Abstract
One day in December 1942, during his internment as an illegal alien in Switzerland, Herbert Lewandowski opened his diary and mused over the significance of regular journaling. Partly in jest and partly in earnest he then added: “In keeping a diary at least I hold on to being a man” (Lee van Dovski, Schweizer Tagebuch eines Internierten. Pfeil Verlag, 1946, 35). Born in 1896 in Cassel, Germany, to a Jewish family, the Catholic convert Lewandowski was on the run from the genocidal antisemitic violence of the Nazis, which took the lives of several of his family members. Writing a diary may not appear to be an obvious expression of masculinity and manhood in their various cultural codifications. For Lewandowski, a product of a certain social milieu that celebrated cultural cultivation and refinement as a form of “making it,” the connection between keeping a diary and his identity as a man was not that big of a stretch. But as an interned refugee—safe, “but as a prisoner,” (28) as he put it—in a state of confined agency, the significance of his diary extended far beyond the habits and aspirations typical of his middle-class German-Jewish background. It was a rare outlet for creativity and productivity that allowed Lewandowski to insist on his right to define himself at a time when his ability to do so was increasingly threatened.
The stories of men like Lewandowski, and those of their family and fellow community members, are at the focus of Sebastian Huebel’s important new book, Fighter, Worker and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933–1941. Huebel's book explores how the National Socialist regime deliberately targeted Jewish masculinity as an integral element of its ideology as well as in policy, how Jewish men living in Germany at the time responded to these attacks on a personal level and how German-Jewish organizations confronted them on behalf of the entire community. While the regime's actions towards undermining Jewish masculinity and Jewish men “signified a loss of authority and created feelings of powerlessness that were intricately linked to conceptions of masculinity (Huebel, 7),” Huebel shows that Jewish men developed a variety of strategies that helped to preserve their sense of agency and dignity in their pursuit of fighting against their intended emasculation (as understood according to the prevailing gender norms of their time and place).
Gender historians have been producing incredibly important scholarship on the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust for several decades. Their work has made it clear that it is necessary to approach the analysis of that dark period with serious consideration of gender politics and gendered experiences. And yet, studies focusing explicitly on men and masculinity (and especially Jewish masculinity) remain scant still. Existing works mostly tend to focus on masculinity as a component of Fascism. Huebel's focus on the gendered identities of Jewish men therefore brings to the forefront a theme that has been given insufficient scholarly attention. His thorough and accomplished treatment of the matter makes this contribution ever more welcomed.
Any study that grapples with the complexities of gender norms and gendered perceptions faces the challenge of working through the fluid and elusive nature of these issues, and Huebel's book is no exception. It is not always easy to maneuver between analyzing the very real sense of pain and grievance that Jewish men and their communities experienced when their masculinity was challenged, denied and pathologized, while at the same time acknowledging that this very notion of masculinity developed as a constructed identity that was deeply entrenched in patriarchal convictions and in nationalistic and militaristic tendencies. Huebel addresses this challenge right at the beginning, clarifying his approach to masculinity as a dynamic category that is shaped and reshaped relationally and in dialog with other gender norms and cultural identities. Following George Mosse and Judith Butler, Huebel argues that the erasure of German Jews from the realm of “stereotypical masculinity” caused great distress, and that Jewish men responded to it by seeking avenues where they could still perform rituals of masculinity despite state oppression and violence.
These varied performances of perceived masculinity, which are at the heart of Huebel's book, sometimes reached levels that appear absurd, even agonizingly so, considering what we today know of the Nazi state and its catastrophic endeavors. It is perplexing, for example, to read of Jewish WWI veterans who responded to the state's antisemitic attacks against them by declaring their willingness to once again take up arms and fight for the German Fatherland (24), or others who, while displaying military decorations and flaunting war injuries, resorted to citing Hitler's and other Nazis’ condemnation of anyone who insulted a combat veteran of the German army (28). The antisemitic defamation of Jews as unpatriotic, as war shirkers and profiteers or as cowards unfit for service, which the community in its entirety found egregious but which was particularly painful for men who had served in the military, stirred a turn towards hyper-militaristic performances of masculinity, though many Jews had abandoned this route once it became clear that it did not support their claim to Germanness in the eyes of non-Jewish society. Though the antisemitic discourse that revolved around military service focused naturally on Jewish men, Huebel shows that Jewish women were also affected by it and were likewise mobilized to defend the collective against the accusations of cowardice and dishonor.
Throughout the book, Huebel powerfully conveys how the Nazi regime fused antisemitism and Fascist gender politics in their treatment of Jewish men. Perhaps the most crystalized form of this dual bigotry was the Nazi campaign against so-called “race defilement,” or intimate relations between Aryans and non-Aryans (Jews in particular). Although all parties involved in mixed relations faced legal repercussions as well as social condemnation from mainstream society, Jewish men were at the front and center of the Nazis’ obsession with “race defilement.” Propaganda images depicting vile-looking Jewish men lurking and lusting after pure-blooded German girls were a constant in the Nazi media landscape. In movies, newspapers, books, and other platforms, Jewish men were presented as hypersexualized monsters who sought to destroy the Aryan race by violating Aryan women. And this fixation with the Jewish male was not limited to propaganda alone. The legislation that criminalized relations between Jews and non-Jews explicitly targeted Jewish men as the primary culprits, in accordance with Nazi gender norms that relegated little agency and power to women.
In his treatment of “race defilement,” Huebel’s most powerful contribution is in the analysis of German-Jewish men's reflections on their own experiences as the targets of this hateful campaign, and the trauma that it caused them. The elastic interpretation of “race-defilement” laws turned every casual interaction into a threat. Some men even reported a sense of internalized fear of their own sexuality. One recalled: “Nazi newspapers excelled in dirt and filth. They talked about circumcised pigs. It is very difficult to imagine the level to which these people descended and the atmosphere that surrounded us. The feeling of being isolated, watched, avoided is utterly depressing… Once a Gentile lady stopped me on the street, which was as kind as it was courageous. I said you don't have to talk to a circumcised pig” (59–60).
Significant portions of the book are driven by Huebel's commitment to presenting the experiences of Jewish men as heterogenous, complex and dynamic. He takes issue with depictions (present in some primary sources as well as in some historiographic accounts) that emphasize passivity and melancholy as a common response among Jewish males to their own degradation and to the attacks on their communities. While he acknowledges that the despair experienced by Jewish men did sometimes manifest itself in resignation and withdrawal, he rightly asks that we move beyond monolithic depictions and recognize the multiple ways in which Jewish men adjusted to life under Nazi rule and took actions to resist their oppression. When many Jewish men resorted to illegal work, for example, they were able to fight against their economic dispossession by earning means of survival, but they also held on to their gendered positions as providers and heads of household, which constituted a significant component of their identities as men. Employment became such an important avenue for guarding masculinity and warding off perceived emasculation that some men even reported finding meaning and self-worth while performing forced labor duties to satisfy the needs of the Nazi economy.
In their households and in their familial roles as well, Jewish men did not simply accept the loss of status that accompanied their social ostracization and increasing criminalization. Nazi persecution and violence threatened their positions as husbands and fathers, but Jewish men insisted on finding ways to exercise these positions and to participate in family life. Some made a conscious effort to increase their presence in spheres that were traditionally considered non-masculine, for example by actively participating in their children's education, or by offering more intentional emotional support to their spouses. Several of the very touching sources included in the book address this point, reflecting people's commitments to their loved ones under the most strenuous of circumstances. One married couple whose alternating forced labor shifts kept them apart from each other nearly all the time still managed to express love and intimacy by leaving endearing notes for each other throughout their apartment (104). Fathers who were imprisoned in concentration camps made efforts from behind barbed wire to facilitate their children's flight away from Germany (166). The Nazi regime's attacks on their existence may have injured their ability to perform masculinity according to existing gender norms, but Jewish men persisted in finding modes of expression through which they could sustain a masculine identity.
Huebel's emphatic investment in correcting a skewed appreciation of Jewish men's initiative and agency in their deployment of masculinity strategies sometimes appears unwarranted. I am not as convinced as he seems to be that a misleading image of German-Jewish men as sullen and self-absorbed misanthropes is dominating historiography. In his task to dismantle this supposedly widespread portrayal, any action is elevated to an act of selfless defiance and every emotional expression is read as proof of resilience and virtue. In the process, he unwittingly articulates binary assessments of these men's behaviors and experiences. In statements like: “Observing how their role-model fathers and other men had accepted their responsibilities as men and not given up, neither surrendering to passive behaviour nor abandoning their families, Jewish sons, internalized and grew into the roles and expectations their fathers had adhered to for years” (125)—and in others like it—the complexities of gender identities as a construct, which Huebel so skillfully demonstrates throughout the book, disappear. Instead, we get a black-and-white division into role-models/deserters, heroes/cowards, men of action/passive victims. Ultimately, there is enough nuanced and thoughtful analysis in the book to eclipse these occasional simplifications, but the book would have presented a more consistent argument without them.
Shedding light on German-Jewish masculinities and the lived experiences of Jewish men under Nazi rule, Huebel's book is a valuable study that enriches our understanding of multiple themes, including Fascist gender politics, performances of masculinity and everyday manifestations of group oppression and antisemitic violence. Huebel's and the editors’ choice to incorporate helpful background and contextualization to every chapter allow non-specialists to engage more closely with the work. Experts also stand to benefit from this textured analysis of the complex identity construction of a social group, which, because it is assumed to be standing at the center of historical accounts, is not often represented in its multi-dimensional qualities.