Abraham Ascher. A Community under Siege: The Jews of Breslau under Nazism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. x + 324 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-5518-4.

Reviewed by Jill Storm (Department of History, Washington University)
Published on H-German (March, 2008)

An Insider Perspective on Interwar Breslau

In 1925, the Jewish population in the city of Breslau (Wroc?aw) in Lower Silesia numbered 23,000. Its diverse Jewish community had several synagogues and Jewish schools, including a theological seminary that trained aspiring rabbis and scholars from all over Germany. By May 1945, only 160 Jews remained in the city. In A Community under Siege, historian Abraham Ascher provides a detailed narrative of the response to years of exclusion and persecution in the once vibrant and integrated Jewish community in Breslau. Ascher argues that the Jews of Breslau resisted National Socialist control by turning within and strengthening Jewish institutions. In order to gather a comprehensive picture of Jewish life in Breslau during the Nazi period, Ascher culled sources from archives in New York, Warsaw, Jerusalem, and Wroclaw. He also conducted many interviews with survivors. Ascher skillfully includes the direct voices of these survivors and weaves anecdotes from individual memoirs into the history.

A specialist on late imperial Russia, Ascher undertook a detailed study of Jewish life in Breslau largely for personal reasons. A native of the city, Ascher witnessed for himself the early stages of persecution. His family gradually emigrated. Ascher's father made his way to the United States and his siblings journeyed to Great Britain and Palestine in 1938; his mother and he left for England in the summer of 1939. Longstanding curiosity about the fates of those who remained led him to write this history, even though it falls outside his expertise. Even though Ascher limits most of his childhood remembrances to the introduction, a sense of personal memory nonetheless pervades the work. The personal quest is perhaps most evident in his prolonged search for information on the American consul who, in exchange for a bribe, procured the necessary papers for Ascher's father to go to the United States. Although the work recounts many events in its author's life, however, the book is much more than a memoir. It is instead an attempt to characterize the ways in which the Jewish community of the city collectively and individually responded to persecution.

The book opens with a survey of the Jews of Breslau from the Middle Ages to the Nazi period. Ascher focuses his attention on the post-1871 rise of antisemitism and its culmination in the appointment of Hitler to the chancellorship. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Jews of Breslau were culturally and economically influential but became less important in the public and political spheres. They achieved a "fairly high level of integration" (p. 43), but remained a distinct minority whose primary social contacts were with other Jews. This picture of Jewish-Christian relations in Breslau corresponds to the picture presented in other historical accounts, including Till van Rahden's Juden und andere Breslauer (2000).

The success of Jewish acculturation in Breslau makes it even more surprising that initial support for the Nazis in Breslau was comparatively high. After voting in proportionally high numbers for the Nazi Party (43.5 percent compared to 37.4 percent nationally), the majority of residents in Breslau welcomed the Nazis. Ascher looks at how the NSDAP quickly infiltrated local leadership in Breslau, especially the police force, from 1933 to 1935. Excluded from public arena and increasingly unable to conduct profitable business among Gentiles, the Jews of Breslau responded by focusing inward and developing closer communal ties. When excluded from cultural events, the Jews started their own. They held concerts and sold-out theater productions. After many Jews in public schools transferred to Jewish schools, these became the social and cultural center of the community, maintaining a degree of normality in a tumultuous, uneasy time. That Jewish schools and other key institutions remained opened until the spring of 1942 testifies to the relative success of their resistance and the community's ability to unify. The strengthening of Jewish institutions was a "stance of defiance" (p. 23) for a community under attack. In 1935, the elders of the community decided to undertake a costly renovation of the crumbling New Synagogue. This and other signs of ongoing optimism revealed a community under siege but not defeated.

Ascher focuses primarily on the economic rather than the physical harm perpetuated against the Jews of Breslau. By 1935, the Aryanization of Jewish businesses was already in full force. In both subtle and overt ways, Jews were deprived of the ability to flourish economically. Eventually they were unable to eke out even meager livings. With the cooperation of local leadership in Breslau, the Nazis gradually cheated the Jews of all their assets, ultimately forcing them to fund their own deportations. Ascher successfully reveals how the criminality of the Nazis was at best only thinly veiled under "legal" rulings. The "meanness and greed of [Breslau's] bureaucracy" was evident throughout the period of persecution (p. 233). The appropriation of Jewish wealth, purportedly for the benefit of the German nation as a whole, more often than not masked local interests and greed.

Ascher urges his fellow historians to see numerous ways in which Nazi ideology was a cover for selfishness, what he describes as "bestiality in the service of ideology" (p. 23). Since Ascher seeks to challenge overly simplistic notions of Nazi ideology, it would have been helpful for him to reference directly the vast historiography on the issue. This lack of attention to larger historiographical debates is also evident in his argument about Jewish resistance in Breslau. Without a more theoretical conception of Jewish resistance, which defines the concept and establishes its parameters, the term can rapidly lose its meaning. Ascher presents any positive assertion of community as a form of Jewish resistance. But what were the limits of Jewish resistance under Nazism? Must it have been a conscious, deliberate undertaking or did the sheer act of living under Nazi persecution constitute resistance? A more sustained reference to the larger discussion that continues in the field about how to define the term would have strengthened his argument.

Historiographic shortcomings aside, the book is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the Nazi period and a very good micro-history. Ascher adeptly tells the story of the Breslau Jewish community. A myriad of individual voices leap from the page to capture in detail the harrowing years of emigration, deportation, and eventual extermination.

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Citation: Jill Storm. Review of Ascher, Abraham, A Community under Siege: The Jews of Breslau under Nazism. H-German, H-Net Reviews. March, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14339

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