Description
Book SynopsisThe First World War saw almost 100,000 German Jews wear the uniform of the Imperial army; some 12,000 of these soldiers lost their lives in battle. Over the last century, public memory of their sacrifice has been very gradually subsumed into the much greater catastrophe of the Holocaust. This book focuses on the multifaceted ways in which these Jewish soldiers have variously been remembered and forgotten from 1914 through until the late 1970s. During and immediately after the conflict, Germany’s Jewish population were active participants in a memory culture that honoured the war dead as national heroes. With the decline of the Weimar Republic and the National Socialists’ rise to power, however, the public commemoration of the Jewish soldiers gradually faded, as Germany’s Jewish communities were systematically destroyed by the Nazi regime. It was only in the late 1950s that both Jews and other Germans began to rediscover and to re-remember this largely neglected group. By examining Germany’s complex and continually evolving memory culture, this book opens up a new approach to the study of both German and German-Jewish history. In doing so, it draws out a narrative of entangled and overlapping relations between Jews and non-Jews during the short twentieth century. The Jewish / non-Jewish relationship, the book argues, did not end on the battlefields of the First World War, but ran much deeper to extend through into the era of the Cold War.
Trade ReviewA fine addition to our understanding of German Jewish history in the period of the First World War and in its aftermath, full of clearly written and interesting detail and impressive research.
Jay WinterGrady’s book presents many illuminating examples and carefully chosen quotations. The six chapters are clearly structured and draw upon a broad base of original source material, including newspapers, personal memoirs, and official documents from communal archives.
Matthias Hambrock, The American Historical Review, vol 117, no 5In his study, Grady has provided a commendable contribution to the history of the Jewish war veterans in Germany, in particular during the interwar years. He illustrates the opinions of both non-Jewish Germans towards their Jewish fellow-citizens as well as Jewish interpretations of their own position in contemporary German history.
Klaus-Peter Friedrich, Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft, 61 Jahrgan, Heft 4This is a thought-provoking book. Many readers will remember their fathers’ participation in the First World War and the medals they earned and wore with pride. Alas, although they had hoped that these medals would protect them once the Nazis came to power, this was not to be. I should add that this book is written entirely with West Germany in mind. In East Germany (the DDR), where culpability for the Nazi crimes was never acknowledged, it would have been a very different story.
Leslie Baruch Brent, Association of Jewish Refugees, Volume 12, No. 2Table of Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction 1. Dying: War, Mutilation and Mass Death, 1914-1918
- 2. Mourning: Defeat, Revolution and Memorialisation, 1918-1923
- 3. Commemorating: War Veterans, Ritual and Remembrance, 1923-1929
- 4. Forgetting: Nazism, Front Fighters and Destruction, 1929-1945
- 5. Discovering: War Victims, War Crimes and Reconstruction, 1945-1960
- 6. Embracing: The Growth of Holocaust Awareness and Acknowledgement of the Jewish Soldiers, 1960-1980
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
