On Germans and Jews: Reply to Dennis Klein

Abstract

One does not read books or essays entitled Blacks and Americans, Mormons and Americans or and Americans; yet Dennis Klein uses the formula and in his review of Peter Gay's Freud, Jews and Other Germans (NGC 19, Winter, 1980). I don't think that in choosing his title Peter Gay intended to be funny; he correctly speaks of and Other Germans. One may argue, as Mr. Klein does, that assimilation did not prevent the recurrence of anti-Semitism; but that is decidedly not the same thing as saying that assimilation did not work. There was no more assimilated Jew than Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. Those Germans and Austrian Jews who had not immigrated from the East recently had no other culture than German. Of course, no one will deny regional distinctions and religious differences; just as Faulkner was a Southern writer, so one might call Kafka a Bohemian-Jewish writer in the German language; but Jews were spread over the whole spectrum, from monarchist to anarchist, from North to South. It should be difficult to tell how Hugo von Hofmannsthal or Stefan Zweig were writers or how Johann Strauss's Jewish grandfather made the Vienna Valse Jewish. These are Nazi arguments which assign to 'blood the prime role in the making of a man's mind and disregard the preponderant influence of language, education, daily environment and experience. Regional and sectarian cleavages and class differences have always been very prominent in German culture. In my gymnasium class in Berlin, which was Protestant and upper middle class, the Jews were more integrated than a Catholic, or the son of a worker, a barber or a nobleman. In his much-acclaimed Prophets Without Honor Frederic Grunfeld cites many Jews for whom before the Nazis, cooperation and understanding were the rule rather than the exception .... in business, banking, publishing, the arts (and) on a personal level. ... one third of the Jewish marriages was mixed. Jews and other Germans went to school together, worked together, played together (there were not, as at that time in the U.S., segregated or retricted beaches and resort places), served in the same army and were killed together. My father was a member of a Patriotic League of Jewish War Veterans and of the Central