Book Review: Fighter, Worker, and Family Man. German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 by Sebastian Huebel

Abstract

One day in December 1942, during his internment as an illegal alien in Switzerland, Herbert Lewandowski opened his diary and mused over the significance of regular journaling. Partly in jest and partly in earnest he then added: “In keeping a diary at least I hold on to being a man” (Lee van Dovski, Schweizer Tagebuch eines Internierten. Pfeil Verlag, 1946, 35). Born in 1896 in Cassel, Germany, to a Jewish family, the Catholic convert Lewandowski was on the run from the genocidal antisemitic violence of the Nazis, which took the lives of several of his family members. Writing a diary may not appear to be an obvious expression of masculinity and manhood in their various cultural codifications. For Lewandowski, a product of a certain social milieu that celebrated cultural cultivation and refinement as a form of “making it,” the connection between keeping a diary and his identity as a man was not that big of a stretch. But as an interned refugee—safe, “but as a prisoner,” (28) as he put it—in a state of confined agency, the significance of his diary extended far beyond the habits and aspirations typical of his middle-class German-Jewish background. It was a rare outlet for creativity and productivity that allowed Lewandowski to insist on his right to define himself at a time when his ability to do so was increasingly threatened. The stories of men like Lewandowski, and those of their family and fellow community members, are at the focus of Sebastian Huebel’s important new book, Fighter, Worker and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933–1941. Huebel’s book explores how the National Socialist regime deliberately targeted Jewish masculinity as an integral element of its ideology as well as in policy, how Jewish men living in Germany at the time responded to these attacks on a personal level and how German-Jewish organizations confronted them on behalf of the entire community. While the regime’s actions towards undermining Jewish masculinity and Jewish men “signified a loss of authority and created feelings of powerlessness that were intricately linked to conceptions of masculinity (Huebel, 7),”Huebel shows that Jewish men developed a variety of strategies that helped to preserve their sense of agency and dignity in their pursuit of fighting against their intended emasculation (as understood according to the prevailing gender norms of their time and place). Gender historians have been producing incredibly important scholarship on the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust for several decades. Their work has made it clear that it is necessary to approach the analysis of that dark period with serious consideration of gender politics and gendered experiences. And yet, studies focusing explicitly on men and masculinity (and especially Jewish masculinity) remain scant still. Existing works mostly tend to focus on masculinity as a component of Fascism. Huebel’s focus on the gendered identities of Jewish men therefore brings to the forefront a theme that has been given insufficient scholarly attention. His thorough and accomplished treatment of the matter makes this contribution ever more welcomed. Book Reviews