Nicola Wenge. Integration und Ausgrenzung in der städtischen Gesellschaft: Eine jüdisch-nichtjüdische Beziehungsgeschichte Kölns 1918-1933. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern Verlag, 2005. X + 479 S. EUR 51.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-8053-3459-4.

Reviewed by Jay Howard Geller (Department of History, University of Tulsa)
Published on H-German (December, 2007)

Non-Jews and Jews: Together in Weimar-era Cologne

There has been no shortage of scholarship on the situation of the Jews in the Weimar Republic and on non-Jewish, German views of Jews in Weimar-era Germany. The Weimar era is often portrayed as a period of unparallelled integration or a period of increasing antisemitism and social displacement. Nicola Wenge argues that both pictures can be true, depending on a variety of situational factors. To make her case, she seeks to answer some fundamental questions as they apply in Cologne. How did Jews and non-Jews relate to one another on an everyday basis in an era of increasing antisemitism? How did they interact and regard each other in voluntary associations and civic institutions? How did non-Jews promote broader social integration and combat antisemitism? What changes occurred over time?

Wenge argues that neither the Jewish community nor the antisemitic camp was homogeneous. Because of the latter factor, she posits that Shulamit Volkov's widely accepted characterization of antisemitism as a cultural code of the political Right does not apply in Weimar-era Cologne. Antisemitism did not strictly delineate unreconstructed opponents of the Weimar Republic from republicans. Anti-Jewish sentiment in Cologne was largely situational. One could express "antisemitic" views on one issue and not express them on another, with no bearing on one's broader political outlook. In additional to situational factors, she argues, gender, age, and social class affected antisemitism as much or more than milieu. For example, she finds in analyzing working-class Catholic attitudes toward Jews that class allegiance trumped religious allegiance. Additionally, the Catholic Church and the Jewish community had more in common than Catholic and Protestant churches in their attitudes toward modernization and liberalization. Indeed, on many issues of religious-political significance, religious Jews and Catholics formed coalitions. On the other hand, "milieu managers" (such as group elites) often found themselves reacting to antisemitism from below within their social, political, professional, or religious groups. In such situations, elites attempted to channel antisemitic sentiment, lest they lose their leadership positions to other, more radical exponents of anti-Jewish sentiment. Overall, however, the impact of the Catholic Church and political Catholicism enhanced opportunities for Jewish integration and civic cooperation in Cologne. Indeed, Wenge finds that "bourgeois" and Protestant groups expressed more opposition to Jewish integration than their Catholic counterparts.

After a bibliographical and methodological introduction, Wenge presents an initial chapter on the history of Jewish integration in Cologne. Cologne's Jewish community was small, constituting a little more than 2 percent of the population. Wenge shows Cologne to have been an important center of Jewish religious and communal life in the larger region. Both the Jewish and Protestant communities enjoyed greater average prosperity than the dominant Catholic community, and Cologne Jews were disproportionately overrepresented in the legal and medical professions. Nonetheless, the community remained religiously and socioeconomically heterogeneous.

Wenge's main exposition is divided into five chapters, each on a separate, yet interrelated facet of Jewish/non-Jewish relations: everyday encounters, cultural life, university life, economics, and politics. Interconfessional socialization manifested itself through neighborly assistance, children's playgroups, associational life, and in mixed marriages. However, Cologne's Jews still socialized primarily with other Jews. Moreover, antisemitic sentiment did permeate many social contacts. While mixed marriages remained common and even increased in the period under examination, interconfessional socialization, both among individual neighbors and on an associational level, diminished in the late 1920s. That said, gender, age, class status, and place of origin strongly impacted interconfessional relationships. Wenge posits that middle-class German Jews had closer friendships with non-Jews than poor Jews or even many Jews of the haute bourgeoisie; however, working-class Jews, including those from eastern Europe, had closer neighborly relations with their class comrades than with their bourgeois coreligionists. Jewish children mixed with non-Jews more than adults did, but they also experienced the most frequent discriminatory exclusion from organizations and social groups. According to Wenge, the Jewish bourgeoisie was most strongly integrated into interconfessional associational life, but tended to socialize and to marry among itself. Gender was a critical factor as women mixed far more than men, and the women's movement remained less susceptible to antisemitism than other groups. Over all, antisemitic parties remained largely unable to influence or to limit interconfessional mixing in the years of the Weimar Republic. In Weimar's twilight years, a pervasive antisemitic undertone increased in society, and Jewish/non-Jewish mixing decreased. While this change was neither initiated nor instrumentalized by local elites, they failed to combat it energetically.

Cologne's cultural life was a site of particularly strong interconfessional integration. Cooperation across religious lines played a notable role in the promotion of the arts and modern cultural life, the groundwork partially having been laid by joint participation in Cologne's famed Carnival. Anti-Jewish sentiment in bourgeois circles did not preclude cooperation in cultural associations. Moreover, city leaders did not shy away from appointing Jews to positions of leadership or authority in cultural institutions and even applauded manifestations of specifically Jewish culture in Cologne. In this, they had the support of the population, and Nazi-style cultural policies found little resonance in Cologne before 1933. More effective were efforts by traditional cultural conservatives against cultural liberalism, which in turn led to an institutionalization of some anti-Jewish sentiments in aspects of the cultural scene (especially theater). Overall, however, neither the general populace nor so-called milieu elites desired segregation and exclusion of Jewish patrons, creators, and consumers of culture. Such a course would have threatened Cologne's position as a cultural metropolis.

Intellectual life, particularly at Cologne's university, was another arena for contact and conflict between Jews and non-Jews. Conventional wisdom holds that the university was known for its liberal atmosphere, relatively high number of Jewish faculty members, and relative lack of radicalization among the student body compared to many other German universities of the time. Wenge argues that the case is far more complex than previously thought. The university was generally less antisemitic than other universities in the 1920s. Jewish academics did have a fair chance for employment at the university and were integrated into the city's intellectual life. Their senior colleagues were plainly interested in promoting the university's reputation through the employment of renowned scholars, regardless of religion. Still, limits to nondiscrimination at the university remained. Foreign and foreign-born students faced exclusion and Jewish doctoral candidates endured discrimination. The university seemed to have a differentiated attitude to Jewish academicians: established scholars who brought prestige to the university were shielded from antisemitism, others were not. Moreover, their peers ostracized Jewish students. By 1930, anti-Jewish violence plagued the university. Though university officials did not condone it, they did little to stamp it out, either, and antisemitism became an ever-stronger presence in Cologne academia.

Economic and commercial life provides Wenge's most interesting field of examination, the one with the most pronounced manifestations of antisemitism. The same Catholic establishment that tempered social antisemitism abetted it in economic matters. Leading Jewish businessmen joined and even led commercial and industrial associations. However, calls for boycotts of Jewish shops found resonance with a populace accustomed to thinking of Jews as having an insalubrious effect on the local economy. By 1928, National Socialists found an audience for their economic antisemitism. But the radical Right was not the only group evincing anti-Jewish prejudice in economic matters. Catholic leaders were also culpable here. In an atmosphere of heightened economic competition, the Catholic middle class contributed to the rise of antisemitism through calls for boycotts of Jewish businesses. Wenge also claims that Catholic elites promoted such boycotts in order to maintain the political support of the Catholic middle classes and not lose it to the Nazis. Though this course of action may been a combination of political calculation and in-group protectionism rather than true Judeophobia, Wenge sees it as only a few steps removed from the infamous Nazi-led boycott of Jewish shops in April 1933. She also points out that Church-sponsored boycotts of Jewish businesses did not occur in Protestant regions of Prussia in the 1920s.

The previous categories of examination lead to politics. Jews were active participants in local political parties and government during the Weimar Republic, though Wenge does not go into great detail on their political engagement. In matters of politics influencing Jewish schools, Jewish cemeteries, and kosher butchers, the Jewish community generally enjoyed the support of local government. On the other hand, Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe (Ostjuden) were never really a part of the confessionally neutral or interconfessional community in Cologne. As a result, they faced overt discrimination (though this pattern differs little from other German cities at the time). During the turbulence that wracked Germany from 1919 through 1923, antisemitism grew dramatically in other parts of Germany, but was largely suppressed in Cologne by British occupiers. By the mid-1920s, when the occupation had ended, street violence against Jews in Cologne increased. Police and city officials reacted against this threat with legal means, as did representatives of the SPD and Center Party in the city council, but Cologne's judiciary was no more vigorous in sentencing right-wing criminals than courts elsewhere in Germany. Nonetheless, police and republican politicians continued their efforts even after 1930, when the Nazis began achieving electoral success in Cologne and public violence increased markedly.

For her book, Wenge surveyed an immense body of secondary literature. She integrates it and responds to it well. Her source base, however, is occasionally somewhat narrow, especially when it comes to specifically Jewish sources from Cologne. Finding abundant, highly focused extant Jewish sources from pre-Nazi Germany can be challenging. The book is also organized as so many German dissertations are: rigidly structured around thematically based chapters and subchapters rather than following a chronological narrative. This structure makes the study particularly useful for the scholar, but much less readable as a story about Jews in Weimar-era Cologne.

It is unsurprising that a doctoral student at the University of Cologne would focus on Cologne, although it must be said that the Rhine metropolis makes for an interesting case study. Its relative size, its "western" orientation, the centrality of Catholicism to Cologne life, and the dominance of the Catholic, republican Center Party all make for intriguing variables. However, the same factors that make Cologne particularly interesting also make it rather unrepresentative. Its size and confessional composition separate it from other notably cosmopolitan cities, such as Berlin and Hamburg. Its politics and pervasive social ambiance differentiate it from other Catholic metropolises, such as Munich and Breslau. While Wenge's study thus will not answer all questions regarding the state of Jewish/non-Jewish relations in the Weimar Republic, it convincingly argues for a nuanced and variegated view of the situation. It also provides an admirable model of highly academic German-Jewish Ortsgeschichte, and it is hoped that more such studies will follow.

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Citation: Jay Howard Geller. Review of Wenge, Nicola, Integration und Ausgrenzung in der städtischen Gesellschaft: Eine jüdisch-nichtjüdische Beziehungsgeschichte Kölns 1918-1933. H-German, H-Net Reviews. December, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13984

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