Memoirs of German Jew:
Historiographical essay:
Write a historiographical essay answering questions in the order description. Full question is aslo attached for further details.
Order Description:
Write a Historiographical essay about whether German Jews should be blamed for not seeing “the writing on the wall” about Germany’s antisemitism during the Second and/or Third reich. Was Germany a deeply antisemitic country- on the path towards the Holocaust, were German-Jews blind behind his fact? The scholars assigned and materials attached lends credence to either side of this debate. Choose a side and support it with the range of the given attachments.
1000 WORDS
“We were so German,” “We were so assimilated,” We were so middle class,” –these are the common tropes that emerge in the memoirs of German Jews who try to recall their prewar life before the Nazi onslaught. (Kaplan, 5). It is for this reason—the perception that German Jews were deeply integrated into German society—that historians and contemporaries have castigated German Jews for not seeing the writing on the wall. In other words, German Jews from the Second to the Third Reich have been accused of allowing their loyalty to German culture and society to blind them from the rising and dangerous anti-Semitism in their midst. Other scholars have an adopted an alternative position. These historians have argued that we cannot read history with the benefit of hindsight, and that pre-Nazi Germany looked “anything but a chamber of potential horrors.” Further, this scholarly school has stressed the hurdles confronted by German Jews both in leaving Germany and realizing the need for emigration. Please take a position within this scholarly debate and support your contention with the primary and secondary sources assigned in this class.
WORD LIMIT: 1000 words
RECOMMENDED SOURCES
Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1-45.
Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Antisemitism in a German Town (New York: Norton, 2002), introduction.
Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3-49, 50-73, 119-145.
Memoirs by “Henry Buxbaum,” “Wolfgang Roth,” “Emil Schorsch,” and “Ottie Schonwald, née Mendel,” “Marta Appel,” “Max Daniel,” in Monika Richarz, ed., Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).