Between Dignity and Despair

Jewish Life in Nazi Germany

Bibliographic Data

ID19980920
AuthorsMarion A Kaplan (City University of New York), Marion Kaplan (City University of New York, corresponding author)
Year1999
Pages302
Publication date1999-11-04
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueBetween Dignity and Despair (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressNew York (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195130928.001.0001
OpenAlexW2490405719
Open LibraryOL698973M
ISBN9780195130928
LanguageEN
Citations received20

This book draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. The book tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor from the vantage of the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, the book shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of November 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; many others went underground and endured the terrors of nightly bombings and the even greater fear of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness. Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, this book takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany

Art history · Criminology · Dignity · Emigration · Judaism · Loneliness · Memoir · Nazi concentration camps · Nazism · Political science · Portrait · Sociology · The Holocaust · Gender Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Psychology · 1789 · 1933-1945 · 1939-1945 · Alltag · Dagelijks leven · Derde Rijk · ethnic relations · Germany · Holocaust · Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) · Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) fast (OCoLC)fst00958866 · Jews · Joden · Juden · Judenverfolgung · Judenvernichtung · Social conditions