Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe: Shared and Comparative Histories

320 Pages·2019·1.051 MB·English

by  Tobias Grill (editor)

Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe
New Perspectives on
Modern Jewish History
Edited by
Cornelia Wilhelm
Volume 8
Jews and
Germans in
Eastern Europe
Shared and Comparative Histories
Edited by
Tobias Grill
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Grill, Tobias.
Title: Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe : shared and comparative histories
/ edited by/herausgegeben von Tobias Grill.
Description: [Berlin] : De Gruyter, [2018] | Series: New perspectives on
modern Jewish history ; Band/Volume 8 | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018019752 (print) | LCCN 2018019939 (ebook) | ISBN
9783110492484 (electronic Portable Document Format (pdf)) | ISBN
9783110489378 (hardback) | ISBN 9783110489774 (e-book epub) | ISBN
9783110492484 (e-book pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Jews--Europe, Eastern--History. | Germans--Europe,
Eastern--History. | Yiddish language--Europe, Eastern--History. | Europe,
Eastern--Ethnic relations. | BISAC: HISTORY / Jewish. | HISTORY / Europe /
Eastern.
Classification: LCC DS135.E82 (ebook) | LCC DS135.E82 J495 2018 (print) | DDC
947/.000431--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019752
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Contents
Preface   VII
Shaul Stampfer
Settling down in Eastern Europe   1
Jürgen Heyde
Images and Narratives: Germans and Jews in the “Annales seu Cronicae
incliti Regni Poloniae” of Jan Długosz   21
Zuzanna Krzemien
Solomon Dubno, His Eastern European Scholarship, and the German
Haskalah   46
Rachel Manekin
From Johann Pezzl to Joseph Perl: Galician Haskalah and the Austrian
Enlightenment   61
Marie Schumacher-Brunhes
The Figure of the Daytsh in Yiddish Literature   72
Steffen Krogh
Dos iz eyne vahre geshikhte … On the Germanization of Eastern Yiddish
in the Nineteenth Century   88
Martina Niedhammer
Codified Traditions? YIVO’s filologishe sektsye in Vilna and Its Relationship
to German Academia   115
Tobias Grill
“Pioneers of Germanness in the East”? Jewish-German, German, and Slavic
Perceptions of East European Jewry during the First World War   125
Philipp Nielsen
In the Defense of Germandom in the East: Jews and the Verein für
das Deutschtum im Ausland, 1914 to 1935   160
VI   Contents
Marija Vulesica
An Ambivalent Relationship: The Yugoslav Zionists and Their Perception
of “Germanness,” Germany, and the German Jews at the Beginning
of the Twentieth Century   177
Mariana Hausleitner
Transformations in the Relationship between Jews and Germans
in the Bukovina 1910–1940   199
Hannah Maischein
The Historicity of the Witness: The Polish Relationship to Jews and Germans
in the Polish Memory Discourse of the Holocaust   215
Kamil Kijek
Aliens in the Lands of the Piasts: The Polonization of Lower Silesia
and Its Jewish Community in the Years 1945–1950   234
References   257
Index   293
Preface
In the last 25 years historiography has shifted its focus increasingly away from
long-standing “methodological nationalism” and toward more transnational
approaches and perspectives. These take an interest in relational aspects of
history, moving beyond a hitherto prevalent concern for the history of the
(European) nation state. However different such transnational approaches may:
[…] all share the conviction that historical and social processes cannot be apprehended and
understood exclusively within customary, delineated spaces or containers, might they be
states, nations, empires or regions. Consequently, all of these tools or perspectives stress the
importance of the interaction and circulation of ideas, peoples, institutions or technologies
across state or national boundaries and thus the entanglement and mutual influence of
states, societies or cultures.1
Thus, transnational perspectives focus on the multi-directionality of cultural
relationships and reflect the rejection of the previously prevailing method of
historical comparison which investigates similarities and differences, conver-
gences and divergences between independent units.2 Yet, we should be aware
that it fundamentally limits scholarly insight to completely discard any compar-
ative approach within transnational history. Rather, it “is the task of the future
to better combine comparative and entanglement history,”3 as Jürgen Kocka and
Heinz-Gerhard Haupt have stressed.
One such transnational approach in historiography is the concept of shared
or entangled history, which is closely related to the emergence of the New Imperial
History.4 This approach concentrates first and foremost on interactions, depend-
encies, and interdependencies between specific national, regional, ethnic,
social, political or religious entities, but also on parallels, similarities and differ-
ences. An entangled history approach particularly encompasses issues of cultural
1 Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris and Jacques Revel, “Introduction: Space and Scale in Transna-
tional History,” The International History Review 33 no. 4 (2011): 573–574; see also Akira Iriye
(ed.), The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: From the Mid-19th Century to the Present
Day (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xviii. The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational
History claims that transnational history deals with the “links and flows,” the “people, ideas,
products, processes and patterns that operate over, across, through, beyond, above, under, or
in-between polities and societies.”
2 On the method of comparison see Jürgen Kocka and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, “Comparison and
Beyond: Traditions, Scope, and Perspectives of Comparative History,” in Comparative and Trans-
national History: Central European Perspectives and New Approaches, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and
Jürgen Kocka (eds.) (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 1–30.
3  Ibid., 21.
4  See Margrit Pernau, Transnationale Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2011), 56.
Open Access. © 2018 Tobias Grill, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed
under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110492484-201
VIII   Preface
borrowing, transfer or appropriation, such as when one group adopts or imitates
certain ideas and cultural practices of another group, and adapts them according
to their own specific needs.5 Insofar, to overcome former research interests in uni-
directional “influences” of one culture on another, a general concern for cultural
hybridity has gained much currency among scholars of culture, history, anthro-
pology etc. However, it needs to be emphasized that processes of exchange and
interaction between certain entities are regarded as highly ambivalent. According
to Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria, who devised the approach of entan-
gled history, an increasing circulation of goods, people and ideas generates not
only commonalities, but also demarcations and the desire for particularism,
and the reification of dichotomic structures, which still dominate perceptions of
history.6 Thus, entanglement is not only characterized by parallels, similarities,
exchange, or appropriation, but also by differences, exclusion, and even perse-
cution. Hence, historical acts of violence can also be interpreted as an entangled
or shared history of perpetrators and victims. In general, the perspective of an
entangled history should not neglect, as Klaus Kiran Patel warns, “the suppres-
sion and subsiding, the diversion and destruction, the forgetting and fading of
transnational relations.”7
One of these destructed and largely forgotten transnational, transcultural,
or entangled relations is the history of Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe. For
many centuries, both “groups”8 played a very significant role in Eastern Europe,
a region which for a long time was dominated by the poly-ethnic and multi-con-
fessional empires of Russia, the Habsburgs, the Ottomans and Prussia-Germany.9
According to Andreas Kappeler, who subdivides Eastern Europe into East Central,
Eastern and South Eastern Europe, one of the three historical characteristics of
5 See Jürgen Kocka and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, “Comparison and Beyond,” 19–20.
6 Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria, “Einleitung: Geteilte Geschichte – Europa in
einer postkolonialen Welt,” in Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den
Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria (eds.) (Frankfurt/
Main-New York: Campus Verlag 2002), 17.
7 Klaus Kiran Patel, “Transnational History,” Europäische Geschichte Online (EGO) (Mainz: In-
stitute of European History (IEG), 2010) http://www.ieg-ego.eu/patelk-2010-en, 14.
8  The use of the term groups in quotation marks confronts the tendency, observed by Rog-
ers Brubaker, “to treat ethnic groups, nations, and races as substantial entities” […] as if they
were “internally homogenous, externally bounded groups, even unitary collective actors with
common purpose” and “to represent the social and cultural world as a multichrome mosaic of
monochrome ethnic, racial, or cultural blocs.” See Rogers Brubaker, “Ethnicity without groups,”
Archives Europeénnes de Sociologie 43 no. 2 (2002): 164.
9 And, of course, one could add the commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania which for a considera-
ble time was also a global player in Eastern Europe.
Preface   IX
East Central Europe was the fact that since the Middle Ages the German and
Jewish settlements had a significant influence on the societies, cultures, econo-
mies, and legal traditions of the region.10
Other scholars also have observed the structural and functional similarities
of Jews and Germans in the fabric of East European societies. Thus, by referring
to the Russian Empire of the 19th century, Yuri Slezkine has phrased this fact in
the following way: “The German estate manager was the central Russian version
of the Pale of Settlement’s Jewish leaseholder.”11 These structural and functional
similarities might have been the main reason that Jews and Germans were per-
ceived by the surrounding population as the essential “others.” One example will
suffice to illustrate this: in the 1870s there was much anger among peasants in
the southwestern region of the Tsarist Empire against Jews and Germans, who
they regarded as their “main ‘oppressors’ and ‘bloodsuckers.’” As Sergei Zhuk
has demonstrated:
[…] local peasants blamed only Jews and Germans. For the Russian and Ukrainian peasants,
especially for recent migrants, the “alien others” – Germans and Jews – were the obvious
“cultural opponents.” Therefore, these “cultural others” became the first victims of the
ethnic hatred in the southern provinces.
As a consequence, according to Zhuk, the “Russian administration was anxious
to maintain and protect the Russian national identity of the peasantry of the
southern frontier in the struggle with the economic and cultural influence of
Germans and Jews.”12
10  Andreas Kappeler, “Osteuropäische Geschichte,” in Aufriß der historischen Wissenschaften,
vol. 2: Räume, M. Maurer (ed.) (Stuttgart: Reclam Verlag, 2001), 213.
11 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton/ NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 112; See
also Eric Lohr, “1915 and the War Pogrom Paradigm in the Russian Empire,” in Anti-Jewish Vio-
lence. Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan
M. Meir, and Israel Bartal (eds.) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 49. Lohr writes that
the “structural similarities between Germans and Jews in the empire were striking.”; See further
Winfried Schich, “Zum Problem der Juden in der frühen deutschrechtlichen Stadt im östlichen
Mitteleuropa,” in Deutsche, Polen, Juden – ihre Beziehungen von den Anfängen bis ins 20. Jahrhun-
dert; Beiträge zu einer Tagung, Stefi Jersch-Wenzel (ed.) (Berlin (West): Colloquium Verlag, 1987),
65–101, esp. 82–95; See also Wolfgang Wippermann, “Probleme und Aufgaben der Beziehungs-
geschichte zwischen Deutschen, Polen und Juden,” in Deutsche, Polen, Juden – ihre Beziehungen
von den Anfängen bis ins 20. Jahrhundert; Beiträge zu einer Tagung, Stefi Jersch-Wenzel (ed.) (Ber-
lin (West): Colloquium Verlag, 1987), 12–13. Wippermann, like Schich, points to the structural and
functional similarities of both groups in East Central Europe during the Middle Ages.
12 Sergei I. Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation. Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in South-
ern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917 (Washington D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004), 52.
X   Preface
The common perception of Jews and Germans as essential and influential
“others” could also be observed during the First World War when the denunci-
atory rhetoric in the Russian population, press, bureaucracy and among army
commanders freely mixed the notion of “German dominance” with that of “Jewish
dominance.”13 Hence, the overwhelming majority of those Russian subjects who
were deported from their hometowns were Jews and Germans. This was not only
because they were regarded as collaborators with the German war-enemy, but
particularly for the opportunity deportation afforded for seizing German and
Jewish property – and thus to terminate their perceived economic dominance.14
Apart from structural and functional similarities, Jews and Germans in
Eastern Europe also shared cultural commonalities. These centered on the
common origin of German and Yiddish, termed by Peter Stenberg as “sister lan-
guage cultures.” According to Stenberg, in his 1991 monograph The End of the East
European Yiddish and German Worlds in the Mirror of Literature, within “Eastern
Europe, Yiddish created a Germanic-language base, which was complemented
by the more erratic settlements of the German colonialists in much the same geo-
graphical sense.”15 This resulted in “historical and literary threads that have run
in broadly parallel and often intertwining lines for more than half a millennium
between the sister language cultures.”16
This concept of “sister language cultures” emphasizes two distinct cultures
founded on the common linguistic origin of German and Yiddish vernaculars.
Nevertheless, at certain times and in particular regions of Eastern Europe, Jews
and Germans also formed a more hybridized “communication community” with
a shared “communication structure.”17 In the course of the 19th century, Jews
13 Lohr, “1915 and the War Pogrom Paradigm in the Russian Empire,” 49; Yuri Slezkine, The
Jewish Century, 166.
14 Ibid. See also Eric Lohr, “The Russian Army and the Jews: Mass Deportation, Hostages, and
Violence during World War I,” Russian Review 60 no. 3 (2001): 404–419.
15 Peter Stenberg, Journey to Oblivion. The End of the East European Yiddish and German Worlds
in the Mirror of Literature (Toronto et al.: University of Toronto Press 1991), 23.
16 Ibid., 13. See also Stenberg’s following summary in the same monograph: “German begins its
drive into Eastern Europe at about the same time as Yiddish does, moves into approximately the
same territory, eventually finding a home in much the same geographical space, and comes to a
historical end at almost the same time. Thus roughly speaking, the two sister Germanic languag-
es travel eastward together (though in isolation from each other), spend approximately 750 years
in this newly won linguistic territory, establish populations numbering in the millions in gener-
ally the same area, become the mother languages of large minority populations in great parts of
Eastern Europe, and virtually cease to exist in these areas within a decade of each other.” (26–27)
17 See in part Carl Bethke, (K)eine gemeinsame Sprache? Aspekte deutsch-jüdischer Beziehungs-
geschichte in Slawonien, 1900–1945 (Berlin: LIT-Verlag, 2013), 6.