Three Voices Reheard To An Unfolding Madness

At sundown on Saturday, April 30, Belmont’s conducted its annual service in honor of Yom haShoah, the Holocaust. 

This year Beth El, at 2 Concord Ave., had the privilege to hear from Temple member Thomas Dunlap speaking about his recently released book, ‘Before the Holocaust: Three German-Jewish Lives, 1870 – 1939.’

The enormity of the Jewish holocaust – six million, including one-and-a-half million children – is almost impossible to imagine. In 1998, a middle school in rural Tennessee set out to collect six million paper clips to honor the dead and to teach tolerance. So many paper clips arrived from all over the world that they filled a warehouse.

Dunlap, who lives in Belmont with his wife, Paula Lerner, the award-winning photographer, and their two daughters, found the autobiographies of German Jews who escaped Germany before the war and the subsequent Holocaust in the Harvard University archives. Dunlap then translated, edited, and annotated the autobiographies of three for his book.

Dunlap, an academic translator, chose the writings of a woman physician, and two men, a lawyer and a teacher. By the late 1930s, the woman and one of the men found refuge in America; the other fled to Palestine, soon to be Israel. Thousands of Jews in Germany, and millions of others elsewhere in Europe, had no country to take them in.

Patch: Of the more than 250 autobiographies from Jews who escaped Germany, you chose three, those of Käte Frankenthal, Max Polke and Joseph Levy. Why?

Dunlap: Of the 263 entries submitted for a contest in 1940, the vast majority, though not all, were by German Jews. My goal was to provide an insight into the kinds of lives possible for German Jews between 1871, when they gained full political and civic rights, and Hitler’s rise to power.

I wanted essays long and detailed enough also about the pre-Nazi period, because understanding how German Jews fit and did not fit into German society is crucial to understanding both how the Nazi assault on the Jewish community unfolded and how the Jews responded.

Patch: Hitler and his party, your writers show, never won a majority, but imposed a dictatorship through coercion and terror. Max Polke quotes a Gestapo agent in 1938, who prayed for peace, not war.  Peace would have meant no Auschwitz. Does this outcome remind us about the value of democracy and its fragility?

Dunlap: Historically it is certainly true that democracy has been more peaceful, and that the great humanitarian disasters of the past and the present are the work of dictatorships or authoritarian regimes. As for the fragility of democracy, I think when democracy cannot deliver on its promises, or when people believe it cannot, such as in the Weimar Republic prior to Hitler, democracy becomes vulnerable to extremism. The great crisis of European Jewry from the late 19th century through Nazi Germany was also the great crisis of liberal democracy.

Patch: In World War I, each of the three writers served Germany with loyalty and distinction, as a physician or soldiers. Joseph Levy’s son won the Iron Cross for bravery.  Yet they were hounded for being Jews.  Why is the mind of an anti-Semite so closed?

Dunlap: The anti-Semitism in Europe was an extreme form of projection with deep roots. In Germany, the Jews were identified with all the forces that seemed to threaten society from Bolshevism to unfettered capitalism to modernist cultural trends. Extreme anti-Semitism, or any extreme form of prejudice for that matter, strikes me as a kind of psychosis all too common throughout history and rarely amenable to reason or common sense.

Patch: “What is it these people [the Nazis] are not capable of…?” asks a Christian friend of Joseph Levy after the burning of a synagogue. In spite of assaults, restrictive laws, book burnings, and the concentration camps, why couldn’t these writers in 1940, let alone the victims across Europe, foresee Nazi plans for mass murder and the Holocaust?

Dunlap: I don’t think that any of us, in 1939 or early 1940, could have foreseen the Holocaust. Historical hindsight tends to distort our view of the past and what could have and should have been known and understand at any given moment. One reason I find these autobiographies so interesting is that they were written before the Holocaust, which means that their perspective was not tainted by what unfolded later.

Saul Friedländer, a famous Holocaust historian, and others have shown that whatever the rhetoric of the Nazis may have been, there were no plans for mass murder and the physical extermination of the Jews when these accounts were written. The goal of Nazi policy at that time was to make life unbearable for Jews in Germany so as to force them to leave the country.

Facing legal and physical assaults, Jews remembered past oppression. There was historical precedent for what the Nazis did: segregate the Jews and subject them to legal and social discrimination and eventually expel them. Of course, all three left because it became clear they had no future in Germany. But I’m not sure anyone, even in his darkest moments, could have foreseen what was to come.

Patch: Your writers show impressive resilience. Käte Frankenthal, an experienced psychiatrist, sells ice cream on the streets of New York until she gets her medical license. In Germany, attorney Polke defends his Jewish clients in courts with Nazi sympathies. Assaulted, the teacher Levy continues supporting Jewish organizations.  Are they are models for youth about integrity overcoming prejudice and injustice?

Dunlap: All three writers strike me as individuals of great personal and moral integrity; yet neither the German Jews nor the majority of Christians in Germany could stop the madness unfolding under the Nazis. Perhaps the more important lesson is awareness of what is going on within society and to stand up to prejudice and injustice.

Patch: Speaking of youth, do you think the youth of Germany, if they read your book, are open to the lessons within it about the dangers of anti-Semitism and racism?

Dunlap: From my own experience growing up in Germany, I can say that German society is highly sensitized to the dangers you mention. Of course, that doesn’t mean that anti-Semitism and racism don’t exist – they certainly do. But because of the historical legacy of Nazism, German society is perhaps more vigilant than others about these dangers.