carrying out its duties, the youth welfare law authorized child welfare authorities to intervene to protect the child’s inalienable right to proper physical and

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moral rearing. In theory as in law, the state assumed the role of “substitute parent” (Ersatzerzieher), making “correctional education a form of public child-rearing which . . . should function as a substitute education or the supplementing of private rearing by the parents or responsible adults.”19 Like the requirement for public education, correctional education superseded parental authority and operated independently of the wishes of the responsible adults or the minor himself. In entrusting the responsibility for rearing to state representatives, correctional education thus represented the most radical and decisive educational measure recognized by the law.20 According to the Youth Welfare Law, the primary objective of correctional education was the prevention or removal of Verwahrlosung. On the order of the guardianship court, which became the arbiter of correctional education cases in the new welfare bureaucracy, the state could assign a minor to correctional education “when the removal of the minor from his present environment is necessary for the prevention of neglect or due to “inadequacies of education.”21 The first type of neglect assumed parental deficiencies in childrearing; the second was evidenced by specific antisocial behaviors even when there were no outward signs of parental deficiencies. This flexible definition of neglect and “inadequacy of education” provided social workers with a great deal of latitude in interpreting the Youth Welfare Law. As a further prerogative, the court could order temporary correctional education for a minor without going through the complex bureaucratic proceedings necessary for referring a child to correctional education if it was found that there would be “danger in delay.”22 Parents had the right to contest the court’s decision and did so in significant numbers. During the 1920s, for example, one in four correctional education decrees was contested by the parents or guardian.23 Verwahrlosung was thus the key concept for defining a child’s lack of appropriate rearing and legitimated the state prerogative to intervene. By definition, Verwahrlosung could not be corrected by the individual and required social intervention.24 Indeed, by the 1920s, Verwahrlosung counted among the core concepts in social policy. One educator characterized the entire enterprise of social welfare as the “battle against Verwahrlosung.”25 The reputed causes of Verwahrlosung, as well as the

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symptoms and behaviors associated with it, ranked among the issues most frequently discussed by the medical doctors, psychiatrists, social pedagogues, criminologists, and theologians who researched and wrote on youth welfare. The “discovery” of Verwahrlosung in the 1880s appeared in conjunction with growing public anxiety over the threat presented by workingclass youths to middle-class notions of social orderliness. The term “post-school-age youth” (schulentlassene Jugend), which came into currency around the turn of the century, connoted this newly defined social problem.26 Most important for our purposes, the very concept of “degenerate youth” became, for middle-class society, evidence of a social realm that was chaotic and seemingly out of control. The origins of Verwahrlosung thus appear closely related to the mass entry of male youths into the industrial workforce.27 Ranging between the ages of fourteen and twenty years old, these working-class youths occupied a socially and temporally transitional space between school’s end and entrance into the army. The young men, who had allegedly lost all ties to conventional institutions of social control, seemed to be drawn toward what one contemporary described as a “deeply craved freedom that transgresses all prior boundaries.”28 Their employment appeared particularly threatening because they acquired not only financial resources but also leisure time in which to spend those funds. Their resulting independence came to be viewed as an uncontrollable element in society and, consequently, a threat to the social order. Accordingly, the social dislocations resulting from rapid industrialization, rural-urban migration, and deteriorating living conditions in the metropolitan centers provided the stimulus for the construction of the “post-school-age youth” and the corresponding necessity of regulating this unconstrained variable of modern urban life. Despite the perception that Verwahrlosung constituted the preeminent social illness of the time, there was little consensus among professionals as to its definition and etiology.29 But regardless of whether experts specified a moral, medical, psychological, or spiritual diagnosis, all descriptions of its manifestations conformed to the conclusion that individuals bearing the degenerate psychic or physical condition of Verwahrlosung compromised the social body. They identified the manifestation of this condition in the individual’s inability to conform to the

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existing norms of the social order. Indeed, Verwahrlosung could be perhaps best defined as “social unusefulness.” Analyses of Verwahrlosung by medical and social work professionals illustrate just how thoroughly the phenomenon was coextensive with the perception of disturbance to middle-class society. The varied explanations of youth degeneracy all revolved in some fashion around the idea that affected youth failed to control their drives and instincts and behaved irrationally and without an ability to exercise restraint—in short, all those qualities often associated with the working class. One definition of Verwahrlosung relied on the drive model of psychology to explain the mechanism by which individuals came into conflict with social norms. According to this model, a young person’s deviant behavior could be understood as the result of his or, more often, her “being prisoner to one’s drives” (Triebhaftigeit), where the primal drives dominated both the intellectual and spiritual capacities of the individual.30 Some theorists thus saw Verwahrlosung as “the regressive development of education”: while education developed the spiritual and intellectual powers of the individual, Verwahrlosung rolled back the intellectual superstructure whose function was to constrain the outpouring of individual passions and base instincts. The effects of the unbridled expression of the instinctual drives thus broke “through the dams and limits of social life.” In this way, Verwahrlosung entailed a trespassing of the boundaries imposed by both internalized self-discipline and communal norms erected to constrain the individual.31 But this was but one analysis of the dynamics behind Verwahrlosung. Professionals analyzed Verwahrlosung through the lens of their particular discipline. As a result, the concept remained multifaceted yet conveniently vague. Predictably, different professions focused on different dimensions of the individual-family-society nexus to identify illness and treatment. Physicians and psychiatrists looked inward, seeking pathology in the individual, while educators and social pedagogues looked outward, identifying dysfunction in family and community and pursuing strategies to remedy the child’s social environment.32 Social welfare workers concentrated on locating deficiencies in families, since their primary concern was to ameliorate family problems.33 Thus, while the medical establishment tended to view the child as defective material,

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professionals in the social disciplines tended to focus on identifying deficient milieus. The many contrasting approaches to Verwahrlosung paralleled a longstanding and much broader theoretical debate pitting milieu against genetic constitution. Medical studies dominated early research and continued to influence public and legal opinion about the problem of wayward youth well into the 1920s.34 By that time, the young field of psychiatry was gaining increasing influence in defining youth deviance, and this medical focus increasingly weighed in on the side of constitutional incapacity over milieu. Though psychiatrists did not discount the role played by milieu in shaping the personality of wayward youth, the focus of their studies lay in attempts to locate the etiology of pathology within the individual. In one of the defining studies of Verwahrlosung, published by Adalbert Gregor and Else Voigtländer in 1918, the researchers demonstrated that a deficient constitution of the individual was the most important determinant in the majority of cases they examined. In their comprehensive study of 100 boys and 100 girls at a sanatorium at Kleinmueusdorf, they acknowledged the role milieu had played in 59 percent of the cases but argued that constitution presented the most important determining factor in 82 percent of the cases.35 In the two Jewish institutions for wayward boys and girls, the administration of the reformatories also increasingly relied on psychiatrists to predict the potential for the success of correctional education for youths who were being considered for admission. Not surprisingly, psychiatrists at the two Jewish facilities produced findings that mirrored those of Gregor and Voigtländer.36 Psychiatrists reported that a majority of the Jewish boys—61 out of 105—exhibited a constitutional predisposition to abnormal development, as compared with only 44 who were found to have a normal constitution. Other studies on the role played by gender in the formation of constitutional deficiencies also paralleled the diagnostic results of psychiatrists at the girls’ home at Köpenick. Hans W. Grühle’s research on the causes of Verwahrlosung in boys and Barth’s on girls indicated that girls were more frequently “verwahrlost ” as a result of constitution than boys.37 Similarly, psychiatrists reported that Jewish girls at Köpenick exhibited

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significantly higher rates of constitutionally determined degeneration than boys at the Jewish facility at Repzin.38

Correctional Education and the Jews Two Jewish reformatories were founded shortly after the passage of the Correctional Education Law of 1900 stipulating the placement of youth wards in families or an institution of the same religious faith as the child. As a result, the German-Jewish League of Communities first established the boys’ institution in Repzin (in Pomerania) in 1901, which moved to Wolzig (near Berlin) in 1929. It then established a girls’ home in Plötzensee in 1902 that was relocated to Köpenick in 1915 (both near Berlin). The founding of the girls’ home just one year after that of the boys’ reveals how the perception of the problem of youth degeneracy, which had begun as a male phenomenon, now extended to both genders. As we have seen with confessional welfare in general, Protestant and Catholic correctional education institutions stressed more typically “religious” goals: saving the souls of their wards and teaching them to recognize their place in society.39 Although Jewish institutions shared the goals of rehabilitating the youths into productive members of German middleclass society with Catholics and Protestants, the Jewish leadership in youth welfare sought less to inculcate a religious faith than to respond to the survivalist imperative to “save these young people to the Jewish community.” Specifically, educators hoped to help lead these neglected Jewish youth to conform to the dominant expression of Liberal Judaism that was so inextricably linked with German bourgeois values. Although Jews were not identified in the scientific literature as particularly prone to constitutionally induced Verwahrlosung, the Jewish population of inmates nevertheless differed in certain important respects from the correctional education population as a whole. This difference in the composition of the Jewish and non-Jewish populations was rooted in part in the distinct demographic and class structure of German Jewry. Among the general population, correctional education wards came from the lowest end of the educational spectrum and disproportionately from the urban-industrial and wage-labor class strata. Although the Jew-

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ish population as a whole boasted a disproportionately high middleclass status before the war, the influx of east European Jews expanded the size of both the Jewish working and lower middle classes. While a systematic breakdown of Jewish inmates by class status and national origin is not possible, scattered sources suggest that the percentage of Jewish youths who came from families that were culturally identifiable as east European ranged between 25 and 50 percent, although the proportion fluctuated considerably. In a letter to a parent, Director Baronowitz at Repzin estimated that approximately 30 percent of the parents of his boys were naturalized Ostjuden.40 But because the vast majority of Jews from eastern Europe in Germany remained nonnaturalized, one may assume that additional children who were not naturalized citizens were also admitted.41 In 1932, twenty-five pupils out of a total population at Wolzig of 103 came from Poland, Romania, Croatia, Austria, and Luxembourg.42 The remaining three quarters would have consisted of native German-Jewish children who came from middle-class or lowermiddle-class homes before the inflation, as well as children from east European cultural backgrounds. Other estimates indicate that girls from east European families made up 31 percent of the Jewish correctional education population, and boys 34 percent.43 While the majority of lower-class Jews lived in an urban and cultural milieu that was similar to that of German working-class youth, Jewish families culturally identifiable as east European and even working-class native German Jews cannot be considered as fully analogous to nonJewish working-class families. Jews of east European origin, even at the lowest income levels, were occupied primarily in branches of commerce. An occupational structure so heavily weighted toward mercantile activity suggests a second significant difference: the majority of Jewish parents were most likely self-employed. In a sampling of 100 case files, close to 50 percent of the entrance applications listed the father’s class as businessman (Kaufmann), and nearly 30 percent of those could be classified as traders (Händler).44 Alongside those two groups, 6 percent were craftsmen, such as sheet-metal workers and glaziers and, at the lowest end of the economic spectrum were waiters, peddlers, and workers, accounting collectively for 14 percent of Jewish fathers. By contrast, for example, in Prussia 40 percent of non-Jewish parents worked in industry,

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13 percent worked in commerce and trade, and only 10.3 percent of these workers were self-employed.45 Despite the differences in the two populations, however, lower-income Jewish families were part of the nonJewish working-class milieu in at least one important respect: they lived primarily in working-class districts. In Berlin, for example, poorer east European Jews lived in Berlin-Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, Neu Kölln, Freidrichshain, and Wedding. But what Jewish and non-Jewish wards did have in common was that they came overwhelmingly from large metropolitan areas. Both populations were drawn disproportionately from cities with a population of 100,000 and above. Nationwide, 33 percent of all Germans lived in the large metropolitan areas, whereas 44.6 percent of correctional education wards came from large cities, with 11.6 percent of all youths ordered into correctional education coming from Berlin alone.46 A full two thirds of all Jews lived in the country’s largest cities—with a third that lived in Berlin. Out of the 239 Jewish children who entered correctional education in 1926, nearly one half—118—came from Berlin. Thus in both the Jewish and non-Jewish populations, Berlin provided a disproportionately high percentage of the correctional education clientele.47

Manifesting Degeneration Despite these differences among the Jewish and non-Jewish correctional education populations, court decrees employed the same terminology and homogenizing language for Jews as non-Jews. The grievances made against the young people in these guardian court decrees equated deviant social behaviors with symptoms of Verwahrlosung. Almost without exception, case narratives portrayed these behaviors as appearing in clusters.48 To be sure, if the infractions of the minor were presented as a series of unrelated and isolated incidents, they would probably not have occasioned a response of the severity of correctional education. Instead, case narratives related infractions as a set of symptoms whose collective appearance confirmed the diagnosis of a social disease. This description of clustered behaviors confirmed the depiction of the child as inhabiting a

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social world of his or her own, replete with its own rules. Such representations characterized rebellious actions or attempts at independence not as merely behavior problems but as problems that threatened the social equilibrium. In court decrees, this threat to social equilibrium looked very different, depending on the gender of the transgressor. In the boys’ cases, the most frequent concern lay in their deviation from their prescribed role as productive workers. Over half of all decrees for boys elaborated on their failure to hold a job or an apprentice position. The boys were reproached for changing jobs frequently either because of their dishonesty, lack of discipline, or avoidance of work. More often than not, the final result of these behaviors was unemployment. The case of Hermann A., a vocational student from Aschaffenburg, exemplifies the type of grievance that revolved exclusively around the failure to find an occupational niche. Born October 2, 1911, Hermann’s father was a businessman and his mother had died. At the time of the correctional education trial in 1927, he was in the protective custody of the Provincial Youth Welfare Bureau in Berlin. The court decree described his inability to sustain a job or apprenticeship in great detail, referring to an earlier court decree from January 8, 1927, that had placed Hermann under protective custody because it was already clear then that his avoidance of work, lack of discipline and his self-importance (Grossmannssucht) had put him in danger of moral Verwahrlosung. It was hoped that bringing him to his uncle’s family would get him back on the right track. This hope however, was not realized. The youth, who had already caused problems while living in Nuremburg, was first brought to the Jewish Agricultural School in Ahlem as a gardening apprentice, but was discharged after three months, much to his delight. He then came to the merchant Vogel as an apprentice but was let go on January 1, 1927. For quite a while he went neither to an apprenticeship nor to work and caused trouble both at school and at home.

Lacking interest in a business apprenticeship, Hermann had expressed a desire to learn a trade. He arrived in Berlin at the beginning of July 1927 to start an apprenticeship, but the police had taken Hermann into custody on August 4. While imprisoned, he declared that he could not stay

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with his uncle because the family did not prepare food ritually. Hermann was picked up again on August 15, and another attempted apprenticeship demonstrated that “the youth had neither the desire nor the capability to learn shoemaking and that he would not last long in another work position.” After being taken into custody once again by police, Hermann was soon “running around Berlin again”; an attempt at placing him as a butcher’s apprentice “failed due to the boy’s own resistance, and all concerned shared the view that stronger educational measures must be taken.” Building a compelling case for correctional education, the case narrative concluded with reference to an August 22 Provincial Youth Welfare Bureau report that noted “the youth continues to run around avoiding work while complete Verwahrlosung awaits him. The rearing of the youth by his father and by his relatives has been insufficient, since the youth does not live an orderly life and simply does what pleases him. It would be dangerous to delay taking measures since with his release from police custody a greater danger of further Verwarhlosung threatens.”49 Hermann’s punishment was not meted out because he committed a criminal offense. Rather, his avoidance of work, lack of discipline, and self-importance put him at risk of becoming “morally degenerate.” Labeled as “work-shy” (arbeitsscheu), Hermann thus displayed one of the classic symptoms associated with male Verwahrlosung. To deny the value of hard work and individual investment in its outcomes was to reject one of the fundamental principles of middle-class society. In this sense, male Verwahrlosung evoked a deficient sense of obligation to the larger society. Individuals diagnosed as work-shy reputedly neither experienced the normal feelings of satisfaction from one’s work nor enjoyed a sense of accomplishment or pride in supporting one’s family or contributing to society.50 Well beyond the social meaning assigned to the image of unproductive boys, practical issues about work formed a frequent source of parentchild conflict. Helping a child obtain an apprenticeship position offered the single most important means for parents to secure their children a stable economic future.51 The case of Hermann A. epitomizes the lengths to which parents and relatives of middle-class or professional families might go to locate apprenticeships for young men and may in fact have been a distinguishing feature of Jewish parents and families in

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correctional education. In the far more precarious situation of families of unskilled workers, clashes over employment probably had less to do with long-term planning than with immediate economic needs. Since one in every three working-class families relied on children’s contributions to the family income, a child’s failure to produce his share was sometimes the source of family strife.52 Indeed, in such families, the failure of boys to become consistent, reliable workers constituted the most significant factor provoking conflict with parents and other authority figures. Whether lower or middle class, however, the youths in this population were expected either to hold a job or to be in training for one. But successful rehabilitation did not constitute the sole factor determining a child’s release from a correctional education institution. In the case of Karl B., for example, the boy’s father had applied to repeal the correctional education ordinance and stated his intention to find his son an apprentice position. When the administration of Repzin expressed serious reservations about Karl’s release, it did not specify the boy’s failed rehabilitation. Instead, it noted a lack of confidence in the father’s ability to locate a position for his son because of the bleak employment opportunities for unskilled workers in Berlin.53 In an internal memo, the Berlin municipal orphan authority explained that Repzin director Herr Baronowitz had received a “negative impression of the correspondence between the ward and his father.” The director feared the father had not yet found the youth a position and that the son would find work only as an “occasional worker” in Berlin, which he noted, “especially now, is an entirely unsuitable place.” Based on Baronowitz’s recommendation, Berlin’s orphan authority refused to lift its correctional education ordinance for Karl, explaining to the father that “the aims of correctional education have not yet been achieved.”54 The determination of Verwahrlosung was in this case largely determined by the lack of viable job options in Berlin, and Karl B. remained incarcerated for being unemployed in a difficult labor market. After work-related infractions, the next most frequently reported offense among boys was thievery. These acts were usually limited to taking money from parents, relatives, or employers. Occasionally, boys dreamed up more creative schemes that fell under the category of embezzlement and swindling. It is difficult not to be amused at the methods

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invented by Albert B. to con small-town Jews: “Having completed his Jewish confirmation almost one year ago, he went begging house to house among local Jews in Ichenhausen for money for a confirmation suit.”55 On another occasion, Alfred B. returned to Ichenhausen to beg among Jews there again. He told people that he and his seven siblings had no money since their father drank away all the family’s savings. “In reality,” noted the decree sternly, “Alfred was one of only three siblings and the father cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered an alcoholic.”56 General incorrigibility, “running around” (herumtreiben), and lying formed a general category of behaviors considered to be symptoms of Verwahrlosung. Twenty percent of the boys whose files were examined here were charged with each one of these. Jewish boys were also accused of physical aggression at a higher rate of frequency than vagabondage and begging. Bad moral traits, including smoking, quarrelsomeness, wastefulness, and the generic category of “keeping bad company” frequently supported the other, more central charges being leveled. In case narratives of girls, employment also constituted a recurring theme. But in contrast to boys’ case files, it was not the main preoccupation, and when it surfaced, the primary concern was not productivity. To be sure, court decrees noted complaints about girls’ unsatisfactory work habits analogous to those of boys. But only about one third of the decrees for girls, as opposed to over half for boys, found them irresponsible in either acquiring or maintaining an apprentice position. The decrees also noted female unemployment less frequently, suggesting it was less socially relevant than for boys. The main work-related infractions for girls related to their refusal to work or the frequency of changing jobs, which, as with boys, were held to be a result of their irresponsibility and dishonesty. Even given this shared concern with employment, the diagnosis of deviance emerged from different narrative frameworks for boys and girls. The complaints against Hertha G. point toward this distinction: “The minor is a thief, changes jobs frequently, and spends her salary.”57 Thievery and failure to stay at one job surface in the case narratives of both genders; the charge that Hertha spent money that she herself had earned pointed to a gender-specific expectation that Hertha had flouted. In their

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research on Verwahrlosung, Gregor and Voigtländer noted how conflicts between girls and their families were often bound up with issues of financial and emotional independence.58 Noted the two researchers: “These young people were prematurely forced to work outside the home, yet their ties to home still required they turn over most of their earnings to the family.”59 It was the conflict between their economic independence on the one hand and having to remain subject to parental control on the other “that created fertile ground for familial conflict, which, in turn, led to Verwahrlosung.”60 In other words, while male independence was often taken to indicate maturity, a parallel phenomenon of female independence denoted deviance. Ironically, it appears that the very capacity of the girls to become gainfully employed and independent was also believed to sow the seeds of Verwahrlosung. This reveals a significant division between the approved gender roles of young men and women and the ongoing difficulty of coming to terms with the effects of female employment on earlier ideals of domestic order. The most pervasive symptoms of female Verwahrlosung, however, were exhibited in the realm of sexual behavior. Eighty percent of the girls were accused of some type of sexual transgression, an even higher proportion than that of boys labeled “work-shy.” The recorded sexual offenses ranged from the specific to the most general. The most concrete sign of a girl’s advanced degeneracy was having had an abortion or evidence of a sexually transmitted disease. Court decrees named sexual partners where the information was available. Among the less concrete charges, girls were described as being at risk of falling into prostitution, although few were actually called prostitutes in the ordinances. The most common charges of all impugned a girl’s morality and reputation while providing no evidence: decrees charged girls with conducting an “immoral lifestyle,” having a bad reputation, or keeping bad company. Indeed, it was common to associate young women who moved to the city in search of work as highly susceptible to promiscuity because allegedly insatiable appetites for luxury might lead them to sell their bodies to satisfy their desires.61 As with the boys’ cases, decrees presented several of these moral violations in clusters. Running away from home (less common among boys) and the ubiquitous “running around” (treibt sich herum) were charges frequently leveled to substantiate cases against

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young women. Marie B. was accused simply of leading “an immoral lifestyle and running around.” The court ordered her placed under official custody, after she had run away from her parents, once she was caught or returned on her own in order to “prevent further degeneracy.”62 While the placement of boys in correctional education was occasionally justified by the danger they posed to their families (i.e., physical threats and aggression), the danger girls presented to society was more frequently located in their passing along sexually transmitted diseases. The case of Henriette S. typifies this approach: The minor calls herself an artist, but she pursues no occupation, and instead, runs around with English and other men late into the night. On the twenty-third of this month (1919), she was seen in a secret brothel. Soon after, on October 1, she was treated at the Lindenburg clinic for gonorrhea. Despite her youth, she leads the life of a secret prostitute and presents a danger for the public. At home, she behaves insolently and treats her mother abusively. The mother is a widow and she herself is carrying on an immoral relationship with a married man.63

With Henriette S., venereal disease occupied a central location in a cluster focused on degenerate sexual behavior. Her mother’s deviant sexual morality further establishes the inappropriateness of the home environment and necessity of her removal to a correctional education home. The case narrative against Selma W. constructs a cluster with many of the same elements as that of Henriette S. but concludes with the danger she may pass on her sexually transmitted disease: The girl’s frequent “wandering about” indicates that she lacks necessary and strict supervision and signals that danger is imminent. As a result of her still active venereal disease, which she refuses to have treated although doctors have directed her to do so, the girl endangers the male youths with whom her careless lifestyle brings her into contact. The parents are also indifferent about this matter.64

This narrative structure establishes Selma’s capacity for contagion as the most compelling legitimation for intervention. By contrast, the issue of sexually transmitted diseases among boys—who by contemporary social standards were presumed to be more sexually active than girls—never arises in their case narratives. Indeed, their capacity for transmitting

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such diseases remained unaddressed. But threat of contagion did provide a compelling argument for the corrective education of girls. Put another way, the bodies of boys—i.e., what they did with their bodies sexually—remained private. By contrast, the bodies of girls were public, and what they did with their bodies was exposed in case narratives. It is quite clear, then, that the collision of girls’ behavior with social norms revolved first and foremost around their bodies. But this extended even beyond their sexual behavior: court decrees indicated that girls displayed a lack of cleanliness more often than boys.65 Girls’ bodies thus formed the primary territory of contest between themselves, their families, and the larger society. But both genders were targeted on the basis of gender-specific expectations of productivity. While boys’ behavior called their role as productive wage-earners into question, girls’ violations related to typical social expectations of young girls: to embody a restrained sexuality and to become mothers and wives. Girls’ social productivity thus lay to a great extent in their reproductivity. The prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases imperiled girls’ reproductive capacities since sex outside marriage carried physical risks that could jeopardize their chances of becoming mothers. Moreover, the possibility of drawing boys and men into illicit sexual liaisons only exacerbated the social danger girls posed. The accessibility of sexual pleasure outside marriage and the possibility for impairing the health of their young male partners and their current or future wives through the transmission of venereal disease made them a peril whose effect could be multiplied far more than that of their “degenerate” male counterparts. Not surprisingly, the gender-distinctive perceptions of Jewish girls’ and boys’ asocial behaviors closely mirror general patterns of delinquent behavior in Germany.66 In fact, the National Statistics for Correctional Education traced girls’ Verwahrlosung back to the matter of drive control, explaining that many correctional education pupils have weak limits on their drives. This weakness, it was noted, manifests itself differently among girls and boys. While 80 percent of the boys in the national statistics were inclined toward vagabondage, begging, or thievery, only 30 percent of girls exhibited such behaviors. By contrast, the chief difficulty in girls’ drive control was their tendency toward an immoral lifestyle.67 The director of the Jewish girls’ home confirms this

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general diagnosis of female Verwahrlosung in her letter to a parent where she explained that Köpenick “primarily admits girls who have repeatedly committed serious property offenses or sexual ‘mistakes.’ ”68

“Ein Brauchbarer Mensch Machen” There were numerous cases in which Jewish parents sought the admission of their children to Repzin and Köpenick directly, independent of the state. In 1926, Frau K., a mother of six, wrote to the director of Köpenick requesting the admission of her teenage daughter for reeducation. The girl had attended a homemaking course and studied for a time to become a tailor, but her training had yielded little. As Frau K. wrote, “my daughter is a real problem child. Because I’ve already had difficulty with a son who possesses almost the same character traits as she, I believe it advisable to place my daughter in a very strict educational institution, so that she can become a useful person. My daughter is really not bad, but I fear that with her unique disposition, things have the potential to turn out badly.”69 Frau K.’s request offers a window into the task with which the Jewish institutions were charged. The narratives discussed above, representing the judgment of social workers writing for the youth welfare courts, built their case against each child by showcasing the disturbances she or he posed in order to justify state intervention. While the court defined the onset of Verwahrlosung and supplied detailed examples of the youth’s social unusefulness, it became the task of the Jewish institutions—as part of the state welfare apparatus and in accordance with gender- and classspecific parameters expressed in court decrees—to mold them into responsible citizens and productive workers. But how was this social disciplining effected? How did these institutions seek to inculcate their wards with the values, behaviors, and sense of responsibility toward others that formed the foundation of responsible social citizenship? Both the courts and the Jewish correctional institutions defined the interest of the totality as lying first and foremost in helping these young men and women develop character traits of self-discipline and responsibility. The institutions were designed to help these young

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people reverse the effects of Verwahrlosung by developing their rational capacity (or their superego) to restrain them from following their individual passions and baser instincts. Until the late 1920s, Repzin and Köpenick tried to accomplish this goal through imposing a “strict education”—the popular euphemism for an authoritarian and repressive regime of discipline that often included corporal punishment. In this way, professional social workers, volunteer bourgeois ladies, and the educational staff of the Jewish youth homes sought to habituate boys to reining in their aggression and internalizing the discipline that was being imposed from the outside. For girls, female self-discipline needed to be introduced first and foremost in the area of sexuality. If the overarching goal in the treatment of female Verwahrlosung was to assist young Jewish women in their “return to a respectable middle-class life,” as one spokesman for the institution put it, then the girls at Köpenick had to avoid future “sexual mistakes” such as those for which they were usually admitted.70 Educators believed that the inculcation of self-discipline was necessary for facilitating the second primary goal of correctional education— the acquisition of marketable job skills. Thus, another important means of producing responsible citizen-workers was through job training. In particular, in both the girls’ and boys’ home, the emphasis was placed on developing the ability to learn a trade, stick to it, and submit to authority. But in an economic environment as volatile as that of the Weimar Republic, educators considered appropriate job skills to be only those that took into consideration market demand. In the case of the boys, the administration at Repzin placed its greatest emphasis on finding boys a trade. Repzin arranged opportunities for boys to learn the skills of a trade either at a workshop on the premises or through placement in apprenticeships with master craftsmen outside the youth facility. The chief opportunities for learning a trade included tailoring, shoemaking, woodworking, and even the occasional kosher slaughterer. Although it never succeeded, the administration generally sought to steer boys away from business-related jobs. In this we can see the renewed interest in occupational restructuring not only as a defense against anti-Semitism but also as a potential solution to the economic situation. Indeed, an occupational restructuring that would encourage training for skilled labor, crafts, and agricultural occupations among Jewish young

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adults ranked at the very top of the Jewish welfare agenda.71 Thus, in both the boys’ and girls’ home, “social usefulness” was additionally defined to include contributing to the “productivization” and regeneration of German Jewry as a whole. Through acquiring job training in the handicrafts, social work professionals hoped that otherwise marginal young men could help bring about the recuperation of the Jewish population by restoring balance and a more efficiently functioning organism. Despite widespread enthusiasm for a return to agriculture and the land as a means of healing the illness of urban life, however, the administration at Repzin refused to offer agricultural training for boys. There were certainly many who felt that agriculture offered young Jewish men no viable future in Germany. But agriculture was also associated with German Romantic nationalism and with Zionist ambitions in Palestine. Perhaps also for this reason, the administration at Repzin opposed agricultural training. Moreover, critics argued, a Jewish facility for training boys in agriculture and handicrafts had already existed at the youth home at Ahlem since 1896. In this context, the case of the young ward Herbert K. sheds light on the way that the boys’ home sought to correct not only deviant social behavior but also deviant Jewish behavior that was regarded as detracting from the institution’s overall vision of a productivized Jewish population. In a 1920 letter to Baronowitz, the uncle of Herbert K. wrote that his nephew is healthy and strong, but suffers from fixed Zionist ideas. . . . These ideas have already led him along the wrong path. He has not kept any apprentice position he has held and wants only to be a farmer, so he can go to Palestine. My family doctor recommended a reeducation institution in which he will have to do physical work and be educated on the basis of strict order and discipline, a task that my sister-in-law is too weak to accomplish.72

Apparently these parents and relatives believed that Repzin might help their family drum out Herbert K.’s own ideas about his future through the application of “strict order and discipline.” The reply of Dr. Schäffer, the chairman of the Central Welfare Agency’s Committee for the Welfare for Endangered Youth, was sympathetic. Herr B. was

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instructed to encourage the “poor mother” to apply for correctional education at the local court. “If she were to base her case on Herbert’s bad behaviors rather than on his ‘fixed Zionist ideas’ her appeal should certainly meet with success.” Not surprisingly, it did. For girls at Köpenick, becoming a “useful person” translated into the acquisition of a set of job skills that were primarily domestic in nature. Girls at the Jewish reformatory received their primary “professional” training in the kitchen, in sewing, and in the laundry. A few girls were also given the opportunity to work in the children’s home established at Köpenick during the inflation, where they cared for poor Jewish children from the Berlin Jewish community. The goal was to prepare them for a career in the social field encompassing subspecializations such as kindergarten teaching, childcare, classroom teaching, and social work. A few girls also received instruction in gardening and tended the fruit and vegetable garden located at the home. But beyond the occasional elegant formulations concerning the importance of the teacher’s “pedagogical influence” and “role modeling,” the German-Jewish League of Communities’ own Dr. Schäfer compared the girls’ training at Köpenick essentially to that of a school for domestic science (Haushaltungsschule)—an institution that, until the Weimar Republic, was geared toward preparing girls from working-class and lower middle-class families for a career in domestic service. As with the boys, administrators also sought to steer girls away from business—which for many girls often meant working as a shopgirl. An opposition to whitecollar work certainly accorded with the aim of reconfiguring the community’s occupational distribution, but it probably also reflected the common association of urban female white-collar workers with a threatening economic and sexual independence. Occupational retraining for girls, then, was meant to prevent them from returning to precisely those moral and sexual dangers of urban life that had landed them at Köpenick in the first place. Unlike boys, girls might be seen to have achieved the goal of return to respectable society through marriage.73 The director of Köpenick looked favorably upon girls who had marriage prospects, and she released a number of them when furnished a concrete marriage proposal.74 Dr. Schäfer reported with disappointment that although many

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of Köpenick’s young women did go on to marry after their release, “they did so predominantly in mixed marriages.”75 Thus, though the girls may have achieved a reintegration of sorts by achieving the highest-valued female occupation, from the Jewish communal perspective, they became marginal all over again since the community considered increasing Jewish in-marriage to be a crucial part of its regeneration program. In an important sense, much of the girls’ training for “social usefulness” at Köpenick can be seen as focused on habituating them to accept subordinate positions in both the broader economic and domestic realms for which they were being prepared. Social workers did not necessarily aim to give poor young women the hope for a bourgeois future but sought to help them to adjust to their future lot in Jewish and German life with equanimity and restraint.

Reforming Correctional Education Given the significant scope of progressive trends in youth welfare, the repressive character of correctional education became the subject of increasing controversy throughout the 1920s. It was, Markus Gräser has noted, as though correctional education had been left behind, outside the entire wave of reforms that had swept social workers from those working with infants and kindergarteners all the way up to top welfare bureaucrats.76 During the November revolution, anti–correctional education forces aligned with revolutionary forces on the left in an attack on what was perceived as its oppressive character and bias against the working class.77 Correctional education’s symbolic importance became particularly evident when a number of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils ordered the release of inmates.78 After the period of inflation, this struggle between the new liberalizing pedagogies and older authoritarian approaches picked up again. By the middle of the decade, correctional education had once again come under attack owing to a series of wellpublicized scandals at correctional education institutions. Even in Repzin there was a minor revolt.79 The public pressure to abandon authoritarian discipline also led Jewish pedagogical experts to institute pedagogical reform in correctional

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education institutions in a manner comparable to developments in other youth welfare organizations. In 1929, leading Jewish educational and social reformers issued a statement calling for fundamental reform.80 With the closure of Repzin in 1927 and the opening of Wolzig in 1929, followed shortly by the economic crisis of 1930, we can see how pedagogical developments within these Jewish communal institutions were part of the larger changes underway at the end of the Republic but, at the same moment, began to diverge from them. The directors of the Commission on Endangered Youth hired Dr. Hans Lubinski, erstwhile director of Kinderhaus Kovno, to light the way for this new path in correctional education by means of the new Jewish correctional education facility at Wolzig, on the outskirts of Berlin.81 As Wolzig’s first director, Lubinski introduced new policies that eliminated punishment, removed burdensome restrictions that were typical of the old regime, and instead granted boys greater freedom of movement.82 He acknowledged the influence of the youth movement (education of youth by youth) and education for responsibility and autonomy, along with a new emphasis on a “youth community.” This reflected his experience at Kinderhaus Kovno and the now ubiquitous imprint of the youth movement. He even left the gates of the home permanently unlocked, much to the dismay of Wolzig’s villagers.83 Lubinski disavowed the old educational methodologies as having been the wrong means of rehabilitation. But even beyond the progressive pedagogical changes that were enacted at Wolzig, this change in orientation can be seen most compellingly in Lubinski’s approach to Verwahrlosung. Just four years after Wilhelm Neumann reported in the social work periodical Zedakah that the majority of Jewish boys and girls in correctional education suffered from constitutionally induced Verwahrlosung, Lubinski returned a radically different diagnosis on that most central concern to Jewish social healers. Writing in 1932, Lubinski found that only a few of the boys suffered from constitutionally induced degeneracy.84 Rather than constitution, Lubinski identified family dynamics and childhood experiences (including unrealistic expectations of children by their mothers) as the chief sources of the disturbances of his wards. He thus advocated the treatment of various wounds and behaviors through a more nurturing relationship with teachers and leaders and sought to create a Gemeinschaft

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that functioned to heal the wounded psyches of these young people while creating a new kind of therapeutic community. Along with innovations in the methods and approach of correctional education, there also appeared to be an accompanying sense of openness to a more multifaceted notion of the Jewishness of the social body. Even distinctions between Zionism and anti-Zionism—as evidenced in the case of Herbert K., who was institutionalized at Repzin for his “fixed Zionist ideas”—began to dissolve at Wolzig between the years 1931 and 1933. At that point, the brother of the director, Georg Lubinski, arranged for members of the Zionist youth movement Chaluzim (pioneers) to work with and train asocial youth in what had formerly been the antiZionist institution at Repzin.85 Zionist versions of occupational restructuring took shape within the Hechaluz-Verband, which operated four agricultural training centers. The result of all of this activity was that some of the period’s most identifiable achievements in the “new education” came to be implemented and associated with the Jewish community to such a degree that, by the time of Wolzig’s opening in 1929, Jewish welfare was sometimes seen in the broader welfare establishment as including the most progressive sites of welfare work. Yet if the Jewish educational experiment at Wolzig came to embody the ideal of the “new education,” it came precisely at a moment when this trend was in retreat in much of the rest of Germany. Indeed, just as welfare had formed a chief battle site in the Republic’s culture wars in the early part of the decade, the beating back of liberal progressive forces also suggested a turning away from the ideals that had once characterized the era’s radical hopes for renewal. As the economic crisis forced the state to retreat from its broad promise of support to all those in need, the new pedagogy’s emphasis on the transformability of every youth was being rendered irrelevant. Conservatives took the opportunity to challenge the liberal reformers by seeking to allocate the state’s limited financial resources to healthy young people. Instead, the crisis years of the Republic gave rise to what Detlev Peukert has identified as a motivation to distinguish the educable from the uneducable.86 In that, argues Peukert, the way was being paved for the radical eugenic approaches of National Socialism.

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Wolzig’s distinctive path from 1929 until the end of the Republic thus shows how the means to reconstructing the German and Jewish social body began to take fundamentally irreconcilable paths by the early 1930s. Just as Wolzig had come to see its wards as even more malleable than in the past, the larger field of social pedagogy was in retreat. By 1933, Hans Lubinski’s tenure at Wolzig was cut short when storm troopers (SA) and SS men planted communist literature in the Jewish boys’ home, allowing the Nazis to deport its inhabitants to Oranienburg and take over the facility.87 What began as a bourgeois enterprise of domesticating the outsider and east European thus changed, if not ultimately in aim then certainly in means. By the end of this period in correctional education, Jewish social workers in the bourgeois establishment had moved away from an authoritarian model for correctional education and had instead begun to borrow extensively from the ideals of self-education, youth leadership, and radical empowerment that characterized the youth movement. As a result, Jewish correctional education developed a new notion of the integration of outsiders that was based on progressive social pedagogy. Chapter 5 explores the roots and implications of these more revolutionary methods of managing and ultimately seeking to remake the different parts of the Jewish social body, especially east European Jewish youth and orphans. These programs actually began long before Wolzig. But with the shifts at Wolzig, we see how a more fundamental movement had occurred as the bourgeois establishment edged quite near to the positions staked out by the “fathers” of revolutionary social pedagogy who will be discussed in Chapter 5. Further illustrated by Wolzig are the ways in which this integration of radical pedagogy into the mainstream of Jewish welfare was also frequently accompanied by an increasing sympathy with if not Zionism then at least many of the assumptions that underlay it. In this way, we can see how the course of Jewish correctional education during this period illustrates how German educational and political circumstances provided the framework for parallel developments within Jewish pedagogy but also how the final Weimar years proved this shared path was rapidly reaching a point of irreconcilable division.

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F i v e Trauma and Transference:

War Orphans Shape a New Jewish Nation

“The present moment demands something unique of Jewish youth,” wrote Siegfried Bernfeld in his 1919 book, Das Jüdische Volk und Seine Jugend (The Jewish People and Its Youth)1 Bernfeld, who was a disciple of Gustav Wyneken and a pivotal figure in the Viennese Jewish youth movement, rejected popular theories predicting Jewry’s decline in favor of a vision of the Jewish future in which youth would cultivate and shape an entirely new form of life. For Weimar social reformers, sentiments like Bernfeld’s resonated deeply and gave voice to their own aspirations to remake the present and future of the nation through youth reform projects. Indeed, in the revolutionary education initiatives launched by Jewish reformers during the early postwar years, Germans and German Jews offered overlapping visions of a future propelled forward by the unharnessed energy of youth. Through schemes that were rooted in the broader youth movement, progressive pedagogy, the settlement movement, and psychoanalysis, experimental Jewish educational efforts drew upon ideologies of antibourgeois youth empowerment that emphasized antiauthoritarianism and the creation of community. Repudiating a bourgeois model that stressed individual liberation and success, these revolutionary institutions instead predicated national revival on collective achievement and emphasized the building of community based on a pedagogy of peerto-peer instruction and learning as key ideals. If youth had the potential for remaking community, Bernfeld and his contemporary Siegfried Lehmann set their sights on a subgroup of youths who they believed were particularly suited to this task. By taking youth who were orphaned during the war or the postwar pogroms, these educators pressed yet another urgent Jewish social problem into the ser-

War Orphans Shape a New Jewish Nation

vice of communal revitalization. Where progressive pedagogy would nurture traumatized and abused Jewish children, they believed that psychoanalysis would do this and more: it would also cure them of their desire to assimilate, liberating them from their “assimilatory neurosis.” From a mass of impoverished and traumatized orphans, these educators sought to shape the cadre of a new Jewish nation. Unlike correctional education, which sought to integrate youth into respectable middle-class society, the educational reformers discussed in this chapter sought to transform society in a more far-reaching way. Drawing from new institutional forms and pedagogic thinking inspired by the youth culture movement ( Jugendkulturbewegung), the programs undertaken by progressive pedagogues sought to radically transform social relations rather than simply correct those youths labeled disadvantaged and “wayward.” Representing a major departure from the mainstream institutional approaches for the education of disadvantaged and “wayward youth,” experimental programs for orphans defined the problem of Verwahrlosung in ways that diverged significantly from current conceptions of the causes of and treatments for antisocial behaviors. Viewing Verwahrlosung neither as disturbance to the existing norms of the social order, as discussed previously, nor as heritable degeneration, as many in the psychiatric profession held, Bernfeld and Lehmann saw early disturbances to the child-parent relationship and arrested development as the source of the problems of “wayward youth.” These new institutions similarly approached the Jewish aspects of orphan education in a distinctive fashion. In the nineteenth century, orphanages had no Jewish content whatsoever, their social goal being the production of German citizens; by the turn of the century, as the result of the pedagogic reform movement, a greater emphasis was placed on the development of the individual. Only in the 1920s, however, did Jewish institutional education for orphans set out to produce children who would devote their lives to the service and revival of the Jewish people. The emphasis placed on the creation of community in youth welfare not only was influenced by the youth movement but also was drawn from the emerging disciplines of psychology and social pedagogy. The term social pedagogy, which had become virtually synonymous with youth welfare during this period, denoted “education with the aim of socialization,

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or the theory and therapy for socialization problems.”2 The perceived need for this new kind of educational therapy arose from the social changes accompanying industrial development that were believed to have rendered the family, church, and school incapable of fulfilling their functions as agents of social cohesion. Leading theoreticians of social pedagogy such as Paul Natorp and Hermann Nohl believed that a pedagogic program directed toward social goals could help reconstitute the nation’s inner unity. In their view, the essential goal of all reform pedagogic movements was the creation of a new type of Gemeinschaft to counteract the illness of the national body caused by an overemphasis on individualism. The ideal of individualism, enshrined in pedagogy since the Enlightenment, was to be succeeded by an education oriented toward the collectivity, which promised to restore society’s wholeness through forging new social relationships bound together by Gemeinschaft. The popularization of the works of educational reformers like Montessori and the rediscovery of Pestalozzi, along with the growing influence of social pedagogy, contributed to new educational methodologies whose goal was the creation of a new type of individual rooted in genuine community. The programs of Siegfried Bernfeld and Siegfried Lehmann in particular are widely considered to be emblematic of this new revolutionary movement in social pedagogy, and their approach generated a considerable amount of enthusiasm and admiration on the part of social workers and educators within the non-Jewish and Jewish professional world. Illustrating the ways in which concepts of the Jewish nation extended beyond the boundaries of the nation-state while at the same time shaping discourses of reform within Germany and Austria is Siegfried Bernfeld’s youth settlement. At the same time, Bernfeld’s youth settlement reflected the universe of ideas that engaged other figures interested in early childhood education, psychoanalysis, and social change in the Viennese psychoanalytic community including Anna Freud, Adolf Aichhorn, Erik Erikson, and Willi Hoffer.3 Though ultimately located in Vienna, Bernfeld’s program was clearly an extension of the German youth movement ideals of self-education and antiauthoritarianism and was, in turn, seen as an important pedagogical model by German reformers.4 Siegfried Lehmann’s programs likewise extended the reform projects of German Jewry beyond the bounds of the German nation-state as he established

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programs in Berlin, Kovno, Lithuania, and Lod, Palestine. Like Bernfeld, Lehmann believed that the absence of emotional bonds to the family would enable orphans to fix their emotional attachments more powerfully to the Jewish Volksgemeinschaft. Rather than create new institutions to discipline a new generation of children, both Bernfeld and Lehmann sought to create new youth communities that addressed multiple aspects of the Jewish social crisis and that might offer the opportunity to create the groundwork for a new Jewish community and nation to take shape.

Siegfried Bernfeld’s Kinderheim Baumgarten Siegfried Bernfeld is primarily remembered for his work on education and psychoanalysis as well as for his writing on Freud. But before immersing himself exclusively in the world of psychoanalysis, Bernfeld was a highly regarded and visible proponent of youth culture, a disciple and colleague of Gustav Wyneken’s reform pedagogy, and a socialist and editor of the radical youth journal Der Anfang. During the war, he was influenced by the influx of Jewish refugees from Galicia and Bukovina into Vienna, and through his ensuing preoccupation with the “Jewish Question” he became a committed Jewish nationalist, creating a series of pioneering institutions for Jewish youth and Jewish education in Vienna. In his 1916 article entitled “War Orphans,” published in Der Jude, Bernfeld outlined a blueprint for a new type of settlement for orphans that was to be founded in Palestine.5 In it, he issued a fierce critique of the narrow, partisan goals of traditional Jewish orphan care, charging that they served only to reinforce particular factions of Judaism rather than Jewry as a whole.6 Neither the profusion of new committees, massive fundraising efforts, nor even the aspirations for “educating these abandoned children” to become “productive people” would overcome what for him was the fundamentally narrow view of welfare assistance upon which all these plans were based.7 Despite the millions of marks that traditional Jewish philanthropy might amass, these efforts would ultimately bear little fruit since they would only assure the physical maintenance of the orphans as isolated individuals.8 Left in the hands of the traditional welfare establishment, Bernfeld feared that the problem of caring for masses of war orphans would be

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handled as a merely quantitative problem. He derided the sense of selfsatisfaction that he predicted would accompany the bureaucratic solutions offered up by the Jewish community. From their perspective, he anticipated, “two hundred orphanages one next to the other will mean that the Jewish orphans have been saved.”9 But by reproducing the overcrowded and uninspired institutional conditions on a mass scale, whether they were located in the industrial quarters of big cities or in small and stagnant towns, the Jewish welfare authorities would ensure that the orphaned children would become part of the “foreign Jewish element” without adequate means of support. As a result, they would be forced into ruthless competition for jobs where most would end up as beggars, vagrants, or, at best, members of a disenfranchised Jewish proletariat or candidates for overseas immigration.10 Not only did various branches of the community compete for wards to fortify their own versions of Judaism—Polish-assimilated, Orthodox, German-assimilated—they also offered such weak and diluted Jewish fare as to virtually guarantee the defection of these young people at their first opportunity. For these poor Jewish orphans, “the Jewish Gemeinschaft would soon come to mean nothing more than the dull religion teacher or the semi-annual visits of the volunteer female patrons (Schutzdame).”11 Jewish fate would become identified with the personal tragedies met by their brutalized parents, and the Jewish future would appear as dark and insipid as their own. For the socialist Bernfeld, not even the healing and holy qualities generally attributed to the nuclear family promised to release the child from an atomized and isolated existence: “The child who is lucky enough to find himself placed with a rich couple would be cared for and coddled; but those given over to the poor widow already burdened with many children would serve her financially but they would be miserably oppressed.”12 The failure of the traditional Jewish welfare establishment lay in its view of the child as a passive, obedient pawn of Jewish communal politics. Like his Berlin counterparts who were intent on modernizing the practice of social work, Bernfeld made the case for new methodologies based on progressive educational thinking. Since traditional Jewish philanthropy offered children under its tutelage no meaningful hope for the future, Bernfeld proposed a new kind of orphan care. While a

War Orphans Shape a New Jewish Nation

cruel and meaningless fate had uprooted these children from their homes, he believed that their second chance at life should not be approached with the same arbitrariness. Their new destinies had to be accompanied by a higher meaning. Bernfeld asked: Won’t each one of these 20,000 children at some point come to the realization that in his own misfortune lies his calling to the collectivity? That with the severance of family ties they will be ready to bind themselves to a stronger, higher connection? That orphan youth, without any mediators, be integrated in the broader, more essential circle of the nation? It is a holy injunction to integrate them into the process of Jewish renewal. And perhaps it is the task of orphan education to capture such fleeting feelings and turn them into thoughts, to raise the sentiment of a single boy to the will of a youth community. Perhaps the orphans can experience the recognition at the heart of their existence, that they are not victims of a meaningless brutality, but of the tragic entanglement of the Jewish people with the failures and fate of foreign peoples. And from this, they may realize that they themselves were spared for the sake of helping Jewry out of this chain of entanglements. Our duty is to make this possible.13

Bernfeld’s vision was to have these orphans, the victims of the cruel Jewish fate of Diaspora, form the core of a regenerated Jewish nation. To facilitate their role as agents of Jewish renewal, Bernfeld proposed the creation of orphan settlements. This particular institutional form had its roots in a radical offshoot of the pedagogic reform movement, the rural educational settlement (Landerziehungsheim), which was to serve as a foundational unit for a new Volksgemeinschaft.14 Inspired by the work of Hermann Lietz and his successor Alfred Andreesen and emerging out of a critique of bourgeois society, a new group of these school settlements emerged after the war, driven by a renewed sense of cultural crisis.15 In these settlements, the perception that the bonds joining individual, family, and state had broken down led its participants to try to create a new quality of social relations held together by the binding power of Gemeinschaft. In the spirit of collective renewal, Jewish orphan care would now aim at shaping a group of individuals into an integral and redemptive part of the nation rather than focusing only upon isolated individuals in

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need of aid.16 “Without the protective and veiled atmosphere of the family,” Bernfeld observed, “they are, as it were, placed naked in the life of the nation, so that their souls would have no redemption except through the collectivity.”17 The loss of the orphans’ families and the loosening of the bonds linking individual, family, and state could, in Bernfeld’s view, be turned from a social liability into a national asset. The children’s home that was actually established in 1919 with Bernfeld at its head, however, was situated not in Palestine but in Vienna. Under the sponsorship of the American Joint Distribution Committee, Kinderheim Baumgarten opened its doors in October 1919 with the aim of providing a loving, educationally enriching environment for orphans from three refugee homes in and around Vienna. Though he had intended to situate the settlement in a rural setting, Bernfeld quickly reconciled himself to postwar financial and logistical constraints and agreed to instead locate the new orphan community in five former army barracks outside Vienna. What emerged there became a unique type of children’s home, the beginnings of an organic youth community that would provide the basis for a fuller settlement at a future time. Though the children’s home was unable to provide the facilities for agricultural training to prepare these children for their vital role in Palestine, the youths were still given instruction in the handicrafts in an attempt to redress the skewed occupational structure of European Jews and provide them with more “productive” occupations. Bernfeld designed his educational program to heal the physical and emotional scars acquired by this population both in their home countries and in their most recent experience in Vienna’s orphanages. According to Bernfeld’s account of his work at Baumgarten, the children arrived at their new home having suffered varying degrees of neglect. Some were in acceptable physical condition and even showed signs of good manners: “If you dressed these children up in nice . . . clothes,” wrote Bernfeld, “they could pass in polite society.”18 Many more, however, found themselves in the most desperate circumstances. Unkempt and unclean, afflicted with lice and eczema, some had been abused into docility, while others had developed into “criminal types.” All had suffered harsh treatment and continuing deprivation in their former temporary homes of refuge. The adults looking after them were easy to

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anger and quick to punish, subjecting the children to frequent verbal abuse or beatings or even locking them up in cold, dark cellars.19 As a consequence of their caretakers’ authoritarian disciplinary practices, the children’s relationships with adults were universally founded in mistrust. The children, feeling lied to and betrayed by adults, acted toward others in a similar manner. In their interactions with one another, they behaved with aggression and brutality, and Bernfeld linked their unbounded egoism to their anal fixations.20 At the absolute center of their lives was food, and they arrived at Kinderheim Baumgarten with a shocking number of pathologies. By what stroke of pedagogic magic, then, did Bernfeld envision the transformation of this dejected mass of traumatized, pathological orphans into the regenerate cadre of the new Jewish nation? The answer is evident in his very diagnosis of their condition: “The children were on their way to becoming, from the human standpoint, antisocial and from a national standpoint, anti-Jewish.”21 For Bernfeld, their distance from, and disinterest in, Judaism demonstrated a disturbance that was comparable to individual psychological pathology. In this way, Bernfeld conceived his educational program to counter both of these negative tendencies in his orphan population and planned to implement them by applying principles of “the new pedagogy,” which combined the teachings of Maria Montessori, Gustav Wyneken, and Berthold Otto. In contrast to authoritarian modes of relationship in traditional orphanages, Bernfeld’s approach was instead based on the popular ideal of relations of equals (Kameradschaftsverhältnisse). In this model of relationship, the child-teacher bond was central. Indeed, according to Bernfeld, the development of new relational patterns among adults and children was the most important feature of their school community. The teacher was supposed to demonstrate “unconditional love and attention for the children, complete restraint of all desires for power, vanity, dominance.”22 Taking off on “the garden of childhood” metaphor frequently employed by educators, Bernfeld contrasted the teacher at Kinderheim Baumgarten with the conventional image of the pedagogue-gardener as it appeared in pedagogical literature: rather than taking the model of a rather hysterical caretaker, running back and forth between binding, watering, and pruning to help his blooms grow, “his essential role is to recognize the needs

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of his fledglings for rain, air and earth, and, through careful observation of his charges, learn to understand how to create the conditions that will best meet their needs.” 23 The deed of the new educator was thus more an “undeed”; it entails careful observation rather than constant warning, punishing, teaching, demanding, forbidding, inducing, and rewarding. The new teacher-child relationship was supposed to create a safe environment in which essential psychological healing could take place.24 At Baumgarten, the teachers did not prevent the children from expressing negative emotions, including criticism of conditions at the home. Indeed, according to Bernfeld, their complaints about lack of food, heat, and essential articles of clothing were quite warranted. Given permission to express themselves and act out their aggressions, the children released their latent and repressed rage by means of acting out that rage (Abreaktion) and thereby managed to heal the psychic wounds inflicted on them by their troubled pasts. “During this period of Abreaktion,” explained Bernfeld, “their false affective fixations on, for instance, food, began quietly, unconsciously and in an unarticulated way, to loosen and to become free to form attachments to their teachers, friends, the school community, Histadruth [federations], Kwuzoth [groups], and the Kinderheim in general.”25 By February and March of 1919, Bernfeld reported that the children had regained an affective life. At that point, their attitude toward the teachers had also begun to change. They were kinder and more considerate. The newly released libido now allowed them to form attachments to the teachers and the home, and through their increasingly rich emotional life, they developed strong ties to their peers.26 Bernfeld believed that the children would be capable of forming a true community only once they overcame their egoism.27 And herein lay the link between psychological liberation and a renewed relationship to the Jewish community. Bernfeld applied the psychoanalytical model of the progression from repression to the reaccessing of emotional life to describe the “recovery” of a healthy and positive emotional stance toward things Jewish. The pedagogic “garden” cultivated by Bernfeld and his staff would foster growth from asociality to emotional integration, thereby reversing the children’s “anti-Jewish” attitudes and helping them to blossom into full, contributing members of the Jewish people.

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Bernfeld believed that Jewishness was a complicated and contradictory issue for these young people, given their experience of pogroms. Being Jewish was the source of feelings of inferiority and was something from which they sought to hide and distance themselves. Because they had suffered for being Jewish, their desire to assimilate could be seen as a psychological reaction to avoid unpleasantness.28 But at the same time, their Jewishness was also “fading, buried, unconscious, an element of the vestigial repressed affective sphere, which was connected with ‘back then,’ ‘at home,’ ‘when our parents were still alive,’ ‘when we were still in Galicia.’ ” At this level, Jewishness was associated with an affirmative part of their lives at a time when the people they loved were still with them.29 Bernfeld understood their ambivalent feelings about Jewishness as he did other types of repression, asserting that the “recovery” of Jewishness would come about only through the retrieval of repressed material. Inherent in Bernfeld’s theory equating emotional health with a positive Jewish commitment was a more general critique of Jewish education. Having argued that psychoanalysis was an indispensable tool in what we might today call the construction of a positive Jewish identity, Bernfeld attacked conventional forms of Jewish education as superficial. Jewish educators merely imposed external forms upon children in a futile effort to generate a positive internal disposition to Jewishness. The “wearing stars of David and saying ‘shalom’ ” would not suffice to bring about a real transformation.30 According to Bernfeld, there was only one way to push through the blocked sphere, and that was through relationship: Would the children be able to attach the remains of their destroyed affective lives to the people in their new environment? Would the teachers so love the children and the children feel so loved by them that the new affect would be similar to the forgotten one? Could the original love experienced in early childhood be reawakened and anchored to these new objects? Only if this were to succeed . . . and this success cannot be assumed or forced, it can only be hoped for—can the Jewish essence be saved. And in Baumgarten this has been achieved.31

As a result of this emotional working through, Bernfeld maintained that the affective foundation for a genuine Jewish school community had been laid and that his wards displayed a rapid recovery of the Jewish

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affect as well as the swift rejection of the assimilatory façade. What remained was to provide a curriculum whose content was nondidactic. Bernfeld rejected what he saw as the hypocrisy and moralizing of standard Jewish pedagogy and viewed the apologetic approach of the Kinderheim Baumgarten administration with particular contempt. The administrators were anxious to keep the home especially clean to demonstrate Jews’ penchant for hygiene, and the children were instructed to be particularly polite to Gentile visitors “to prove to the goyim” that even Jewish children can be civilized.32 He believed it futile and even counterproductive to impose Jewish symbols and values, to try to effect change from the outer to the inner spheres. This, he charged, was the essential problem with Zionist education, which was no better than other types of Jewish education if it only sought to indoctrinate. “Content must become form. A school cannot be a Jewish one simply by transmitting Jewish content; it must be Jewish in its form.”33 For Bernfeld, the only way to begin to achieve a new form in the western Diaspora was through the creation of a youth community in which a Jewish language, Hebrew or Yiddish, the Jewish life-cycle, and symbols would all find expression. But he recognized that this most monumental of changes in the mentality of western Jewry would not come to pass in the immediate future. In fact, Bernfeld left the school in April 1920 due to irresolvable conflicts with the administration over his progressive pedagogy. Not only did his revolutionary pedagogy inform and reformulate educational and psychoanalytic thought at the time, but the importance he ascribed to the reworking of emotional attachments and the interlacing of the Jewish and the psychological were elaborated and expanded by a Berlin contemporary, Siegfried Lehmann.

Siegfried Lehmann: From Berlin to Palestine Bernfeld was not the only Zionist to try his hand at “new education” in a Jewish context.34 In contrast to Bernfeld’s short-lived experiment at Kinderheim Baumgarten, the pediatrician and pedagogue Siegfried Lehmann left an institutional legacy spanning three countries and two continents. Lehmann’s social commitments and pedagogic interests led

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him to found innovative youth institutions in Berlin, Kovno (Lithuania), and Lod (Palestine), the last of which is still in existence. Lehmann’s social pedagogic work with the Jewish public began with what was probably his best-known project, the Jüdisches Volksheim, a nationally oriented Jewish settlement house in Berlin.35 The revolutionary atmosphere of the late war years and the early Republic (1916–1923) created a unique historical conjuncture for the founding of Germany’s first Jewish settlement house. The war had reduced the geographic distance between western and eastern Jews and put thousands of German Jews in contact with their “foreign” brethren. Within this context, the Volksheim quickly established a reputation as a serious site of Jewish renewal, not least because it counted leading Jewish intellectuals and Zionists among its ranks. More than being “merely” a welfare institution, the Volksheim became a magnet for postassimilationist Jews in Berlin. Within the framework of Gemeinschaft as a cooperative project based on ethical and spiritual foundations, the Volksheim represented an attempt to reconfigure the nature of social relations of Jewish life by creating a new type of community that was based on an east-west union.36 Its revolutionary social agenda drew upon Bernfeldian pedagogy, libertarian socialism, Gustav Landauer’s humanitarian nationalism, Martin Buber’s religious mysticism, the youth movement, and Anglo-Saxon settlement work to forge a voluntaristic, radically democratic community of equals. Through its eclectic intellectual offerings, the Volksheim supplied a paradigm for the continuing practical work of Jewish renewal in Europe and created a cadre of social practitioners who could transport their newly honed skills and earnest national devotion to a wider European sphere. Established in the heart of the Jewish working-class district of east Berlin on May 18, 1916, the Volksheim’s growth from its modest beginnings as a public soup kitchen into a community center owed much to the energies of a group of Jewish students who felt moved to provide a level of care for the neighborhood children that went beyond merely meeting their immediate physical needs.37 They sought to give the children more sustained attention and exposure to Jewish culture. From a pedagogic perspective, the institution of the Volksheim blended modern social work with the rebuilding of community. This specific synthesis was to be achieved through the establishment of a settlement, precisely

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the term Bernfeld had employed the same year. Lehmann’s settlement house was to be a place where “students and women would work with the Jewish proletarian street population and practice social work.”38 In reality, their work almost exclusively served the youth population. The project of Jewish renewal was thus conceived to reconstitute the Jewish Gemeinschaft by beginning at the local level of the Jewish neighborhood. A Jewish settlement, Lehmann maintained, “seeks to bring the Jewish population of one or more streets together into a living Jewish community, bringing with it the spirit of national renewal.”39 Lehmann found inspiration in other nineteenth-century European social renewal movements. The student-led “Back to the People” movement (Wnarod) beginning in the 1860s in Russia, the Danish student movement led by Grundvig, and the settlement movements in England and the United States all served as models for “work for the nation” (Volksarbeit), as opposed to social work by young ideological cohorts of students or skilled professionals.40 In Russia, Denmark, and Finland, for example, students fanned out into the countryside to live among the peasants, offering social and medical assistance, themselves becoming transformed through sustained contact with the “pure,” “wholesome” qualities of the peasants who represented “the people.” In Denmark, cadres of nationally minded students resettled in villages where, through contact with the bearers of old Danish culture, the youth took in traditional culture, folk songs, and language.41 Significantly, Lehmann asserted that the “Back to the People” movement at its inception contained no ideological program for social revolution or any other type of revolutionary thinking: “The only goal was to teach the masses of peasants to read, to instruct them, to give them medical assistance or help them out of the darkness and squalor in some other ways, and to figure out which of their ideals would help improve their lives.”42 The paradigm evolved by Lehmann was to engage the activist social worker, who, through working with the most authentic representatives of “the people,” would intensify his ties to his people while helping those less fortunate. While Lehmann never proposed the “return” of western Jews to east European Jewish towns and villages, Lehmann wanted to build upon the social life still pulsing in the streets and neighborhoods of

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large European cities. There in the Jewish street, Lehmann saw the potential for the re-creation of discrete Jewish Volksgemeinschaften in the Diaspora that would bring together eastern and western Jews in economic and spiritual union. Whatever hope still existed for an authentic and dynamic Jewish Volksgemeinschaft in the metropolis rested with the resuscitation of an organic, national-religious culture whose vital signs had not been extinguished, even in the face of the corrosive effects of urban life. In contrast to the originally pastoral vision of Bernfeld (and many other Jewish social reformers), Lehmann’s vision embraced the urban character of east European Jews. His agents for the preservation and transmission of this authentic culture in the Jewish case were not the peasant dwellers of remote villages but the east European Jewish masses of the inner cities. Especially for social workers inclined toward Zionism, the community of the Ostjuden was held up as a model of the original fullness and richness in Jewish community life. Before looking for models of community that were foreign to the Jewish historical experience, Lehmann urged his compatriots to appreciate the intrinsically positive qualities of communities in the east:43 “We want to go to the people and seek to find out which ideals of a Jewish life in community still endure in the morals and customs of the people or their texts, before we force upon them a foreign system from the outside.” Western Jews should look at the institutions of the east European Jewish community that still existed, such as their legal system, conceptions of justice, and care they provided for the needy. In these, Lehmann believed, “we will find a marvelous Jewish spirit and Jewish essence upon whose foundation we shall reestablish the new Jewish Gemeinschaft.”44 Although Lehmann viewed Palestine as the ultimate site for Jewish renewal, like other cultural Zionists, he considered the cultural work to be achieved in the Diaspora as a valuable and necessary precondition for the eventual establishment of a vibrant Jewish center in Palestine. Discussing the idea behind a Jewish settlement house in Berlin, Lehmann asserted its importance in laying the groundwork for the ultimate Jewish settlement. Echoing the cultural message of Ahad Ha’am, Lehmann asserted that “Zion will not be reestablished simply by amassing the greatest possible number of Jews in Palestine, but only when those who come

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have already found their way back to Jewish humanity in the Diaspora.”45 Lehmann’s brand of Zionism was inclusive and nonpartisan. In fact, Lehmann’s fellow Zionist, Georg Lubinski, went so far as to call the Volksheim “unpolitical.”46 The settlement house’s highest goal was to offer education rather than dogma. Cultural activities revolved around Hebrew and Yiddish music, discussions of current Jewish issues, ethical questions, and Bible-related discussions, while guest lectures and visits from intellectual figures such as Gustav Landauer, Martin Buber, Shai Agnon, and Salman Rubaschoff provided an eclectic, often Zionistleaning cultural and intellectual atmosphere. In addition to Jewish culture, participants also took in what they considered to be the best of European culture. During the final years (1924–1929) of the Volksheim, the question of Palestine shifted to center stage, but its appeal still lay in its ability to attract all kinds of postassimilationist Jews with their diverse worldviews, as Lehmann explained: Two different kinds of people will come together in a Jewish social working community. “We desire the perfection [Vervollkommnung] of our people, and all the help we give our comrades is a step on the way to the perfection of the nation,” says the one. “We want to redeem the world,” says the other softly. The objective of the first is the Volk and its time is the future; the goal of the second is the world, and its time is eternity. The bridge between the two, which is of a third type, leads people, especially women, to the world, to helping humanity. It will not be the national idea nor God, but simply, love.47

Lehmann went even further in disavowing a narrow nationalist stance by acknowledging the role that religion might play in the renewal of the Jewish people. The settlement idea, he asserted, would be effective only if its adherents had a religious orientation: “Today we still do not know whether the national idea on its own can release in us that driving force which requires us to do social work, and to share in life and suffering.”48 Modeled most directly on the American and English settlement movements, the Volksheim was the first Jewish institution of its kind in Germany. Though neither a direct institutional nor ideological outgrowth of traditional Jewish welfare, the Volksheim addressed the same complex set of social problems that were the province of Jewish social welfare

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work and its affiliated institutions. The innovation of the Volksheim as a social welfare institution lay in its attempt to provide an array of social services under one roof. By concentrating the social services under the auspices of the Volksheim, its social workers sought to earn the trust of parents and the local community and thus more effectively render its services.49 By offering care for preschool children, after-school activities, youth clubs for school-age children, and evening leisure activities for post–school-age working youth, they hoped to bypass the numerous institutions that were structured according to distinct age groups. The Volksheim also overtook the responsibilities of recuperative care by organizing vacations for the children in the summertime. In addition, the Volksheim provided legal services and medical care for the mothers, many of whom had been abandoned by their husbands.50 Although special evenings were arranged for mothers to discuss domestic matters over tea and engage in Jewish cultural activities, the Volksheim’s organizers acknowledged their failure to recruit parents as active members of the Volksheim.51 Lehmann envisioned the Volksheim’s social and educational offerings as the way to re-create the “original” qualities of Jewish community life. Here, Lehmann’s goal for reconstituting some of the key aspects of the premodern Jewish community paralleled the approach of the social reformers at the Central Welfare Agency. Like those at the Central Welfare Agency, the leaders of the Volksheim sought to transform what had become in the nineteenth century charity and philanthropy back into the social institutions and mutual aid that had formerly formed an important foundation of communal life. One of the most critical aims of the Volksheim was to influence the occupational choices young people made. For Lehmann, occupational restructuring was at least as antibourgeois as it was Palestine oriented.52 “One of the most unfortunate concomitants of life in the big city,” he lamented, “is the life course of the Jewish youngster, which begins from behind the shopcounter and leads him to become a member of the dejudaized bourgeoisie in Berlin West.”53 The Volksheim thus offered regular instructional workshops in metalwork and book-binding and planned weekend and extended stays outside the city for youths to gain experience in agriculture. It also tried to situate boys in apprentice positions. The

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boys themselves formed an apprentices’ club, which for Lehmann constituted evidence that “they were not headed along the above described path of tragic assimilation.”54 The other oft-chosen profession of the Volksheim’s protegés and helpers was social work. The pedagogic sphere formed another area in which the Volksheim sought to improve upon traditional welfare. Structured much like Bernfeld’s Kinderheim Baumgarten and sharing similar goals, Lehmann’s Volksheim relied upon the active participation of youth in the running of the institution; he too sought to implement the radical democracy of “the new pedagogy.” In trying to avoid the stigma attached to recipients of middle-class Jewish philanthropy, the Volksheim created an environment in which children and youth leaders could codetermine their activities and priorities. Here, as at Baumgarten, perhaps the most distinguishing feature of its educational approach was the relationship between “caretaker” and “recipient.” The Volksheim’s youth leaders were proud of the relationships they established with the children, which went beyond the inequality, formality, and time constraints that characterized the standard social worker–client relationship.55 Following the model of American youth clubs and the German youth movement, girls and boys, young men and women were joined together by the camaraderie of youth and took over responsibilities for their own education, activities, and the social education of the younger children. Indeed, the Volksheim was probably the first Jewish institution to combine youth movement ideals—that of youth led by youth—with traditional youth care ( Jugendpflege) by adults. Social workers hoped that the sense of responsibility that each individual developed toward the community would breed a new generation of children who would prove to maintain strong and lasting commitments toward their people as adults.56 Describing its progression from social work to something closer to the youth-movement ethos of leadership by youth for youth, the social worker Franz Lichtenstein noted, “It is not that one brings something to the youth, nor is it that one works on behalf of youth, but it is the work one has simply done with youth.”57 Uniting the varied organizational, pedagogic, and cultural innovations in the Volksheim was an overarching aspiration to reconstruct a genuine community. One participant characterized the course of the

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Volksheim’s thirteen-year development as embodying a shift from social work to national work. The caretaker became the “leader,” and the traditional methods of social work caretaking were replaced with the relationships formed in a close-knit community life. The adoption of more youth movement rituals including outings in nature, for example, also assumed importance as an expression of this impulse to create community. With the closing of the Volksheim in 1929, the participatory and youth-led character of the social work that had evolved at the Volksheim lived on in the National Commission for Jewish Youth Associations (Reichsausschuss für Jüdische Jugendverbände), which was founded under the auspices of the Central Welfare Agency. In seeking to employ the most modern forms of social work and pedagogy with a thoroughgoing commitment to “national work,” the Volksheim, like the Central Welfare Agency, offered a new institutional form as well as progressive educational, organizational, and ideological orientations that would distinguish it from traditional Jewish charitable work. In contrast to the Central Welfare Agency, however, the Volksheim’s desire to move beyond traditional charity not only stemmed from the desire to modernize but, as with Bernfeld, arose from a classbased critique of bourgeois philanthropy. Ten years into its existence, Lehmann wrote that although the Volksheim succeeded in carrying out meaningful national work, the greater goal for western and eastern Jews to reconnect with the “primal mother” (Urmutter) of the Volk in the form of the east European masses remained unfulfilled. His vision of seeing the masses reconnect with the restorative powers of the Volksgemeinschaft had failed. He attributed this failure to the fact that the Jews who were in search of a new existence in cities across Europe no longer constituted the Volk. Severed from the nation as a source of nourishment, these rootless Jewish masses had become withering limbs of the national body.58 Already back in 1921, however, Lehmann had found another arena for the project of remaking the Volksgemeinschaft in an urban setting. This time, he went directly to the source of that Jewish Volksgemeinschaft in the east. His move to Kovno, Lithuania, at the behest of the central childprotection organization of Lithuania and in conjunction with the Jewish National Council of Lithuania, was the next step toward the creation

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of the type of Jewish settlement that he had launched in Berlin. Charged with caring for needy and neglected east European Jewish children and youth, Kinderhaus Kovno (Kovno Children’s Home), like the Volksheim, brought together numerous social services: infant care, pedagogic work, and medical care. Dr. Hans Lubinski, who served as director of the home between 1925 and 1929, described the population of Kinderhaus Kovno as “normal, not ‘genetically tainted,’ but ‘verwahrlost’ as a result of the war and aftermath.”59 Many of the children who had lost their parents to pogroms, war, and epidemics had been living on the streets as vagabonds; in other cases, the utter destitution of their parents had forced them to entrust their children to the community for care. But like Bernfeld’s orphans who had already served time in other welfare institutions, these orphans were now embittered, mistrustful, and filled with negative experiences of authoritarian adults. Reminiscent of Bernfeld, Lehmann described the bonding of a youth community at the Kinderhaus as an exhilarating odyssey that took a mass of wayward street children and transformed them into a genuine Gemeinschaft.60 As was the case with the Volksheim and Kinderheim Baumgarten, the youth community represented the most vital pedagogic instrument of this new orphan settlement. For the realization of their pedagogic goals, the directors of Kinderhaus Kovno, like Bernfeld, placed the utmost importance on the development of a sense of attachment to the Gemeinschaft. According to Lubinski, every young person had to believe in the creative powers of his Gemeinschaft and in his own ability to shape it for genuine youth work to take place.61 Developing a sense of attachment to the Gemeinschaft would also pave the way for the child’s integration into middle-class society. Lehmann and Lubinski shared Bernfeld’s belief that repressed individual traumas had to be accessed and healed before genuine bonds of community could develop. In his description of the stages of community formation corresponding to those outlined by Bernfeld, Lehmann too pointed to the first stage as the most crucial, as it involved moving beyond the individual’s damaged ego.62 At Kovno, Lehmann observed that this tended to be the longest and most painful part of the healing process. He suggested that the children’s mistrust united them in joint battle, first

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against the Kinderhaus, then against what they saw as the ills of capitalism, Zionism, and bourgeois society. As they vehemently opposed being viewed as the beneficiaries of the well-situated classes, the youngsters became obsessed with achieving material independence from the home’s financial supporters and tried to make the home financially self-sufficient. While the children had quickly formed ties to one another, these bonds were based on past hatreds and old wounds. At this stage, according to Lehmann, they had not yet achieved Gemeinschaft. The second stage of development was distinguished by the formation of working groups. Within these groups, youths united on the basis of common interests that primarily involved doing battle with what they saw as the great evils of their day, capitalism and religion. At first, the children adopted “Godlessness” as their new religion.63 But, as Lehmann explained, their blind enthusiasm for “the [Communist] Party only lasted until their hatreds had been discharged, their painful memories faded, and their ties to the educators duly strengthened. It was then that they faced their most profound crisis of meaning. The youth realized that the Party was nothing more than an instrumental organization in contrast to a genuine Gemeinschaft. With this realization, they now entered the final stage of the development of the Gemeinschaft where they were forced to confront its ultimate meaning.64 In the accounts of both directors, this marked the point at which a new basis for community life had finally begun to take root. The children now pursued constructive projects. They tried to rebuild a house, they made furniture, tried to open a small dairy, and took over as much of the work at the home as possible so as to limit financial output and enable more children to join Kinderhaus Kovno. The powerful sense of belonging to the Gemeinschaft and the individual affirmation that membership in it provided now led the children to work on behalf of the Kinderhaus and commit themselves to the dual goals of achieving a just society and serving the Jewish people. Both Lubinski and Lehmann maintained that the home had no political orientation.65 What had initially brought the children together was neither an ideological nor political program but a common experience of need and the absence of actual or functioning homes. The directors thus viewed the political

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and social commitments that emerged as an outgrowth of the bonds of Gemeinschaft. Rather than being the result of indoctrination, it was the highly polarized political and ideological makeup of the Lithuanian Jewish community that made Zionism, Yiddishism, socialism, and Orthodoxy the crucial forms of self-identification for the children of Kinderhaus Kovno: “Our youth were divided into those who loved the city, the poor people and wanted to serve them, and those who wanted to be with Mother Earth and see the reconstruction of the Jewish people in Palestine.”66 This sharp division between socialists and Zionists also determined their choice of professions. Those who wanted to go to Palestine prepared themselves through agricultural training, while those wanting to continue their work with the people in Europe chose social work and teaching as professions. To Lehmann and Lubinski, it seemed natural that a commitment to social work would arise out of their participation in a community of meaning. It was the need that the children had experienced “on their own bodies” that turned the young people into socialists and wagers of class warfare.67 But both groups wanted to serve the Volk and shared a noble human desire: the wish for the immediate realization of all their hopes and the complete devotion to this idea. With the third phase of community development firmly underway, Lubinski concluded that the youngsters, having endowed their community and their individual lives with purpose and direction, no longer needed their former educators: [W]e had [now] lost the claim to be educators for our young people. The life of the Volk itself will shape them from now on. Our task was merely to bring the individuals together and give them back courage and faith and trust in humanity and in their own future. Now that they have found the connection, life and the Volk will be their guide.68

In 1926, one of the older youth groups at Kinderhaus Kovno elected to serve its people and realize its future by embarking on a one-way journey to Palestine. Their destination was a 500-dunam plot of land in Lod, southeast of Tel Aviv. Working the dusty uncultivated fields leased from the Jewish National Fund, they became the first of several youth groups from Kinderhaus Kovno to help Lehmann lay the foundation for

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a youth settlement in Palestine. The founding of Ben Shemen youth village was the culmination of Lehmann’s prior work in Berlin and Kovno and was heralded as both a continuation and crowning achievement of the work he had begun at Kinderhaus Kovno. Ben Shemen was the final installment and most enduring contribution of Lehmann’s pioneering work as a Jewish educator, and it was there that the youth settlement idea came to fullest fruition. The creation of the youth village at Ben Shemen ensued from the efforts of the organization Aid to Jewish Orphans ( Jüdische Waisenhilfe) founded in Berlin in 1926.69 While still based at Kinderhaus Kovno, Lehmann began assembling supporters across Europe for a Palestinian youth settlement that would serve as a central protection and educational institution for orphaned and homeless children from eastern Europe. In Berlin, the project attracted the attention and support of people from various sectors of Jewish religious and political life, a point used by its promoters to prove the universal importance of matters pertaining to Jewish youth.70 The plan for Ben Shemen appealed to agencies concerned with the social and economic problems of east European Jews, educators, and social workers with interests in the progressive pedagogic practices of Kinderhaus Kovno, socialist youth movement activists, and those who “yearned to see the organic, healthy growth of the community in Palestine.”71 With the backing of a suitably renowned executive committee—Mrs. Albert Einstein was president, and Frau Lola-Hahn Warburg, Bernhard Timendorfer, Martin Buber, Max Brod, and Otto Warburg were among the board members of the new organization— Lehmann won support abroad as well as from important Jewish organizations in Germany including B’nai Brith, the Aid Society of German Jews (Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden), Zionist Union of Germany (Zionistische Vereinigung Deutschland), the League of Jewish Women, the Gemeinde of Berlin, Society for Spreading Artisan and Agricultural Work Among Jews (ORT), and Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jews (OSE).72 It was apparent to all interested parties that Ben Shemen offered a solution to the real social and economic problems facing east European Jews and ultimately German Jewry. Whatever the successes of a thriving orphanage like Kinderhaus Kovno, alone it offered no solution to the massive problem of Jewish orphans.

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The idea of settling east European youth in Palestine offered prospects for a viable economic future, especially for those who hoped to remain true to their ideals of being productive, creative workers in the crafts and agriculture. At Ben Shemen, as at Kinderhaus Kovno, work formed an integral component of the children’s life and constituted the foundation of their education. The relationship between work and Gemeinschaft, the idea of productive education in community rooted in autonomous agricultural enterprise, was to reach its highest level of fulfillment in Palestine. The intense community life lent the educational imprint a greater impact than an orphanage could ever produce. One observer wrote that as a result of his energetic labors, “the child will make his plot of earth into his Heimat and possession.”73 Anything but charity cases, the children of Ben Shemen had, in the realization of Lehmann’s highest vision, become citizens of a self-contained community and polity. The work at Ben Shemen centered on agriculture and the skilled trades.74 Boys developed skills in masonry and carpentry and also worked in the vegetable gardens, fields, and the dairy, while the girls specialized in raising chickens. Practical work was accompanied by more theoretical training by way of evening classes in agronomy. As the first annual report on the youth settlement described: “The serious and high degree of active work, the feeling of responsibility for the Gemeinschaft, the joy at being able to work and create for the Gemeinschaft have passed the test at Ben Shemen.”75 Like Bernfeld, Lehmann saw orphans as more inclined than other children to form intense emotional bonds to the Jewish people, owing to the absence of mediating familial attachments.76 In what appears to have been the final phase in his own odyssey as an educator, Lehmann expanded the scope of the educational goal of facilitating emotional transference to the Volk, extending it to include the Land.77 In a 1928 article entitled “On the Pedagogic Powers of Soil and Volk,” he presented the drive for attachment as a central human drive and consequently as the highest ideal of education. Only an education that could liberate the individual from his isolation, he insisted, would lead the individual to feel part of a higher unity.

War Orphans Shape a New Jewish Nation

Using a Freudian model, Lehmann traced this drive for attachment back to the primal experience of loss that every individual undergoes at birth. Violently expelled from a harmonious state of being, the infant is forced to suddenly confront the isolation and unsettledness of the “real world.” Though the symbiotic relationship between mother and child continued after birth, the self gradually differentiates from the mother and, by the time of puberty, wrestles free from the bonds tying mother and child. Departing now from Freud, Lehmann described the moment of a second birth, when the pubescent youth tries unconsciously to reproduce that primal childhood experience by seeking to replace his maternal attachment with a new one. Having exited the safe and secure world of childhood, he may look back longingly to his past but knows that only the future offers him a possibility of true being. The adolescent now embarks on the most important journey of his life in search of a new Heimat and bond with an eternal mother. Underlining his assertion of the Volk as the new mother, Lehmann points to the frequent linguistic gendering of the Volk as female (ironically excluding German) as reflective of the motherly character of the human community.78 In the final link entwining individual and national destinies, Lehmann brought his psychological and nationalist thinking full circle. For not only did he propose that the individual life course is determined by the trauma of loss and the ensuing search for a new love object, he also painted the entire sweep of Jewish history according to the same schema, in a kind of Zionist-inspired psychohistory of the Jews. The early Israelite tribes, upon completing their transition from a nomadic life to a sedentary one, were compelled to redirect their bonds of kinship to a new love-object, namely, the Land—this was the stage that corresponded to the ancient period. During this period of living on the Land, “they worked it and loved it and honored it as a mother who bears great fruits.”79 But when driven from the Land and faced with the disappearance of the love-object, the Jew again had to rechannel his drive for attachment, this time into the Volksgemeinschaft. This represented the premodern Diaspora stage of Jewish history. Most recently, the loss of community in western Europe and the uprooting of east European Jews from the nation as primal mother (Ur-Mutter Volk) had left

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Jews feeling vulnerable and without the protection of the Mother (Volk). As national ties weakened with the dissolution of the Volksgemeinschaft bringing Jews to the post-Emancipation era, the drive for a new object of attachment is once again set in motion, headed now toward uniting the nation and its native soil.80 The loosening bonds to the MotherProtector-Volk also explained for Lehmann the intensity of intracommunal Jewish politics. Where Land and Volk appear as two competing party programs in the east—Zionists want to settle Palestine in contrast with the autonomists who were committed to building a Volksgemeinschaft in the Diaspora—the vehemence of the political battle waged between the two can only be understood as a contest for mother.81 It is interesting to note how Lehmann employs a psychodynamic model of childhood based on the ideal bourgeois family. The notion of the intense emotional mother-child attachment, the sense of safety and security it entailed, the idealized image of a trouble-free childhood—all of these could not have appeared farther from the real life experiences of the abandoned, neglected, and abused children whose emotional pasts occupied Lehmann so intensively in the course of his youth work. In charting the dual and interconnecting paths of individual and national psychology, he evinces what for him and Bernfeld appear to be among the most compelling evidence for the uniqueness of the Jewish national path: while sharing many of the Romantic assumptions and aspirations of their peers and their particular age, it was neither biology nor race but psychology that Lehmann and Bernfeld treated as the decisive determinant of Jewish destiny. The significance of such a mutable and nonracialized notion of nationality, of course, contrasts sharply with much of the rest of nationalist rhetoric of these years and also confirms Lehmann’s notion that the path to Jewish nationhood was only to be achieved through the recovery of humanity in the Diaspora. Though both agreed that the drive for attachment had its origin in the dynamics of the nuclear family, they suggest that the family’s ultimate function is to lead the individual toward an intense union and merging with the Mother Volk. In the end, the psychological theories of Siegfried Bernfeld and Siegfried Lehmann that fused individual and national development exerted less

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influence than did their actual educational experiments. The educational work of both Bernfeld and Lehmann were highly respected, particularly by educators associated with the Central Welfare Agency, which had committed itself to modernizing the educational methodologies of its affiliate institutions. However, there are several indicators suggesting that the achievements of both men comprised more than a footnote to the history of Jewish social pedagogy. Their work received support from broad sections of the Jewish community, despite the fact that Bernfeld himself boasted that he had alienated the organized Zionist establishment. By the end of the 1920s, many of the principles making up the progressive Jewish educational agenda introduced by Lehmann and Bernfeld had been adopted in part by “mainstream” youth welfare institutions of the Jewish community, with the result that, by the end of the decade, Jewish youth welfare gained the reputation in some quarters as being more progressive than either Protestant or Catholic youth welfare.82 Among Bernfeld’s many publications on youth and the youth movement, his book Kinderheim Baumgarten regularly appeared on lists of recommended reading for social workers and pedagogues in Jewish and non-Jewish professional social work journals long after the children’s home had closed its doors. Even more significant was the degree to which they ultimately shared many goals with their Central Welfare Agency counterparts. The educational programs for “endangered” youth in the 1920s were designed both to counter the major social ills facing Jewish society and to form the core of a rejuvenated Jewish community. Educational reformers, social workers, Zionist and non-Zionist communal leaders alike sought to redress the overconcentration of Jews in commerce and trade by training youth in agriculture and the skilled trades. They countered the alienation of the city with the intimacy of community and, when possible, with a “return” to the land. They sought to transcend the fractious nature of Jewish communal life by placing Jewish social bonds above partisan and religious differences. Most importantly, both the radical pedagogues and the Central Welfare Agency sought to create a new Jew who could look forward to an economically productive and secure future, live in a healthy environment, repudiate the superficial values of the city, and feel strongly bound to his people by the bonds of organic Gemeinschaft.

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In these efforts that paralleled nationwide German progressive and nationalistically inspired groups, while at the same time drawing significantly from a collective cultural Zionist ethos, we can see how the process of moving from Germans into Jews within the larger schema of Weimar reform was not one that was necessarily mediated by the state. That the state was often an important source of funds or ideological energies, as previous chapters have documented, should not be overlooked. However, as this discussion of radical Jewish educational initiatives shows, the overriding category in this process is that of nation. That the Ben Shemen Youth Village established itself in Palestine is one clear indication of this. Yet this observation should not distract from the point that these processes of Jewish national aspiration and realization cannot be neatly disentangled from the project of reviving a specifically German Jewry during Weimar.

Conclusion

The new economic crisis of 1930 ultimately sealed the political fate of the Weimar Republic, putting an end to the expansive plans for communitybuilding that Jewish leaders had pioneered during the 1920s. The grand plans and visions of those who sought to secure and strengthen the social existence of the Jews took a back seat to the exigencies of real and pressing social needs on a mass scale. Jewish social workers thus watched with horror as parts of the social infrastructure they had built in the 1920s were dismantled by the end of the embattled Weimar Republic. Lehmann’s Volksheim closed its doors in 1929 and the girls’ Fürsorgeerziehung home at Köpenick was closed in 1931 owing to lack of funds. Jewish social reformers who had once emphasized the strengthening of the Jewish population through transforming the family, facilitating reproduction, and rehabilitating endangered youth were compelled to shift their focus to endeavoring to hold the socially disastrous effects of the economic crisis in abeyance. In contrast to the broader aspirations that shaped its early establishment, the economic crisis forced the newly reorganized Jewish welfare system to create and prioritize programs that would address the most fundamental needs of economic subsistence. Facing shrinking state welfare subsidies, Jewish families now sought support from the Gemeinde in increasing numbers, with foreign families being edged out of assistance by the masses of unemployed from the middle classes. By 1930, the Berlin Gemeinde’s welfare expenditures—one third of its total budget—became typical for communities across the country. In the same year, a full 15 percent of Berlin’s Jews applied for welfare, an increasing number of whom lived in the city’s more prosperous neighborhoods.1 There were even Jews who, having officially withdrawn

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from the Jewish community, restored their membership in order to apply for Jewish welfare.2 Making the already difficult situation of Jewish members of the economically distressed middle classes significantly worse was the anti-Semitic boycott. In big cities, just as in rural areas, directories of German-Christian businesses were distributed and published in newspapers. In middle-size cities, it was estimated that the boycott was responsible for a 20 percent decline in income for Jewish middle-class families beyond what was caused by the general economic crisis in the middle class. For the east European Jews within the German Jewish population, not only did communal support decline considerably, but so did support they had been receiving from municipal welfare services. The atmosphere that characterized the end of the Weimar Republic must be understood, however, as a distinct period of crisis from the initial postwar era in which “crisis” was notably marked by the parallel sense of the potential for significant and enduring reform that gave rise to the communal institutions ultimately eclipsed by the 1930s. Indeed, the distinction between these two different moments points up the larger fact that even as the concept of crisis, decline, and survival are central to modern Jewish history, they remain surprisingly underanalyzed. During the Weimar Republic, Jewish leaders frequently used the language of crisis, but in it they also saw the possibility for revitalizing the Jewish community through an unleashing of new energies. In this way, we can see how crisis produced a new landscape of possibilities and did not remain the sole property of cultural pessimists. At the same time, a striking feature of both the perception of crisis and fear about Jewish survival is the way in which survival itself is understood in gendered terms. Diagnosing the illness of the Jewish social body and trying to establish a more “healthy” relationship among its internal constituent parts required attendance to more fundamental aspects of Jewish communal existence than the standard concerns of religion, ideology, or even anti-Semitism. It went to the heart of Jewish physical and social existence encapsulating how Jewish men and women worked; how they took care of their health, their bodies, and their young; and how they reproduced and reared their children. In taking as its focus the perception of social crisis in the realm of family, welfare, and reproduction, this study has sought to move away from treating the crises of the Weimar Republic and the Jews primarily from

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the standpoint of the decline and collapse of liberalism and the Republic.3 As a result, the question of how Weimar Jews understood the political crisis that led to the collapse of the Weimar state has not occupied a central place in this work. While this most certainly remains a critical question in German and German-Jewish history, it is one that has also drawn attention away from considering the compelling and complex dynamics of Weimar Jewish communal life in the years before its demise. In shifting emphasis, this book, like other recent works on Weimar, goes beyond linear narratives of the decline of the Weimar Republic to highlight the experimental and contingent nature of efforts by Weimar contemporaries to manage the challenges of the postwar period. Considered in this way, modern Jewish predictions of communal crisis and decline often have far more to do with disillusionment over the perceived social costs of modernization than with an essential and abiding Jewish fear of “disappearing.”4 Just as the newly emerging body of scholarship on Weimar has begun to offer wide-ranging correctives to the binary of liberalism and illiberalism by examining the connections between conservative and liberal thought in realms such as health, welfare, and biology, this work similarly demonstrates how much common ground existed between Zionists and the classically liberal German-Jewish community.5 Indeed, just as the Zionists critiqued Emancipation without intending to do away with it, the same held true for many Liberal and religious nonnationalist Jews working in the social arena: the manner in which they defined social crisis and sought to solve its problems reveals the extent to which disenchantment with modernization and its social effects permeated broad segments of the Liberal Jewish establishment. Viewed from a broader historical perspective, both Zionist and Liberal responses thus belong to the continuum of German postwar responses to the perceived crises of the Republic. During the short period between the end of World War I and the Nazi rise to power, the sense of national, social, and moral decline that many Germans had so forcefully articulated in the postwar period was accompanied by attempts to find definitive solutions to intractable problems. Among many Jews in the organized Jewish community, the desire to reinvest the community with “authentic” Jewish values feared lost in the process of assimilation came as a response both to the perceived ill-effects

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of urban society and to the social consequences of Emancipation. Combined with a long-standing Jewish communal tradition of charity and self-help, the application of modern social policy methods to help mitigate the disastrous effects of the war and its aftermath spurred more rationalized, expansive, and sometimes bold experiments for the forging of new kinds of ties between the individual, the family, and the larger Jewish community. This emerging Jewish communal vision for strengthening and deepening the social ties binding the individual, family, and community was shaped through the active engagement of Jews in German social welfare and the related disciplines of social hygiene, sex reform, and medicine. Not only did Jews as individuals take part in building social work in Germany, but Jewish social reformers sought to reorganize Jewish social welfare as a whole in ways that corresponded to the new structures of the Weimar welfare system, such that Jewish welfare became part of the intricate web of bodies providing welfare under the auspices of the state. Simultaneous with its greater integration in the German welfare system, Jewish social work also recognized and quite self-consciously cultivated a unique Jewish social body that its leaders hoped would develop, over time, into a stronger, more deeply rooted community of Jews who were bound not merely by religion but by ties of solidarity, family, community, and fate. The dramatically increased Jewish social need in the postwar period led reformers to turn to new conceptions and forms of social assistance emerging as part of contemporary German social policy. As an important feature of Sozialpolitik in the 1920s that placed an emphasis on strengthening individuals for the health and productivity of the nation, Jewish social reformers found an approach to social problems that resonated with both their goals for communal regeneration and the collectivist emphases of the traditional Jewish community. Taken as a whole, Jewish reformers of this period increasingly focused on creating German citizens who would serve and strengthen both a Jewish ethnos and the German nation-state. Undertaking this ambitious project by utilizing some of the most modern and progressive methods of social welfare, Jewish reformers adapted them to an arena of social activity where they presented them as “intrinsically” Jewish values.

Conclusion

Jews were among a variety of Germans of different political, social, and religious orientations who identified the interrelated social crises of the postwar period as diminishing the strength, health, and reproductive capacity of German society. Like other Germans, they identified the threats posed by individualism, a culture of consumption, secularization, and the changing organization of gender both within and beyond the family as threats to social and national cohesion. Given the breadth and spirit of innovation within social reform circles during the Weimar period, the specifically Jewish definition of crisis and the accompanying proposed solutions did not represent “merely” an internal Jewish crisis but formed a subset of a larger German middle-class one. While it is certainly true, as one Jewish observer noted in 1931, that the development and fate of the German middle class is at the same time the fate of the German Jews, it was also true that for Jews these crises had particular meanings for continued Jewish economic stability and long-term communal sustainability. In light of this reality, it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid treating “German” and “Jewish” populations as separate entities, as Jewish social reformers helped contribute to the larger German body of thought on the crisis and the path to Jewish communal renewal could in many ways be seen as traversing the social and conceptual landscapes of a revitalized German nationhood. In exploring the ideas and initiatives that formed part of the Jewish community’s program of communal regeneration outside the framework of the rise of Nazism, this work also raises questions that extend beyond Weimar itself. Most immediately, it would be of interest to trace how German and German-Jewish visions for population policy, health, and youth welfare operated within the explicitly nationalist framework of Palestine. To what extent, if any, did such conceptions of population policy and pronatalism in particular go on to shape the policies of the emerging Jewish state? Such questions are of particular interest given the number of figures active in shaping Weimar Jewish social policy who moved to Palestine: Siddy Wronsky, Georg Lubinski, and Friedrich Ollendorff were but a few who moved in the 1930s. A few works have already taken up related questions, most notably Derek Penslar’s work on agricultural training and Palestine as well as research on Jewish social scientists by Mitchell Hart, particularly his work on Arthur Ruppin. The

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recent work on motherhood and eugenics in 1930s Palestine by Sachlav Stoller Liss offers some intriguing suggestions as to how GermanJewish ideas were put to use in Palestine but leaves room for more such studies.6 As part of the shift in focus away from Weimar’s calamitous end, this work has also avoided placing anti-Semitism at the center of its analyses. And yet the irony that an increased fear of communal dissolution appeared in tandem with a resurgence of anti-Semitism was not lost on contemporaries. This can be discerned in the 1927 call to action issued by the Prussian Federation of Jewish Communities, which declared that if Jewish men and women did not undertake the reforms charted by a new Jewish population policy, “the ‘Jewish Question’ in Germany, will, within two generations, be settled by itself, to the delight of our enemies.”7 It appears that the social reformers and Jewish communal leaders under examination here understood the threats to group coherence and economic sustainability to have been more immediate than the fear of dissolution aroused by a renewed anti-Semitism. Thus, rather than consider how accurately Jews assessed the threat of anti-Semitism for the Jewish future in Germany, the question to which this work may ultimately contribute is a consideration of how anti-Semitism operated as a force of social exclusion that helped shape the longings, analyses, and visions of the Weimar Jews who sought to mount projects of internal reform and renewal. Formulated in this way, it appears that, despite the new quality and virulence of Weimar anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism functioned in many respects in a manner that was continuous with earlier and more recent periods of German-Jewish history. Shulamit Volkov and Jacob Borut have explained the emergence of a Jewish turn inward as Jews created more defined and separate spheres of organizational life in the 1890s as the result of both anti-Semitic exclusion and the internal drive for self-preservation, the combination of which led to the creation of new Jewish communal values and forms of self-expression.8 Weimar Jewish communal life clearly continues and manifests in new ways this important dynamic in modern Jewish history, to adapt and rework forms drawn from the non-Jewish world by bringing them into the Jewish community.9 In this important sense, Jewish communal life in the Weimar Republic—despite its end—saw an

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intensification of both the centripetal and centrifugal forces in modern Jewish history. Anti-Semitism undoubtedly played a key role in pushing Weimar Jews to search for greater ethnic cohesiveness and expanded communal autonomy, but it did not come with a call to renounce Germanness. For Zionists, of course, such a move represented but the first step toward the realization of a complete Jewish national vision. But for Liberals, it reflected the desire to maintain a distinct Jewishness with full legal rights within the framework of a democratic state, while defending against exclusion by creating a regeneration of Jewishness that in some respects, perhaps, also afforded the means of a strategic retreat. By all accounts, while there was a growth in the disaffection of some Jews, there was also an intensification of Jewish engagement in numerous spheres of Weimar Jewish life. Anti-Semitism was thus not simply a precursor to the collapse of Weimar and the rise of National Socialism but a social force that affected the way many activist Jews from across the ideological divide devoted themselves to Jewish self-development and autonomy during the initial postwar years. With the economic crisis of 1930, the tension between the sense of crisis and possibility that characterized Weimar social experimentation tipped to the side of crisis and despair. But one of the unintended consequences of the growth and vibrancy of the Jewish social sphere during the Weimar Republic was the creation of a strong institutional foundation from which an increasingly pauperized and marginalized community would operate after 1933. The fact was, of course, that these social reformers never imagined that the welfare operations they had put in place to take care of east European Jews would become the basis from which they would help ease their own struggle for existence.10 It is thus an ironic twist of fate that the Jewish network of self-help during the Nazi period had its foundations in the Weimar Republic, a system put in place by individuals who identified the danger of German-Jewish decline as stemming not from the outside but from within. In the early years of the Third Reich, some Weimar Jewish institutions were closed outright: the boys’ home at Wolzig was shut down and many of its inhabitants sent to Sachsenhausen on trumped-up political charges. The new modern facility that had once been the pride of the Jewish community became the property of Hitler Youth. Other institutions created

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in keeping with the Weimar spirit of possibility, utility, and remaking the profile of German Jewry were transformed into institutions to prepare for emigration. Most symbolic, perhaps, was the new rural settlement at Landwerk Neuendorf in Gross Glasgow, founded in 1931 at the initiative of the National Union of Jewish War Veterans with assistance from the state. The new settlement, which was meant to enable the Jewish residents to become more productive through occupational retraining and a social pedagogical approach to education, became, after 1933, a site for helping Jews emigrate, primarily to Palestine. Jews under National Socialism enlisted the family, too, in the struggle to maintain themselves in increasingly hostile surroundings. Whereas the Weimar ideology of the family characterized the family as a shield against assimilation and the site for cultivating Jewish uniqueness, Jews under National Socialism turned to the family as a source of support in the face of the pain of disenfranchisement and exclusion imposed from without. German Jews now called upon the Jewish family to serve as a spiritual resource, to offer succor and solace to those in need of emotional comfort and material support even as the family became a launching point for emigration. Thus, as Marion Kaplan has shown, in facing the Nazi onslaught, there was an increased intensity in family life, and the family became ever more clearly defined as a symbol of Jewish identity, solidarity, continuity, and comfort.11 “Even as the real bonds of family were being broken as a result of emigration,” wrote Hannah Karminski, social worker and president of the League of Jewish Women, “the inner ones continue to demonstrate tremendous staying power.”12 From the vision of a distinct social body with full legal rights in a democratic state, the Jewish community under National Socialism came to form an identifiable and separate social body that was disenfranchised, marginalized, and increasingly powerless. This is a story of German Jewry that is tragically familiar and that tends not surprisingly, given the magnitude of events to follow and the pervasive evidence of Weimar anti-Semitism, to be projected back onto the entire Weimar period to yield a narrative of unquestionable Jewish decline and a gathering storm of hatred and exclusion that constitutes the immediate prehistory of Nazism. Even as such histories of Jewish life under Weimar are not without material basis and a sense of crisis undoubtedly shaped

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the experience of German Jews during those years, the extensive projects of Jewish reformers disclose the lineaments of a substantively different understanding of communal identity and possibility than can be discerned when failing to distinguish the different moments of “crisis” that marked the beginning and end of Weimar. Beyond offering a new understanding of the more varied textures of Weimar Jewish life, consideration of the vision and projects of the era’s German-Jewish social workers and social reformers yields helpful insights into the shifting relationship between Jewish communal identity and the structures and ideologies of the modern nation-state. To read the Weimar Jewish experience as intrinsically bound up with the history of modern Germany and the formation of German national subjects in ways other than as objects of its dark history of anti-Semitism permits us to recall the vibrant energy and creativity of Jewish reformers who sought to reimagine Jewish collective existence for the modern age; it also refuses to have that rich history occluded by a proleptic history of Nazism that reduces it to a prelude to genocide. Even as the passage from Germans into Jews lurched toward the horrific conclusion of the Final Solution a short time later, we must remain no less attentive to the potentials of a historical moment when it seemed that a different future might still unfold.

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Abbreviations

Newspapers BJFB GB IF JF JWSP MRJJ ZJAW ZJW

Blätter des jüdischen Frauenbundes Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin Israelitisches Familienblatt Die Jüdische Frau Jüdische Wohlfarhtspflege und Sozialpolitik Mitteilungen des Reichsausschusses der Jüdischen Jugendverbände Zeitschrift für Jüdische Arbeits- und Wanderfürsorge Zeitschrift für Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege

Archives ACV ADW ALBI CAHJP CJ CZA JNUL

Archiv Caritas Verband Archiv des Diakonischen Werkes der EKD Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People Centrum Judaicum Central Zionist Archives Jewish National and University Library

Terms FE ZWSt

Fürsorgeerziehung Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden

Notes

Introduction 1. Jüdische Bevölkerungspolitik. Bericht über die Tagung des Bevölkerungspolitischen Ausschusses des Preussischen Landesverbandes Jüdischer Gemeinden vom 24. Februar 1929 (Berlin: Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden, 1929), 5. 2. Ibid. 3. This quotation comes from Peter Fritzsche, “Landscapes of Danger, Landscapes of Design: Crisis and Modernism in Weimar Germany,” in Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic, ed. Thomas Kniesche and Stephen Brockmann (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994), 44. For an important set of critical reflections on the use and conceptualization of crisis by scholars of the Weimar Republic, see Moritz Föllmer and Rüdiger Graf, eds., Die “Krise” der Weimarer Republik: Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters (New York: Campus Verlag, 2005). 4. Detlev Peukert develops the notion of a “paradox of Weimar” in The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), xiii. 5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977); Foucault, “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 166–182; Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104. 6. I use the term Liberal Jews or Judaism to refer to the dominant form of Judaism in Germany, Judaism that emerged out of the Reform movement of the nineteenth century and that stands in opposition to Orthodox interpretations of Judaism. When I use the term “liberalism” with a small “l,” I am referring to a combination of cultural, political, and economic attitudes and orientations that include personal freedom, individualism, tolerance, and representative government. 7. On the social body in Germany, see also Peter Fritzsche, “Did Weimar Fail?” Journal of Modern History 68 (September 1996): 647–654. For France, Italy, and Britain, see Carolyn J. Dean, The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and

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Notes to Introduction Other Sexual Fantasies in Interwar France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 4–5; David Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). On organic metaphors in discourses of the nation, see Robert Nye, “Degeneration and the Medical Model of Cultural Crisis in the French Belle Époque,” in Political Symbolism in Modern Europe, ed. Seymour Drescher, David Sabean, and Alan Sharlin (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1982), 19–41. 8. Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2001), 178. Shulamit Volkov called attention to the unity in ideologically diverse efforts to innovate in Jewish life in her important article, “Die Erfindung einer Tradition: Zur Entstehung des modernen Judentums in Deutschland,” Historische Zeitschrift 253 (1991): 603–628 and Shulamit Volkov, “Jews and Judaism in the Age of Emancipation: Unity and Variety,” in The Jews in European History: Seven Lectures, ed. Wolfgang Beck (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1994), 73–93. 9. Amos Funkenstein, “The Dialectics of Assimilation,” Jewish Social Studies 1, no. 2 (1995): 11. 10. I refer to the title by Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 11. The work of Shulamit Volkov has been central in charting this new direction within German and German-Jewish historiography. Among her many essays on this theme, see “Die Dynamik der Dissimilation: Deutsche Juden und die ostjüdischen Einwanderer,” in Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Zehn Essays (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990), 166–181, and “Erfolgreiche Assimilation oder Erfolg und Assimilation: Die deutsch-jüdische Familie im Kaiserreich,” Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Jahrbuch 2 (1982/83): 373–387. Her recent book in English further develops the notion of dialectical assimilation: Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (New York: Cambridge, 2006). Till van Rahden’s work has also substantively revised and complicated notions of assimilation in Juden und andere Breslauer: die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Grosstadt von 1860 bis 1925 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000); “Germans of the Jewish Stamm: Visions of Community Between Nationalism and Particularism, 1850–1933,” in German History from the Margins, ed. Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 27–41. 12. This position is best epitomized by the now tired polemical debates surrounding the “German-Jewish symbiosis.” See Gershom Scholem, “Once More: The German-Jewish Dialogue,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 61–68. The emphasis on Nazism as the vantage point through which to view Weimar was built into the first

Notes to Introduction important collection on Weimar Jewry with its focus on the crisis year 1932, Entscheidungsjahr 1932: Zur Judenfrage in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik, ed. Werner Mosse and Arnold Paucker (Tübingen: Mohr, 1966). See also Mosse and Paucker, eds., Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution 1916–1923 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1971); Arnold Paucker, Der jüdische Abwehrkampf gegen Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus in den letzten Jahren der Weimarer Republik (Hamburg: LeibnizVerlag, 1969); Niewyk, Jews in Weimar Germany; Jehuda Reinharz, “The Zionist Response to Antisemitism in the Weimar Republic,” in Jewish Response to German Culture, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985), 266–293. A more recent work that continues to view the Weimar Jewish community in terms of disintegration and radical assimilation is Moshe Zimmermann, Die deutschen Juden 1914–1945 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1997). On the former orthodoxies in German-Jewish historiography, see Samuel Moyn, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity: Historiography and Theory,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 41 (1996): 291–308. 13. Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). See also the collection of articles in Derek Penslar and Michael Brenner, eds., In Search of Community: Collective Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1932, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); and Oded Heilbronner, ed., Yehude Vaimar: hevrah be-mashber ha-moderniyut, 1918–1933 (Jerusalem: Y.L. Magnes Press, 1994). 14. Some exceptions to this are the recent monographs coming out of Germany: Angelika Kipp, Jüdische Arbeits-und Berufsfürsorge in Deutschland 1900–1933 (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 1999); Hilde Lütkemeier, Hilfen für jüdische Kinder in Not: Zur Jugendwohlfahrt der Juden in der Weimarer Republik (Freiburg im Breisgau: Lambertus, 1992); Claudia Prestel, Jugend in Not: Fürsorgeerziehung in deutschjüdischer Gesellschaft (1901–1933) (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2003). 15. Historians of Jews in the long nineteenth century have already begun to consider Jewish welfare work as an important realm of engagement for middle-class Jews. See Rainer Liedtke, Jewish Welfare in Hamburg and Manchester c.1850–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Derek J. Penslar, “Philanthrophy, the ‘Social Question’ and Jewish Identity in Imperial Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 38 (1993): 51–73; Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, Identity in Imperial Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 192–219; Kaplan, The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns of the Jüdischer Frauenbund 1904–1938 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979); Maria Benjamin Baader, “When Judaism Turned Bourgeois: Gender in Jewish Associational Life and in the Synagogue, 1750–1850,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 46 (2001): 113–123; Claudia Prestel, “ ‘Praktisches Judentum,’ ‘Fürsorgliche Belagerung’ und Moderne Sozialarbeit—die Versuche zur Integration von Randgruppen, 1901–1933,” in Juden und Armut in Mittel- und Osteuropa, ed. Stefi Jersch-Wenzel

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Notes to Introduction (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 357–381; Brita Konz, Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936): Ein Leben für jüdische Tradition und weibliche Emanzipation (New York: Campus Verlag, 2005). 16. Geoff Eley notes how increasing surveillance and intervention also functioned to promote social cohesion. “Is There a History of the Kaiserreich?” in Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930, ed. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 26–27. 17. George Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington and Cincinnati: Indiana University Press and Hebrew Union College Press, 1985), 17. 18. David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1849 (New York: Oxford, 1990); Steven E. Aschheim, “Beyond Bildung and Liberalism: The Radical Jewish Revival in the Weimar Republic,” in The German-Jewish Dialogue Reconsidered: A Symposium in Honor of George L. Mosse, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 125–140; Shulamit Volkov, “The Ambivalence of Bildung: Jews and Other Germans,” in Jewish History: Essays in Honor of Chimen Abramsky, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven Zipperstein (London: Peter Halban, 1988), 81–97; Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class. 19. George Mosse, “The Influence of the Völkish Idea on German Jewry,” in Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a “Third Force” in Pre-Nazi Germany (New York: H. Fertig, 1970), 77–115. In later essays, Mosse explores some of the intersections between liberalism, the Jewish search for community, and Zionism. See his Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1993). 20. See Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Sex Reform 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany: Women’s Reproductive Rights and Duties (New York: Macmillan, 1992). Mary Louise Roberts makes a parallel argument for postwar France in Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994). 21. David Crew, Germans on Welfare: From Weimar to Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Young-Sun Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919–1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Grossmann, Reforming Sex; Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Usborne, Politics of the Body; Marcus Gräser, Der blockierte Wohlfahrtsstaat: Unterschichtsjugend und Jugendfürsorge in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995); Annette Timm, “The Politics of Fertility: Population Politics and Health Care in Berlin, 1919–1972” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1999); Christoph Sachsse, Mütterlichkeit als Beruf: Sozialarbeit, Sozialreform und Frauenbewegung, 1871–1929 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986); Christoph Sachsse and Florian Tennstedt, Geschichte der Armenfürsorge in Deutschland: Fürsorge und Wohlfahrtspflege 1871 bis 1929 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1988); Jürgen Reyer, Alte Eugenik und Wohlfahrtspflege: Entwertung und Funktionalisierung

Notes to Introduction der Fürsorge vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart (Freiburg im Breisgau: Lambertus, 1991); Detlev Peukert, Grenzen der Sozialdisziplinierung: Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Jugendfürsorge von 1878 bis 1932 (Cologne: Bund Verlag, 1986); Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Elizabeth Harvey, Youth and the Welfare State in Weimar Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Derek Linton, Who Has the Youth Has the Future: The Campaign to Save Young Workers in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Peter Stachura, The Weimar Republic and the Younger Proletariat: An Economic and Social Analysis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989); Iris Schröder’s book on the women’s movement and social reform represents the exception. See Iris Schröder, Arbeiten für eine bessere Welt: Frauenbewegung und Sozialreform, 1890–1914 (New York: Campus Verlag, 2001). 22. Siddy Wronsky played a central role in the professionalization of social work in Germany and founded the Social Women’s School (Soziale Frauenschule) in Berlin, together with Alice Salomon. She co-edited the respected journal Deutsche Zeitschrift für Wohlfahrtspflege (German Journal for Social Welfare) and authored several pioneering works on social work and social work education. Wronsky was also actively involved in reforming Jewish communal social welfare. Through her work with east European Jewish refugees in Berlin after World War I, she became a Zionist and a member of the board of the Central Welfare Agency and worked on various aspects of Jewish welfare, including population policy. Felix Theilhaber was a dermatologist and leading sex reformer who specialized in sexually transmitted diseases and helped found the Society for Sex Research (Gesellschaft für Sexualforschung). He authored a prize-winning essay for a contest sponsored by the Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene on the subject of the degeneration of the Jews of Berlin. Theilhaber too was a Zionist, having founded the Jewish fraternity Jordania in Munich. John Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Finde-Siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 142–143. Gustav Tugendreich was trained as a pediatrician and co-authored the landmark book on social hygiene with Max Mosse, Krankheit und Soziale Lage (Munich: Lehmanns, 1913); Tugendreich is considered to be the father of Germany’s public infant welfare program and was an active contributor to the Jewish press on matters related to hygiene. Henriette Fürth was actively engaged in Social Democratic politics, the German feminist movement, and social welfare work particularly as it affected women, work, and family. She was among the original founders of the League of Jewish Women with Bertha Pappenheim and was a board member of Frankfurt’s chapter of the liberal Centralverein Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens. On Wronsky, see Joachim Wieler, “Wronsky, Siddy (Sidonie),” in Jüdische Frauen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Lexikon zu Leben und Werk, ed. Jutta Dick and Marina Sassenberg (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1993), 406–407; Franz-Michael Konrad, “Paradigmen sozialpägogischer Reform in Deutschland und Palästina: Zur Erinnerung

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Notes to Introduction an Siddy Wronsky (1883–1947)” in Soziale Arbeit. Deutsche Zeitschrift für soziale und sozialverwandte Gebiete (December 1987): 459–470. On Theilhaber, see Joseph Walk, Kurzbiographien zur Geschichte der Juden 1918–1945 (New York: K.G. Saur, 1988), 365. On Fürth, see CV-Zeitung 10 (August 14, 1931): 409. Angelika Epple discusses Fürth’s Jewish commitments in Henriette Fürth und die Frauenbewegung im deutschen Kaiserreich (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1996), 68–79. 23. See Horn, Social Bodies, 12, and George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 2–4, 55–69. 24. Steinmetz, Regulating the Social, 56. 25. Gilles Deleuze, “The Rise of the Social,” in Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, cited in Horn, Social Bodies, 11. 26. Martin Hewitt, “Biopolitics and Social Policy: Foucault’s Account of Welfare,” Theory, Culture, and Society 2 (1983): 67. 27. For the history of Jewish statistics and their ideological function in producing new forms of Jewish identity, see Mitchell Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Sylvana Patriarca has addressed the ideological uses of statistics in Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 28. Brigitte Berger and Peter L. Berger emphasize this point in their critique of discourses of family decline in The War over the American Family: Capturing the Middle Ground (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), 8. It is important to note that feminist scholarship has led the way in historicizing Jewish communal discourse. Feminist historians were the first to challenge the communal leadership’s portrait of nineteenth-century social crisis by exposing the sexism underlying much of this discourse. Paula Hyman has shown how Jewish leaders placed much of the blame on women for the decline of Judaism, their failure to preserve the family, and nearly every other perceived negative social phenomenon associated with modernity. Paula Hyman, “The Modern Jewish Family: Image and Reality,” in The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, ed. David Kraemer (New York: Oxford, 1989), 179–197; Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Seattle: University of Washington, 1995), 44–49; Paula Hyman and Steven Cohen in The Jewish Family: Myths and Realities, ed. Paula Hyman and Steven Cohen (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986), 1–9. 29. Edward Ross Dickinson, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity,” Central European History 37, no. 1 (2004): 1–48. 30. Ibid., 13. See also Geoff Eley, “German History and the Contradictions of Modernity: The Bourgeoisie, the State, and the Mastery of Reform,” in Eley, Society, Culture, and the State, 77–80.

Notes to Introduction and Chapter 1 31. See, among many others, Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Shela Faith Weiss, Race Hygiene and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer (Berkeley: University of California, 1987); Peter Weingart, Jürgen Kroll, and Kurt Bayertz, Rasse Blut und Gene: Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988). 32. Peukert, Grenzen der Sozialdisciplinierung, and “The Genesis of the Final Solution in the Spirit of Science,” in Reevaluating the Third Reich, ed. Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993), 234–253. On the broad reach of Peukert’s work in the field, see the essays in Frank Bajohr, Werner Johe, and Uwe Lohalm, eds., Zivilisation und Barbarei: Die Widersprüchlichen Potentiale der Moderne (Hamburg: Christians, 1991). 33. Grossmann, Reforming Sex, ix–xi. David Crew, “The Ambiguities of Modernity: Welfare and the German State from Wilhelm to Hitler,” in Eley, Society, Culture and the State, 319–344, and Crew, Germans on Welfare, 6–12; Young-Sun Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1–9. 34. The reference is to Peter Gay’s original formulation on the relationship of Jews to Weimar culture. See Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).

Chapter 1 1. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1969), 527. 2. Jakob Wassermann, “Bourgeois Marriage,” in The Book of Marriage: A New Interpretation by Twenty-Four Leaders of Contemporary Thought, ed. Hermann Keyserling, trans. W. H. Hilton-Brown (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926), 203. 3. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Perspectives of World-History, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, vol. 2 (New York: Knopf, 1928), 103; Mann, “Marriage in Transition,” in Keyserling, 253. 4. Volkov, “Erfolgreiche Assimilation,” 373–387; Paula Hyman, “The Jewish Family: Looking for a Usable Past,” in On Being a Jewish Feminist, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 20; Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Seattle: University of Washington, 1995), especially chapter 1; Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford, 1991). 5. Katherina von Ankum, “Between Maternity and Modernity: Jewish Femininity and the German-Jewish ‘Symbiosis,’ ” Shofar 17/4 (Summer 1999): 20. 6. Avraham Barkai and Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 4, Renewal and Destruction, ed. Michael A. Meyer and Michael Brenner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 170–194; Jost Hermand, “Juden in der

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Notes to Chapter 1 Kultur der Weimarer Republik,” in Juden in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Walter Grab and Julius Schöps (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 9–37. 7. The nature and intensity of anti-Semitism during the Weimar years and particularly its relationship to Nazism have been the subject of a great deal of scholarship. See Saul Friedlander, “Political Transformations During the War and Their Effect on the Jewish Question,” in Hostages of Modernization: Studies on Modern Antisemitism, 1870–1933/39, ed. Herbert A. Strauss (New York: W. de Gruyter, 1993), 150–164; Arnold Paucker, Jüdische Abwehrkampf gegen Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus in den letzten Jahren der Weimarer Republik (Hamburg: Leibniz-Verlag, 1969); Niewyk, Jews in Weimar Germany, 43–81; Zimmermann, Die deutschen Juden, 39–43; Dirk Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt: Judenfeindschaft in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1999); Anthony Kauders, German Politics and the Jews: Nuremberg and Düsseldorf, 1910–1933 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 8. Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 133; Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder, Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 201. 9. See Jakob Segall, Die deutschen Juden als Soldaten im Kriege 1914–1918: Eine statistische Studie (Berlin: Philo Verlag, 1922); Franz Oppenheimer, Die Judenstatistik des Preussischen Kriegsministeriums (Munich: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1922); Werner Angress, “The German Army’s ‘Judenzählung’ of 1916: Genesis, Consequences, Significance,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 23 (1978): 117–137. 10. Zimmermann, Die deutsche Juden, 41. In contrast to Zimmermann and others, Anthony Kauders argues that anti-Semitism during Weimar represented a fundamentally new phenomenon. See Kauders, German Politics and the Jews. 11. Jakob Wassermann, My Life as German and Jew (New York: Coward-McCann, 1933), 217. 12. Barkai and Mendes-Flohr, German Jewish History, 30; Esra Bennathan, “Die demographische und wirtschaftliche Struktur der Juden,” in Werner Mosse and Arnold Paucker, eds., Entscheidungsjahr 1932: Zur Judenfrage in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1966), 87. 13. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, Jews practiced birth control earlier than the non-Jewish population, and for the purpose of preserving and securing their desired social status. Shulamit Volkov, Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: zehn Essays (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990), 138–142; Monika Richarz, “Vom Kramladen an die Universität: Jüdische Bürgerfamilien des späten 19. Jahrhunderts,” Journal für Geschichte (March/April 1985): 49. 14. Barkai and Mendes-Flohr, German Jewish History, 33. 15. Avraham Barkai, “Die Juden als sozio-ökonomische Minderheitsgruppe in der Weimarer Republik,” in Juden in der Weimarer Republik (see n. 6), 331. 16. Ibid. 17. Barkai and Mendes-Flohr, German Jewish History, 31–32.

Notes to Chapter 1 18. James Silberstein, “Die Austritte aus Gemeinde und Judentum,” Jüdisches Jahrbuch (1930): 51. 19. Shalom Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 1880–1940 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1959), 47. 20. Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland. 1918–1933 (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1986), 72. 21. Aharon Bornstein, “The Role of Social Institutions as Inhibitors of Assimilation: Jewish Poor Relief System in Germany, 1875–1925,” Jewish Social Studies 50, no. 34 (1993): 207. 22. Much has been written on Ostjuden as a focus for German-Jewish solidarity. See Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); Penslar, “Philanthropy”; Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland; Adler-Rudel, “Fürsorge für das Volk: Anfänge einer neuen jüdischen Sozialpolitik in Deutschland 1919–1933,” in Gegenwart im Rückblick: Festgabe für die Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin 25 Jahre nach dem Neubeginn, ed. Herbert Strauss and Kurt R. Grossmann (Heidelberg: Lothar Stiehm Verlag, 1970), 109–112; Jack Werthheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Volkov, “Die Dynamik der Dissimilation.” 23. Barkai and Mendes-Flohr, German Jewish History, 35. 24. Ibid., 38. 25. Kurt Zielenziger, “Soziale Umschichtung und deutsches Judentum,” Der Schild (February 8, 1929): 45. 26. The number of Jews counted as white-collar workers increased as the category of “family members helping out in business,” made up largely of women, declined. Barkai and Mendes-Flohr, German Jewish History, 35. 27. “Arbeitslosigkeit der Angestellten,” JWSP 2 (July 1931): 314. 28. Donald L. Niewyk, “The Impact of Inflation and Depression on the German Jews,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 28 (1983): 24. 29. Lütkemeier, Hilfen für jüdische Kinder, 64. According to Niewyk, Jewish welfare spending in Berlin increased even during the “stable” years by 33 percent in 1925 and by 28 percent in 1926. Niewyk, “Impact of Inflation,” 24. 30. Cited in Niewyk, Jews in Weimar Germany, 19. 31. Mitteilungen der Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden. no. 3 (June 1, 1929): 3. 32. Richarz, “Vom Kramladen,” 13. 33. Selma Stern, “Die Entwicklung des jüdischen Frauentypus seit dem Mittelalter,” Der Morgen 2, no. 1 (1926): 80; Klara Mautner, “Die Umgruppierung in der Familie,” Menorah 1, no. 1 (1923): 15. 34. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, “Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany,” in When Biology Became Destiny, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 9.

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Notes to Chapter 1 35. Reinhard Sieder, Sozialgeschichte der Familie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 213. See also Karin Hausen, “Mothers, Sons and the Sale of Symbols and Goods: The ‘German Mother’s Day’ 1923–33,” in Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship, ed. Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 402. Federn’s book, Zur Psychologie der Revolution: Die vaterlose Gesellschaft (Leipzig: Brüder Suschitzky, 1919), suggested that the paternal state, having failed to protect the “motherland,” left sons with an irretrievable sense of security and a feeling of disappointment with the fathers. 36. Carola Kuhlmann, Erbkrank oder Erziehbar? Jugendhilfe als Vorsorge und Aussonderung in der Fürsorgeerziehung in Westfalen von 1933–1945 (Weinheim and Munich: Juventa Verlag, 1989), 88. 37. (CJ) 75C Ge1 DIGB Köpenick, 3452. 38. (CJ) 75C Ge1 DIGB, 769. 39. Dr. Elfriede Kultze, “Die Familienverhältnisse von gefährdeten und verwahrlosten Jugendlichen,” Zeitschrift für Kinderforschung 42, no. 1 (Berlin, 1933): 57. 40. (CJ) 75C Ge1 DIGB, 768. 41. Alice Salomon and Marie Baum, eds., Das Familienleben in der Gegenwart. 182 Monographien (Berlin: Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1930), 20. On the Akademie, see Margarete Hecker, “Sozialpädagogische Forschung: Der Beitrag der Deutschen Akademie für soziale und pädagogische Frauenarbeit,” Soziale Arbeit 33 (April 1984): 208–217. 42. Lucy Mecklenburg, “Beruf und Ehe,” BJFB 7, no. 5 (May 1932): 13. 43. “Ausstellung ‘Die Frau,’ ” BJFB 9 (March 1933): 5. 44. See, for example, Frevert, Women in German History, 176–177. While female employment rose from 36 to 38 percent by the end of the Republic, a comparable increase took place within the male working population. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, “Beyond Kinder, Küche, Kirche: Weimar Women in Politics and Work,” in When Biology Became Destiny, 44–45. Nevertheless, the impression that women were entering the workforce in greater numbers, particularly for conservative members of the middle classes, reinforced the notion that women were choosing work over family, abandoning home for career. 45. Grossmann, Reforming Sex, 6. 46. Frevert, Women in German History, 333. 47. Birthe Kundrus, “The First World War and the Construction of Gender Relations in the Weimar Republic,” in Homefront: The Military War and Gender in Twentieth Century Germany, ed. Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (New York: Berg, 2002), 164–165; Usborne, Politics of the Body, 85–86. On Jewish women professionals in central Europe, see Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Female, Jewish and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2002).

Notes to Chapter 1 48. In 1907, 25.8 percent of all married women worked, 28.7 percent in 1925, and 29.2 percent in 1933, making up 29.3, 31.7, and 36.4 percent of the female workforce, respectively. In 1925 the female workforce was made up of 6,802,135 single, 3,645,326 married, and 1,030,551 widowed and divorced women. In 1933 the figures were 6,415,089; 4,117,404; and 886,548. Richard Bessel, Germany After the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 83. 49. On the historiography of the New Woman in Germany, see Cornelie Usborne, “The New Woman and Generational Conflict: Perceptions of Young Women’s Sexual Mores in the Weimar Republic,” in Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770–1968, ed. Mark Roseman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 137–163. See also Katharina von Ankum, “Introduction” in idem. Women in the Metropolis. Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 1–12. 50. Harriet Freidenreich’s analysis of Jewish New Women’s identity is defined largely through categories that extrapolate identity from specific behavioral indicators such as ritual observance and intermarriage. Some of the categories she uses to analyze identity are those used in National Jewish Population Surveys. She concludes that most were Jews by descent only and lacked a strong, positive Jewish identity. Offering a different perspective on Jewish New Women, Till van Rahden finds a relationship between intermarriage and the rise of an independent and assertive new (usually working-class) woman who pioneered more egalitarian relations between the sexes and, in so doing, undermined traditional gender hierarchies. Relying less on quantitative assessments, he finds that intermarriage did not always indicate a loss of Jewish identity, even when Jewish communal leaders counted it as such. See Harriet Pass Freidenreich, “Jewish Identity and the ‘New Woman’: Central European Jewish University Women in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Gender in Judaism, ed. T.M. Rudavsky (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 113; Till van Rahden, “Mingling, Marrying, and Distancing: Jewish Integration in Wilhelminian Breslau and Its Erosion in Early Weimar Germany,” in Jüdisches Leben in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Wolfgang Benz, Arnold Paucker, and Peter Pulzer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), 214–219. For a comprehensive analysis of intermarriage in Germany, see Kirstin Meiring, Die Christlich-Jüdische Mischehe in Deutschland 1840–1933 (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1998). 51. Claudia Prestel, “The New Jewish Woman in Weimar Germany,” in Juden in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Peter Pulzer and Wolfgang Benz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), 135–156. On the image of the Jewish New Woman in German culture, see Darcy Buerkle, “Gendered Spectatorship, Jewish Women, and Psychological Advertising in Weimar Germany,” Women’s History Review 14, no. 4 (September 2006): 625–636. 52. Anna Beatte Nadel, “Neue Lebensformen der Frau,” JF 1 (June 7, 1925): 1–2. 53. ZWSt, Jüdische Bevölkerungspolitik, 45.

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Notes to Chapter 1 54. See Nadel, “Neue Lebensformen,” 1–2; Nadel, “Alltag und Alltägliches,” JF 1 (October 22, 1925): 8; J.R., “Die Stunde der Entscheidung,” JF 1 (August 7, 1925): 10; “Wie stellen sich die Eltern am besten auf die heutige Lebensauffassung ihrer Kinder?” JF 1, no. 3 (June 17, 1925): 14. 55. Julie Meyer-Feilchenfeld, “Hauswirtschaftliche Ausbildung und ihre bevölkerungspolitische Bedeutung,” ZJW 1, no. 1b (1929): 31–32; “Frau und Beruf,” BJFB (March 1931): 5; Nadel, “Neue Lebensformen,” 1. Prior to the Republic, a considerable number of Jewish families helped support job training for their daughters and a range of communal organizations existed to give girls job training. See Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 167. 56. Julie Feilchenfeld, “Die Beschäftigung mit hauswirtschaftlichen Fragen im J.F.B.,” BJFB 3, no. 11/12 (August/September 1927): 9–10. 57. Martin Buber, “The Jewish Woman’s Zion,” in The First Buber: Youthful Zionist Writings of Martin Buber, ed. and trans. Gilya G. Schmidt (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 115. 58. Emil Bernhard Cohn, “Die Jüedische Frau und der Luxus,” BJFB 8 (August 1932): 1–2. On this theme, see also Hugo Rosenthal, “Zur Psychologie jüdischer Frauen und Mädchen II,” BJFB 8, no. 7 (July 1932): 6–7, and the appeal to Jewish women published in Der Schild 1, no. 9 (August 22, 1922): Beilage. See also Dr. W. Hanauer, “Die bevölkerungspolitische Lage der deutschen Juden,” in Hygiene und Judentum: Eine Sammelschrift, ed. Hans Goslar (Dresden: Verlag Jac. Sternlicht, 1930), 88. 59. Henriette Fürth, “Die Not der Zeit und die jüdische Frau,” BJFB 7, no. 6 (June 1931): 1–2. Anitta Müller-Cohen, “Das Grosse Schweigen,” in Menorah 1, no. 5, (1923): 1. 60. In Berlin, the rate rose even higher, to 10.4. Prof. Dr. Hanauer, “Uneheliche Geburten bei den Juden,” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, vol. 132 (June 6, 1930): 903. 61. Hanauer shows that while the rate of out-of-wedlock births among Lutherans in the inner city in Hamburg was 5.6 per 100 inhabitants, it was only 0.7 in the well-to-do areas, and even lower, 0.2, among the Jewish population. 62. Prestel, “New Jewish Woman,” 147. 63. Another possible source for a higher rate of illegitimacy in the east European Jewish population stemmed from the many marriages that were concluded only in accordance with Jewish law, and not with the civil laws of the state. 64. Claudia Prestel, “Uneheliche Kinder und ledige Mütter in der jüdischen Gemeinschaft im 20. Jahrhundert: Eingliederung oder Ausschluss? Ein Beitrag zur deutsch-jüdischen Frauengeschichte,” L’Homme: Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 5, no. 2 (1994): 90. 65. Ibid. 66. Prestel, “ ‘Praktisches Judentum,’ ” 358–359. 67. Prestel, “Uneheliche Kinder,” 82–83.

Notes to Chapter 1 68. Prestel, “ ‘Praktisches Judentum,’ ” 360. 69. Fritz Lamm, “Uneheliche Kinder,” BJFB 2, no. 9–10 (June/July 1926): 5. 70. Lütkemeier, Hilfen für jüdische Kinder, 76. On Jewish collective guardianship during the 1920s and under Nazi rule see Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, “Elend und Furcht im Dritten Reich: Aus den Akten der Sammelvormundschaft der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 45, no. 7 (1997): 617–641. 71. See Günther Krolzig, Der Jugendliche in der Grosstadtfamilie: Auf Grund von Niederschriften Berliner Berufsschüler und Schülerinnen (Berlin: Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1930); Bridenthal, “Something Old, Something New,” 490. 72. Hildegard Hirsch, “Aussprache. Eine nichtgehaltene Diskussionsrede zum Artikel: ‘Unsere gefährdete Jugend,’ ” BJFB 5, no. 3 (January 1929): 6. 73. Fritz Lamm, “Aufgaben der jüdischen Jugendfürsorge,” in Von jüdischer Wohlfahrtspflege, ed. Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden (Berlin: Fritz Scherbel, 1922), 50; Mautner, “Die Umgruppierung in der Familie,” 15. 74. Rosenthal, “Zur Psychologie jüdischer Frauen,” 7. 75. Jürgen Reulecke, “Männerbund versus the Family: Middle-Class Youth Movements and the Family in Germany in the Period of the First World War,” in The Upheaval of War: Family Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918, ed. Richard Wall and Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 439. 76. Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem (New York: Schocken, 1980) 30–31, 41–43, 84. 77. Anonymous, “Wie ist unser Verhältnis zu unseren Eltern jetzt tatsächlich? Diskussionsbemerkungen eines Mädchens in dem Sprechsaal des jüdischen Mittelschülerbundes in Wien,” Jerubaal 1 (1918–1919): 412. 78. Rosenthal, “Zur Psychologie jüdischer Frauen,” 5–7. 79. See Michael Müller-Claudius, “Das jüdisches Kind in der Schule,” Der Morgen 3 (April 1927): 1; “Trauungen,” Jüdisches Adressbuch für Gross-Berlin (Berlin: Goedega Verlag, 1931), 50–54. On Jewish responses to anti-Semitism in public schools during the Weimar Republic, see the first chapter in Yfaat Weiss, Schicksalsgemeinschaft im Wandel: Jüdische Erziehung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933–1938 (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1991). 80. “Entwurf eines Programms für die Fürsorgearbeit in der jüdischen Gemeinde,” n.d. but probably 1920, (CJ) 75A B32 289 #62; Erich Stern, “Zur Psychologie des jüdischen Kindes,” Der Morgen 3 (February 1928): 555–574; idem, “Über die Bedeutung religiöser Formen für die Erziehung,” Der Morgen 4, no. 5 (December 1928): 433–444; Rosenthal, “Zur Psychologie jüdischer Frauen,” 5–7. See also the book by the British physician N.M. Feldmann, The Jewish Child: Its History, Folklore, Biology and Sociology (London: Baillieu, Tindall and Co., 1917) on the history of Jewish childhood, family life, and the biological and physical characteristics of the modern Jewish child and the review, Siegfried Bernfeld, “Das jüdische Kind,” Der Jude 4 (1919–1920): 95–96.

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Notes to Chapter 1 81. Rosenthal, “Zur Psychologie jüdischer Frauen,” 6; Müller-Claudius, “Das jüdisches Kind in der Schule,” 1. 82. Erich Stern, “Zur Psychologie des jüdischen Kindes,” 570. See also Berta Lask, “Die Wirkung der christlichen Religion auf das jüdische Kind,” Der Jude 1 (1916–1917): 484–485. 83. Mitteilungen des Wohlfahrts- und Jugendfürsorgeamtes der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 2 (August/September 1930): 5; “Zweck der Erziehungsberatungsstelle,” BJFB 4 (May 1928): 1–2. Other medical clinics were opened, including one in the Jewish quarter of Berlin. (CJ) 75A Be2 290 #63, 120. In 1929, Hermann Stahl treated 5,000 children. See also Eugen Caspary, “Die doppelte Wurzel der modernen jüdischen Sozialhygiene,” in Hygiene und Judentum, ed. Goslar, 95. 84. Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 542. Fischel Schneersohn, born in the Ukraine, trained as a physician at the University of Berlin, worked in the department of psychology at the University of Kiev. He published a two-volume study of the psychology of children as well as works in various Hebrew journals on the psychology of Jews. 85. On the alleged nervousness of the Jews, see Professor Dr. med. F. Schneersohn, “Zur Grundlegung einer psychischen Hygiene der Juden,” JWSP 3 (1932): 437–443; John Efron, Medicine and the German Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 151–185; Hart, Politics of Jewish Identity, 111–113, 153–154. 86. N.a., Jüdisches Addressbuch für Gross Berlin (1929–1930), 388. 87. Wassermann, “Bourgeois Marriage,” 203. 88. Leo Baeck, “Entwicklung und Weidergeburt,” GB 14 (May 9, 1924): 1. 89. Frevert, Women in German History, 198. 90. Maria Kiene, “Die Familie als Retterin der gefährdeten Volksjugend,” Jugendwohl: Zeitschrift für Katholische Kinder und Jugendfürsorge 17 (March–April 1928): 44–45; Dr. Willy Hellpach, “Familie und Volk,” Nord und Süd—Monatschrift für Internationales Zusammenarbeit 53 (June 1930): 494. On the cell-state metaphor in the nineteenth century, see the first chapter in Christopher Kenway, “ ‘Kraft und Schönheit’: The German Physical Culture Movement, 1890–1920” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1996). 91. Friedrich Zahn, Wie die Familie—so das Volk. (Munich: Landesverband Bayern im Reichsbund der kinderreichen Deutschlands zum Schutze der Familie, e.V., 1930), 12. Zahn was president of the German Statistics Society, and in 1933 became a member of the SS, viewing statistics as the key to National Socialist population policy. Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 2, 25. 92. M. Helm, “Familienfürsorge,” in Staatslexikon d. Görresgesellschaft, ed. Hermann Sachen, 5th ed. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1926–1932), 131. 93. Martin Buber, “How Can Community Happen?” in The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings, ed. Asher D. Biemann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 253.

Notes to Chapter 1 94. Allison Rose, “Die ‘Neue Jüdische Familie:’ Frauen, Geschlecht und Nation im zionistischen Denken,” in Deutsch-Jüdische Geschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte: Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum and Kirsten Heinsohn (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006), 181. 95. Eliahu Rappaport, “Die Familie als Element der Gemeinschaft,” Der Jude (1919–1920): 215–227. 96. Ibid., 222. 97. Dora Silbermann was a full-time social worker at the Berlin Sammelvormundschaft, “Das Heimlose Jüdische Kind,” JF 1 (September 1925): 4–5. 98. My thoughts on this theme were shaped by my conversations with Amos Funkenstein. On the secularization of the uniqueness myth in Zionist thought, see “Zionism, Science, and History,” in Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 338–350. 99. Ibid., 344–346. 100. Ibid., 345. 101. Paula Hyman, “The Modern Jewish Family: Image and Reality,” in The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, ed. David Kraemer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 170–180. 102. See, for example, Zahn, 11–26 and Hermann Muckermann, a Catholic priest and director of the Eugenics Department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Die Kinderreiche Familie in Lichte der Eugenik (Munich: Landesverband Bayern im Reichsbund der kinderreichen Deutschlands zum Schutze der Familie, e.V., 1930), 26–35. 103. On the ascendancy of biological thinking among German Protestant women in the early twentieth century, see Doris Kaufmann, Frauen Zwischen Aufbruch und Reaktion: Protestantische Frauenbewegung in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Piper, 1988). 104. Buber, “The Jewish Woman’s Zion,” 113. 105. Rahel Straus, “Ehe und Mutterschaft,” in Vom jüdischen Geist, ed. Jüdischer Frauenbund (Berlin: Biko Verlag, 1934), 21. 106. Founding Statement of the Gesellschaft für jüdische Familienforschung, 2. Arthur Czellitzer Collection, ALBI. 107. Funkenstein, “Zionism, Science, and History,” 344. 108. Founding Statement, Gesellschaft für jüdische Familienforschung, 2. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid. 111. Paula Hyman and Steven Cohen, eds., The Jewish Family: Myths and Realities (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986), 3–4. 112. Ismar Schorsch, “Art as Social History: Oppenheim and the German Jewish Vision of Emancipation,” in Moritz Oppenheim: The First Jewish Painter (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1983), 413–439; see also Richard Cohen, “Nostalgia and ‘Return to the Ghetto’: A Cultural Phenomenon in Western and Central Europe,” in Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jonathan

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Notes to Chapters 1 and 2 Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 135–138. 113. Dr. med. Fritz von Gutfeld, “Ärtzliche Beobachtungssprechstunden für Jugendliche” GB 16 (September 1, 1926): 189–190. 114. The title of the book by Ellen Key, The Century of the Child (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909). 115. Margarete Kamensky, “Die Neue Erziehung,” JF 1 (July 1925): 6. 116. Rabbiner Dr. Strassburger, “Erziehung,” JF 2 (October 1926): 1. 117. Hilde Ottenheimer, “Die jüdische Familie: Eine Kulturgeschichtliche Skizze,” BJFB 14 (September 1938): 3. See also Dr. Rebecca Zadik, “Unsere gefährdete Jugend,” BJFB 4, no. 3 (March 1928): 1–3. 118. ZWSt, Jüdische Bevölkerungspolitik, 60. 119. Selma Stern, “Die Entwicklung des jüdischen Frauentypus,” 7. 120. Henriette Fürth, “Der Geburtenrückgang bei den Juden,” BJFB 6 (April 1930): 3. 121. Hans Lubinski, “Zwei Jahre Erziehungsarbeit in Wolzig,” JWSP 3 (April 1932): 113. 122. Anonymous, “Wie ist unser Verhältnis zu unseren Eltern,” 413. 123. Mecklenburg, “Beruf und Ehe,”13. 124. Ute Frevert, “The Civilizing Tendency of Hygiene: Working-Class Women Under Medical Control in Imperial Germany,” in German Women in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John C. Fout (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984), 322–323. 125. Silberstein, “Die Austritle aus Gemeinde,” 52. 126. Jüdische Bevölkerungspolitik, 33. 127. Czellitzer, “Gesellschaft für jüdische Familienforschung,” 1, 3. 128. Ibid., 2. 129. Jüdische Bevölkerungspolitik, 42–43. 130. Ottenheimer, “Die jüdische Familie: Eine Kulturgeschichtliche Skizze,” 3. 131. Ibid. 132. Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: Free Press, 1997), 27.

Chapter 2 1. Siddy Wronsky, “Die Forderungen der Gegenwart an die jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege,” in Von jüdischer Wohlfahrtspflege, ed. ZWSt (Berlin: Fritz Scherbel, 1922), 14–15. 2. On German biopolitics, see Dickinson, “Biopolitics,” 77–80; See also Ute Planert, “Der dreifache Körper des Volkes: Sexualität, Biopolitik und die Wissenschaften vom Leben,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000): 539–576. 3. Steinmetz, Regulating the Social, 198–203 and Ulrich Herbert, “Rassismus und rationales Kalkül,” in Vernichtungspolitik: Eine Debatte über den Zusammemhang von

Notes to Chapter 2 Sozialpolitik und Genozid im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, ed. Wolfgang Schneider (Hamburg: Junius, 1991), 28. 4. Between the years 1814 and 1860 the rate of population growth had climbed to 60 percent. Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 189. 5. The term was coined by the economist Julius Wolf in 1912 as cited by Grossmann, Reforming Sex, vi. 6. Usborne, Politics of the Body, 3. 7. Shela Faith Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany, 1904–1945,” in The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia, ed. Mark B. Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 26. Established in 1905 at the initiative of municipal and private agencies, maternity care and infant welfare centers provided financial incentives for working-class women to breast-feed and dispensed pre- and postnatal medical advice. See Christoph Sachsse, Mütterlichkeit als Beruf: Sozialarbeit, Sozialreform und Frauenbewegung 1871–1929 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 63, 67; Young-Sun Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 24–25. 8. Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics, 10. This argument is also central to Foucault’s discussion of population and the state. Foucault, “Governmentality,” 99–101 and Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 123. 9. See Usborne, Politics of the Body, 12–15 and James Woycke, Birth Control in Germany, 1871–1933 (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 133–144. 10. Usborne, Politics of the Body, 17–30. 11. The emphasis on women’s unique maternal capacities in the constitution also became a basis for discriminating against them. See Susanne Rouette, “Mothers and Citizens: Gender and Social Policy in Germany After the First World War,” Central European History 30, no. 1 (1997): 48–66; Young-Sun Hong, “Gender, Citizenship, and the Welfare State: Social Work and the Politics of Femininity in the Weimar Republic,” Central European History 30, no. 2 (1997): 1–25; Iris Schröder, Arbeiten für eine bessere Welt: Frauenbewegung und Sozialreform 1890–1914 (New York: Campus Verlag, 2001). 12. Grossmann, Reforming Sex, 46–77; Michelle Mouton, From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 108–115. 13. Esra Bennathan, “Die demographische,” 87. 14. Barkai, “Die Juden,” 330. 15. Ibid., 331. 16. Verwaltungsblatt des Preussischen Landesverbandes jüdischer Gemeinden 5, no. 6 (October 15, 1927): 1. 17. Dr. Kurt Zielenziger, “Die deutschen Juden—ein aussterbender Volksteil?” CV Zeitung 10, no. 33 (1931): 405–406.

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Notes to Chapter 2 18. Steven Lowenstein, “Jewish Intermarriage and Conversion in Austria and Germany,” Modern Judaism 25, no. 1 (2005): 24–28; Meiring, Die Christlich-Jüdische Mischehe, 92–97. 19. See Gustav Tugendreich, “Was für Aufgaben fallen der Sozialhygiene in der jüdischen Gemeinde-Wohlfahrtspflege zu?” ZJW 1, no. 1 (1929): 42–44. 20. Felix A. Theilhaber, Der Untergang der deutschen Juden. Eine Volkswirtschaftliche Studie (Munich: E. Reinhardt, 1911). All further citations are from the second edition published in Berlin by Jüdischer Verlag in 1921. 21. Efron, Defenders of the Race, 142–143. On the larger political debates concerning abortion, see Woycke, Birth Control in Germany, 146–148; Atina Grossmann, “Abortion and the Economic Crisis: The 1931 Campaign Against Paragraph 218,” in Bridenthal, Grossmann, and Kaplan, 66–86. 22. On the conflict between individual and national health in Dr. Helen Stöcker’s League for the Protection of Mothers, see Marielouise Janssen-Jurreit, “Sexualreform und Geburtenrückgang—Über die Zusammenhänge von Bevölkerungspolitik und Frauenbewegung um die Jahrhundertwende,” in Frauen in der Geschichte, ed. Annette Kuhn and Gerhard Schneider (Düsseldorf: Pädagogisches Verlag Schwann-Bagel, 1979), 56–81 and Ann Taylor Allen, “Mothers of the New Generation: Adele Schreiber, Helene Stöcker, and the Evolution of a German Idea of Motherhood, 1900–1914,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10 (1985): 418–438. 23. Walk, Kurzbiographien, 365. 24. Cited in Dr. med. Jakob Levy, “ ‘Geburtenstreik’—die Frage der jüdischen Ehe,” Nachalath Z’wi: Eine Monatschrift für Judentum in Lehre und Tat no. 11/12 (1930): 15. 25. Salomon Lehnart [Siegfried Lehmann], “Jüdische Volksarbeit,” Der Jude 1 (1916–1917): 110; Verwaltungsblatt des Preussischen Landesverbandes jüdischer Gemeinden 5, no. 6 (October 15, 1927): 1. 26. Rabbi (Doctor) Max Eschelbacher, “Mischehen,” Ost und West 17 (March/ April 1917): 80–88. 27. Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 86–88. 28. Dr. Friederich Ollendorff, Einigung der jüdischen Wohlfahrtspflege, August 10, 1917, (CJ) 75C Ge1/903; Eschelbacher, “Mischehen,” 74–88. 29. Prof. Dr. med. Wilhelm Hanauer was born in 1866 in Richen/Baden and was active in the Jewish community of Frankfurt. Walk, Kurzbiographien, 139. 30. ZWSt, Jüdische Bevölkerungspolitik, 39. 31. Ibid. 32. The phrase is from Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 33. ZWSt, Jüdische Bevölkerungspolitik, 21. 34. Ibid., 26.

Notes to Chapter 2 35. Ibid., 9. 36. Ibid., 77. 37. Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, 246. 38. ZWSt, Jüdische Bevölkerungspolitik, 23. Prostitution was also implicated as a by-product of late marriage, owing to what observers explained as increased sexual promiscuity. Those who sought to eliminate white slavery traced the increasing demand for prostitution to self-imposed bachelorhood and resulting increase in demand for sex before marriage. In the Jewish case, prostitution was also linked to unauthorized and ritual marriages and wife desertion among east European Jews. The larger discussion about prostitution and its moral and physical ramifications for national health, however, featured much more prominently in the work of both Jewish and non-Jewish feminists. Marion Kaplan, The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns of the Jüdischer Frauenbund, 1904–1938 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 103–146. 39. Ibid., 9. 40. “Aufruf,” BJFB 3, no. 4 (October 1927): 4. 41. Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 152–162; Joachim Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität: Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (Munich: Hanser, 1998). 42. Zadik, “Unsere gefährdete Jugend,” 3. 43. Eschelbacher, “Mischehen,” 78. 44. Ernst Kahn, Der International Geburtenstreik: Umfang, Ursachen, Wirkungen Gegenmassnahmen? (Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag, 1930), 37. 45. Eugen Wolbe, Selbstmord oder neues Leben? Ein Wort zur Bevölkerungspolitik der deutschen Juden (Oranienburg: Orania-Verlag, 1918), 17. The author was referring to the approximately hundred conversions to Judaism per year by lower-class Catholic women who did so “out of love for their Jewish suitors.” 46. Max Marcuse, Über die Fruchtbarkeit der christlich-jüdischen Mischehe: Ein Vortrag (Bonn: A. Marcus & E. Webers Verlag, 1920), 4. See also Prof. Dr. W. Hanauer, “Die Mischehe,” Jüdisches Jahrbuch 1929 (Berlin: Fritz Scherbel, 1929): 50–55. 47. van Rahden, “Mingling, Marrying, Distancing,” 214; Hanauer, “Die Mischehe,” 56–57. 48. Hanauer, “Die Mischehe,” 57. 49. Marcuse, Über die Fruchtbarkeit, 5. 50. Meiring, Die Christlich-Jüdische Mischehe, 103. 51. Hanauer, “Der Wiederaufbau der jüdischen Bevölkerung nach dem Krieg,” IF (March 13, 1919): 1. 52. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 187. 53. Ibid., 185–214. 54. Werner Senator, “Sozialpolitik für die Ostjuden in Deutschland,” Der Jude 6 (1921–1922): 7.

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Notes to Chapter 2 55. Hilde Hochwald, “Erneuerungsbestrebungen und Möglichkeiten in Hort und Kindergarten,” MRJJ: Sonderheft: Soziale Woche in Seesen 2, no. 1 (1929): 18–19. 56. Chapter 4 discusses estimates of the east European population presence in welfare institutions in greater detail. 57. Hochwald, “Erneuerungsbestrebungen,” 18. 58. Ibid. 59. Theilhaber, Der Untergang, 22. 60. Ibid., 11. 61. Ibid., 16. 62. See in particular the essays in the volume edited by Hans Goslar, Hygiene und Judentum: Eine Sammelschrift. 63. Theilhaber, Der Untergang, 7. 64. Eschelbacher, “Jüdische Weltanschauung und Verhütung der Geschlechtskrankheiten,” Zedakah 3 (July 1928): 46. 65. Levy, “ ‘Geburtenstreik,’ ” 15. 66. Wolbe, “Selbstmord,” 3. 67. Ibid., 8. 68. Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, 1–12. 69. Dr. Pfeil, “Die Bevölkerungspolitik der deutschen Juden,” Archiv für Bevölkerungspolitik Sexualethik und Familienkunde (Berlin: Verlag von Dienst am Leben, 1932): 10. 70. ZWSt, Jüdische Bevölkerungspolitik, 4–5 and Max P. Birnbaum, Staat und Synagoge 1918–1938: Eine Geschichte des Preussischen Landesverbandes jüdischer Gemeinden (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr Paul Siebeck, 1981), 189–190. 71. Wohlfahrts-Ausschuss des Preussischen Landesverbandes jüdischen Gemeinden, Verwaltungsblatt des Preussischen Landesverbandes jüdischer Gemeinden 5, no. 6 (October 15, 1927): 1. The appeal was intended to inspire rabbis to address the matter from their pulpits. Birnbaum, Staat und Synagoge, 190. 72. ZWSt, Jüdische Bevölkerungspolitik, 68–70. 73. Ibid., 67. 74. Ibid., 40–41. 75. Ibid., 69. 76. Wolbe, “Selbstmord,” 7. 77. ZWSt, Jüdische Bevölkerungspolitik, 59; Kaplan, Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany, 132. 78. Ibid. 79. Wolbe, “Selbstmord,” 19–20. 80. Tugendreich, “Was für Aufgaben?” 44. 81. ZWSt, Jüdische Bevölkerungspolitik, 38. 82. “Bericht über die Sitzung des Bezirkes Schöneberg am 28. 4. 26.” (CJ) 75A B32 290 #63; see also von Gutfeld, “Ärtzliche Beobachtungssprechstunden,” 189–190.

Notes to Chapters 2 and 3 83. ZWSt, Jüdische Bevölkerungspolitik, 45. 84. Ibid., 46. 85. Ibid., 29. 86. Ibid. 87. The term motherhood-eugenics consensus is used by Atina Grossmann in Reforming Sex, 15. 88. “Gedanken zum Aufruf über Bevölkerungspolitik,” in BJFB 3, no. 13 (October 1927): 3. 89. As cited in Dr. Kurt Zielenziger, “Die deutschen Juden—ein aussterbender Volksteil?” CV Zeitung 10, no. 33 (1931): 405–406.

Chapter 3 1. Crew, Germans on Welfare, 47. 2. Gertrud Ehrmann, “Die deutsche Frauenbewegung und die jüdische Frauen,” BJFB (April 1927): 4. 3. Hong, “Gender, Citizenship, and the Welfare State,” 2–3. 4. Ernestine Eschelbacher, “Die jüdische Frau als Mitarbeiterin in der Hygiene,” in Goslar (see n. 58 chap 1), 6. 5. Max Kreutzberger, “Erneuerungsbestrebungen in der allgemeinen und jüdischen Wohlfahrtspflege,” MRJJ 2 (Sonderheft Soziale Woche in Seesen) (March 1929): 6–7. On private welfare and the state, see Gerhard Buck, “Die Entwicklung der Freien Wohlfahrtspflege von den ersten Zusammenschlüssen der freien Verbände im 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Durchsetzung des Subsidiaritätsprinzips in der Weimarer Fürsorgegesetzgebung” in Geschichte der Sozialarbeit: Hauptlinien ihrer Entwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Rolf Landwehr and Rüdeger Baron (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz Verlag, 1983), 139–172. See Sachsse and Tennstedt, Geschichte der Armenfürsorge, sections 3 and 4. 6. Buck, “Die Entwicklung,” 158–161. 7. Bertha Pappenheim, “Weh’ dem, dessen Gewissen schläft,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 80 (December 22, 1916): 60; draft in (CJ) 75 G1 903/ZWSt. On Pappenheim, see Kaplan, Jewish Feminist Movement; Marianne Brentzel, Anna O.—Bertha Pappenheim. Biographie (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002); Melinda Given Guttmann, The Enigma of Anna O. (Wickford, RI: Moyer Bell, 2001); Konz, Ein Leben für jüdische Tradition. 8. Segall, “Die erste Jahrzehnt” 29–32. Friederich Ollendorff, “Einigung der jüdischen Wohlfahrtspflege,” August 26, 1917 (CJ) 75C Ge1 903/ZWSt. 9. The Central Welfare Agency continued and expanded its work under the National Socialists until the organization was dissolved by the regime in 1939. While the history of the organization has yet to be written, see Giora Lotan (formerly Georg Lubinski), “The Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 4 (1959): 185–207. On the successor organization founded in 1951, the Central Welfare Agency

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Notes to Chapter 3 of Jews in Germany, (Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland), see “Die Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle—Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege in Deutschland 1917–1987. Eine Selbstdarstellung” (Frankfurt am Main: Zentralwohfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland e.v., 1987); Zedaka: Jüdische Sozialarbeit im Wandel der Zeit. 75 Jahre Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland 1917–1992 (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Frankfurt am Main, 1992). 10. Friederich Ollendorff, “Die Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle: Rückblick-GegenwartAusblick,” Zedakah (July 1928): 3–4. 11. Jakob Segall, “Das erste Jahrzehnt,” Jüdische Sozialarbeit: Mitteilungsblatt der Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland 2 (1957), 29–32. 12. On the position of the Jewish social welfare sector in relation to private welfare and the state during the Weimar Republic, see Fritz Lamm, “Aufgaben der jüdischen Jugendfürsorge,” in Von Jüdischer Wohlfarhtspflege, ed. ZWSt (Berlin: Selbstverlag, 1922), 56–57. 13. Sachsse and Tennstedt, Geschichte der Armenfürsorge, 56. 14. The umbrella organizations during the Weimar Republic included the Protestant Innere Mission, the Catholic Caritas Verband, the Jewish Central Welfare Agency, Red Cross, Workers’ Welfare, and the Fifth Welfare Organization (Fünfter Wohlfahrtsverband). All but the Workers’ Welfare were part of the League for Private Welfare. 15. Auszug aus dem Geschäftsbericht der ZWSt für das Jahr 1925. ADW CA 817 I, 12. 16. Bericht über die Tätigkeit der ZWSt in der Zeit vom 1 Feb. bis 1 Juli 1921. ADW CA 817 I. 17. Ibid. Despite the efforts at centralization initiated by the national government, the effects of the inflation hindered the process and ultimately returned much of the authority back to local and private initiatives. See Bornstein, “The Role of Social Institutions,” 206. 18. See, for example, Liedtke, Jewish Welfare in Hamburg, 232–243; Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 192–227; Penslar, “Philanthropy.” 19. ZWSt, Führer durch die Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege in Deutschland (Berlin: Fritz Scherbel Verlag, 1928), 279. 20. Jakob Segall and Frieda Weinreich, eds. Die geschlossenen und halb-offenen Einrichtungen der jüdischen Wohlfahrtspflege in Deutschland (Berlin: Herbig, 1925), 4. 21. Leo Baeck, foreword to Führer durch die Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege, ZWSt, n.p. 22. Adler-Rudel, “Fürsorge für das Volk,” 109. 23. Kipp, Jüdische Arbeits-und Berufsfürsorge, 13. 24. Adler-Rudel, “Zehn Jahre jüdische Berufsberatung,” JWSP 3 (1932): 49. 25. Kipp, Jüdische Arbeits-und Berufsfürsorge, 15. 26. Eugen Caspary, “Die doppelte Wurzeln der modernen jüdischen Sozialhygiene,” in Goslar (see n. 58 chap 1), 95. 27. Sachsse and Tennstedt, Geschichte der Armenfürsorge, 152.

Notes to Chapter 3 28. Ibid., 155. 29. Ibid., 2, 18. 30. Ibid. 31. Joachim Prinz, “Seelsorge und Wohlfahrtspflege. Bemerkungen ihrer begrifflichen Klärung und Abgrenzung,” ZJW 1 (1929): 317. 32. Leo Baeck, “Eugen Caspary zum Gedächtnis,” JWSP 2 (1931): 108. Rabbi Baeck was the head of the Central Welfare Agency until 1933, when the Nazis incorporated it into the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland. 33. Rachel Heuberger, “Die Gründung der Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden im Jahre 1917,” in Zedaka: Jüdische Sozialarbeit in Wandel der Zeit. 75 Jahre Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland 1917–1992, ed. Georg Heuberger and Paul Speigel, Frankfurt am Main: Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Frankfurt am Main, 1992, 74. 34. Friederich Ollendorff, “Erneuerungsbestrebungen in der allgemeinen und jüdischen Wohlfahrtspflege,” MRJJ 2 (Sonderheft: Sozial Woche in Seesen) no. 1 (March 1929): 4–5. 35. MRJJ no. 3 (May 1928): 1; Adler-Rudel, “Fürsorge für das Volk,” 107–108. 36. Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State; Dickinson, Politics of German Child Welfare; Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, “Freie Wolhfahrtsverbände im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik. Ein Überblick,” Westfälische Forschungen 43 (1993): 26–57. 37. Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 56. 38. Ibid. 39. Hong, “Gender, Citizenship, and the Welfare State,” 7–9. 40. Siddy Wronsky (CZA) A 149/2 26. 41. Baeck, “Eugen Caspary zum Gedächtnis,” 107. 42. Max Kreutzberger, “Zum Begriff einer jüdischen Sozialpolitik,” JWSP 1 (1930): 1–6; idem, “Über die Notwendigkeit einer jüdischen Sozialpolitik,” JWSP 1 (1930): 131–139; idem, “Über den Auf bau einer jüdischen Sozialpolitik,” JWSP 1 (1930): 358–367. 43. Kreutzberger, “Über die Notwendigkeit einer Sozialpolitik,” 134. 44. Pappenheim, “Weh’ dem,” 60. 45. Lotan, “The Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle,” 192–193. 46. Birnbaum, Staat und Synagoge, 15–18. 47. See Michael Brenner, “The Jüdische Volkspartei: National-Jewish Communal Politics During the Weimar Republic,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 35 (1990): 219–243. 48. Adler-Rudel, “Fürsorge für das Volk,” 111. 49. Crew, Germans on Welfare, 327. 50. Quoted in Crew, Germans on Welfare, 328. 51. Cited in Lütkemeier, Hilfen für jüdische Kinder, 62. 52. Frieda Weinreich, “Soziale Hilfe als Beruf,” BJFB 5, no. 2 (November 1929): 3.

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Notes to Chapters 3 and 4 53. Ibid. 54. Kaplan, Jewish Feminist Movement, 174. 55. Siddy Wronsky, “Soziale Berufsfragen,” Jüdische Arbeits-und Wanderfürsorge (March 1929): 157. 56. Weinreich, “Soziale Hilfe als Beruf,” 4. 57. “Berufsberatung,” IF (September 13, 1925): 13. 58. Eschelbacher, “Die jüdische Frau als Mitarbeiterin,” 66. 59. Ibid. 60. Ehrmann, “Die deutsche Frauenbewegung,” 4. 61. Ismar Schorsch, “From Wolfenbüttel to Wissenschaft: The Divergent Paths of Isaak Marcus Jost and Leopold Zunz,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 22 (1977): 109–128. 62. Rüdiger vom Bruch, Weder Kommunismus noch Kapitalismus. Bürgerliche Sozialreform in Deutschland vom Vormärz bis zur Ära Adenauer (Munich: Beck, 1985), 113–131. 63. Pappenheim, “Weh’ dem,” 60. 64. Ibid. 65. Wronsky, “Die Forderungen,” 17. 66. Ibid., 13. 67. Ibid., 17. 68. Ibid., 14. 69. Wronsky, “Die sozialen Aufgaben des Rabbiners,” ZJW 1 (1929): 237. 70. Ibid., 237–238. 71. Rabbi Katten responds to Wronsky in “Zur Aussprache über die sozialen Aufgaben des Rabbiners,” ZJW 1 (1929): 309. 72. Wronsky, “Die Forderungen,” 13. 73. Ibid., 15. 74. Ibid., 14. 75. Geoff Eley and Atina Grossmann, “Maternalism and Citizenship in Weimar Germany: The Gendered Politics of Welfare,” Central European History 30, no. 2 (1997): 67. 76. Werner Cahnmann, “Village and Small-Town Jews in Germany—A Typological Study,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 19 (1974): 107. 77. Baeck, “Eugen Caspary zum Gedächtnis,” 108.

Chapter 4 1. Salli Kirschstein and Bernhard Timendorfer, undated letter (1918), (ALBI) ZWSt Collection. 2. Ibid. 3. Wolbe, Selbstmord oder neues Leben, 6–7. 4. Georg Baum, “Jüdische Sozialpolitik,” in Von Jüdischer Wohlfahrtspflege, ed. ZWSt, 37.

Notes to Chapter 4 5. For German social reformers as for German-Jewish ones, there was a clear link between concerns about declining national birthrates and rehabilitating those youths already born. See Gräser, Der blockierte Wohlfahrtsstaat, 33. 6. Gertrud Moses, Zum Problem der sozialen Familienverwahrlosung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Verhältnisse im Krieg (Langensalza, 1920), 8–9. 7. Elizabeth Kitzinger, correspondence, March 1922 (ALBI) MF 568. 8. Bericht über die Tätigkeit der ZWSt seit ihrer Begründung im September 1917 bis zum 30. Sept. 1920 (CJ) 75C Ge1 ZWSt 904/219; Auszug aus dem Geschäftsbericht der ZWSt für das Jahr 1925, 12. (ADW) CA 817 I. 9. Protokoll über die Sitzung des Arbeitsausschusses October 17, 1918 (CJ) 75C Ge1 ZWSt 904/241. 10. Bericht über die Tätigkeit der ZWSt seit ihrer Begründung 1917–1920, 1–2. (CJ) 75C Ge1 904/307. 11. The larger communities notified the central authority of the measures they had taken on behalf of the child, including the timely appointment of a guardian, foster parent, or other appointed supervision: (CJ) 75C Ge1 ZWSt 904/51. 12. Bericht über die Tätigkeit seit ihrer Begründung, 1917–1920. A total of 176 communities established contact with the ZWSt. (CJ) 75C Ge1 904/307. 13. Satzung Jüdische Kinderhilfe E.V. zu Berlin (CAHJP) Inv/78; Tätigkeitsbericht der Jüdischen Kinderhilfe E.V. für das Jahr 1929 (CAHJP) Inv/78. 14. Jüdische Kinderhilfe Tätigkeitsbericht für das Jahr 1933 (CAHJP) Inv/78. 15. Satzung Jüdische Kinderhilfe E.V. zu Berlin (CAHJP) Inv/78; Tätigkeitsbericht der Jüdischen Kinderhilfe E.V. für das Jahr 1929 (CAHJP) Inv/78. 16. Bericht über die erste Sitzung des Fachausschusses für Kinder und Jugendwohlfahrt, March 12, 1922 (CAHJP) Inv/78. 17. Jahresbericht der Zentralstelle für jüd. Adoptionsvermittlung und Pflegestellenwesen. Jüd. Frauenbund e.V. Januar 1926–1927 (ACV) 319.4 A02/11. 18. (CZA) A 149/2 26; (CJ) 75A Be2 290 #63. 19. Ludwig Clostermann, Theodore Heller, and P. Stephani, eds., Enzyklopädisches Handbuch des Kinderschutzes und der Jugendfürsorge, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1930), 231. 20. Ibid., 232. 21. Youth Welfare Law, paragraph 62. On the Youth Welfare Law, see Walter Friedlander and Earl Dewey Myers, Child Welfare in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940). On correctional education generally, see Stachura, Weimar Republic, 133–154; Elizabeth Bamberger, “Die Fürsorgeerziehung,” in Handbuch der Jugendwohlfahrt, ed. Heinrich Lades, Friedrich Scheck, and Fritz Stippel (Munich and Düsseldorf: Verlag Wilhelm Steinebach, 1950); Gräser, Der blockierte Wohlfahrtsstaat; Manfred Heinemann, “Normprobleme in der Correctional Education,” in Sozialisation und Bildungswesen in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Manfred Heinemann (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1976), 77; Harvey, Youth and the Welfare State; Prestel, Jugend in Not.

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Notes to Chapter 4 22. Youth Welfare Law, paragraph 67. 23. Detlev Peukert and Richard Münchmeier, eds., Jugendhilfe—Historischer Rückblick und neuere Entwicklungen. Materialien zum 8. Jugendbericht. Vol. 1 (Munich: Verlag Deutsches Jugendinstitut, 1990), 12. Statistik über die FE Minderjähriger für das Rechnungsjahr 1926 (Berlin: Preussischer Statistischer Landesamt, 1929) indicates that out of 9,600 new correctional education wards for 1926, 2,404 objected to or had the ordinance for correctional education repealed. 24. Peukert, Grenzen der Sozialdisziplinierung, 152–159. 25. H. Schreiner quoted in Karl Janssen, “Zur Geschichte des Verwahrlosungsbegriffes in der Jugendhilfe,” in Spannungsfelder der Evangelischen Soziallehre. Aufgaben und Fragen vom Dienst der Kirche an der heutigen Gesellschaft, ed. Friedrich Karrenberg and Wolfgang Schweitzer (Hamburg: Ferche Verlag, 1960), 111. 26. Linton, Who Has the Youth, 130. 27. Ibid., 34. 28. Cited in Gräser, Der blockierte Wohlfahrtsstaat, 19. 29. Interestingly, although the science of criminology often drew a connection between biology, race, and criminal behavior, this connection was not invoked in considerations of Verwahrlosung and correctional education, nor do widely held ideas about Jewish criminality appear to have affected the representation of Jews in the correctional education population. In fact, Jews were underrepresented, accounting for between 0.04 and 0.05 percent of the national correctional education population, while their percentage of the general population in 1933 was 0.077. On perceptions of the relationship between Jews and criminality, see Michael Berkowitz, “Unmasking Counterhistory: An Introductory Explanation of Criminality and the Jewish Question,” in Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective, ed. Peter Becker and Richard F. Wetzell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 61–84. 30. Heinrich Többen, “Zur Begriffsbestimmung der Verwahrlosung,” Freie Wohlfahrtspflege 5 (August 1930): 193–200. 31. Quoted in Elfriede Kultze, “Die Familienverhältnisse von gefährdeten und verwahrlosten jugendlichen,” Zeitschrift für Kinderforschung 42 (1933): 53. 32. See Hildegard von Heimann, Studien zur Erziehungsarbeit an verwahrlosten Mädchen. Mit Berücksichtigung der Erfahrungen in Hamburg-Ohlsdorf (Hamburg: W. Gente, 1924). 33. Enzyklopädisches Handbuch für Kinderschutz und Jugendfürsorge, 13. See also Detlev Peukert, Jugend zwischen Krieg und Krise. Lebenswelten von Arbeiterjungen in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1987). 34. Ibid. 35. Adalbert Gregor and Else Voigtländer, Die Verwahrlosung, ihre klinischpsychologische Bewertung und ihre Bekämpfung (Berlin: Verlag von S. Karger, 1918). See also Kuhlmann, Erbkrank oder Erziehbar?, 45.

Notes to Chapter 4 36. Wilhelm Neumann, “Ein Jahrzehnt der Wohlfahrtspflege des DeutschIsraelitischen Gemeindebundes,” Zedakah no. 3/4 (July 1928): 29. 37. Cited in von Heimann, Studien zur Erziehungsarbeit, 18. According to von Heimann, 41 percent of the boys’ cases were considered to be rooted in their constitution; among girls, the figure was 53 percent. 38. Neumann, “Ein Jahrzehnt,” 29. 39. Harvey, Youth and the Welfare State, 232. 40. Correspondence of the Director Baronowitz, n.d. (CJ) 75C Ge1 770. 41. Unpublished Meldebuch für die ständige Wohnbevölkerung der Gemeinde Wolzig (1932–1933). A copy of this book was given to me courtesy of Herr Gerhard Tschechne of Wolzig. 42. Ibid. 43. One report notes that only three out of the twenty-two girls at Köpenick were not German citizens. N.a., “Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege in Gross-Berlin,” in Jüdisches Jahrbuch für Gross Berlin (Berlin: Scherbel and Co., 1926), 107. Prestel suggests that a full 31 percent of the girls in Köpenick were foreign citizens and that overall, east European youths in Repzin and Köpenick ranged from under 10 percent to 34 percent. See Prestel, Jugend in Not, 21. At Neu Isenburg, founded by Bertha Pappenheim, over 50 percent of the girls reportedly came from families of east European Jewish immigrants. 44. The term Kaufmann usually referred to shopkeepers and businessmen who had a regular place of business. A Handler connoted someone involved in trade with no set business establishment, such as market traders. A Kaufmann was more likely to be a member of the middle class, whereas the Handler would generally be associated with the lower middle class. 45. Peukert, Grenzen der Sozialdisziplinierung, 339. 46. Statistik über die FE (1926), 34–35. The percentage of Jews transferred to correctional education corresponded approximately to their proportion in the general population. Jews were somewhat underrepresented, while Catholics were overrepresented. Jews accounted for between 0.04 and 0.05 percent of the national correctional education population, while their percentage of the general population in 1933 was calculated at 0.077. The proportion of Jews sent to correctional education remained at 0.04 percent through 1932, despite the overall drop in correctional education charges in the early 1930s. In 1932, only 116 Jewish youths were admitted to correctional education, though none of these figures include private wards taken up by the two Jewish homes. 47. Statistik über die FE 1927/1928, 12; Statistik über die FE 1929, 172. 48. The form provided by the Berlin Youth Welfare Bureau asked social workers to list all relevant behaviors and presented clusters of behaviors from which the social worker was asked to choose. 49. (CJ) 75C Ge1 DIGB Akten betreffend FE Hermann A.

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Notes to Chapter 4 50. Moses, Zum Problem der sozialen Familienverwahrlosung, 33. 51. Peukert, Jugend Zwischen Krieg und Krise, 311. 52. Ibid., 61. 53. (CJ) 75C Ge1 DIGB, Akten betreffend FE Karl B. 54. Memo from Repzin to Städtische Waisendeputation, January 1919, 14 (CJ) 75C Ge1 DIGB Akten betreffend FE Karl B. 55. (CJ) 75C GE1 DIGB Akten betreffend FE Albert B. 56. Ibid. 57. (CJ) 75C GE1 DIGB Akten betreffend FE Hertha G. 58. Gregor and Voigtländer, Die Verwahrlosung, 488. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 72. 62. (CJ) 75C Ge1 DIGB Akten betreffend FE Marie B. 63. (CJ) 75 C Ge1 DIGB Akten betreffend FE Henriette S. 64. (CJ) 75 C Ge1 DIGB Akten betreffend FE, No. 8290. 65. Gregor and Voigtländer concluded that Verwahrlosung expressed itself among post-school-age boys in the form of uncleanliness in 6.8 percent of his cases, while 12.9 percent of the girls of the same age were “unsauber und liederlich.” See Charakterstruktur Verwahrloster Kinder und Jugendlicher (Leipzig: Barth, 1922), 3. 66. On similar patterns in the United States, see M. Odem, “Single Mothers, Delinquent Daughters and the Juvenile Court in Early Twentieth Century Los Angeles,” Journal of Social History 25, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 27–43. 67. Statistik über die FE 1926, 37. 68. (CJ) 75C Ge1 Köpenick, 3452. 69. Ibid. 70. Neumann, “Ein Jahrzehnt,” 30. 71. Eugen Caspary, “ ‘Das Kind’ in der Gemeinde-Wohlfahrts-und Jugendpflege,” in ed. Wohlfahrts-und Jugendamt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, Sondernummer des Gemeindeblatts zu Chanukkah 5686 (1926): 3. 72. (CJ) 75C Ge1 DIGB Akten betreffend FE Herbert K. 73. Prestel, Jugend in Not, 188–192. 74. Ibid. 75. Margarete Schäfer, “Die Erziehungsanstalt Köpenick,” BJFB 1, no. 10 (July 1925): 3. Interview with Mr. Eli Nussbaum, who spent time at Wolzig as a Chaluz (pioneer). Kibbutz Galil Yam, Israel, May 17, 1992. 76. Gräser, Der blockierte Wohlfahrtsstaat, 31. 77. Harvey, Youth and the Welfare State, 231. 78. Ibid., 131. 79. Prestel, Jugend in Not, 247.

Notes to Chapters 4 and 5 80. “Zur Reform der Fürsorgeerziehung,” ZJW 1 (1929): 136–145. 81. Prestel, Jugend in Not, 249. 82. Hans Lubinski, “Ausbau der Fürsorgeerziehung,” JWSP 2, no. 8–9 (1931). 83. Interview with Walter Keins, Jerusalem, June 4, 1992. 84. Hans Lubinski, “Zwei Jahre Erziehungsarbeit in Wolzig,” JWSP 3, no. 4 (April 1932): 113–116. 85. Interview with Mr. Eli Nussbaum. 86. Peukert, Grenzen der Sozialdisciplinierung, 307. 87. Joseph Walk, “Das Ende des Jüdischen Jugend-und Lehrheims Wolzig,” Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 66 (1983): 8–13, 18.

Chapter 5 1. Siegfried Bernfeld, Das jüdische Volk und seine Jugend (Berlin: R. Löwit Verlag, 1919), 26–27. 2. Helga Marburger, Entwicklung und Konzepte der Sozialpädagogik (Munich: Juventa Verlag, 1979), 9–10. 3. Elizabeth Ann Danto, Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 42; Elisabeth YoungBruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 101. 4. Bernfeld’s books and articles appeared on recommended reading lists for non-Jewish professionals in related fields of education. (CJ) 75C Ge1 866, 111. 5. Siegfried Bernfeld received a doctorate in 1915 from the University of Vienna and was an active member of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1925, he was invited by Freud to work at the Poliklinik in Berlin. On Bernfeld’s youth and socialist engagements, see Willi Hoffer, “Siegfried Bernfeld and Jerubaal,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 10 (1965): 150–167; Phillip Utley, “Siegfried Bernfeld’s Jewish Order of Youth, 1914–1922,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 24 (1979): 349–369; Gert Mattenklott, “ ‘Nicht durch Kampfesmacht und nicht durch Körperkraft . . .’ Alternativen jüdischer Jugendbewegung in Deutschland vom Anfang bis 1933” in “Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit:” der Mythos Jugend, ed. Thomas Koebner, Rolf-Peter Janz, and Frank Trommler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 338–360. On the relationship of Kinderheim Baumgarten to Bernfeld’s later pedagogic thinking, see Annette Koch, “Siegfried Bernfeld’s Kinderheim Baumgarten: Voraussetzungen jüdischer Erziehung um 1920” (dissertation, University of Hamburg, 1974). 6. Siegfried Bernfeld, “Die Kriegswaisen,” Der Jude 1 (1916–1917): 269–271. 7. Ibid., 270. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid.

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Notes to Chapter 5 13. Ibid., 270–271. 14. Hermann Nohl, “Die pädagogische Bewegung in Deutschland,” in Handbuch der Pädagogik, ed. Hermann Nohl and Ludwig Pallat, vol. 1 (Berlin-Leipzig: Verlag Beltz in Langensalza, 1933), 342. 15. Ibid., 343. 16. Ibid., 271. 17. Ibid. 18. Siegfried Bernfeld, Kinderheim Baumgarten: Bericht Über einen Ernsthaften Versuch mit neuer Erziehung (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1921), 30. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 31. 22. Ibid., 32. 23. Ibid., 33–34. 24. Ibid., 40. 25. Ibid., 43–44. 26. Ibid., 44. 27. Ibid., 32. 28. Ibid., 104. 29. Ibid., 105. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 106. 32. Ibid., 113. 33. Ibid. 34. During the Weimar Republic, the idea of orphan settlements was not the exclusive property of Zionist educators. In 1918, directors of Jewish orphanages and youth homes sought an immediate solution to the housing shortage for Jewish war orphans and proposed to link the goals of occupational restructuring, geographic relocation, moral and physical rehabilitation, and the revival of small failing communities in Germany through building colonies of Jewish orphans in rural areas. The financial strategy of these proposals was to identify children who did not otherwise qualify as state wards for correctional education and, therefore, for state funding. The target population included those who were endangered due to lack of proper parental care but “who could still be saved.” (CJ) 75C Ge1 ZWSt 904/ 90–91. Salli Kirschstein mobilized friends and supporters to form the Jewish Settlement Cooperative, which purchased land for a boys’ home and which opened in May 1919 at Halbe, outside Berlin. While the settlement at Halbe was closed in 1924 due to financial insolvency resulting from inflation, there were plans underway for founding other orphan settlements in Berlin, Schwersenz, and Pasewalk. “Bericht über die Tagung der Waisenhäuser, Erziehungsanstalten und Stiftungen, September 1, 1918,” (CJ) 75 Ge1/904/22; “Entwurf,” Bertha Pappenheim, April 9, 1918. (CJ) 75C Ge1

Notes to Chapter 5 ZWSt 904/89; “Leitsätze für die Aufgaben der jüdischen geschlossenen Anstaltsfürsorge,” Director Dr. Adler, Frankfurt am Main. (CJ) 75C Ge1 ZWSt /904/ 105). In 1931, the National Union of Jewish War Veterans established a settlement which also housed Jewish war veterans in Gross Glagow, and in the same year, the first rural educational settlement with its own school, the Jewish Children’s home at Caputh, opened to educate “difficult children” through using the Montessori method and the cultivation of sports and activities in nature. Clearly, though Kirschstein, the Central Welfare Bureau, and the Reichsbund were not advocating a Zionist solution to the Jewish social crisis, the nationalist roots of the settlement movement are significant for understanding the means through which German Jews articulated a renewed sense of distinctiveness in the postwar context. 35. On the Volksheim, see Georg Lubinski, “Erinnerungen an das jüdische Volksheim in Berlin,” Der Junge Jude 3 (July, 1930), 131–134.; Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), 78–80; Kaf ka’s letter to Felice Bauer, herself a participant, in the summer of 1916 and Gustav Landauer’s letter to his daughter are quoted in Eike Geisel, Im Scheunenviertel: Bilder, Texte, und Dokumente, 2d ed. (Berlin: Severin and Siedler, 1981), 46–49; Rolf Landwehr, “Die Ostjudenfürsorge in Berlin,” in Heuberger and Spiegel (see n. 33 chap 3), 93–111; Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 55–59. 36. Lehmann’s brand of Zionism and religiosity, as well as his views concerning Jewish education, reveal his debt to Martin Buber. The Volksheim bore the imprint of the Buberian commitment to Gegenwartsarbeit (work in the present) and the principles of a Jewish Renaissance. In a letter to Buber, Lehmann wrote that the Volksheim could not have been created without his influence. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 194. Lehmann was a friend and student of Bernfeld as well. See Chaim Hoffmann, “Ben Schemen,” Der Junge Jude 3, no. 5 (October 1930): 162; see also Siegfried Lehmann, Hinukh B’tkufat Hatekhnika (Tel Aviv: Mifaley Tarbut Wechinuch, 1962), 42–52. 37. Gertrude Weil, “Vom jüdischen Volksheim in Berlin,” JWSP 1, no. 7–8, (July–August 1930): 282. 38. Salomon Lehnert (Siegfried Lehmann), “Jüdische Volksarbeit,” Der Jude 1 (1916–1917): 110; Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 55. 39. Lehmann, “Idee der jüdischen Siedlung und des Volksheims” (BerlinSchöneberg: Printed by Siegfried Scholem, n.d.), 1 (JNUL). 40. Ibid., and Lehmann, “Die Stellung der westjüdischen Jugend zum Volke,” Der Jude 4 (1919–1920): 207–209. 41. Lehmann, “Idee,” 1. 42. Lehmann, “Stellung,” 209. 43. Implicit in the elevation of the eastern Jew was the criticism of the western Jew. As Aschheim shows, the cult of the Ostjuden generally proceeded from a comparative east-west Jewish analysis. The Ostjude served as a foil for critiques of

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Notes to Chapter 5 the assimilating western Jew as shallow and imitative. Thus, the east-west evaluation was almost always derived from predominantly antibourgeois sentiments. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 185–213. 44. Lehmann, “Stellung,” 213–214. 45. Lehmann, “Idee,” 3. Cultural Zionism was one of several ideological positions within the Zionist movement whose political wing was represented in the World Zionist Organization by the Democratic Fraction, formed at the Zionist Congress of 1901 by Ahad Ha’am and Martin Buber. Adherents of cultural Zionism focused on cultural work in the Diaspora rather than strictly on the political goal of forming a state. On cultural Zionism during this period, see Hagit Lavsky, “The Distinctive Path of German Zionism,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 6, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990): 254–272; Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 46. Cited in Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 58. 47. Lehmann, “Idee,” 3. 48. Lehnert, “Jüdische Volksarbeit,” 111. 49. Lehnert, “Jüdische Volksarbeit,” 109. 50. Weil, “Vom jüdischen Volksheim,” 284; Lehnert, “Jüdische Volksarbeit,” 108. 51. Franz Lichtenstein, “Vom jüdischen Volksheim in Berlin,” JWSP 1 (1930): 285. 52. Lehmann, “Idee,” 2. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Weil, “Vom jüdischen Volksheim,” 284; Lichtenstein, “Vom jüdischen Volksheim,” 288. 56. Lehmann, “Idee,” 1. 57. Lichtenstein, “Vom jüdischen Volksheim,” 286. 58. Siegfried Lehmann, “Von der Strassenhorde zur Gemeinschaft. Aus dem Leben des ‘Jüdischen Kinderhauses’ in Kovno,” n.p., 1926 (JNUL), 1. 59. Hans Lubinski, “Kinderhaus Kovno. Ein Bericht über die Entwicklung der Anstalt von 1925–1929,” Der Junge Jude 2/3 February 1930: 13. 60. Lehmann, “Von der Strassenhorde,” 16. 61. Lubinski, “Kinderhaus Kovno,” 14. 62. Lehmann, “Von der Strassenhorde,” 7. 63. Ibid., 9. 64. The concept of an instrumental organization (Zweckorganisation) derives from Tönnies’ taxonomy of social forms in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft which connotes the organization of individuals as a means to an end, not, like genuine Gemeinschaft, which is an end in itself. See Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and

Notes to Chapter 5 Society, trans. Charles P. Loomis (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957). 65. According to Chaim Hoffmann, most of the educational leadership was drawn from Hashomer Hatzair, the socialist Zionist youth movement, Hoffmann, “Ben Schemen,” 162. 66. Lehmann, “Von der Strassenhorde,” 18. 67. Lubinski, “Kinderhaus Kovno,” 18. 68. Ibid., 19. 69. ZWSt, Führer durch die Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege, 276. 70. “Die Jüdische Kinder und Jugend Siedlung Ben Schemen,” Erster Jahresbericht der Jüdischen Waisenhilfe/Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Erziehung jüdischer Waisenkinder zu Produktiver Arbeit E.V.,” May 1927, 5–6 (CAHJP). 71. “Erster Jahresbericht,” 5–6. 72. Ibid., 6. 73. Erich Roth, “Das jüdische Kinderdorf Ben-Schemen,” JWSP 1, no. 6 (June 1930): 230. 74. During the first three years of its existence, Ben Shemen’s youth population consisted of 53 percent boys and 45 percent girls. The national origin of its population broke down in the following way: Lithuania (16 percent), Poland (15.6 percent), Russia (22.2 percent), Palestine (31 percent), and other (15.2 percent). After 1933, Ben Shemen increased the number of German-speaking youth it took in. Only 10 percent of the children were said to come from “normal family circumstances,” while 58 percent were full or half orphans, 11.4 percent came from families with broken marriages, and 20 percent were there due to poverty, illness, or other circumstances that prevented the children from being with their parents. Cited in Roth, “Das jüdische Kinderdorf,” 233. 75. “Erster Jahresbericht,” 2. According to Lehmann, there was a pedagogic shift at Ben Shemen by the mid- to late 1930s from a completely work-centered education to one entailing a “Jewish humanistic education.” This new focus rejected the mere transmission of knowledge but sought “real humanistic educational influence in the sense that Judaism intended.” 76. Hoffmann, “Ben Schemen,” 163. 77. Siegfried Lehmann, “Über die erzieherischen Kräfte von Erde und Volk,” Der Jude. Sonderheft zu Martin Bubers fünfzigstem Geburtstag (March 1928): 58–69. 78. Ibid., 63. 79. Ibid., 64. 80. Ibid., 65. 81. Ibid., 66. 82. Interview with Walter Keins, carpentry teacher at Wolzig, June 1992, Jerusalem, Israel.

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Notes to Conclusion

Conclusion 1. Gabriel Alexander, “Yehudei Berlin be-mashber ha-kalkali,” Weimar Jewry and the Crisis of Modernization (Hebrew), ed. Oded Heilbronner (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1994), 142–143. 2. Alexander, “Yehudei Berlin,” 142. 3. Much scholarship on the Weimar Jewish community has understandably focused on this larger question. Two articles dealing explicitly with the crisis consciousness of Weimar Jewry focus exclusively on political crisis. See Jakob Toury, “Gab es ein Krisenbewusstsein unter den Juden während der ‘Guten Jahre’ der Weimarer Republik 1924–1929?” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 17 (1988): 145–168; Martin Liepach, “Das Krisenbewusstsein des jüdischen Bürgertums in den Goldenen Zwanzigern,” in Juden, Bürger, Deutsche. Zur Geschichte von Vielfalt und Differenz 1800–1933, ed. Andreas Gotzmann, Rainer Liedtke, and Till van Rahden (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 295–418. 4. The reference is to the much-cited essay by Simon Rawidowicz, “Israel: The Ever-Dying People,” in State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity: Essays on the “Ever-Dying People,” ed. Benjamin Ravid (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1986), 53–64. 5. This point has been increasingly noted by scholars in the field, among them Volkov, “Die Erfindung einer Tradition,” 289; Barkai and Mendes-Flohr, German Jewish History, 76–77, 86–88; van Rahden, “Germans of the Jewish Stamm,” 31–41; Scott Spector, “Forget Assimilation: Introducing Subjectivity to German-Jewish History,” Jewish History 20 (2006): 349–361. 6. Derek J. Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870–1918 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Hart, Politics of Jewish Identity, 125–138. On Ruppin, see also Etan Bloom, “The ‘Administrative Knight’: Arthur Ruppin and the Rise of Zionist Statistics,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte 35 (2007): 183–203; Amos Morris-Reich, “Arthur Ruppin’s Concept of Race,” Israel Studies 11, no. 3 (2006): 1–30; Sachlav Stoler-Liss, “Mothers Birth the Nation: The Social Construction of Zionist Motherhood in Wartime in Israeli Parents’ Manuals,” Nashim 6 (2003): 104–118. 7. “Gedanken zum Aufruf über Bevölkerungspolitik,” 3. 8. Volkov, “Dynamik der Dissimilation”; Jacob Borut, Ruah hadashah be-kerev ahenu be-Ashkenaz: temurot be-Yahadut Germanyah le-nokhah tahalikhe shinui kalkali, hevrati u-politi ba-Raikh be-sof ha-me’ah ha-19 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1999). 9. On this theme in French history, see Michael Graetz, The Jews of Nineteenth Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 10. Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 45.

Notes to Conclusion 11. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 50–51. 12. Hannah Karminski, “Die Jüdische Familie—Heute,” BJFB 14 (August 1938): 7. Karminski was president of the League of Jewish Women from 1926 to 1942.

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Select Bibliography Bridenthal, Renate, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, eds. When Biology Became Destiny. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984. Buber, Martin. “How Can Community Happen?” In The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings, ed. Asher D. Biemann, 252–257. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. ________. “The Jewish Woman’s Zion.” In The First Buber: Youthful Zionist Writings of Martin Buber, ed. and trans. Gilya G. Schmidt, 111–117. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Buck, Gerhard. “Die Entwicklung der Freien Wohlfahrtspflege von den ersten Zusammenschlüssen der freien Verbände im 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Durchsetzung des Subsidiaritätsprinzips in der Weimarer Fürsorgegesetzgebung.” In Geschichte der Sozialarbeit: Hauptlinien ihrer Entwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Rolf Landwehr and Rüdeger Baron, 139–172. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz Verlag, 1983. Buerkle, Darcy. “Gendered Spectatorship, Jewish Women, and Psychological Advertising in Weimar Germany.” Women’s History Review 14, no. 4 (September 2006): 625–636. Cahnmann, Werner. “Village and Small-Town Jews in Germany—A Typological Study.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 19 (1974): 107–130. Clostermann, Ludwig, Theodore Heller, and Paul Stephani, eds. Enzyklopädisches Handbuch des Kinderschutzes und der Jugendfürsorge, 2d ed. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1930. Coblenz, Henni. “Die Erziehung der Schulpflichtigen und Jugendlichen in jüdischen Heimen.” Ph.D. diss., University of Cologne, 1927. Cohen, Richard. “Nostalgia and ‘Return to the Ghetto’: A Cultural Phenomenon in Western and Central Europe.” In Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein, 135–138. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Crew, David. Germans on Welfare: From Weimar to Hitler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Danto, Elizabeth. Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Davis, Belinda. Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Dean, Carolyn J. The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Sexual Fantasies in Interwar France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Dickinson, Edward Ross. “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity.” Central European History 37, no. 1 (2004): 1–48. ________. The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Select Bibliography Dietrich, Donald. “Nazi Eugenics: Adaptation and Resistance among Catholic Intellectual Leaders.” In Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich: Historical and Contemporary Issues, ed. John Michalczyk, 50–63. Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1994. Efron, John. Medicine and the German Jews. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. ________. Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Eley, Geoff, ed. Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Eley, Geoff, and Atina Grossmann. “Maternalism and Citizenship in Weimar Germany: The Gendered Politics of Welfare.” Central European History 30, no. 2 (1997): 67–75. Enzyklopädisches Handbuch des Kinderschutzes und der Jugendfürsorge, ed. Ludwig Clostermann, Theodore Heller, P. Stephani, 2d ed. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1930. Epple, Angelika. Henriette Fürth und die Frauenbewegung im deutschen Kaiserreich. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1996. Federn, Paul. Zur Psychologie der Revolution: Die vaterlose Gesellschaft. Leipzig: Bruder Suschitzky, 1919. Feldman, Gerald D. The Great Disorder, Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Feldmann, N.M. The Jewish Child: Its History, Folklore, Biology and Sociology. London: Baillieu, Tindall and Co., 1917. Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Föllmer, Moritz, and Rüdiger Graf, eds. Die “Krise” der Weimarer Republik: Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters. New York: Campus Verlag, 2005. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon, 1977. ________. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. ________. The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. ________. “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, 166–182. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Frader, Laura Levine. “Social Citizens without Citizenship: Working-Class Women and Social Policy in Interwar France.” Social Politics (Summer/Fall 1996): 111–135. Freidenreich, Harriet Pass. Female, Jewish and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

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Select Bibliography ________ .“Jewish Identity and the ‘New Woman’: Central European Jewish University Women in the Early Twentieth Century.” In Gender in Judaism, ed. T.M. Rudavsky, 113–122. New York: New York University Press, 1995. Frevert, Ute. “The Civilizing Tendency of Hygiene: Working-Class Women Under Medical Control in Imperial Germany.” In German Women in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John C. Fout, 322–323. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984. ________. Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation. Washington: Berg, 1990. Friedlander, Saul. “Political Transformations During the War and Their Effect on the Jewish Question.” In Hostages of Modernization: Studies on Modern Antisemitism, 1870–1933/39, ed. Herbert A. Strauss, 150–164. New York: W. de Gruyter, 1993. Friedlander, Walter, and Earl Dewey Myers. Child Welfare in Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940. Fritzsche, Peter. “Did Weimar Fail?” Journal of Modern History 68 (September 1996): 629–656. ________. Germans into Nazis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ________. “Landscapes of Danger, Landscapes of Design: Crisis and Modernism in Weimar Germany.” In Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic, ed. Thomas Kniesche and Stephen Brockmann, 29–46. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994. Funkenstein, Amos. “The Dialectics of Assimilation.” Jewish Social Studies 1, no. 2 (1995): 1–14. ________. “Zionism, Science, and History.” In Perceptions of Jewish History, ed. Amos Funkenstein, 338–350. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Gay, Peter. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. New York: Harper and Row, 1968. Geisel, Eike. Im Scheunenviertel: Bilder, Texte, und Dokumente. Berlin: Severin and Siedler, 1981. Gilman, Sander L. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Goslar, Hans, ed. Hygiene und Judentum, Eine Sammelschrift. Dresden: Jac. Sternlicht, 1930. Grab, Walter, and Julius Schöps, eds. Juden in der Weimarer Republik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998. Graetz, Michael. The Jews of Nineteenth Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Gräser, Marcus. Der blockierte Wohlfahrtsstaat: Unterschichtsjugend und Jugendfürsorge in der Weimarer Republik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995. Gregor, Adalbert, and Else Voigtländer. Charakterstruktur verwahrloster Kinder und Jugendlicher. Leipzig: J.A. Barth, 1922.

Select Bibliography ________. Die Verwahrlosung, ihre klinisch-psychologische Bewertung und ihre Bekämpfung. Berlin: Verlag von S. Karger, 1918. Grossmann, Atina. Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Sex Reform 1920–1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Guttmann, Melinda Given. The Enigma of Anna O. Wickford, RI: Moyer Bell, 2001. Hart, Mitchell. Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Harvey, Elizabeth. Youth and the Welfare State in Weimar Germany. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Hausen, Karin. “Mothers, Sons, and the Sale of Symbols and Goods: The ‘German Mother’s Day,’ 1923–1933.” In Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of the Family and Kinship, ed. Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean, 371–415. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Hecker, Margarete. “Sozialpädagogische Forschung: Der Beitrag der Deutschen Akademie für soziale und pädagogische Frauenarbeit.” Soziale Arbeit 33 (April 1984): 208–217. Heilbronner, Oded, ed. Yehude Vaimar: hevrah be-mashber ha-moderniyut, 1918–1933. Jerusalem: Y.L. Magnes Press, 1994. Heinemann, Manfred. “Normprobleme in der Correctional Education.” In Sozialisation und Bildungswesen in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Manfred Heinemann. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1976. Herbert, Ulrich. “Rassismus und rationales Kalkül.” In Vernichtungspolitik: Eine Debatte über den Zusammemhang von Sozialpolitik und Genozid im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, ed. Wolfgang Schneider, 28. Hamburg: Junius, 1991. Herman, Arthur. The Idea of Decline in Western History. New York: Free Press, 1997. Heuberger, Georg, and Paul Speigel, eds. Zedaka: Jüdische Sozialarbeit in Wandel der Zeit. 75 Jahre Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland 1917–1992. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Frankfurt am Main, 1992. Hewitt, Martin. “Biopolitics and Social Policy: Foucault’s Account of Welfare.” Theory, Culture, and Society 2 (1983): 67–84. Hoffer, Willi. “Siegfried Bernfeld and Jerubaal.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 10 (1965): 150–167. Hong, Young-Sun. “Gender, Citizenship, and the Welfare State: Social Work and the Politics of Femininity in the Weimar Republic.” Central European History 30, no. 1 (1997): 1–25. ________. Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919–1933. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Horn, David. Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

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Select Bibliography Hyman, Paula. Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Seattle: University of Washington, 1995. ________. “The Jewish Family: Looking for a Usable Past.” In On Being a Jewish Feminist, ed. Susannah Heschel, 19–26. New York: Schocken Books, 1983. ________. “The Modern Jewish Family: Image and Reality.” In The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, ed. David Kraemer, 179–197. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Hyman, Paula, and Steven Cohen, eds. The Jewish Family: Myths and Realities. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986. Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik. Stuttgart: G. Fischer Verlag, 1930. Janssen, Karl. “Zur Geschichte des Verwahrlosungsbegriffes in der Jugendhilfe.” In Spannungsfelder der Evangelischen Soziallehre: Aufgaben und Fragen vom Dienst der Kirche an der heutigen Gesellschaft, ed. Friedrich Karrenberg and Wolfgang Schweitzer, 106–117. Hamburg: Ferche Verlag, 1960. Janssen-Jurreit, Marielouise. “Sexualreform und Geburtenrückgang—Über die Zusammenhänge von Bevölkerungspolitik und Frauenbewegung um die Jahrhundertwende.” In Frauen in der Geschichte, ed. Annette Kuhn and Gerhard Schneider, 56–81. Düsseldorf: Pädagogisches Verlag SchwannBagel, 1979. Jüdisches Adressbuch für Gross-Berlin. Berlin: Goedega Verlag, 1929–1931. Jüdisches Jahrbuch. Berlin: Scherbel, 1929–1933. Jüdisches Jahrbuch für Gross-Berlin. Ein Wegweiser durch die jüdischen Einrichtungen und Organisationen Berlins. Berlin: Scherbel, 1926–1933. Jüdisches Lexikon. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1927–1930. Kahn, Ernst. Der International Geburtenstreik: Umfang, Ursachen, Wirkungen Gegenmassnahmen? Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag, 1930. Kaiser, Jochen-Christoph. “Freie Wolhfahrtsverbände im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik. Ein Überblick.” Westfälische Forschungen 43 (1993): 26–57. Kaplan, Marion. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ________, ed. Geschichte des jüdischen Alltags in Deutschland vom 17. Jahrhundert bis 1945. Munich: Beck, 2003. ________. The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns of the Jüdischer Frauenbund, 1904–1938. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979. ________. The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Kauders, Anthony. German Politics and the Jews: Nuremberg and Düsseldorf, 1910–1933. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Kaufmann, Doris. Frauen zwischen Aufbruch und Reaktion: Protestantische Frauenbewegung in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Piper, 1988.

Select Bibliography Kenway, Christopher. “ ‘Kraft und Schönheit’: The German Physical Culture Movement, 1890–1920.” Ph.D. diss., University of California Los Angeles, 1996. Key, Ellen. The Century of the Child. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909. Keyserling, Hermann Alexander, ed. The Book of Marriage: A New Interpretation by Twenty-four Leaders of Contemporary Thought. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1926. Kipp, Angelika. Jüdische Arbeits-und Berufsfürsorge in Deutschland 1900–1933. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 1999. Koch, Annette. “Siegfried Bernfeld’s Kinderheim Baumgarten: Voraussetzungen jüdischer Erziehung um 1920.” Ph.D. diss., University of Hamburg, 1974. Konrad, Franz-Michael. “Paradigmen sozialpägogischer Reform in Deutschland und Palästina: Zur Erinnerung an Siddy Wronsky (1883–1947).” Soziale Arbeit: Deutsche Zeitschrift f ür soziale und sozialverwandte Gebiete (December 1987): 459–470. Konz, Brita. Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936): Ein Leben für jüdische Tradition und weibliche Emanzipation. New York: Campus Verlag, 2005. Krolzig, Günther. Der Jugendliche in der Grosstadtfamilie: Auf Grund von Niederschriften Berliner Berufsschüler und Schülerinnen. Berlin: F.A. Herbig, 1930. Kuhlmann, Carola. Erbkrank oder Erziehbar? Jugendhilfe als Vorsorge und Aussonderung in der Fürsorgeerziehung in Westfalen von 1933–1945. Weinheim and Munich: Juventa Verlag, 1989. Kundrus, Birthe. “The First World War and the Construction of Gender Relations in the Weimar Republic.” In Homefront: The Military War and Gender in Twentieth Century Germany, ed. Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, 159–180. New York: Berg, 2002. Lavsky, Hagit. “The Distinctive Path of German Zionism.” In Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 6, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn, 254–272. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Lehmann, Siegfried. Hinuch B’tkufat Hatechnika. Tel Aviv: Mifaley Tarbut Wechinuch, 1962. Liedtke, Rainer. Jewish Welfare in Hamburg and Manchester c. 1850–1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Liepach, Martin. “Das Krisenbewusstsein des jüdischen Bürgertums in den Goldenen Zwanzigern.” In Juden, Bürger, Deutsche: Zur Geschichte von Vielfalt und Differenz 1800–1933, ed. Andreas Gotzmann, Rainer Liedtke, and Till van Rahden. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001. Linton, Derek S. Who Has the Youth Has the Future: The Campaign to Save Young Workers in Imperial Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Lotan, Giora. “The Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 4 (1959): 185–207.

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Select Bibliography Lowenstein, Steven. “Jewish Intermarriage and Conversion in Austria and Germany.” Modern Judaism 25, no. 1 (February 2005): 23–61. Lütkemeier, Hilde. Hilfen für jüdische Kinder in Not: Zur Jugendwohlfahrt der Juden in der Weimarer Republik. Freiburg im Breisgau: Lambertus, 1992. Mann, Thomas. Buddenbrooks, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Knopf, 1969. Marburger, Helga. Entwicklung und Konzepte der Sozialpädagogik. Munich: Juventa Verlag, 1979. Marcuse, Max. Über die Fruchtbarkeit der christlich-jüdischen Mischehe. Ein Vortrag. Bonn: A. Marcus & E. Webers Verlag, 1920. Mattenklott, Gert. “ ‘Nicht durch Kampfesmacht und nicht durch Körperkraft . . .’ Alternativen jüdischer Jugendbewegung in Deutschland vom Anfang bis 1933.” In Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit, ed. Thomas Koebner, Rolf-Peter Janz, and Frank Trommler, 338–360. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985. Maurer, Trude. Ostjuden in Deutschland. 1918–1933. Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1986. Meiring, Kirstin. Die Christlich-Jüdische Mischehe in Deutschland 1840–1933. Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1998. Morris-Reich, Amos. “Arthur Ruppin’s Concept of Race.” Israel Studies 11, no. 3 (2006): 1–30. Mosse, George. Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1993. ________. German Jews Beyond Judaism. Bloomington and Cincinnati: Indiana University Press and Hebrew Union College Press, 1985. ________. “The Influence of the Volkish Idea on German Jewry.” In Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a “Third Force” in Pre-Nazi Germany, 77–115. New York: H. Fertig, 1970. Mosse, Max, and Gustav Tugendreich. Krankheit und Soziale Lage. Munich: Lehmanns, 1913. Mosse, Werner, and Arnold Paucker, eds. Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution 1916–1923. Tübingen: Mohr, 1971. ________, eds. Entscheidungsjahr 1932: Zur Judenfrage in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik. Tübingen: Mohr, 1966. Mouton, Michelle. From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Moyn, Samuel. “German Jewry and the Question of Identity: Historiography and Theory.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 41 (1996): 291–308. Muckermann, Hermann. Die Kinderreiche Familie in Lichte der Eugenik. Munich: Landesverband Bayern im Reichsbund der kinderreichen Deutschlands zum Schutze der Familie, e.V., 1930. Myers, David. Reinventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Select Bibliography Niewyk, Donald L. “The Impact of Inflation and Depression on the German Jews.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 28 (1983): 19–36. ________. The Jews in Weimar Germany. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2001. Nohl, Hermann, and Ludwig Pallat, eds. Handbuch der Pädagogik. Vol. 1. BerlinLeipzig: Verlag Beltz in Langensalza, 1933. Nye, Robert. “Degeneration and the Medical Model of Cultural Crisis in the French Belle Époque.” In Political Symbolism in Modern Europe, ed. Seymour Drescher, David Sabean, and Alan Sharlin, 19–41. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1982. Odem, M. “Single Mothers, Delinquent Daughters and the Juvenile Court in Early Twentieth Century Los Angeles.” Journal of Social History 25, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 27–43. Oppenheimer, Franz. Die Judenstatistik des Preussischen Kriegsministeriums. Munich: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1922. Orloff, Ann Shola. “Motherhood, Work, and Welfare in the United States, Britain, Canada and France.” In State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz, 321–354. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Patriarca, Sylvana. Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Paucker, Arnold. Der jüdische Abwehrkampf gegen Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus in den letzten Jahren der Weimarer Republik. Hamburg: Leibniz-Verlag, 1969. Penslar, Derek J. “Philanthropy, the ‘Social Question’ and Jewish Identity in Imperial Germany.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 38 (1993): 51–73. ________. Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870–1918. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Penslar, Derek, and Michael Brenner, eds. In Search of Community: Collective Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1932. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Peukert, Detlev. “The Genesis of the Final Solution in the Spirit of Science.” In Reevaluating the Third Reich, ed. Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, 234–253. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993. ________. Grenzen der Sozialdisziplinierung: Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Jugendfürsorge von 1878 bis 1932. Cologne: Bund Verlag, 1986. ________. Jugend zwischen Krieg und Krise. Lebenswelten von Arbeiterjungen in der Weimarer Republik. Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1987. ________. The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. Peukert, Detlev, and Richard Münchmeier, eds. Jugendhilfe—Historischer Rückblick und neuere Entwicklungen: Materialien zum 8. Jugendbericht. Munich: Verlag Deutsches Jugendinstitut, 1990.

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Select Bibliography Planert, Ute. “Der dreifache Körper des Volkes: Sexualität, Biopolitik und die Wissenschaften vom Leben.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000): 539–576. Poovey, Mary. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Prestel, Claudia. Jugend in Not: Fürsorgeerziehung in deutsch-jüdischer Gesellschaft (1901–1933). Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2003. ________. “ ‘Praktisches Judentum,’ ‘Fürsorgliche Belagerung’ und Moderne Sozialarbeit—die Versuche zur Integration von Randgruppen (1901–1933).” In Juden und Armut in Mittel- und Osteuropa, ed. Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, 357–381. Cologne: Böhlau, 2000. ________. “Uneheliche Kinder und ledige Mütter in der jüdischen Gemeinschaft im 20. Jahrhundert: Eingliederung oder Auschluss? Ein Beitrag zur deutschjüdischen Frauengeschichte.” L’Homme: Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 5, no. 2 (1994): 81–101. Radkau, Joachim. Das Zeitalter der Nervosität: Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler. Munich: Hanser, 1998. Rawidowicz, Simon. “Israel: The Ever-Dying People.” In State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity: Essays on the “Ever-Dying People,” ed. Benjamin Ravid. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1986. Reinharz, Jehuda, and Walter Schatzberg, eds. Jewish Response to German Culture. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985. Repp, Kevin. Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Reulecke, Jürgen. “Männerbund versus the Family: Middle-Class Youth Movements and the Family in Germany in the Period of the First World War.” In The Upheaval of War: Family Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918, ed. Richard Wall and Jay Winter, 439–452. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Reyer, Jürgen. Alte Eugenik und Wohlfahrtspflege: Entwertung und Funktionalisierung der Fürsorge vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart. Freiburg im Breisgau: Lambertus, 1991. Richarz, Monika. Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland. Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte, 1918–1945. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1976–1982. _______. “Vom Kramladen an die Universität: Jüdische Bürgerfamilien des späten 19. Jahrhunderts.” Journal für Geschichte (March/April 1985): 42–49. Roberts, Mary Louise. Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994. Rose, Allison. “Die ‘Neue Jüdische Familie’: Frauen, Geschlecht und Nation im zionistischen Denken.” In Deutsch-Jüdische Geschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte: Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, 177–195. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006. Rouette, Susanne. “Mothers and Citizens: Gender and Social Policy in Germany after the First World War.” Central European History 30, no. 1 (1997): 48–66.

Select Bibliography Sachsse, Christoph. Mütterlichkeit als Beruf: Sozialarbeit, Sozialreform und Frauenbewegung, 1871–1929. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Sachsse, Christoph, and Florian Tennstedt. Geschichte der Armenfürsorge in Deutschland: Fürsorge und Wohlfahrtspflege 1871 bis 1929, vol. 2. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1988. Scholem, Gershom. From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1980. ________. “Once More: The German-Jewish Dialogue.” In On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner Dannhauser, 61–68. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. Schorsch, Ismar. “Art as Social History: Oppenheim and the German Jewish Vision of Emancipation.” In Moritz Oppenheim: The First Jewish Painter, 413–439. Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1983. ________. “From Wolfenbüttel to Wissenschaft: The Divergent Paths of Isaak Marcus Jost and Leopold Zunz.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 22 (1977): 109–128. Schröder, Iris. Arbeiten für eine bessere Welt: Frauenbewegung und Sozialreform, 1890–1914. New York: Campus Verlag, 2001. Schüler-Springorum, Stefanie. “Elend und Furcht im Dritten Reich: Aus den Akten der Sammelvormundschaft der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin.” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 45, no. 7 (1997): 617–641. Segall, Jakob. “Das erste Jahrzehnt (1917–1926).” Jüdische Soziale Arbeit: Mitteilungsblatt der Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland 2 (1957): 29–32. Segall, Jakob. Die deutschen Juden als Soldaten im Kriege 1914–1918: Eine statistische Studie. Berlin: Philo Verlag, 1922. Segall, Jakob, and Frieda Weinreich. Die geschlossenen und halb-offenen Einrichtungen der jüdischen Wohlfahrtspflege in Deutschland. Berlin: Herbig, 1925. Sieder, Reinhard. Sozialgeschichte der Familie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987. Sorkin, David. The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1849. New York: Oxford, 1990. Spector, Scott. “Forget Assimilation: Introducing Subjectivity to German-Jewish History.” Jewish History 20 (2006): 349–361. Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West: Perspectives of World-History. Vol. 2, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Knopf, 1928. Staatslexikon d. Görresgesellschaft, ed. Hermann Sacher. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1926–1932. Stachura, Peter. The Weimar Republic and the Younger Proletariat: An Economic and Social Analysis. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Statistik über die Fürsorgeerziehung Minderjähriger für das Rechnungsjahr 1926–1929, 1931–1932. Berlin: Pruessischer Statistischer Landesamt. Steinmetz, George. Regulating the Social: Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

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Select Bibliography Stoler-Liss, Sachlav. “Mothers Birth the Nation: The Social Construction of Zionist Motherhood in Wartime in Israeli Parents’ Manuals.” Nashim 6 (2003): 104–118. Straus, Rahel. “Ehe und Mutterschaft.” In Vom jüdischen Geist, ed. Jüdischer Frauenbund, 21–35. Berlin: Biko Verlag, 1934. Theilhaber, Felix A. Der Untergang der deutschen Juden: Eine Volkswirtschaftliche Studie, 2d ed. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1921. Timm, Annette. “The Politics of Fertility: Population Politics and Health Care in Berlin, 1919–1972.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1999. Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Society, trans. Charles P. Loomis. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957. Toury, Jakob. “Gab es ein Krisenbewusstsein unter den Juden während der ‘Guten Jahre’ der Weimarer Republik 1924–1929?” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 17 (1988): 145–168. Usborne, Cornelie. “The New Woman and Generational Conflict: Perceptions of Young Women’s Sexual Mores in the Weimar Republic.” In Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770–1968, ed. Mark Roseman, 137–163. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ________. The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany: Women’s Reproductive Rights and Duties. New York: Macmillan, 1992. Utley, Phillip. “Siegfried Bernfeld’s Jewish Order of Youth, 1914–1922.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 24 (1979): 349–369. van Rahden, Till. “Germans of the Jewish Stamm: Visions of Community between Nationalism and Particularism, 1850–1933.” In German History from the Margins, ed. Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman, 27–41. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. ________. Juden und andere Breslauer, die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Grossstadt von 1860 bis 1925. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000. Volkov, Shulamit. “The Ambivalence of Bildung: Jews and Other Germans.” In Jewish History: Essays in Honor of Chimen Abramsky, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven Zipperstein, 81–97. London: Peter Halban, 1988. ________. “Die Dynamik der Dissimilation: Deutsche Juden und die Ostjüdischen Einwanderer.” In Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Zehn Essays, 166–181. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990. ________. “Die Erfindung einer Tradition: Zur Entstehung des modernen Judentums in Deutschland.” Historische Zeitschrift 253 (1991): 603–628. ________. “Erfolgreiche Assimilation oder Erfolg und Assimilation: Die deutschjüdische Familie im Kaiserreich.” Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Jahrbuch 2 (1982/83): 373–387. ________. Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation. New York: Cambridge, 2006.

Select Bibliography ________. “Jews and Judaism in the Age of Emancipation: Unity and Variety.” In The Jews in European History: Seven Lectures, ed. Wolfgang Beck, 73–93. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1994. ________. Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Zehn Essays. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990. vom Bruch, Rüdiger, ed. Weder Kommunismus noch Kapitalismus. Bürgerliche Sozialreform in Deutschland vom Vormärz bis zur Ära Adenauer. Munich: Beck, 1985. von Ankum, Katharina. “Between Maternity and Modernity: Jewish Femininity and the German-Jewish ‘Symbiosis.’ ” Shofar 17/4 (Summer 1999): 20–33. ________, ed. Women in the Metropolis. Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. von Heimann, Hildegard. Studien zur Erziehungsarbeit an verwahrlosten Mädchen: Mit Berücksichtigung der Erfahrungen in Hamburg-Ohlsdorf. Hamburg: W. Gente, 1924. Walk, Joseph. “Das Ende des Jüdischen Jugend-und Lehrheims Wolzig.” Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 66 (1983): 3–22. ________. Kurzbiographien zur Geschichte der Juden 1918–1945. New York: K.G. Saur, 1988. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in LateVictorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Walter, Dirk. Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt: Judenfeindschaft in der Weimarer Republik. Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1999. Wassermann, Jakob. My Life as German and Jew. New York: Coward-McCann, 1933. Weindling, Paul. “Eugenics and the Welfare State During the Weimar Republic.” In The State and Social Change in Germany, 1880–1980, ed. W.R. Lee and Eve Rosenhaft, 131–160. New York: Berg, 1990. ________. Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Weingart, Peter, Jürgen Kroll, and Kurt Bayertz. Rasse Blut und Gene. Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988. Weiss, Shela Faith. “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany, 1904–1945.” In The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia, ed. Mark B. Adams, 8–68. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. ________. Race Hygiene and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer. Berkeley: University of California, 1987. Weiss, Yfaat. Schicksalsgemeinschaft im Wandel: Jüdische Erziehung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933–1938. Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1991. Werthheimer, Jack. Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Wieler, Joachim. “Wronsky, Siddy (Sidonie).” In Jüdische Frauen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Lexikon zu Leben und Werk, ed. Jutta Dick and Marina Sassenberg, 406–407. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1993.

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Select Bibliography Wolbe, Professor Eugen. Selbstmord oder neues Leben? Ein Wort zur Bevölkerungspolitik der deutschen Juden. Oranienburg: Orania-Verlag, 1918. Woycke, James. Birth Control in Germany, 1871–1933. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Anna Freud: A Biography. New York: Summit Books, 1988. Zahn, Friedrich. Wie die Familie—so das Volk. Munich: Landesverband Bayern im Reichsbund der kinderreichen Deutschlands zum Schutze der Familie, e.V., 1930. Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden. Führer durch die Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege in Deutschland. Berlin: Verlag Fritz Scherbel, 1928. ________. Jüdische Bevölkerungspolitik: Bericht über die Tagung des Bevölkerungspolitischen Ausschusses des Preussischen Landesverbandes Jüdischer Gemeinden vom 24. Februar 1929. Berlin: Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden, 1929. ________. Von jüdischer Wohlfahrtspflege. Berlin: Fritz Scherbel, 1922. Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland. Die Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle— Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege in Deutschland 1917–1987: Eine Selbstdarstellung. Frankfurt am Main: Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland e.v., 1987. Zimmermann, Moshe. Die deutschen Juden 1914–1945. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1997.

Index

Adoption and foster care, 112–113 Agnon, Shai, 150 Agricultural training, 130, 134, 156, 158 Aichhorn, Adolf, 138 Aid to Jewish Orphans, 157 Aid Society of German Jews, 157 Andreesen, Alfred, 140 Ankum, Katharina von, 20 Anti-Semitism: boycott of Jewish businesses and, 164; centrality of, 168; consumerism and, 34; education and, 187n79; Jewish family life and, 46–47; Jewish social body and, 79, 168, 169; Jewish youth and, 38; Weimar Republic and, 5, 6, 8, 182n7, 182n10; World War I and, 21–22 Apologetic functions: education and, 146; Jewish family life and, 47, 50; occupational restructuring and, 86–87 Apprenticeships, 122–123, 151–152 Aschheim, Steven, 66 Assimilation: Bildung (self-education) and, 6–7; consumerism and, 33–34; Eastern European Jews and, 205–206n43; family life and, 12–13, 19–20; intermarriage and, 23; Jewish family life and, 45, 47, 52; Jewish population policy and, 53; Jewish social body and, 1, 4–5; Jewish welfare and, 165–166; Jüdisches Volksheim settlement house and, 152; war orphans and, 137; Weimar Republic and, 5–6, 8–9, 21, 176–177n12

Attachment, drive for, 158–159 Authoritarian discipline, 135, 141–142, 154 “Back to the People” movement, 148 Baeck, Leo, 26, 39, 85, 88, 93 Baer, Yitzchak, 100 Beckmann, Joachim, 90 Behavior, deviant, 120–128, 143, 201n48 Ben Shemen youth village, 156–158, 207n74, 207n75 Berent, Margarete, 48–49 Berg-Platau, Linna, 64, 74–75 Berlin: birthrates and, 58, 60, 72; Central Welfare Agency of German Jews and, 83; conference on Jewish Population Policy and, 72; correctional education and, 120–123; east European Jews and, 24, 35; hypermodernity and, 23; Jewish welfare and, 96, 111; Jüdisches Volksheim settlement house and, 146–147, 150; Society for Jewish Genealogy and, 50; unmarried Jewish mothers and, 35 Berlin Gemeinde, 23, 25, 36, 39, 111–112, 131, 157, 163–164 Bernfeld, Siegfried: Jewish social body and, 160; Kinderheim Baumgarten (Baumgarten children’s home), 139–146; professional life of, 203n4, 203n5; social pedagogy and, 138, 161; youth welfare policy and, 15–16, 136 Biblical texts, 68, 69, 94 Bildung (self-education), 6–7

228

Index Bildungsbürgertum (cultivated bourgeoisie), 7 Biopolitics: German identity and, 11–12; German reproductive policy and, 54, 55; Jewish population policy and, 76–77; Jewish social body and, 11; “social,” concept of, 9–12; social welfare and, 10 Birth control, 56, 57, 60, 69, 75, 182n13 Birthrates: German population and, 23, 55–56; Jewish immigrants and, 24; Jewish population and, 22, 23; Jewish population policy and, 58; Jewish social body and, 13–14; social classes and, 40; youth welfare policy and, 199n5 Blumenfeld, Kurt, 5 B’nai Brith, 82, 84, 107, 157 Borut, Jacob, 168 Boycott, of Jewish businesses, 164 Boys, deviant behavior and, 121–124. See also Gender roles Brenner, Michael, 6 Bridal fund, the, 73 Brod, Max, 157 Buber, Martin: Ben Shemen youth village and, 157; consumerism and, 34; family life and, 41–42, 46; Jüdisches Volksheim settlement house and, 147, 150; Siegfried Lehmann and, 205n36 Bureau for Jewish Statistics, 57–58 Cahnmann, Werner, 105–106 Caritas, 87, 91, 92 Caspary, Eugen, 96 Census, Jewish (1916), 21 Central Agency for Jewish Adoption and Foster Care, 113 Central Committee for Foreign Assistance, 83–84 Central Welfare Agency of German Jews: Jewish population policy and, 71; Jewish welfare and, 14, 82–84, 195–196n9; Jüdisches Volksheim settlement house and, 153; professionalization of social work and, 88–89; social pedagogy and, 161; Sozialpolitik (social policy) and, 94; youth welfare policy and, 107, 111–112

Charitable organizations: Jewish welfare and, 84–85; Jüdisches Volksheim settlement house and, 153; professionalization of social work and, 88; war orphans and, 139–140; the welfare state and, 81, 82–83; women and, 99 Childrearing, 32, 37, 48, 49–50, 114–115. See also Motherhood Child-teacher relationships, 143–144, 152 Christian social work, 90–91. See also Inner Mission; Caritas; Protestant social work Citizenship, 56–57, 96–97, 119 Cohn, Emil Bernhard, 34 Collective guardianship offices, 36, 187n70 Commerce, employment in, 25, 33, 86, 119, 201n44 Commission on Endangered Youth, 133 Committee for Child and Youth Welfare, 112 Communitarianism, youth welfare policy and, 15–16 Community pride, Jewish welfare and, 84 Constitution of 1919, 56–57, 78–79, 111, 191n11 Consumerism, 33–34, 167 Conversion, rates of, 23, 193n45 Correctional education: appeals and, 200n23; disciplinary functions of, 109, 128–132, 133; Eastern European Jews and, 201n43; endangered youth and, 109–110, 118–120, 132–135; Jewish rates of, 200n29, 201n46; non-Jewish Germans and, 118–119, 119–120; right to education and, 113–114; Verwahrlosung (neglect) and, 114–118; Working Group for the Welfare of Endangered Jewish Youth, 112 Correctional Education Law (1900), 118 Crew, David, 97 Criminality, 65–66, 123–124, 200n29 Cultural activities, 6, 21, 150 Culture wars, social work and, 90 Czellitzer, Arthur, 36–37, 45–46, 50–51, 72 Decline of the German Jews, The (Theilhaber), 60

Index Degeneration, 120–128 DeLeuze, Gilles, 10 Demographic concerns: German reproductive policy and, 55–57; Jewish population policy and, 57–60; social reformers and, 1–2 Deviance, construction of, 113–118 Dickinson, Edward, 11, 90, 90–91 Difference, assertions of. See Ethnic particularism Dissident Jews (Austritte), 23 Domestic science, 33, 131 Double earners, women’s employment and, 29, 30 Dowries, 62, 63, 73 Drive model of psychology, 116, 127–128, 158–159 Eastern European Jews: anti-Semitism and, 22; assimilation and, 205–206n43; correctional education and, 119, 201n43; Jewish Aid for Children and, 74; Jewish population and, 24, 59; Jewish population policy and, 53, 66–67; Jewish welfare and, 81, 85; Siegfried Lehmann and, 148–149; unwed mothers and, 35; youth welfare policy and, 108–109, 112, 153, 157 Economic concerns: Ben Shemen youth village and, 157–158; German welfare state and, 78; Jewish population policy and, 72–73; marriage and, 62–63; social reformers and, 163; Sozialpolitik (social policy) and, 93; women’s employment and, 64; Worker Welfare Bureaus and, 85–86 Economic crisis of the 1930s, 163–164 Education: anti-Semitism and, 187n79; Ben Shemen youth village and, 207n75; Bildung (self-education), 6–7; correctional education and, 118–120, 132–135; Jewish family life and, 48; Jewish identity and, 145–146; right to, 111, 113–114; Siegfried Lehmann and, 146–160; social pedagogy and, 137–138, 143–144, 152; for social work, 88; Verwahrlosung

(neglect) and, 116; war orphans and, 140–146 Educators, 116, 143–144, 152 Egoism, war orphans and, 143, 144 Ehrmann, Gertrud, 79, 99 Eley, Geoff, 105, 178n16 Emigration, to Palestine, 170 Employment: Ben Shemen youth village and, 158; correctional education and, 119–120; Eastern European Jews and, 66; family life and, 29–30; Jewish population and, 25; Jewish social reformers and, 3; job training and, 129–130; Kinderhaus Kovno (Kovno Children’s Home) and, 156; the New Woman and, 30–32, 33; occupational restructuring, 86–87, 129–130, 134, 141, 151–152; parent-child relationships and, 124–125; social classes and, 201n44; social work and, 98; war orphans and, 140; white-collar workers and, 183n26; women and, 27, 63, 64, 184n44, 185n48; Worker Welfare Bureaus and, 85–86; youth and, 115, 124, 131 Employment rates, 30 Endangered youth: the construction of deviance and, 113–118; correctional education and, 118–120, 132–135; Eastern European Jews and, 67; educational reforms and, 161–162; juvenile delinquency and, 27; manifesting degeneration and, 120–128; social usefulness and, 128–132; youth welfare policy and, 15, 107–113 Enlightenment, ideals of, 6–7, 138 Erikson, Erik, 138 Eschelbacher, Ernestine, 80, 99 Eschelbacher, Max, 65, 69 Ethnic particularism: family life and, 19–20, 43–44, 45; German identity and, 106; Jewish population policy and, 53, 71, 76, 77; Jewish social body and, 7, 11; Jewish welfare and, 92; Sozialpolitik (social policy) and, 93–94; unwed mothers and, 35; youth welfare policy and, 15–16

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Index Eugenics: correctional education and, 134; Jewish population policy and, 69, 69–70, 71, 72, 74–75; Palestine and, 168; promotion of marriage and, 73; social classes and, 40 Family: civic virtue and, 44–45, 47; feminism and, 180n28; German national identity and, 39–43; government intervention in, 111, 113–114; intermarriage and, 66; Jewish ideology of, 43–52; Jewish social body and, 5, 12–13, 17–52, 160; Jewish welfare and, 91; juvenile delinquency and, 27–28; nation and, 12–13, 18–19, 40–41; Nazism and, 170; nostalgia and, 52; patriarchal family structures, 29–30, 42, 91; social work and, 7–8, 98; war orphans and, 140; Weimar crisis of the family, 2, 26–39 Family size, German population and, 56 Fathers, 27, 28, 29–30. See also Childrearing Federal Association of the Principal Organizations for Private Welfare, 83 Federn, Paul, 27 Feminism, 80, 96–97, 180n28. See also Jewish feminism Fertility rates, 2, 55–57 Freidenreich, Harriet, 31, 185n50 Freud, Anna, 138 Freud, Sigmund, 159 Fritzsche, Peter, 5 Funding, Jewish welfare and, 83–84, 163–164, Funkenstein, Amos, 4, 189n98 Fürth, Henriette, 9, 34, 49, 179n22 Gay, Peter, 21 Gemeinschaft (community), 3, 7, 42, 43, 98. See also Jewish social body Gender: assimilation and, 33; deviant behavior and, 121–128; endangered youth and, 118, 121; family and, 19; social work and welfare, 96–105; Verwahrlosung (neglect) and, 117–118

Gender relations, Jewish family life and, 48–49 Gender roles: employment and, 125; endangered youth and, 127; Jewish social body and, 7–8, 167; Jewish social reformers and, 3; Jewish welfare and, 80; the “New Woman” and, 30–32; patriarchal family structures and, 29–30; social reformers and, 2; Verwahrlosung (neglect) and, 202n65; Weimar crisis of the family and, 27, 29, 39; Zionism and, 42 Genealogy, Jewish family life and, 50 Generation gap, 27, 36–37 German Academy for Social and Pedagogic Women’s Work, 29 German Aid for Children, 83, 112 German identity: biopolitics and, 11–12; ethnic particularism and, 106; family life and, 20, 39–43; Jewish population policy and, 76, 77; Jewish social body and, 4–5, 16, 79–80, 162, 166–167, 171; Nazism and, 5; social welfare and, 14; Weimar Republic and, 51; youth welfare policy and, 108–109 German-Jewish League of Communities, 27, 82, 84 German-Jewish Women’s League, 84 German nationalism, family life and, 39–43 German reproductive policy, 54, 55–57, 75–76 German welfare state. See Welfare state, German Girls, deviant behavior and, 124–128. See also Gender roles; Women Government, German. See Welfare state, German Government intervention, in family life, 111, 113–114 Graetz, Heinrich, 44 Gräser, Markus, 132 Great Depression, the, 12 Gregor, Adalbert, 117 Grossmann, Atina, 105 Guardianship commission, 111–112 Guardianship courts, 114, 120, 121

Index Gutfeld, Fritz von, 47 Guttman, Julius, 100 Hachnasat Calah society (bridal fund). See Bridal fund, the Halbe settlement home, 204n34 Hanauer, Wilhelm, 62–64, 186n61, 192n29 Hart, Mitchell, 167 Hashomer Hatzair organization, 207n65 Health, personal: Jewish family life and, 49–50; Jewish population policy and, 61, 70–71, 74; Jewish social body and, 102, 164; motherhood and, 28; nervous disorders and, 64–65, 66, 74; Palestine and, 167; religious practice and, 70; Verwahrlosung (neglect) and, 117–118; the welfare state and, 56 Historiography: German, 8–9, 16, 170–171; Jewish, 5, 10–11, 168–169, 176n11 Hochwald, Hilde, 67 Hoffer, Willi, 138 Hong, Young-Sun, 90 Humanitas, 91–92 Hygiene, 66–67, 69, 103, 146. See also Health, personal Hyman, Paula, 47 Illegitimate children, 35, 36, 186n61, 186n63 Immigrants. See Eastern European Jews Individualism: education and, 137, 138; Eliahu Rappaport and, 42; family life and, 17–18; Jewish population policy and, 61, 68–69; Jewish social body and, 167; women and, 31, 64 Individual welfare, Jewish social body and, 5 Industrialization, population growth and, 56 Infertility, intermarriage and, 65–66 Inflation, the welfare state and, 196n17 Inflation of 1923, 25, 26, 30 Inner Mission, 87, 90, 91, 92 Instrumental organizations, 206–207n64 Intermarriage: correctional education and, 132; infertility and, 65–66; Jewish population and, 23, 59–60; Jewish

population policy and, 65; nervous disorders and, 66; the New Jewish Woman and, 185n50; youth welfare policy and, 113 International Birth Strike, The (Kahn), 77 Jewish Aid for Children, 38–39, 74, 112 Jewish Children’s Home (Caputh), 205n34 Jewish community, ideal of, 3 Jewish Emancipation: Bildung (selfeducation) and, 6–7; ethnic particularism and, 44; Jewish family life and, 47, 51; social work and, 100, 101; Weimar Republic and, 5 Jewish feminism, 13, 33, 34, 46, 49, 64, 73, 98. See also Feminism Jewish identity, 19, 31, 145–146. See also Jewish social body Jewish Marriage Bureau, 62, 74 Jewish National Council of Lithuania, 153–154 Jewish nationalism: Jüdisches Volksheim settlement house and, 147, 150, 153; psychoanalytical models and, 159–160; youth welfare policy and, 137–160. See also Zionism Jewish People and Its Youth, The (Bernfeld), 136 Jewish People’s Party, 95 Jewish population policy: development of, 53–55; endangered youth and, 107; German demographic trends and, 55–60; impediments to Jewish reproduction and, 60–71; implementation of, 71–77; Jewish social body and, 5, 13–14; occupational restructuring and, 86–87; Palestine and, 167; subsidies for larger families and, 72; Weimar Republic and, 2 Jewish Settlement Cooperative, 113, 204n34 Jewish social body: anti-Semitism and, 168, 169; assimilation and, 1; Ben Shemen youth village and, 158; biopolitics and, 11; education and, 138; family life and, 41–43; German identity and, 16, 79–80,

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Index Jewish social body (continued) 162; historical viewpoints, 16, 100–101; Jewish population policy and, 13–14, 68–69, 76; Jewish welfare and, 78, 84, 166; Jüdisches Volksheim settlement house and, 147, 148, 152–153; Nazism and, 170–171; psychoanalytical models and, 160; social reformers and, 3, 164; social theory of, 4; social work and, 97–98, 99; Sozialpolitik (social policy) and, 102–104, 105–106; urban life and, 149; war orphans and, 139–140, 154; Weimar Republic and, 95–96, 168–169, 208n3; women in social work and, 105; youth welfare policy and, 14–16, 107, 108 Jewish Teacher’s Organization, 113 Jewish welfare. See Welfare, Jewish Job training, 129–130, 131, 156, 186n55 Jost, Isaak, 100 Journal for the Demography and Statistics of the Jews, 57–58 Judaism, 45, 46, 70, 92, 104. See also Religious practice Jüdisches Volksheim settlement house, 147–148, 163 Juvenile delinquency, 2, 27, 120–128. See also Correctional education; Verwahrlosung (neglect) Kahn, Ernst, 65, 77 Kaiser, Jochen-Christoph, 90 Kaplan, Marion, 170 Karminski, Hannah, 98, 170 Kauders, Anthony, 182n10 Keins, Walter, 207n82 Kinderhaus Kovno (Kovno Children’s Home), 154–156 Kinderheim Baumgarten (Baumgarten children’s home), 139–146 Kirschstein, Salli, 107, 204n34 Köpenick girls’ home: closure of, 163; Eastern European Jews and, 201n43; social usefulness and, 131–132; Verwahrlosung (neglect) and, 117–118; youth welfare policy and, 15 Kreutzberger, Max, 93–94, 102–103

Lamm, Fritz, 37 Landauer, Gustav, 147, 150 Landwerk Neuendorf settlement, 170, 205n34 Late marriages, 63, 64–65, 193n38 League for Private Welfare, 83, 196n14 League for the Protection of Mothers, 60–61 League of Jewish Women, 73, 82, 98, 113, 157 Legal rights, Weimar Republic and, 21 Lehmann, Siegfried, 15–16, 136–137, 138–139, 146–160, 161, 205n36 Levy, Jakob, 69–70 Liberal idealism, 7, 147, 175n6 Liberal Jews, 175n6; anti-Semitism and, 169; endangered youth and, 108; family life and, 42–43; Jewish population policy and, 69, 70–71; Jewish social body and, 7; Jewish social reformers and, 3–4; Jewish welfare and, 89, 96; middle class values and, 118; social work and, 100; Zionism and, 165 Lichtenstein, Franz, 152 Lietz, Hermann, 140 Liss, Sachlav Stoller, 168 Literary depictions, individualism and, 17–18 Local organizations, Jewish welfare and, 84 Lowenstein, Steven, 59 Lubinski, Georg, 95, 96, 134, 150, 167 Lubinski, Hans: correctional education and, 133, 135; Jewish family life and, 49; Kinderhaus Kovno (Kovno Children’s Home) and, 154, 155, 156 Mann, Thomas, 17–18 Marcuse, Max, 65, 66 Marriage: correctional education and, 131–132; dowries and, 62, 63, 73; employment and, 185n48; individualism and, 18; intermarriage and, 23, 59–60, 65–66, 113, 132, 185n50; Jewish family life and, 48–49; Jewish population policy and, 69–70, 73; Jewish social reformers

Index and, 3; late marriages, 63, 64–65, 193n38; materialism and, 62–63; nervous disorders and, 64–65; the New Jewish Woman and, 33; sex counseling and, 74–75 Marriage bureaus, 62, 73–74 Marriage rates, 59–60 Materialism, 33–34, 62–63, 167 Maternalism, 7–8. Medical care, 74, 112, 113, 188n83, 191n7 Medical professions, 4, 74–75, 116–117 Middle Ages, Jewish historical development and, 100 Middle class, the, 25–26, 167 Middle class values: consumerism and, 34; Eastern European Jews and, 67; family life and, 19, 20, 40, 52; individualism and, 18; Jewish population and, 22–23; Jewish welfare and, 91, 106; the “New Woman” and, 31; patriarchal family structures and, 29; Verwahrlosung (neglect) and, 115, 116; youth welfare policy and, 15, 108–109, 110 Modernization: birthrates and, 58–59; Eastern European Jews and, 66–67; Jewish family life and, 52; Jewish population and, 1, 22–23; Jewish population policy and, 53, 60, 61–62; population growth and, 56; social work and, 87–88, 101 Modesty, consumerism and, 34 Montessori, Maria, 143 Morality, Jewish family life and, 47 Mortality rates, 55 Mosse, George, 6–7 Motherhood: Constitution of 1919 and, 191n11; Eastern European Jews and, 67; ideal of, 32–33; Jewish family life and, 49; juvenile delinquency and, 28; the New Jewish Mother, 32–33; Palestine and, 168; professionalization of, 33; reproductive policy and, 13, 14, 56–57, 75–76; unwed mothers, 34–36, 186n61, 186n63; women’s employment and, 64. See also Childrearing “Motherhood-eugenics consensus,” 75–76

National Commission for Jewish Youth Associations, 153 Nationalism. See German nationalism; Jewish nationalism National Union of Jewish War Veterans, 170, 205n34 Natorp, Paul, 138 Nazism: anti-Semitism and, 182n7; correctional education and, 134–135; German identity and, 5; Jewish population and, 58; Jewish social body and, 170–171; Jewish welfare and, 169–170; reproductive policy and, 55; Weimar Republic and, 11–12 Neglect. See Verwahrlosung (neglect) Nervous disorders, 64–65, 66, 74 Neu Isenburg home for unwed mothers, 35, 36, 98, 201n43 New Jewish Mother, the, 32–33 New Jewish Woman, the, 31, 63, 185n50 New Woman, the, 30–32, 75 Nohl, Hermann, 138 Nossig, Albert, 57 November revolution, the, 21–22, 26–27, 132 Nussbaum, Eli, 202n75 Occupational restructuring, 86–87, 129–130, 134, 141, 151–152 Ollendorff, Freidrich, 62, 89, 167 Ollendorff, Paula, 50 Organizational structure, Jewish welfare and, 81–82 Orphanages, 139–146, 146–160, 204–205n34 Orphan commission, 111–112 Orphans: assimilation and, 137; guardianship commission and, 111–112; settlement houses and, 204–205n34; Siegfried Bernfeld and, 139–146; Siegfried Lehmann and, 146–160; Weimar Republic and, 2; youth welfare policy and, 15, 112–113, 136–162 Orthodox Jews, 69, 70–71, 89 Ottenheimer, Hilde, 48, 51, 52 Otto, Berthold, 143 Outmigration, Jewish population policy and, 58

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Index Palestine: Ben Shemen youth village, 156–158, 207n74, 207n75; correctional education and, 130; emigration to, 170; Jewish welfare and, 167–168; Kinderhaus Kovno (Kovno Children’s Home) and, 156–157; Siegfried Lehmann and, 149–150; war orphans and, 141 Pappenheim, Bertha, 36; Jewish population policy and, 71; Jewish welfare and, 81–82; social work and, 97–98, 100, 101–102, 104; Sozialpolitik (social policy) and, 94 Parent-child relationships: employment and, 122–123, 124–125; generation gap and, 36–37; Jewish family life and, 47–48, 49; Verwahrlosung (neglect) and, 137; Weimar crisis of the family and, 32. See also Childrearing Patriarchal family structures, 29–30, 42, 91 Pedagogical reforms, correctional education and, 132–134 Penslar, Derek, 167 Peukert, Detlev, 12, 134 Plötz, Alfred, 63–64 Political beliefs: correctional education and, 134; Jewish welfare and, 91, 95–96, 95–96; Jewish youth and, 37; Kinderhaus Kovno (Kovno Children’s Home) and, 155–156, 155–156; Weimar Republic and, 165 Poor relief, 78, 81 Population, German, 23. See also German reproductive policy Population, Jewish, 1, 21–26, 36, 58. See also Jewish population policy Population growth, 55, 191n4 Population policy. See German reproductive policy; Jewish population policy Poverty, 87–88, 110 Premarital sex, 63–64, 75 Prestel, Claudia, 31 Prinz, Joachim, 88 Private welfare organizations, 196n14 Professionalization, of social welfare, 85, 87–88

Pronatalism, 13, 54, 63, 72, 167 Prostitution, 193n38 Protestant social work, 87, 90–91, 92, 118 Prussian Federation of Jewish Communities, 63, 71, 168 Psychiatry, endangered youth and, 117 Psychoanalysis: Siegfried Bernfeld and, 137–146; Siegfried Lehmann and, 154, 158–160; war orphans and, 143, 144; youth welfare policy and, 15–16, 137, 138 Psychological impact, of anti-Semitism, 38 Psychological problems, war orphans and, 143, 144, 154–155 Psychology, drive model of, 116, 127–128, 158–159 Puberty, 38 Rabbis, social work and, 102–103, 104 Racial hygiene, 60–61 Rahden, Till van, 176n11, 185n50 Rappaport, Eliahu, 42 Reformatories, 15, 117–118, 121–128, 128–132. See also Correctional education Reich Youth Welfare Law (RJWG), 111 Religionsgemeinschaft (religious community), 79–80, 89. See also Jewish social body Religious education, 47 Religious Jews, Jewish social body and, 7 Religious law, reproductive policy and, 13 Religious practice: charity and, 88; Jewish family life and, 20; Jewish population policy and, 54, 68–69; the “New Woman” and, 31; social work and, 101, 103, 104; Sozialpolitik (social policy) and, 94 Religious welfare organizations, 90–91, 92 Reproduction, impediments to, 60–71, 127 Reproduction, incentives for, 56, 57 Reproductive policy. See German reproductive policy; Jewish population policy Repzin boys’ home: Eastern European Jews and, 119; employment and, 123; job training and, 129; pedagogical reforms

Index and, 133; Verwahrlosung (neglect) and, 117–118; youth welfare policy and, 15. See also Wolzig boys’ home Richarz, Monika, 25–26 Ritual purity laws, 69 Roman Catholic Church, social welfare and, 87, 90–91, 92, 118 Rose, Allison, 42 Rosenzweig, Franz, 66 Rosenthal, Hugo, 37, 38 Rubaschoff, Salman, 150 Rüdin, Ernst, 63–64 Ruppin, Arthur, 57, 167 Rural education settlements, 140 Salomon, Alice, 29, 98 Schneersohn, Fischel, 188n84 Scholem, Gershom, 37 School settlements, war orphans and, 140–146. See also Settlement movement Schorsch, Ismar, 47 Science of Judaism, 100 Segall, Jakob, 82, 84 Self-employment, 25 Settlement movement: Ben Shemen youth village, 156–158; Jüdisches Volksheim settlement house, 147–153; Kinderhaus Kovno (Kovno Children’s Home), 153–156; Palestine and, 149–150; war orphans and, 204–205n34. See also Rural education settlements Sex counseling, 74–75 Sexually-transmitted diseases, 63–64, 126–127 Sex reformers, 60–61 Social classes: birthrates and, 40; correctional education and, 118–119; employment and, 123, 201n44; family life and, 26, 27, 35; Jüdisches Volksheim settlement house and, 151; social work and, 97; Sozialpolitik (social policy) and, 93–94; unwed mothers and, 35. See also Middle class values “Social,” concept of, 9–10, 9–12, 54 Social hygiene, 9, 54, 61, 87, 166

Social institutions: correctional education and, 109–110; Eastern European Jews and, 67; for illegitimate children, 35, 36; Jewish population policy and, 55; Jewish social body and, 6; Jewish welfare and, 81; Köpenick girls’ home, 15, 117–118, 131–132, 163, 201n43; orphanages, 139–146, 146–160, 204–205n34; reformatories, 15, 117–118, 121–128, 128–132; Repzin boys’ home, 15, 117–118, 119, 123, 129, 133; youth welfare policy and, 27–28, 38–39, 112, 113 Socialism, 155, 156 Social liberalism, Jewish welfare and, 90, 91–92 Social-managerial agenda, 90–91, 104–105 Social motherhood, 7–8, 96–97, 99 Social norms, 15, 126–127. See also Middle class values Social pedagogy, 137–138, 143–144, 152. See also Education Social reformers: demographic concerns and, 1–2; economic concerns and, 163; Jewish population policy and, 76–77; Jewish social body and, 11, 171; social work and, 179n22; Verwahrlosung (neglect) and, 115–116; welfare programs and, 7; youth welfare policy and, 107–135, 136 Social usefulness, 115–116, 121–122, 128–132 Social welfare: biopolitics and, 10, 11; Eastern European Jews and, 24; illegitimate children and, 35, 36; Jewish population and, 25–26; Jewish population policy and, 71–72, 74; Jewish social body and, 14; Jüdisches Volksheim settlement house and, 150–151; Weimar Republic and, 2. See also Welfare, Jewish; Youth welfare policy Social Women’s School, 88, 179n22 Social work: Eastern European Jews and, 67; gendered nature of, 96–105; German welfare state and, 80–84; Jewish social body and, 6; Jewish women and, 7–8, 14, 96–105; Jüdisches Volksheim settlement house and, 147–148; Kinderhaus Kovno (Kovno Children’s Home) and, 156;

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Index Social work (continued) professionalization of, 85; social reformers, 179n22; Verwahrlosung (neglect) and, 116–117; youth welfare policy and, 111; Zionism and, 95–96. See also Welfare state, German; Welfare, Jewish Society for Jewish Genealogy, 50 Society for Racial Hygiene, 60 Society for Sex Research, 60 Society for Spreading Artisan and Agricultural Work Among Jews (ORT), 157 Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jews (OSE), 39, 157 Sombart, Werner, 66 Sozialpolitik (social policy), 92–96, 102–104, 105–106, 166 Spengler, Oswald, 18 Sports organizations, 74 Stahl, Hermann, 32, 74 State, the. See Welfare state, German Statistics, 10, 54, 57–58, 59, 180n27, 188n91 Stereotyping, 21, 33–34, 67. See also AntiSemitism Stern, Erich, 38 Stern, Selma, 49 Straus, Rahel, 46 Student movements, 148. See also Youth movement, Jewish “Surplus women,” 18–19, 35 Tänzer, Aron, 65–66 Taxation, Jewish population policy and, 72 Theilhaber, Felix: Jewish population policy and, 60–61, 68–69, 72; Jewish social body and, 9; social work and, 179n22; women’s employment and, 63, 64 Timendorfer, Bernhard, 107, 157 Traditional values, 26–27, 30–31, 33–34. See also Middle class values Tugendreich, Gustav, 9, 179n22 Umbrella organizations, Jewish welfare and, 83–84

Unemployment, 22, 25, 29, 30, 121–122, 123 Union for Social Policy, 93 Union of Orphanages and Reformatories, 112 Unwed mothers, 34–36, 186n61, 186n63 Urbanization: birthrates and, 58; correctional education and, 120; Jewish population and, 22–23, 24; Jewish population policy and, 53, 72; Weimar crisis of the family and, 26; youth welfare policy and, 110, 115 Venereal diseases, 63–64, 126–127 Verwahrlosung (neglect): correctional education and, 114–118; employment and, 121–125; environment and, 116–117, 133–134; gender roles and, 202n65; pedagogical reforms and, 133–134; sexual behavior and, 125–128; war orphans and, 137. See also Juvenile delinquency Voigtländer, Else, 117 Volkov, Shulamit, 168, 176n8, 176n11 Volksgemeinschaft (national community), 40, 79. See also German identity; Jewish social body Volksheim, the. See Jüdisches Volksheim settlement house Volkskörper (German national body), 2, 54 Volunteer workers, social work and, 100 Warburg, Lola-Hahn, 157 Warburg, Otto, 157 War orphans: assimilation and, 137; guardianship commission and, 111–112; Jewish youth welfare and, 136–162; settlement houses and, 204–205n34; Siegfried Bernfeld and, 139–146; Siegfried Lehmann and, 146–160; Weimar Republic and, 2; youth welfare policy and, 15 War widows, 18–19 Wassermann, Jakob, 18, 22, 39 Weimar crisis of the family, 18–19, 26–39 Weimar Republic: anti-Semitism and, 168, 182n7, 182n10; assimilation and, 5–6;

Index collapse of, 163–165; historiography and, 176–177n12; Jewish population and, 21–26; Jewish social body and, 16, 168–169, 208n3; Nazism and, 11–12; reproductive policy and, 56–57; Volkskörper (German national body) and, 2; welfare work and, 8; youth welfare policy and, 110–113 Weindling, Paul, 70 Weinreich, Frieda, 84, 97 Welfare, Jewish, 6, 7, 78–80; assimilation and, 165–166; in the early 1930s, 169–170; gendered nature of, 96–105; German welfare state and, 80–84; scope of, 25–26, 84–87; Sozialpolitik (social policy) and, 92–96, 105–106; specifically Jewish characteristics of, 87–92; the welfare state and, 166 Welfare state, German: educational reforms and, 134–135; endangered youth and, 110–111; family life and, 40–41; German reproductive policy and, 54; human health and, 56; inflation and, 196n17; Jewish social work and, 80–84; Jewish welfare and, 82–83, 94–95, 166; religious welfare organizations and, 90–91; reproductive policy and, 56; Weimar Republic and, 78–79 Wex, Else, 97 White-collar workers, 25, 26, 30, 131, 183n26 Wichern, Johann Heinrich, 87 Wolbe, Eugen, 65, 70, 107 Wolzig boys’ home, 133–135, 169 Women: employment and, 27, 63, 64, 184n44, 185n48; Jewish welfare and, 80; job training and, 186n55; the New Jewish Mother, 32–33; the New Jewish Woman, 31, 63, 185n50; the New Woman, 30–32, 75; reproductive policy and, 13–14; social work and, 7–8, 14, 96–105; “surplus women,” 18–19, 35; unwed mothers, 34–36, 186n61, 186n63. See also Gender roles; Motherhood Worker Welfare Bureaus, 85–86 Working class, the, 93, 119–120, 191n7

Working Group for the Welfare of Endangered Jewish Youth, 112 “Work-shy,” label of, 121, 122 World War I, 1–2, 18–19, 21–22, 27, 80–81, 107 Wronsky, Siddy: Jewish population policy and, 53, 71; Jewish social body and, 1, 9; Jewish welfare and, 91–92; Palestine and, 167; social work and, 98, 100, 101, 102–104, 179n22; Zionism and, 3 Wyneken, Gustav, 136, 139, 143 Youth: anti-Semitism and, 38–39; Jewish welfare and, 89–90; parent-child relationships and, 32, 36–37, 47–48, 49, 122–123, 124–125, 137; Weimar crisis of the family and, 26–27 Youth leadership, 154–155 Youth movement, Jewish, 207n65; Ben Shemen youth village, 156–158; correctional education and, 133, 135; generation gap and, 37–38; Jewish welfare and, 89–90; Jüdisches Volksheim settlement house and, 152; settlement houses and, 148; Weimar Republic and, 7; youth welfare policy and, 136 Youth Welfare Law (1922), 83, 114 Youth welfare policy: birthrates and, 199n5; the construction of deviance and, 113–118; correctional education and, 118–120, 132–135; endangered youth and, 107–113; Jewish social body and, 14–16; manifesting degeneration and, 120–128; Palestine and, 167; social usefulness and, 128–132; war orphans and, 136–162; Weimar Republic and, 12 Zahn, Friederich, 40–41, 52, 188n91 Zionism: anti-Semitism and, 169; correctional education and, 130–131, 134; cultural Zionism, 149–150, 206n45; Eastern European Jews and, 149; educational reforms and, 162; endangered youth and, 108; family life and, 41–42; Hechaluz-Verband and, 134; Jewish

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Index Zionism (continued) population policy and, 61, 68, 70–71; Jewish social body and, 7, 79–80, 106; Jewish social reformers and, 3–4; Jewish uniqueness and, 44; Jewish welfare and, 89, 95–96; Liberal Jews and, 165; political Zionism and, 95;

psychoanalytical models and, 160; settlement movement and, 156–158, 205n34; social work and, 100; Weimar Republic and, 7. See also Jewish nationalism Zionist Union of Germany, 157 Zunz, Leopold, 100 Zwieg, Arnold, 66