The World of Aufbau: Hitler’s Refugees in America by Peter Schrag

Abstract

Reviewed by: The World of Aufbau: Hitler's Refugees in America by Peter Schrag Judith M. Gerson The World of Aufbau: Hitler's Refugees in America. By Peter Schrag. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019. 272 pages. $39.95 (cloth). Aufbau, the émigré newspaper of German-speaking Jewish refugees, had its start in 1934 in New York City as the occasional newsletter of the German-Jewish Club, which was renamed the New World Club in 1940 (116). Within a few short years it grew to become a monthly paper, then semi-monthly, and shortly thereafter expanded again and became a weekly tabloid, regularly reaching 30,000 subscribers in its postwar years and an additional 11,000 in its heyday between 1946 and 1947 (4). During its 70 year lifespan, its readership was concentrated in New York City, particularly in its earliest years, as that is where most of the refugees fleeing Nazi rule had settled before the war. Limited numbers of Jews settled there during the war and many more would restart their lives again in New York in its aftermath. There was also a sizeable readership on the West Coast, in Chicago, and other large cities, as well as in smaller communities throughout the United States and in German Jewish émigré homes scattered throughout the world. From the start, its readership was multinational—a reflection of their diasporic histories and interests. In addition to its American subscribers, recently arrived refugees in England read Aufbau, and before the Nazi occupation still others read the paper in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France. Those fortunate to reach Lisbon in the early 1940s read Aufbau as they waited to sail from the last open European seaport. And during the war, many exiled and stateless people read the paper in Shanghai, Palestine, Bolivia, and elsewhere. No matter where they were located, readers' interests and needs routinely cut across national borders—something that Aufbau's editors and writers appreciated and believed was their responsibility to cover. Indeed, the paper's international focus was the hallmark of many of its editorials, articles, and columns, making it comparable in this respect to other foreign language émigré newspapers. Readers relied heavily on Aufbau's extensive coverage of the [End Page 415] expansion of Nazi rule, the growing atrocities, the war and genocide, and the period of liberation and attempts at restorative justice that followed. Until flight became impossible, readers combed the newspaper for crucial information about remaining routes to safety, requirements for immigration, and updates on the conditions in occupied and unoccupied territories. During the war, Aufbau was an important source of news about the conflict, the deportations, internments, and mass killings, covering events in Europe, North Africa, the Far East and Middle East. After the war, the paper served as a hub for those searching for loved ones, it helped to organize aid for displaced persons, and recruit witnesses to testify at war crime trials. Peter Schrag has two equally important intertwined goals in writing The World of Aufbau: Hitler's Refugees in America—an immensely thoughtful chronicle and perceptive analysis of the newspaper and the refugee community it served. In Schrag's expert hands, Aufbau becomes the essential lens through which he interprets the everyday lives of "Hitler's refugees," a term that includes the German-speaking Jews who fled before the war, survived in the camps, in hiding, or in forced labor, and who were displaced in its aftermath. Schrag's seamless account of the newspaper and its readers living in the United States offers compelling evidence to support his perspective that Aufbau was the hometown newspaper of the German Jewish community in exile (11ff.). Although numerous researchers have cited Aufbau's pages in their scholarship, Schrag's volume is the first book-length treatment of the newspaper and thus fills an important void. This rigorously researched book makes a second significant set of contributions building an encyclopedic portrait of the everyday lives of German Jewish refugees in the US from the 1930s through the present day. Schrag explains that they were far from a uniform community. While some immigrants were economically and socially privileged, and some were or would become famous artists and...