German Jews in Love: A History

By Christian Bailey

This book explores the dynamic role of love in German-Jewish lives, from the birth of the German Empire in the 1870s, to the 1970s, a generation after the Shoah. During a remarkably turbulent hundred-year period when German Jews experienced five political regimes, rapid urbanization, transformations in gender relations, and war and genocide, the romantic ideals of falling in love and marrying for love helped German Jews to develop a new sense of self. Appeals to romantic love were also significant in justifying relationships between Jews and non-Jews, even when those unions created conflict within and between communities.

By incorporating novel approaches from the history of emotions and life-cycle history, Christian Bailey moves beyond existing research into the sexual and racial politics of modern Germany and approaches a new frontier in the study of subjectivity and the self. German Jews in Love draws on a rich array of sources, from newspapers and love letters to state and other official records. Calling on this evidence, Bailey shows the ways German Jews' romantic relationships reveal an aspect of acculturation that has been overlooked: how deeply cultural scripts worked their way into emotions; those most intimate and seemingly pre-political aspects of German-Jewish subjectivity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781503634169

Christian Bailey

Christian Bailey is Assistant Professor of History at Purchase College, State University of New York. After having completed his PhD at Yale University, he was appointed Max Kade Fellow at the Free University in Berlin and has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the History of Emotions Research Center in the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin.

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GERMAN JEWS IN LOVE

A HISTORY

CHRISTIAN BAILEY

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2023 by John Christian Bailey. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bailey, Christian, author.

Title: German Jews in love : a history / Christian Bailey.

Other titles: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2023] | Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022022179 (print) | LCCN 2022022180 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503632790 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503634169 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Jews—Germany—History—19th century. | Jews—Germany—History—20th century. | Jews—Germany—Identity—History. | Love—Germany—History. | Marriage—Germany—History. | Intermarriage—Germany—History. | Man-woman relationships—Germany—History.

Classification: LCC DS134.25 .B35 2023 (print) | LCC DS134.25 (ebook) | DDC 943/.004924—dc23/eng/20220614

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022179

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022180

Typeset by Elliott Beard in Garamond Premier Pro 11/15

Cover painting by Charlotte Salomon . Collection Jewish Museum, Amsterdam © Charlotte Salomon Foundation.

Cover design by Gia Giasullo

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

Edited by David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein

For Suzanne, with my love

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE. A Tabernacle in the Desert: The Loving Marriage in Imperial Germany

TWO. A Society of Two?: Partnerships in the Interwar Democracies

THREE. They Stuck Together like Iron Ore: Jewish and Mixed Marriages in the Third Reich

FOUR. A Golden Cage?: Jewish Families in West Germany

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I KNEW THE WORLD HAD changed when I found myself entering a deceased rabbi’s house and putting my family’s food in his refrigerator. It was the first few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the atmosphere on the hospital campus where I lived was at least as panicky as elsewhere. I had just done a huge supermarket run and was worried that my 4-year-old son would start grabbing the groceries and then touch his face. (At this point, no one quite knew how the virus was transmitted.) When we had moved in a year or so earlier, we had learned that a hospital chaplain used to live next door, in a property that was now abandoned. I had seen a refrigerator in the basement and decided that, under the circumstances, nobody would mind if I broke in and used it.

This story gives, I hope, some sense of the strangeness of daily life while I was writing most of this book. A good deal of the writing was done while I was sitting in the driver’s seat of my car, waiting for my son while he attended forest pre-school. This is not how I imagined myself spending my junior leave. I had envisaged researching and talking to colleagues at the Leo Baeck Institute archives in New York City, where I had a fellowship. Instead, I was living a pretty solitary existence, unusually disconnected from the academic world.

This experience of isolation has made me more grateful than ever for the colleagues and mentors who have helped me to complete this project. My route to the topic went through the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where I was a postdoc with Ute Frevert’s History of Emotions research group. Without the benefit of Frevert’s pioneering work, I doubt I would have found my own way to studying the history of emotions. And, because of her support, I was able to spend my first years after earning my doctorate working with an exceptionally talented group of historians rather than anxiously job hunting and picking up whatever teaching I could.

Since leaving Berlin, I’ve been fortunate to work in a number of stimulating environments. My first teaching position was at The Open University, which is one of the most exceptional institutions I’ve encountered. Working collaboratively to create their new twentieth-century European history course helped me to appreciate just what kind of high-quality distance learning experience is possible with the right resources. Many colleagues there were a great help, but I benefited especially from David Vincent’s insights and encouragement. His own work on autobiography and the history of privacy has been a source of inspiration to me. While in the UK, I was fortunate to take part in a number of research seminars at the University of Oxford. I am grateful to Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway for inviting me to their European History meetings and to Paul Betts and Nick Stargardt for including me in their German History events. These seminars, and the dinners afterward, were among my most sustaining experiences as I was taking my pretty uncertain first steps on the career path.

It was quite a wrench to leave all of that behind when I moved to my current position at Purchase College in New York. But my colleagues here have been extremely welcoming and supportive. I’d especially like to thank the members of my board of study, not least Lisa Keller, who has been a wonderfully generous mentor. Aviva Taubenfeld has been an outstanding chair of our School of Humanities during the challenging pandemic period. Simon Surowicz was a great interlocutor, always ready with a coffee and an open mind. Thanks are also due to the members of an informal research group at Purchase who spurred me on to keep researching and writing. Ling Zhang was the linchpin of the group, hosting us at her house and always cooking delicious meals. Other members include Nathan Holmes, Jason Pine, and Erica Stein, who offered welcome insights from outside the field of history.

This project was quite a leap from my first book, which meant that I needed a lot of help with learning about Jewish history. I have received this help from many kind individuals. Dagmar Herzog initially introduced me to the Working Group on Women and Gender in Jewish History at the Center for Jewish History, from whose meetings I have benefited enormously. I’m indebted to Natalia Aleksiun, Elissa Bemporad, Federica Francesconi, and Dina Dinon for including me in their discussions. Other colleagues have been very helpful along the way, sharing their insights and reading parts of the manuscript or related papers. These include Volker Berghahn, Howard Brown, Hasia Diner, Pascal Eitler, Ute Frevert, Benno Gammerl, Sonia Gollance, Neil Gregor, Atina Grossmann, Rebekka Habermas, Uffa Jensen, Philipp Nielsen, Anita Norich, Margrit Pernau, Till van Rahden, Marsha Rozenblit, Dirk Schumann, Naomi Seidman, Nathan Stoltzfus, Nina Verheyen, Daniel Wildmann, and Sarah Wobick-Segev.

Special mention must go to Marion Kaplan, who has helped me in countless ways, from telling me about the MARLi card for libraries in New York City to vouching for me when I was just starting out in the field. She has always had time for me and my many questions, and she has read and improved a great deal of what I have written. Individuals such as her give me hope that it is possible for busy academics to keep on doing innovative work and still look out for the people around them. The same applies to Martin Conway, who read most of this manuscript and was always willing to provide just the right advice when I needed it. His own work continues to stir and challenge me. I am especially grateful to Barbara Rosenwein, who read the manuscript at short notice and provoked me to organize my arguments more clearly and to keep thinking. Jan Plamper and Paul Betts have been extremely supportive and offered insightful feedback on large chunks of the book. Going a little further back, I’d like to thank Christopher Tyerman, John Moynihan, and Mary Duffy for their willingness to listen and for their encouragement.

Many institutions have helped me to complete this project. I initially received a Small Grant from the British Academy, which was transformative in terms of its impact. While I was busy writing course materials, this grant allowed me to do much of my preliminary research in a wide range of archives in Germany and Austria. But it also served as a much needed early vote of confidence in the project. At least as significant was the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship, which I was awarded by the Leo Baeck Institute. This enabled me to turn a semester of leave into a year when I could do really meaningful research and writing. I am also grateful for the fellowships I received from the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. My own college has provided generous funding for my research, including awarding me junior leave and a number of scholarships from the Jewish Studies Department. Particularly welcome was the Pete and Betty Fishbein Award, not least because the donor took me to lunch and encouraged me with his forensic but friendly questions about the project.

Archivists and librarians in many different places have been very helpful as I undertook my research. I have particularly benefited from the assistance and advice I received from Li Gerhalter and Christa Hämmerle at the Sammlung Frauennachlässe at the University of Vienna, Monika Preuss at the Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland at the University of Heidelberg, Frank Mecklenburg and Michael Simonson at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, and Christine Tröbinger at the Bildungshaus Schloss Puchberg.

I have been extremely lucky to work with the editorial team at Stanford University Press. Particular thanks should go to David Biale. He took me seriously when I first contacted him out of the blue, and he gave me just the kind of incisive feedback I needed to turn an ever-expanding project into a publishable manuscript. I am also grateful to Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Margo Irvin, and Cindy Lim for their wonderful editorial work.

Acknowledgments pages usually have an understandable element of celebration about them as authors share the credit for their achievement. But I can’t help feeling that my acknowledgments should involve some form of apology. In my experience, writing books isn’t just about deepening friendships with colleagues. It’s also about showing a certain kind of selfishness and monomania that keeps one away from friends and family. There are many individuals who have helped me along the way and who have been repaid by me being too busy to write them enough occasional emails, visit them when I’m passing through, and so on. I feel this particularly acutely with regard to friends in the Embassy Singers, who kept me going during my years in Berlin and who came to sing at my wedding. I am also forever grateful to friends from Hertford College, who continue to show me how to nurture friendships, even when they have to be long distance.

This brings me to my family. Work commitments and the pandemic have kept me away from my parents, Terry and Alice, and my sister, Alicia, for too long. But I will always be thankful for their unwavering support and love. My in-laws have also cared for me ever since I arrived back in the US. The two individuals who have borne the brunt of this book are my wife, Suzanne, and son, Alexander. They have done so with remarkable grace and good humor. Alexander’s boisterous entry into my life has been a wonderful tonic. He drags me out of my projects and into his and generally shows me that I have more space in my life and my heart than I realized. Suzy, as ever, has sacrificed her own well-being to put me and the people she loves first. Writing a book about love can involve a fair bit of iconoclasm, breaking into pieces many carefully constructed romantic ideals. But, as many academics’ partners can probably testify, this isn’t necessarily how you should approach daily life. What I’ve learned from Suzy over twenty years is that it’s more important to pick up the pieces and try to make something beautiful with them. I don’t know if I’ve managed that with this book, but I watch her do it again and again and I just marvel.

Introduction

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY HISTORIAN and liberal politician Heinrich von Treitschke regarded the wholesome love fostered in the Christian family as among the firmest evidence of Europe’s—and most particularly Germany’s—unrivaled moral standing in the world. For one thing, Treitschke claimed that those Oriental countries where harems could be found and where polygamy was still practiced were unable to even come close to Christian Europe in terms of their appreciation of the value of women. The love between women and men in Germany was superior because it fused together pagan gallantry and Christian piety. Treitschke argued that, unlike the overly feminized Italian and French societies, the occasionally rough manliness of Germanic culture had been softened just enough in those moments when German men had deferred to feminine morals and manners. In Germany, then, a European love that was wondrously paradoxical found especially powerful expression.¹

Where did this understanding of love leave Germans who were not Christians, though? Could they love in the European way? And if not, were they really German or even European?² These were not innocent questions. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such questions were asked about Jews in Germany in newspaper articles, scholarly journals, novels, operas, and social debate.³ At a time when German Jews were experiencing unprecedented social mobility and were achieving prominence in commercial, professional, and intellectual life, defining love as the product of a national and Christian heritage provided another means of ostracizing them. The implication was that it was not sufficient to contribute to the German economy, learn the German language, thrive in German institutions, observe German laws, or even adopt German habits. One had to possess the same emotional makeup as other Germans. If a Jew did not feel the way that other Germans did, so the argument went, then it was not really possible for them to ever become German, regardless of how many trappings of integration they acquired. This was, for example, Treitschke’s judgment when he famously claimed that the converted Jewish poet Heinrich Heine could not speak to the German spirit because he had not composed a drinking song like the other great German poets.⁴

In this book I spotlight Jewish love in Germany, setting it within a broader German culture that was, despite Treitschke’s claims, itself the product of encounters between Jews and other Germans. Jews and Christians lived and worked together, learned from each other, and sometimes fell in love with one another, particularly in the urban settings that became ever more populous in the modern era. Indeed, it was the increasing proximity of Jews and non-Jews, especially once Jews entered the middle classes in large numbers, that explains why Jews’ emotions—in particular, the emotion of love—became an important means by which they were measured.⁵

As the middle class began to eclipse the aristocracy in the nineteenth century, its intellectuals provided justifications for its ascendance. The German middle class did not thrive simply because government was administered by qualified professionals or because the industrial economy was in the hands of dynamic entrepreneurs. As texts as varied as Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism testified, it was the values of the middle classes that really counted.⁶ Replacing what had been the more morally dubious lifestyle of the nobility, the German middle class prospered because of its work ethic, sense of honor, and, no less important, its stable domestic life, which was based on the love and fidelity of married couples.⁷ According to this narrative, should Jewish Germans wish to succeed in bourgeois Germany, they would have to prove that they possessed middle-class virtues and sentiments.

In this book, therefore, I focus on how especially middle-class Jewish women and men understood, experienced, and practiced love in modern German society. I begin in the 1870s at a moment when marriages between Jews and Christians were first permitted and end a century later, when the children of Holocaust survivors carved out relationships in a German society where sex, politics, and memory were inextricably and messily entangled. This period was a tremendously dynamic and turbulent one in German history. A German Jew such as Victor Klemperer, who was born in 1881 and lived until 1960, would have witnessed five regimes across the period, each radically different from the one that went before. The country experienced extremely rapid industrialization and urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before plunging into two total wars that, in the case of World War II, aimed at the mass murder of Jews and many others. Gender relations changed dramatically across the period, with women demanding and gaining the right to vote and entering educational institutions and the workforce in unprecedented numbers. Moreover, in the realm of family life, huge changes took place in relations between men and women and between parents and children, most notably through the seemingly inexorable rise of marriages based on love.

The impact of these changes on Germany’s Jewish populations was transformative in terms of Jews’ rights and social experience, providing new opportunities for integration and social mobility as well as surges in antisemitic discrimination and ultimately marginalization and annihilation. At each turn, these upheavals provoked anew the question of whether, and on what terms, Jews—however that elusive category might be defined—would be accepted as fully German. This issue played out in many spheres of life from universities to business, but it acquired a particular intensity in the realm of the family and personal relationships. Indeed, the private spaces where Jews and other Germans practiced love became testing grounds within which the possibility for integration and for the maintenance of a distinctive culture acquired its most intimate and emotional expression.

This book is thus an exploration of the influence of the political and the public on the personal and the private, and vice versa. Historians of modern Germany have already provided pioneering and politically charged works on the history of everyday life, including everyday German Jewish life.⁸ But, by investigating how an apparently private and intimate emotion such as love changed, we can appreciate new means by which cultural and political influences reached far into individual subjectivities.⁹ Close readings of the shifting ways that emotions were experienced and communicated can show how the effects of a society’s norms could be felt in quite visceral ways, working their way into habituated bodily practices and even into seemingly preconscious feelings of arousal and desire.¹⁰ Equally, these readings can illustrate how emotional styles and norms that crystallized in private could outlive any political regime that sought to police, redefine, or proscribe them. Indeed, an emotion such as love might seem all the purer (or, conversely, more exciting) if its expression involved an individual not conforming to what was deemed permissible or respectable by the outside world. The norms for public and private expressions of love therefore informed individuals’ sense of where and how they could be their truest selves. For instance, as we will see with regard to the Third Reich, a regime’s attempts to invade private spaces and control intimate relationships could actually further sanctify them as havens where individuals could freely express their emotions, away from the choreography and coercion so evident in public life.¹¹

These findings can help us to approach a new frontier in the study of the modern self. Alongside the numerous political shifts in modern Germany, the profound social transformations of the era also prompted individuals to reconfigure their notions of self. Industrialization and new transport infrastructure drew men and women into unfamiliar towns and cities, depriving them of established markers of status, such as their place in families, family businesses, and religious communities. In turn, these individuals were offered social, occupational, and geographic mobility and the chance to meet a wide cross-section of people from diverse class, regional, and religious backgrounds. These new urban inhabitants therefore needed to do an unprecedented amount of emotional work to achieve and preserve a sense of self as their circumstances and social standing changed.¹² As I will argue in this book, love provided one of the most important means for individuals to tell a story about themselves that gave them a sense of integrity in the face of turbulent historical forces. But this love was culturally malleable, shaped not only by traditional authority figures in families and religious communities but also by new kinds of experts, such as therapists and pedagogues who could brand actions and behaviors as rational or irrational, healthy or harmful, or even natural or unnatural.¹³

Emotions such as love also sat within the personal drama of individuals’ life spans and their process of aging.¹⁴ The first half of the twentieth century was a remarkable period for those who study the history of aging; it was a time of significant increase in life expectancy during peacetime but also an era when millions of young and previously healthy individuals died during wars or through other forms of mass killing. Different phases in the life course also changed in character across the period. Adolescence stretched out for the young women and men who spent more years in education and training, during which time they experienced many new freedoms as single people who sometimes lived away from their parents.¹⁵ But in times of war, these same young people were mobilized for dangerous war work and were thereby forced to confront their mortality.

The disruptive nature of these changes also obliges us to be sensitive to the generational dimension in how emotions are expressed and consumed.¹⁶ For instance, how did Jewish individuals who had learned to feel and act out their emotions—that is, who had developed their emotional intelligence—in earlier eras adapt to a radically new National Socialist society that sought to efface many previously accepted norms?¹⁷ Were their feelings of attraction, optimism, sympathy, and loyalty differently affected by political persecution and propaganda than the same emotions when experienced by those who matured during the Nazi era? This raises challenging questions about the effect of context on the emotions, especially with regard to the experience and expression of love. It is a familiar truth in the historical literature that emotions are socially constructed;¹⁸ but, when discussing the disrupted course of modern German history, the supplementary question that arises is how much these differences of context created differences in terms of emotions. Scholars have offered increasingly sophisticated accounts of how the Nazi regime achieved a Gleichschaltung (Nazification of state and society) through a mixture of coercion and consensus-building.¹⁹ But it is a moot point how far the regime’s new norms penetrated into the realm of emotions. As Barbara Rosenwein has argued, emotions are often rooted in the domains of face-to-face groups and communities that could form into distinct emotional communities.²⁰ These were affected by Nazism, often profoundly, but they were neither created by them nor altogether brought under their control. In that sense, emotional communities—and perhaps especially those formed out of love—always operated at a certain distance from political regimes and obeyed their own dictates. This is emphatically not to say that they were unchanging: Modern love was a malleable and volatile phenomenon. But it had its own logics and momentums, according to which the emotionologies identified by Peter and Carol Stearns were a complex admixture of political influences, social norms, and the more private logics of the self.²¹

We should therefore guard against a reductively political reading of the emotional history of Germany in this period. Jews and other Germans were complex individuals; many of them had relatively high educational levels and were shaped by the overlapping and conflicting social norms that they learned from experience or from the consumption of culture. Thus we must expect their expression of their emotions to have been similarly complex. Individuals’ emotional lives were constructed by means of sometimes conflicting, sometimes mutually reinforcing religious, educational, medical, and commercial institutions that structured how they developed forms of communication, approached peers, related to their bodies, understood gender norms, and internalized feeling rules.²²

THE BOOK’S STRUCTURE AND ITS PROTAGONISTS

This book has four main chapters, which proceed chronologically. This structure helps to foreground the elements of continuity and change, although each chapter also charts distinct stages along the life course when love was learned about, experienced, and communicated.²³ Beginning with adolescents’ and young adults’ experiences of courtship and moving on to the changing role that love played in marriages, the chapters illustrate how Jewish women and men internalized and reworked their society’s conceptions and valuations of emotions as they matured. The sections on marriage discuss how love developed (or waned) between husbands and wives but also explore how children were taught about love and encouraged to love by their parents. The temporal frames placed around each chapter are taken from political history. I compare and contrast Imperial Germany with the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Federal Republic. Although the decisive junctures in social and cultural history did not always align neatly with political shifts, it is instructive to start with conventional periodizations and then track both elements of continuity across political eras and the changes within them. The main chapters are followed by an experimental conclusion, which presents excerpts from witnesses’ accounts that were often nonlinear and bore the hallmarks of trauma. Spotlighting them in this way invites readers to form their own judgments about how I have integrated the sources into a continuous narrative. It also illustrates the tangled relationship between memory and history.

Throughout this project I have been confronted by the unavoidable complexities of how I should define Jewishness. This is a question that has many different answers, depending on the direction from which one chooses to approach it. However, in common with many historians, I wish to avoid imposing any retrospective definition. Therefore, in general, I use the definition offered by Jean-Paul Sartre and Shmuel Eisenstadt when they included in their analyses all those who considered themselves to be or who were considered by others to be Jewish.²⁴ This is, of course, a broader definition than some scholars might use. But it works better than any more restrictive definition across a broad period when the definition of Jewishness was a moving target that was complicated by the migration of Jewish communities into Germany, processes of secularization, and the intermarriage of Jews and non-Jews. For that reason, this study consciously spills beyond any defined Jewish community. I also examine relationships both among German Jews and between Jews and Christians rather than concentrating only on intra-Jewish relationships. The reason for this is that either being in a mixed relationship or dealing with the effects of relatives being in mixed relationships was a significant and contentious part of the Jewish experience in the late nineteenth and particularly early twentieth century.

Despite the openness of this definition of Jewishness, it is nevertheless important to note that I foreground the experiences and perspectives of Jews who were middle class and urban. Since the eve of World War I, most Jews in Germany were bourgeois city dwellers, although the Jewish population remained variegated, incorporating both rural and working-class communities. As a result, I have tried to include the voices of some workers and rural inhabitants. In both cases I was limited by the much smaller number of egodocuments from these demographic groups that can be found in archival collections. Another way that I was selective is with regard to sexuality. Although I do discuss the experiences of a small number of diarists and memoirists who felt and described same-sex desire, I cannot claim that queer experiences and partnerships receive as much attention as more typical and easily discoverable heterosexual relationships.

I should also explain why I often refer to other, that is, non-Jewish, Germans as Christians rather than as Gentiles or simply non-Jews. The primary reason is that most of the diarists and memoirists whose accounts I read used the term Christian when referring to their non-Jewish partners, in-laws, and neighbors. This was not always true, particularly of those who moved in left-wing circles. The term Christian was also often replaced by Aryan during the Third Reich. That so many individuals nevertheless continued to refer to other Germans as Christians suggests the abiding cultural significance of the Christian denominations, even during an era that might be understood as an age of secularization. Furthermore, although not all non-Jewish Germans professed a Christian faith, most of the German population did retain an allegiance to one of the major Christian churches throughout the period studied. And, even if church attendance waned across this era, this did not mean that confessional identity declined or that, for some, religion did not remain a source of opposition to intermarriage and other forms of legal emancipation for Jews. As recent studies have suggested, the modern era was not only a period of secularization but also a period of the accompanying trends of sacralization and confessionalization.²⁵

THE SOURCES

Trying to interrogate multiple contexts has meant that I have had to tackle an ambitiously broad source base. I combine first-person accounts and literary sources with a wide range of other private and public documents, including court case records, newspapers, advice manuals, synagogue records, love letters, films, and personal advertisements. In terms of archival materials, I draw on fourteen collections from five countries. These include the Leo Baeck Institute’s collection of more than 2,000 memoirs; the My Life in Germany archive of 263 life histories housed in the Houghton Library at Harvard University; two collections from the University of Vienna that span in excess of 3,600 life autobiographical writings and 437 sets of literary remains; and the Tagebucharchiv in Emmendingen’s assortment of 22,000 documents produced by 4,500 authors. Alongside these collections of egodocuments, I use Jewish community sources from the voluminous collections at the Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland in Heidelberg, the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin, and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem. In addition, I also consulted various kinds of state and other official records, chiefly drawn from the collections at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, the Landesarchiv in Berlin, the Wiener Library in London, and the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem.

By using this wide array of sources, I can not only illustrate the obvious impact of politics and particularly racial politics on the most intimate aspects of German Jews’ private lives but also bring a multiplicity of social and cultural contexts into play.²⁶ Print media and advice literature have proved particularly useful in illustrating how feeling rules could be formulated and could solidify in civil society. Newspapers have been important not least because they are arguably the urban source par excellence.²⁷ They not only helped urban inhabitants to navigate the new and unfamiliar in their cities but also provided new forms of (emotional) community, allowing readers to be shocked by the same scandals, try out the same recommendations, and consume the same political opinions. In the case of Jewish newspapers, the publications featured in this book often offered moral instruction on the topic of love. They also made space for personal advertisements, primarily