Babies and (Zionist) Banners: Jewish DPs and the Search for Normality

The iconic image, oft displayed on book covers or in exhibits, of Jewish DP life in postwar Germany depicts a defiant march, with banners demanding free emigration to Palestine and denouncing the “British hangmen” who deny entry, led by women parading baby carriages. This paper addresses the interconnected ways in which both Zionist activism and the DP “baby boom” offered displaced stateless Jewish refugees a sense of collective and individual agency, expressing the remarkably oft-articulated desire for a kind of quotidian “normality,” despite, and in direct response to, the “abnormal” conditions of life in transit on “blood-stained German soil” after the traumatic rupture of the Holocaust. For young DPs whose prewar families and national identities had been forever destroyed, marriage and children promised the guarantee of a future, however uncertain; children became a tangible sign of normality for the individual and continuity for the collective. The same arguably could be said of Zionism, which imagined a “normal” national home in a postwar world where citizenship in prewar homelands did not protect Jews but only nation states guaranteed universal human rights.  For displaced Jews, whether they had survived under Nazi occupation or in exile in the Soviet Union and whether their own preferred destination was Palestine or (as in many cases) not, the demand for a particularist nation state in which they could automatically claim the rights of citizens seemed the most plausible path to political agency.  In this paper, family formation and Zionist politics in the Jewish DP camps and communities of postwar Germany provoke questions about the relationship between the personal and the political as well as the individual, familial, and collective in the search for a new “normality” and sense of “future” in the aftermath of catastrophe.