Space and Place in the German-Jewish Experience of the 1930s – Introduction

ABSTRACT

This introduction offers the theoretical and historical framework of the volume’s articles. In highlighting aspects of the German-Jewish experience during the 1930s, in Germany and in transit, it provides a starting point for the ensuing chapters’ discussions of the relationships between ‘place,’ ‘space,’ history and identity. It underscores the significance of ‘space’ as a category for the study of Jewish life during National Socialist persecution. It argues that the divergent interests and processes which constitute (the notions of) places, and the intricacies between places and identities, facilitate a reconsideration of German-Jewish experiences and self-perceptions in a time of extreme uncertainty.

KEYWORDS:

• Space and place
• 1930s
• Jewish history and culture
• Jewish/non-jewish spaces

History takes place in time and space. Yet until recently, temporal aspects of historical experiences – changes over time, memories, and expectations – have been at the centre of historical inquiries. Ever since the late 1990s, however, scholars have growingly emphasized the complex interrelations between the experiences of places, the ways places were arranged, monitored and imagined, and the ongoing process of identity-construction. The consequent ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities demanded and enabled a broad interdisciplinary scope, to comprehend collective and individual experiences in different time periods, locations, and discourses.¹ This tendency became also apparent in the field of Jewish Studies. Already by the early 2000s, several scholars called for a shift towards questions related to space and place in the study of Jewish history.² Answering such calls, the Makom Research Group, established in 2005 at the University of Potsdam, laid the foundations for the comprehension of space as a useful, complex analytical tool in the study of Jewish history and culture, which requires and facilitates interdisciplinary methodologies and novel understandings of Jewish experience.³ The group offered specifications of the categories that defined the differences between space and place in Jews’ experiences. The definitions of the group identified ‘place’ as related to specific locations, and ‘space’ as related to ‘performance,’ namely the display and the negotiation of identities.⁴ Joachim Schlör, the co-ordinator of the group, showed how this approach facilitates the reconsideration of Jewish experiences in urban spaces, which sheds new light on functions and symbolic values of ‘the city’ in Jewish history and culture.⁵ By offering a ‘provisional “canon” of Jewish spaces,’ in her work on Space and Place in Jewish Studies, Barbara E. Mann expanded the terminology of Jewish ‘spatial history.’ Her discussion of the multi-layered Hebrew concept ‘Makom’ emphasized its duality of a (specific) location and the a-spatial ‘location’ of the divine (‘Ha’Makom’). Mann’s study also showed how particular spaces have been essential for the particularities of Jewish history, both conceptional spaces (‘Diasporas’, ‘The Land’ etc.), and actual places (‘the city’, ‘Eruv’ etc.).⁶ Noting that ‘spaces’ combine physical features and the ‘creation of the mind,’ David Cesarani, Milton Shain and Tony Kushner highlighted the need to explore how ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ spaces are interrelated, influence each other as well as social relations within them.⁷ Accordingly, the interrelations between real and imagined spaces were particularly important in the realm of Jewish history, since they expose otherwise obscured relationships among Jews and between them and the non-Jewish environment.⁸ In particular, such binary categorisations as Jewish/non-Jewish have been widely debated because these characterisations are also subject to shifting assumptions and ongoing changes that determine their contemporary use and implications.⁹

The abovementioned arguments functioned as the premise of Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup’s edited volume Space and Spatiality in German-Jewish History.¹⁰ Yet they emphasized that the historical inquiry of ‘space’ must be expanded beyond ‘the history of majority/minority relationships familiar to researchers.’ Consequently, in their volume, the duality of ‘physical’ and ‘imagined’ spaces is complemented by passive and active nature of ‘space’: on the one hand, it determines experiences and identities; on the other hand, it remains fluid, understated, ‘allowing for appropriations and reconfigurations, as well as giving agency to those within it to shape it anew.’¹¹ This assertion resonates the definition suggested by the Potsdam-based ‘Makom’ group, which referred to ‘space’ as a realm of ‘opportunities,’ namely, of the potential reactions to the topography of the ‘place’ and the discourse it dictates.¹² Yet it underlines the instability and uncertainty that are involved in the imagination and the experience of the ever-changing ‘space,’ rather than the ‘opportunities’ it provides.

Working at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem between 2013 and 2018, the research group ‘Daat HaMakom’ explored these tensions further. The flagship project of this group sought to visualized modern Jewish experience by placing (selected aspects of) it on a multi-layered digital map; this task has never been accomplished, not least because the definitions and boundaries of the studied spaces have been constantly transformed or challenged by the studied people and communities.¹³ Rather than indicating the lack of creativity and resources, the inability to produce an intricate-enough map that would adequately represent (real and imagined) changes to and movements in space might highlight the essential nature of ‘space’ as an analytical tool. Richard I. Cohen, a founding member of the group, asserted that in the modern world ‘the boundaries and meanings’ of ‘space or place’ are uncertain, and with them the fundamental features of ‘identity.’¹⁴ By emphasising the fluidity of these spatial categories, he encouraged researchers to focus on the ‘physical and mental bridges’ that connect people, places and spaces, enabling and forming social networks. Such an approach, according to Cohen, would ‘vitally enlarge “Jewish” places and also offer a new way of thinking about Jewish-Gentile relations.’¹⁵

By now, over two decades after the initial wave of interest in the spatial dimensions of Jewish Studies, both the importance and the fluidity of ‘space’ as an analytical tool are widely acknowledged by historians.¹⁶ These recognitions facilitated the construction of interdisciplinary bridges that also contributed to a better understanding of transnational, material, and visual aspects of Jewish experiences. The critical focus on space often underscored perceptions and practices that transcend national boundaries or marginalize their significance.¹⁷ This focus partners easily with transnational approaches to Jewish history, which have gained a stronger foothold in Jewish Studies in recent years.¹⁸ At the same time, Jewish migration studies have been expanded by studies of the materiality of migration processes, which emphasise the role played by the perception of space and connected it with gender-related expectations.¹⁹ The ‘spatial turn’ has contributed to material and gender history beyond the study of migration.²⁰ Several studies on the ‘Jewish home,’ for instance, have juxtaposed the analysis of space and place with a careful reading of material culture to reconsider Jews’ self-perceptions and experiences.²¹ Recent studies on Jewish visual culture have also benefited from the accentuation of spatial considerations. Jewish filmmakers and photographers have persistently explored tensions between space and identity – by evoking concepts such as ‘homeland,’ ‘home,’ ‘exile,’ etc.—to articulate new notions of Jewishness and belonging.²²

It seems that the ‘spatial turn’ in Jewish history has had an unparalleled contribution to the study of the Holocaust. The current approaches have greatly benefitted from Tim Cole’s emphasis on the ‘geographies’ of the Holocaust, as well as from the popularity of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands in 2011, which recontextualized Jewish experiences during the Holocaust within certain (transnationally defined) locations and perceptions of spaces.²³ The focus on space enabled scholars to rethink the organisation of mass murder, to develop comparative approaches to victims’ experiences, and to explore new overlooked aspects of forced migration during the Holocaust.²⁴ While the ‘spatial turn’ has evidently left a mark on the field of Holocaust studies in the past decades, its impact on the study of German Jews’ encounter with Nazism – before the start of the deportations, ghettoization and mass murder – is much newer and less developed.

This volume presents a selection of potential new directions for the study of German-Jewish history of the 1930s through the lens of space and place, which take into account the new emphases in Holocaust Studies, in Jewish Studies, and in the historiography of modern Germany and of German Jews. The scholarship on German Jewish experience in the 1930s have recently placed an emphasis on Jewish daily experiences, hopes and fears in the face of Nazism, resulting in a more intricate understanding of Jews’ self-perception and decision-making in an era of a growing uncertainty.²⁵ In line with this recently developed avenue, the articles in this volume focus on the ways daily experiences were shaped through engagements with the topography, practices and regulations of certain spaces, and the ways these engagements affected emotions, views and self-perceptions. Furthermore, this volume underscores the impact of movement through and between places (in particular during migration, within and outside of Germany). Being ‘in transit,’ we would argue, was no less fundamental to many German-Jews’ experience than the notion of a ‘shrinking world’ under Nazism.²⁶

The ‘Nazification’ of various German landscapes after January 1933 has been underlined by several scholars, who associated it with the complex and far-reaching process of exclusion and persecution of Jews long before the violence of Pogrom-Night in the fall of 1938.²⁷ As several scholars indicated, rather than a clearly defined German-Jewish space, Nazi Germany comprised a variety of interconnected spaces that constructed and exhibited various reactions to anti-Jewish policies and rhetoric.²⁸ The development of anti-Jewish restrictions in symbolic and physical public spaces – from politics, journalism and culture to spas, hotels and parks – was gradual though often incoherent. As Guy Miron convincingly showed, Jews’ engagement with these spaces through the 1930s often reflected the uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the restrictions and their objectives.²⁹ Yet they also display a variety of ‘tactics’ (in De Certeau’s terminology) to comprehend, cope with and manifest responses to such efforts of Jewish exclusion.³⁰ As a reaction to their growingly limited access to public spaces in Germany, the topography of, the practices in, and the meanings assigned to private and semi-public spaces also changed. These changes are evident in the Jewish home, for instance. Numerous private journals, essays in magazines and private photography indicate the various transitions of the Jewish home – and of different rooms inside it – and the experience of its dwellers in the years that followed 1933.³¹ The experience in semi-public spaces, or public spaces for Jews only, such as synagogues or schools, was also subject to significant change. Like in the case of the Jewish home, analysis of the contemporaneous sources shows that the changing interactions with these spaces often manifested the attempts to conceive them through the interrelations between ‘place’ and ‘space,’ namely, as locations that simultaneously shape and express the identity of its dwellers.³²

Similar sentiments and aspirations are evident in relation to the more abstract notion of the ‘homeland,’ Heimat. Heimat, a concept that linked the provincial landscapes of Germany with the notion of authentic belonging in the land, has been at the center of the identity discourses of both German-Jews and German anti-Semites.³³ Reflections on Heimat and Jews’ genuine attachment to it are abundant in private journals, public writings, art works and photographs produced by Jews in the 1930s.³⁴ Movement through space, in Germany and during migration was also fundamental to German-Jewish experience. Here, too, numerous written and visual sources contemplate this experience in a way that discloses the endeavor to assign meanings and manifest nuanced reactions to it.³⁵

By taking this into account, this special issue on ‘Space and Place in the German-Jewish Experience of the 1930s’ aims to build on the existing scholarship to contribute to the further development of this emerging research field. The ensuing articles emphasize the roles played by ‘space’ and ‘place’ in shaping Jews’ experiences, beliefs, and self-perceptions during the years of the National Socialist regime, both within the boundaries of the ‘Third Reich’ and in transit. Consequently, they offer new understandings of the encounters and interactions between Jews and non-Jews in Germany, as well as between different imaginaries and conflicting, yet often entangled, visions.

Sarah Wobick-Segev’s article provides a close reading of a family album and its photographs to highlight the multifaceted struggle of Jews to maintain, and display, their belonging in Germany. In contrast to the regime’s policy of displacing German Jews, the family album she scrutinizes recurrently uses familiar iconography to remind its viewers of the rootedness of family in the landscape. The complex efforts of the Meyer family also point to the temporal dimension in the family’s strategy of claiming place and belonging despite their continued exclusion and marginalisation. Wobick-Segev’s article demonstrates the importance of photography in recent studies of German-Jewish daily life under Nazism. Amit Levy’s article encourages scholars who use photography to go beyond the Third Reich’s years. He shows how the consideration of a larger time frame highlights continuities between life in Nazi Germany to Jewish experiences after remigration in the aftermath of World War Two. Levy’s analysis provides insights into the processes of identity and memory formation among Jews who left Germany at comparatively young age.

By shifting attention to maritime spaces, Björn Siegel’s article aims to provide new insights into the history of forced migration during the Nazi regime and the evolving Jewish refugee crises. The maritime journey of Jews during forced migration has been examined by various scholars in the recent years.³⁶ Building on this scholarship Siegel considers the ship as a unique place – both physical and imagined – that simultaneously underscores and offers resolutions to the various conflicts of social, political and economic interests of the migrants and other protagonists shaping the processes of forced migration. Gerald Lamprecht’s article shifts the emphasis to the confluence of space and memory formation. Recent publications have shown that memory politics became a central point of reference during the Nazi regime and was used to constitute the newly introduced ideology.³⁷ Lamprecht analysis of the debates about the commemoration of the fallen of the First World War in interwar Austria indicates the fusion of Jewish and non-Jewish spaces in Nazi-ruled Austria, following both the demise of the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire and of the Austrian nation-state. Katrin Steffen’s article similarly explores the interrelations between memory and (perceptions of) space. The article examines the so-called heritage societies [Heimatvereine], their principles and purposes. These metaphorical spaces opened up new possibilities for immigrants, in this case Jewish immigrants from the province of Posen to Berlin, to position themselves between an old place of origin and a potential new home. Steffen’s analysis of this complicated, sometimes contradictory, effort reacted to National Socialism and its rejection of Jewish belonging in the German Heimat.

All the articles in this volume demonstrate the fluidity of spaces, and illustrate the different entanglements of historical narratives related to space. By taking a closer look at the five spaces it discusses, this special issue offers new perspectives on the various intersections and interactions at a time of increasing exclusion, marginalisation and repression by the Nazi regime. The ensuing articles shed light on the ongoing debate about measures of exclusion and persecution. They also probe the ability of the National Socialist regime to control and determine the nature of the Nazified landscapes of Germany, and demonstrate the ways Jews negotiated their identities through their conduct in, documentation and imagination of the ‘German’ and the ‘Jewish’ space.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ofer Ashkenazi

Ofer Ashkenazi is a professor of history and the director of the Koebner-Minerva Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His latest book is titled “Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape” (U. Michigan, 2020). He has published on various topics related to German and German-Jewish history, from filmmaking and photography to the interwar German peace movement and German-Jewish immigrants in Mandate Palestine. His current research project considers Jewish photography in Nazi Germany.

David Jünger

David Jünger is Lecturer for Contemporary History at the University of Rostock. He received his PhD from the University of Leipzig. His research focuses on German Jewish and American Jewish History, Modern European History and the History of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. From 2012 to 2017 he worked at the Free University Berlin and from 2017 to 2021 at the University of Sussex, where he was also the Deputy Director of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies. He is currently working on his second book about the life and times of the German-American rabbi Joachim Prinz (1902–1988). His most recent publications include: Jahre der Ungewissheit. Emigrationspläne deutscher Juden 1933–1938 [Uncertain Years. Emigration planning of German Jews, 1933–1938], published with Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in 2016.

Björn Siegel

Björn Siegel is a researcher at the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg/Germany. He received his PhD at the University of Munich and held positions in Jerusalem, Brighton and Graz. His research focuses on Jewish migration history, maritime studies and Brazilian history. He is the co-founder of the podcast “Jüdische Geschichte Kompakt” and his recent publications are “Open the Gate: German Jews, the Foundation of Tel Aviv Port, and the Imagined Power of the Sea in 1936”, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (2021): 1–19 and ‘We Were Refugees and Carried a Special Burden’: Emotions, Brazilian Politics and the German Jewish Émigré Circle in São Paulo, 1933–1957,” European Judaism 54, no. 1 (2021): 27–44.

Notes

1. On the ‘spatial turn’ and its contribution to various approaches in contemporary historiography, see: Charles WJ. Withers, “Place and the ‘Spatial Turn’ in Geography and in History,“Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 4 (2009): 637–58; Kathryne Beebe, Angela Davis and Kathryn Gleadle, “Introduction: Space, Place and Gendered Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn,“ in Space, Place and Gendered Identities, ed. Kathryne Beebe, Angela Davis and Kathryn Gleadle (Oxon/New York: Routledge, 2017), 1–10; Williamson, Fiona, “The Spatial Turn of Social and Cultural History: A Review of the Current Field,” European History Quarterly 44, no. 4 (2014): 703–17; Jessica Wang, “Reckoning with the Spatial Turn: Cartography, Territoriality, and International History,” Diplomatic History 41, no. 5 (2017): 1010–18.

2. See Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Vered Shemtov, “Introduction: Jewish Conceptions and Practices of Space,” Jewish Social Studies 11, no. 3 (2005): 1–8, here 3.

3. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, “Review Essay: The New Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies,” AJS Review 33, no. 1 (2009): 155–64, here 156–7.

4. Anna Lipphardt, Julia Brauch and Alexandra Nocke, “Exploring Jewish Space: An Approach,” in Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, ed. Anna Lipphardt, Julia Brauch and Alexandra Nocke (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 1–23.

5. Joachim Schlör, Tel Aviv: Vom Traum zur Stadt – Reise durch Kultur und Geschichte (Nördlingen: Insel Verlag, 1999); Joachim Schlör, “Tel Aviv: (With Its) Back to the Sea: An Excursion into Jewish Maritime Studies,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 2 (2009): 215–35; Joachim Schlör, “Jewish Forms of Settlement and their Meaning,” in Jewish Space in Central and Eastern Europe: Day-to-Day History, ed. Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė and Larisa Lemertienė (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 1–6. See also Joachim Schlör, “Faith in Residence: Jewish Spatial Practice in the Urban Context,” in Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History, ed. Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup, (New York/Oxford, 2017), 231–45. Jewish urban spaces are likewise analysed by several other authors, such as in Alina Gromova, Felix Heinert and Sebastian Voigt, eds., Jewish and non-Jewish Spaces in the Urban Context (Berlin: Neofelis Verlag, 2015).

6. Barbara E. Mann, Space and Place in Jewish Studies (New Brunswick/New Jersey/London: Rutgers University Press, 2012), quote: 2.

7. David Cesarani, Milton Shain and Tony Kushner, “Introduction,” in Place and Displacement in Jewish History and Memory: Zakor v’Makor, ed. David Cesarani, Milton Shain and Tony Kushner (London/Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2009), 1–14, here 1.

8. Ibid. See also Schlör, ‘Jewish Forms of Settlement and their Meaning,’ 1–2.

9. Tim Corbett, Björn Siegel and Mirjam Thulin, “Towards Pluricultural and Connected Histories: Intersections between Jewish and Habsburg Studies,” PaRDeS 29 (2023): 15–27, here 21–2.

10. Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup, Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History (New York/Oxford, 2017).

11. Lässig and Rürup, “Introduction: What Made a Space “Jewish”? Reconsidering a Category of Modern German History,” in Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History, ed. Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup (New York/Oxford, 2017), 1–22, here 2.

12. Lipphardt, Brauch and Nocke, “Exploring Jewish Space: An Approach,” 4.

13. ‘Daat Hamkom’s’ map is accessible for scholars at: https://www.jewish-cultures-mapped.org.

14. Richard I. Cohen, “Preface,” in Place in Modern Jewish Culture and Society [Studies in Contemporary Jewry an Annual XXX] ed. Richard I. Cohen (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), VII – XI, here IX.

15. Cohen, “Preface,” IX.

16. Fonrobert, “The New Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies,” 155–64; Todd S. Presner, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

17. For instance, Ángel Alcalde, “Spatializing Transnational History: European Spaces and Territories,” European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’Histoire 25, no. 3–4 (2018): 553–67; Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris and Jacques Revel, “Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History,” The International History Review 33, no. 4 (2011): 573–84; Amtje Dietze and Katja Naumann, “Revisiting Transnational Actors from a Spatial Perspective,” European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’Histoire 25, no. 3–4 (2018): 415–30; Thomas J. Sugrue, Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

18. For instance, Rebecca Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Moshe Rosman, “Jewish History across Borders,” in Rethinking European Jewish History, ed. Jeremy Cohen and Murray Jay Rosman (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009), 15–29; Micha J. Perry and Rebekka Voß, “Approaching Shared Heroes: Cultural Transfer and Transnational Jewish History,” Jewish History 30 (2016): 1–13.

19. Viola Alianov-Rautenberg, No Longer Ladies and Gentlemen: Gender and the German-Jewish Migration to Mandatory Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023); Joachim Schlör and others, eds., Dinge des Exils (München: EditionText + Kritik, 2013).

20. Ralph Kingston, “Mind over matter? History and the Spatial Turn,” Cultural and Social History 7, no. 1 (2010): 111–21; Leora Auslander, Amy Bentley, Leor Halevi, H. Otto Sibum and Christopher Witmore, “AHR Conversation: Historians and the Study of Material Culture,” American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (2009): 1355–404.

21. The Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania assembled in 2019 a research group to unravel the concept of ‘The Jewish Home.’ The group work and the forthcoming volume it produced emphasize the advantages of a spatial-material approach to Jewish history. See also, Leora Auslander, “The Modern Country House as a Jewish Form: A Proposition,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 18, no. 4 (2019): 466–88; Simon J. Bronner, ed., Jews at Home: The Domestication of Identity (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010).

22. Ofer Ashkenazi, Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape (Ann Harbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020); Daniel H. Magilow, “Cute Jews: Modernist Photographic Forms and Minor Aesthetic Categories in “Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel. Ein Fotobuch”,” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 64, no. 1 (2019): 47–71; Rebekka Grossmann, “The “Colonial” Vantage Point: Imperial Photography in Mandatory Palestine,” Israel Studies 26, no. 3 (2021): 158–78; Leora Auslander, “Reading German Jewry through Vernacular Photography: from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich,” Central European History 48, no. 3 (2015): 300–34.

23. Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano, eds., Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2014); Tim Cole, Holocaust Landscapes (London et al: Bloomsbury, 2016); Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage Books, 2011).

24. Claudio Fogu, “A “Spatial Turn” in Holocaust Studies?,” Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (2016): 218–39; Wendy Lower, ”Holocaust Studies: the Spatial Turn,” in A Companion to Nazi Germany, ed. Shelley Baranowski, Armin Nolzen and Claus-Christian W. Szejnman (Chichester: Willey, 2018), 565–79; Emily-Rose Baker, Michael Holden, Diane Otosaka, Sue Vice and Dominic Williams, “Introduction: Spatial, Environmental, and Ecocritical Approaches to Holocaust Memory,” Environment, Space, Place 15, no. 2 (2023): 1–13; Natalia Aleksiun and Hana Kubátová, eds., Places, Spaces and Voids in the Holocaust (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021); Stephan Lehnstaedt, “Jewish Spaces? Defining Nazi Ghettos Then and Now,” The Polish Review 61, no. 4 (2016): 41–56.

25. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution: 1933–1939 (London: Hachette UK, 2014); Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Moshe Zimmermann, Deutsche gegen Deutsche: Das Schicksal der Juden 1938–1945 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2008); David Jünger, Jahre der Ungewissheit: Emigrationspläne deutscher Juden 1933–1938 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016); Ofer Ashkenazi, Rebekka Grossmann, Shira Miron and Sarah Wobick-Segev, Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024, forthcoming).

26. For the ‘shrinking world’ see Guy Miron, ‘’Lately, almost constantly, everything seems small to me. “The Lived Space of German Jews under the Nazi Regime,” Jewish Social Studies 20, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 121–49. Several other recent publications, however, emphasize the transnational nature of German-Jewish history during the 1930s: Marion A. Kaplan, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2020); Maiken Umbach and Scott Sulzener, Photography, Migration and Identity: A German-Jewish-American Story (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); David Jünger and Marija Vulesica, “Transnational Jewish Politics in the Interwar Period: Berlin Rabbi Joachim Prinz and the Yugoslav Zionists,” Central European History 56, no. 3 (2023): 380–96.

27. Teresa Walch, “Orchestrating Consent: Public Space and the Nazi Consolidation of Power,” in Räume der Deutschen Geschichte, ed. Teresa Walch, Sagi Schaefer and Galili Shaḥar (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2022), 115–43; Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca, eds., Hitler’s Geographies: The Spatialities of the Third Reich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann and Maiken Umbach, eds., Heimat, Region, and Empire: Spatial Identities under National Socialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Joshua Hagen and Robert Ostergren, “Spectacle, Architecture and Place at the Nuremberg Party Rallies: Projecting a Nazi Vision of Past, Present and Future,” Cultural Geographies 13, no. 2 (2006): 157–81; Trevor J. Barnes and Claudio Minca, “Nazi Spatial Theory: The Dark Geographies of Carl Schmitt and Walter Christaller,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103, no. 3 (2013): 669–87.

28. Caroline Cormier, “Putting History in Its Place: The Spatial Exclusion of Jews in Nazi Berlin, 1933–1939,” S.I.M.O.N. 5, no. 1 (2018): 82–98; Rebekka Grossmann, “Nazi Germany in the Viewfinder: On Space and Movement in German-Jewish Youth Culture,” Naharaim 16, no. 2 (2022): 203–27.

29. Guy Miron, Space and Time under Persecution: The German-Jewish Experience in the Third Reich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023).

30. Michel de Certeau, “The Practice of Everyday Life: “Making do”: Uses and Tactics,” in Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn, ed. Gabrielle M. Spiegel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 213–23.

31. Doron Niederland, The Jewish Home in Nazi Germany as Reflected in the German-Jewish Press, 1933–1938 [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018); Guy Miron, “The Home Experience of German Jews Under the Nazi Regime,” Past & Present 243, no. 1 (2019): 175–212; Ofer Ashkenazi, “Ordinary Moments of Demise: Photographs of the Jewish Home in Late 1930s Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 26, no. 3 (2021):149–85; Shira Miron, “Presence as Absence – The Homely and the Unhomely in Jewish Photography Under Nazism,” New German Critique (forthcoming, 2024).

32. See Teresa Walch, “Editorial: Space & Place in Modern Germany,’ and ‘Orchestrating Consent: Public Space and the Nazi Consolidation of Power,” in Räume der Deutschen Geschichte, ed. Teresa Walch, Sagi Schaefer and Galili Shaḥar (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2022), 7–20 and 115–143; Ashkenazi, “Ordinary Moments of Demise,” 149–185; Sarah Wobick-Segev, “Between Homes and Heimats: The Spatial Worlds of the Staff and Students at the Herrlingen Landschulheim, 1934–1939,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch 49 (2021): 144–73.

33. Philipp Nielsen, Between Heimat and Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871–1935 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

34. Ofer Ashkenazi and Guy Miron, “Jewish Vacations in Nazi Germany: Reflections on Time and Space amid an Unlikely Respite,” Jewish Quarterly Review 110, no. 3 (2020): 523–52; Atina Grossmann, “German Jews as Provincial Cosmopolitans: Reflections from the Upper West Side,” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 53, no. 1 (January 2008): 157–68.

35. Moshe Zimmermann and Yotam Hotam, Zweimal Heimat: Die Jeckes zwischen Mitteleuropa und Nahost (Frankfurt: Beerenverlag, 2005); Ofer Ashkenazi, “Strategies of Exile Photography: Helmar Lerski and Hans Casparius in Palestine,” in Back to the Future: Traditions and Innovations in German Studies, ed. Marc Silberman (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018).

36. David Jünger, “An Bord des Lebens: Die Schiffspassage deutscher Juden nach Palästina 1933 bis 1938 als Übergangserfahrung zwischen Raum und Zeit,” Mobile Culture Studies 1 (2015): 147–63; Kobi Cohen-Hattab, Zionism’s Maritime Revolution: The Yishuv’s Hold on the Land of Israel’s Sea and Shores, 1917–1948 (Berlin/Boston/Jerusalem: De Gruyter Oldenbourg/Magnes, 2019); Joachim Schlör, “’Israel am Meere’: The Sea Voyage as a Place and Time for Questions about Jewish Identity,” PaRDeS 28 (2022): 19–34.

37. For Germany, see: Tim Grady, The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011); Michael Geheran, Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler (Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press, 2020). For Austria, see for example: Tim Corbett, “Once “the Only True Austrians”: Mobilising Jewish Memory of the First World War for Belonging in the New Austrian Nation, 1929–1938,” in The Jewish Experience of the First World War, ed. Edward Madigan and Gideon Reuveni (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 255–76.