Totalitarianism from Below: Toward a History of Emotions of German Jews

How did German Jews react to the Nazi persecution after 1933? Although the totalitarian paradigm has advanced our understanding of the inner workings of the Nazi state, a top-down focus and legal aspects have tended to neglect lived experiences of Jewish victims reconstructed from the bottom up. Too often, the history of German Jews has been written from the vantage point of Auschwitz, presenting the German state stripping its former Jewish citizens of their rights before their deportation. Instead, what scholarship on the Third Reich now requires is the recovery of emotions, perceptions, and uncertainties before the war. This paper offers the first insights into what aims to be a history of the emotions of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, a field merely in its infancy. Based upon a dozen personal memoirs submitted by German Jewish émigrés to the so-called Harvard contest in 1941, the paper argues that the social exclusion of German Jews after 1933 is a powerfully emotional process. Historians have debated the usefulness of the concept of Volksgemeinschaft (peopleʼs community) for describing the enactment of Nazi principles of inclusion into and exclusion from German society. The paper will demonstrate that German Jews were doubly affected by the buildup of this emotional Volksgemeinschaft. Their feelings of belonging to and love of Germany were progressively reduced and destroyed while their emotions turned from love to hate, despair, and fear. Their display of emotions became more and more private and cut off from former friends and neighbors. By analyzing intimate violence and personal accounts in totalitarian regimes, the paper joins recent studies that stress the capacity of victims to resist and write against the process of dehumanization carried out by the Nazis.