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Weimar Culture and the East European Jews, 1918-1923

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Weimar Culture and the East European Jews, 1918-1923 13 The Double Exile: Weimar Culture and the East European Jews, 1918-1923 STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM \leimar society continues to fascinate us partly because of the ironic connection between cultural creativity and political brutalization.l As unwelcome "insiders" of an unwanted Republic, German Je1•s were located at the very center of this dialectic, the concrete link tying these polarities. Their real and symbolic role in the disposition of \leimar Germany has been am!Jly documented.2 lluch less attention :1as been given to the role of the :>ast European Jews (Ostjuden) in Germany during this period. This constitutes a serious gap. Ostjude;1 were the first and mos t vulnerable targets of the newl~r radicalized anti-Semi tism. As a highly visible foreign minority, they were obvious victims of the growing climate of political violence. At the same time they greatly complicated German Jewry's mm e~osed situation and, in many ways, conditioned its responses. llecause the Ostjudenfrage (~uestion of the Eastern European Jews) was portrayed as a German Schicksalfrase, it was transformed into a probler.1 of vital popular and national concern. No treatment of the relationship between \Jeimar culture, the Jews, and anti­ Semitism would be complete without it. To be sure, tl1e problern of East European Jews was not new to Germany. The geographical proximity of Po land to Germany was a special circumstance attending the course of German Jewish emancipation. German Jews were never able to forget that they shared a comnon border with the unemanci11ated Eastern ghetto masses. Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, German Jewish historywas conditioned by this presence, both as myth anJ reality. Indeed, the articulation of a distinctive German Jewish identi ty 1-Tas inseparable from the j uxtaposition with the gi1etto Jew of Eastern Europe. If most nineteenth- century IIestern Jevs looked asl:ance at their primitive ghetto cousins, German Jeus articulated the negative conce11tion of the Ostjude with special intensity because they felt the rift 228 Towards the Holocaust mo$ t acutely. 3 This was true too for man~' non-Jews. Elsewhere in \Jestern Europe tlle Ostjude was regarded as an irritant--in Germany he became a major preoccupation, at times even an obsession.4 This concern reached its height in the immediate post-\lorld Uar I period. The shock of defeat, the fear of revolution, and unparalleled economic hardship provided ne•1 credence to the old slogan "the Jews are our misfortune!" For the first time in twentieth-century Germany, anti-Semitis~ achieved political respectability and gained mass support. J lnlile the anti-Jewish onslaught •.o~as generalized and clearly included native Jewry, the alien and defenseless nature of the Ostjuden made them particularly salient victims of t:1e attack. Hothing, after all, concretized the Jewish danger more effectively than this s trange, repellent ghetto creature. Ili tler' s rmrported "discovery" of tiw Jewish problem, let us not forget, occurred when he encountered the dirty, smelly East EUJ;opean Jew, "an apparition in a black caftan and black hilir locks. nll Ostjudentum, as it filtered into German space and consciousness, kept alive the historical memory of the mysterious and brooding ghetto presence. This was a resonant tradition that became especially effective in a time of mass confusion, political chaos, and economic collapse. llo wonder tnat in the rhetoric and actions directed against the Ostjuden the post-\lar brutalization of the Jews was most acute and achieved its first real success. All myths, if they are to function, must have some basis, however tenuous, in social reality. Right-,•ing accusations of an invasion by ghetto Jews were made plausible by the fact that during the war, 70,000 Eastern Jews--workers, prisoners, internees--were added to the prewar population of ')1J,OOO. 7 In addition, thousands more sought refuge from the brutal pograms that rocked Eastern Europe after the war. Although by 1922 the majority of war-arrivals had left the country, their presence was still noticeable. Against the background of defeat and economic disintegration, it was easy to present this as a mass flood posing a fundamental threat to German morality, economy, sexuality, politics, and culture.3 Old accusations took on new significance. The Shylock myth was revitalized by constant accusations of ruthless Eastern Jewish enrichment at the expense of poor and honest pat:riotic folk. Radical right publications regularly enployed parasi tological language in their descriptions of Ostjuden. Thus in 1920 Theodor Fritsch's Die Hammer wrote: A horrible sight, these faces of animals of prey: in them there is nary a sign of hunan feeling • • • they stand before us as the embodiment of Jehova's promise: Thou shalt devour all other Hations! Yes, devour greedily, pitilessly. The myth t;1at J.ews were forced to become usurers and liars by their environment is exposed the minute these Ostjuden take their first step into our Weimar Culture and the East European Jews 229 land • • • they are the conscious products of Talmudic crininal schools.9 These themes meshed effectively with the fear of radical political change. After the success of the Russian Revolution, bolshevism, that alien export, seemed palpably close to Germany. The nrominent role of Jews in the Russian Revolution and Bela Kun' ~ radical regime in HungarylO lent plausibility to the equation of bolshevism with Judaism. After all, since the beginning of the century Ostjuden such as Rosa Luxembourg, Israel llelphand-Parvus, Leo Jogiches, and Karl Radek had been in the forefront of radical activity in Gernany. !1oreover, in the postwar Berlin and !1unich revolutions, the figures of Luxembourg and Eugen Levine were notoriously prominent. Even radical figures who were clearly not Ostjuden were branded as such. Thus Kurt Eisner, the ßerlin-born leader of the Bavarian Socialist ;lepublic, became widely known as a "Galician Jew," symbol of the Jewish revolutionary, "a Shylock ••• with a dirty yarmulke covering his :1ead."ll l!ard-line anti-Semites were not bothered by the great distance that divided traditional Talmudic Jews fron professional revolutionaries who were radicaily disaffected from their origins. !1odern revolution, wrote Alfred Roth of the Deutsche Schutz und Trutz Bund, was merely tlte conspiratorial Jewish means to sew discontent among the nations, thereb'{- guaranteeing the 1 ultimate triumph of Talmudic \lOrld rule. ~ In the new polari~ed climate, even conservatives began increasingly to ignore the distinction between modern, assimilated German Jews and the Eastern ghetto masses. There were, however, exceptions to this rule. Thus Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski attempted to deal \lith the Jewish problern by making a principled distinction between Eastern European and r~rman Jewry. The forner were "legitimate" targets of animosity, the latter were not. !Iotions of "international Jewry," he wrote, were palpably absurd. This distinction between cultured, assimilated German Jews and backward Ostjuden was obvious. llothing established the point better than German Jewry's own pronounced antipathy. Did they not support moves to keep the Ostjuden out of Germany (Grenzschluss)?l3 l!ere was an explicit attempt to deflect anti-Semitism onto the Ostjuden and away from the German Jews. Indeed, on the eve of Nazi accession to power, ßronikowski sharpened his attack on the Eastern Jews (and Zionists).l4 But the distinction had never been clear in the minds of the different anti-Semitic groups, and the conservative Deutsch national Volkspartei was split on the question. The majority probably linked the two Jewries and regarded Ostjudentum as a massive reservoir for the constant revi talization of IIestern Jewry .15 For all that, the success of anti-Semitic propaganda against the Ostjuden was not a function of their alleged identity with 230 Towards the Holocaust \les tern Jews. Rather its effectiveness derived from the ongoing resonance which the traditional stereotype of "the ghetto Jew" still evoked. Ti1e ghetto Jew symbolized an age-old cultural tension. Uoreover, Eastern Jews--alien, visible, vulnerable-­ could be attacked with greater impunity than native, enfranchised German Jewry. Election posters in r,ermany and Austria constantly exploited these fir;ures in caricature. Thus in 1920, the Austrian Christian Socials portrayed a sna!~e with the head of a repulsive, side-locked Ostjude st~angling his victim to death. Similarly in 1919 a German Uational Democratic party drawing tapped ancient fears of the dar!~ ghetto. It pictured a priest, candle in hand, wall~ing in front of a sim01le German worl~er who is pulling a coffin through the streets. Beilind the coffin walks a gloating Ostjude. Th~ only escape from this danger was to vote National Democratic.lu Of course the anti-Semitic camp attacked the Eastern Jew with particular vehemence. But what of other sectors of 'leimar society? In a time of mass upheaval and a noticeable Eastern Jewish presence, how deeply had the stereotype of the ghetto Jew penetrated? \li t:1 conservati ves like Bronil~owski, the answer is clear. Among vl:llkisch acti vists like Hermann Popert, 17 founder of the Vortrupn youth movement and obsessed with reinvigorating a degenerating Germany through alcohol abstinence, there was a similar response. Popert--himself a half Jew--was deeply concerned with German racial hygiene. But his notion of race was territorial, not genetic. All Germans could be legitimate
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