Nearly one hundred thousand German Jews fought in World War I, and some twelve thousand of these soldiers lost their lives in battle. This book focuses on the multifaceted ways in which these soldiers have been remembered, as well as forgotten, from 1914 to the late 1970s. By examining Germany's complex and continually evolving memory culture, Tim Grady opens up a new approach to the study of German and German-Jewish history. In doing so, he draws out a narrative of entangled and overlapping relations between Jews and non-Jews, a story that extends past the Holocaust and into the Cold War.

Racializing the Soldier explores the impact of racial beliefs on the formation and development of modern armed forces and the ways in which these forces have been presented and historicized from a global perspective. With a wide geographical and temporal spread, the collection looks at the disparate ways that race has influenced military development. In particular, it explores the extent to which ideas of racial hierarchy and type have conditioned thinking about what kinds of soldiers should be used and in what roles. This volume offers a highly original military, social and cultural history, questioning the borders both of racialization and of the military itself. It considers the extent to which discourses of gender, nationality and religion have informed racialization, and probes the influence of expert studies of soldiers as indicators of national population types. By focusing mostly, but not exclusively, on colonial and post-colonial states, the book considers how racialized militaries both shaped and reflected conflict in the modern world, ultimately explaining how the history of this idea has often underpinned modern military planning and thinking. This book is based on a special issue of Patterns of Prejudice.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, traditional historiography has emphasized the similarities between Italy and Germany as “late nations”, including the parallel roles of “great men” such as Bismarck and Cavour. Rethinking the Age of Emancipation aims at a critical reassessment of the development of these two “late” nations from a new and transnational perspective. Essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars examine the discursive relationships among nationalism, war, and emancipation as well as the ambiguous roles of historical protagonists with competing national, political, and religious loyalties.

In the decades between German unification and the demise of the Weimar Republic, German Jewry negotiated their collective and individual identity under the impression of legal emancipation, continued antisemitism, the emergence of Zionism and Socialism, the First World War, and revolution and the republic. For many German Jews liberalism and also increasingly Socialism became attractive propositions. Yet conservative parties and political positions right-of-center also held appeal for some German Jews. Between Heimat and Hatred studies German Jews involved in ventures that were from the beginning, or became increasingly, of the Right. Jewish agricultural settlement, Jews' participation in the so-called "Defense of Germandom in the East", their place in military and veteran circles and finally right-of-center politics form the core of this book. These topics created a web of social activities and political persuasions neither entirely conservative nor entirely liberal. For those German Jews engaging with these issues, their motivation came from sincere love of their German Heimat-a term for home imbued with a deep sense of belonging-and from their middle-class environment, as well as to repudiate antisemitic stereotypes of rootlessness, intellectualism or cosmopolitanism. This tension stands at the heart of the book. The book also asks when did the need for self-defense start to outweigh motivations of patriotism and class? Until when could German Jews espouse views to the right of the political spectrum without appearing extreme to either Jews or non-Jews? In an exploration of identity and exclusion, Philipp Nielsen locates the moments when active Jewish members of conservative projects became the radical other. He notes that the decisive stage of the transformation of the German Right occurred precisely during a period of republican stabilization, when even mainstream right-of-center politics abandoned the state-centric, Volk-based ethnic concepts of the Weimar republic. The book builds on recent studies of Jews' relation to German nationalism, the experience of German Jews away from the large cities, and the increasing interest in Germans' obsession with regional roots and the East. The study follows these lines of inquiry to investigate the participation of some German Jews in projects dedicated to originally, or increasingly, illiberal projects. As such it shines light on an area in which Jewish participation has thus far only been treated as an afterthought and illuminates both Jewish and German history afresh.

This book examines the particular experience of ethnic, religious and national minorities who participated in the First World War as members of the main belligerent powers: Britain, France, Germany and Russia. Individual chapters explore themes including contested loyalties, internment, refugees, racial violence, genocide and disputed memories from 1914 through into the interwar years to explore how minorities made the transition from war to peace at the end of the First World War. The first section discusses so-called ‘friendly minorities’, considering the way in which Jews, Muslims and refugees lived through the war and its aftermath. Section two looks at fears of ‘enemy aliens’, which prompted not only widespread internment, but also violence and genocide. The third section considers how the wartime experience of minorities played out in interwar Europe, exploring debates over political representation and remembrance. Bridging the gap between war and peace, this is the ideal book for all those interested in both First World War and minority histories.

During the First World War, the Jewish population of Central Europe was politically, socially, and experientially diverse, to an extent that resists containment within a simple historical narrative. While antisemitism and Jewish disillusionment have dominated many previous studies of the topic, this collection aims to recapture the multifariousness of Central European Jewish life in the experiences of soldiers and civilians alike during the First World War. Here, scholars from multiple disciplines explore rare sources and employ innovative methods to illuminate four interconnected themes: minorities and the meaning of military service, Jewish-Gentile relations, cultural legacies of the war, and memory politics.

This book represents the most comprehensive history of Germany during the First World War.

Antisemitism in the German Military Community and the Jewish Response, 1914–1938 explores how German World War I veterans from different social and political backgrounds contributed to antisemitic politics during the Weimar Republic. The book compares how the military, right-wing veterans, and Jewish veterans chose to remember their war experiences and translate these memories into a political reality in the postwar world. Antisemitism addresses several neglected issues. First, there is relatively little scholarship discussing antisemitism in the imperial German army and the impact former imperial officers had on the antisemitic predilections of veteran associations. This subject deserves attention given that veteran politics during the Weimar Republic were of tremendous significance to the collapse of democracy and the rise of National Socialism, and that the primary architects of the Third Reich and the “Final Solution” were either World War I veterans or had been members of paramilitary organizations in the interwar period. The second issue addressed is how veterans influenced the definition of “Aryan” identity, or how race came to be perceived through the prism of war and political violence. Since German Jews had to fight both accusations of shirking military service and the perception of the “Jew” as effeminate, the manner in which these veterans tried to reforge Jewish identity and their relationship with their former comrades is an extraordinarily important issue. The third issue concerns situational antisemitism, or the process by which an organization expressed an opinion or policy concerning Jews in response to internal dissension and external influences.

For the Honor of Our Fatherland: German Jews on the Eastern Front during the Great War focuses on the German Jews’ role in reconstructing Poland’s war-ravaged countryside. The Germany Army assigned rabbis to serve as chaplains in the German Army and to support and minister to their own Jewish soldiers, which numbered 100,000 during the First World War. However, upon the Army’s arrival into the decimated region east of Warsaw, it became abundantly clear that the rabbis might also help with the poverty-stricken Ostjuden by creating relief agencies and rebuilding schools. For the Honor of Our Fatherland demonstrates that the well-being of the Polish Jewish community was a priority to the German High Command and vital to the future of German politics in the region. More importantly, by stressing the importance of the Jews in the East to Germany’s success, For the Honor of Our Fatherland will show that Germany did not always want to remove the Jews—quite the contrary. The role and influence of the German Army rabbis and Jewish administrators and soldiers demonstrates that Germany intentionally supported the Polish Jewish communities in order to promote its agenda in the East, even as the modes for future influence changed. By implementing a philanthropic agenda in the East, the Germans recognized that its success might lie in part in enfranchising the Jewish population. Moreover, the directives of these relief agencies were not only beneficial to the impoverished Jewish communities, but the German Army had much to gain from this transnational relationship. The tragic irony was that Germany returned to the East in the Second World War and killed millions of Jews.

This book explores the Holocaust as a social process. Although the mass murder of European Jews was essentially the result of political-ideological decisions made by the Nazi state leadership, the events of the Holocaust were also part of a social dynamic. All European societies experienced developments that led to the social exclusion, persecution and murder of the continent’s Jews. This volume therefore questions Raul Hilberg ́s category of the ‘bystander’. In societies where the political order expects citizens to endorse the exclusion of particular groups in the population, there cannot be any completely uninvolved bystanders. Instead, this book examines the multifarious forms of social action and behaviour connected with the Holocaust. It focuses on institutions and persons, helpers, co-perpetrators, facilitators and spectators, beneficiaries and profiteers, as well as Jewish victims and Jewish organisations trying to cope with the dynamics of exclusion and persecution.