In recent years, the study of the Holocaust through a feminist lens has seen tremendous growth. However, little has been published about the history of Jewish men in Nazi Germany, particularly in the years preceding the outbreak of World War II. The new book by Sebastian Huebel seeks to bridge this historiographical gap. On one side, Huebel shows how German-Jewish men, already before 1939, were subjected to a gender-specific process of marginalization from the Aryan Volksgemeinschaft, and, on the other, the book argues that many of these men resisted emasculation through “contestation, negotiation, and defiance” (7).
In each chapter of his book, Huebel operates on three different levels: discourses and ideas; legal and social practices; and subjective experiences. The author shows how the Nazis sought to make Jewish lives unbearable through the circulation of antisemitic discourses and the implementation of antisemitic rules. At the same time, Huebel exposes how Jewish men – fathers, husbands, veterans, and workers – dealt with these antisemitic ideas and practices and affirmed their own masculinities by opposing – and adapting to – the hostile sociopolitical system they lived in.
The first chapter analyzes the marginalization of Jewish men in the cultural-military realm of Nazi Germany. Compared to the “militarized” Aryan men, Jews were presented as cowards. Their military valor and their role in World War I were denied. However, Huebel emphasizes, Jewish men developed strategies to counter Nazi intimidation by performing their own military masculinity. They embraced their participation in the Great War as brave soldiers and officers of the Imperial German Army and used it as evidence of their Germanness.
The second chapter explores how Nazi propaganda represented Jewish men as hypersexualized individuals intent on defiling the German race. While Aryan men were presented as self-controlled, Jewish men were depicted as prone to extreme and uncontrollable passions. Newspapers, posters, and children's books were used to portray the stereotypical physical features of the Jews and convince German men and women to avoid them. Sexual antisemitism forced Jewish men to change their attitude in the presence of women and avoid behaviors that could be perceived even remotely as flirtatious. Fears and anxieties about racial defilement deeply affected Jewish men who began to believe that having “Aryan” features was the only way to feel safe when walking in the streets.
The third chapter looks at how the Nazi regime strived to emasculate Jewish men by depriving them of their work, their career, and their financial autonomy. Through laws, the Nazi regime gradually but steadily reduced Jewish men's employment opportunities in public administration and private companies. However, as Huebel shows, many German Jews were able to adapt to the economic restrictions imposed by the Nazis and continued to provide for their families, preserving their roles as breadwinners. Many men worked as long as possible in their current professions and, at times, resorted to illegal measures to make ends meet. Huebel interestingly observes that, after the war broke out, many men considered forced labor as a way to see themselves as useful and as an opportunity to prove their value to the Nazi victimizers.
The fourth chapter focuses on how the Nazi regime challenged Jewish men's roles as husbands, fathers, and guardians of their households. However, as Huebel emphasizes, we should not perceive Jewish men as passive victims of the Nazi system. Even if many were concerned about their inability to support their wives and children, these husbands and fathers were still able to be emotionally supportive and present. Nazism undermined Jewish men's protector roles, but the Nazis were not able to completely destroy these roles. Jewish men communicated affection to their loved ones and offered guidance in every possible way to their wives and children. The privacy of the home became for many men the only space in which they could be themselves.
Chapters 5 and 6 focus on Nazi brutality outside and inside the concentration camps before the outbreak of World War II. Both chapters show how German-Jewish men were specifically targeted not simply as Jews but as Jewish men. Huebel explains how, in the early years of the Third Reich, men were the primary victims of the Nazi horror, while women were generally spared the most brutal forms of abuse. Chapter 5 stresses how in the first years of the regime and around the time of Kristallnacht, Jewish men experienced extreme forms of violence even outside the camps. There were very few ways to resist. For most, running away, hiding from the brownshirts, and hoping to be perceived as “Aryans” were the only possibility to avoid brutalization and death.
In the last chapter, Huebel focuses on German-Jewish men held in concentration camps between 1933 and 1939. In his opinion, it is essential to recognize the gender specificity of the population confined in these spaces. The book describes the brutal violence inflicted by SS and SA guards on innocent victims, but it also shows how quite a few Jewish men found ways to preserve their masculinity. In many cases, they handled their lives in the camps with a militaristic attitude. Former soldiers and World War I veterans showed a good adaptation to order, discipline, and arbitrary rules. Moreover, many Jewish men relied on a sense of belonging and camaraderie with their fellow inmates in order to survive. Huebel reveals how many men continued to perform their roles as fathers and husbands from the concentration camps. They sent encouraging letters home that gave advice to their wives on how to handle financial and practical issues, but some also insisted on the necessity of emigrating as soon as possible. However, after their release from the camps, many men, wounded in soul and body and prohibited from revealing the violence they suffered, began a complicated process of readaptation to their family life.
When studying Nazi Germany – and the Holocaust in particular – scholars might tend to overemphasize the power of state institutions aimed at annihilating the non-Aryan Other. Huebel, without losing sight of Nazi power, invites us to change our perspective and see how many men, despite the hardships they had to face, were still able to retain their humanity and express their own agency. Fighter, Worker, and Family Man is essentially a book about resistance, revealing how many German-Jewish men were able to find ways to fight against a system that wanted to humiliate, dehumanize, and ultimately kill them.
