Beyond Marginalization: The (German-)Jewish Soldiers’ Agency in Times of War, 1914–1918

Abstract

Abstract This article rethinks research on Jewish experiences during the First World War and asks what changes if the concept of ‘agency’ is explicitly applied to the subject of Jewish soldiers. Over the past years, historians working on the (German-)Jewish war experience have avoided a one-sided narrative of Jewish marginalization by focusing on larger questions of civic and ethnic belonging. This article picks up this thread, putting emphasis on the possibilities and concrete manifestations of the (German-)Jewish soldiers’ agency and how it was negotiated between the war and the home fronts. It argues that by concentrating on Jewish soldiers as actors in their own right, a more ambivalent narrative becomes visible—one that sees Jews during the First World War not as marginalized subjects across the board. Even though many Jewish soldiers experienced exclusion on an individual and collective level, their coming to terms with what it meant to be a soldier and a Jew during the war frequently triggered a process of Jewish reorientation as well. Bringing these two perspectives together, I show how Jews in and outside Germany were not simply bystanders during the national crisis, but took an active part in shaping their own history.