Abstract
John M. Cox, Circles of Resistance: Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany, Peter Lang: New York, 2009; x + 200 pp.; 9781433105579, £47.00 (hbk)
This is rather a strange book. The title suggests it is going to cover a very wide selection of resistance groups indeed – an impression underlined by the author’s general definition of resistance as ‘any individual or collective effort to impede Nazism’s goals and ideology’ (6). Likewise, the early structure of the work hints at extensive possibilities to come. So, following the introduction, we find chapters discussing the development of Jewish youth groups in Germany from 1900 to 1933, and also the growth of leftist groups from 1917 to 1933. And yet, the very broad terms of the early discussion eventually narrow down to one key focus: the Herbert Baum group. Hence, Cox discusses the growth of a circle – or better circles – around Baum from 1933 to 1942, the concerns of their discussion groups, the attack on the ‘Soviet Paradise’ exhibition in the Lustgarten in May 1942, the arrest of the membership, and, finally, how Baum’s activities were memorialized in the GDR. On balance, some readers might feel that the study provides too much well-known context before getting to its real concerns.
With this said, as he goes along, the author does provide some interesting insights. For instance, between the early 1930s and 1935, the proportion of German Jews in Jewish youth groups rose from 25 per cent to 50 per cent. A young Jewish activist, Henry Kellerman, is quoted with a view to explaining why this was: ‘As I think back to those turbulent days in 1933 where almost everything we had believed in and trusted was shattered overnight, nothing seemed more urgent or more important than to find something that we could hold on to, something that would steady and unite us as we drifted about in a sea of uncertainty with nobody to guide us, to restore our sense of direction and our self-confidence and, more urgently yet, to lift us above the dismal realities of the day … We needed each other. We needed the comfort of our company, the reassuring knowledge that, expelled as we were, we were not alone’. (20)
Cox also highlights the difficulty that Communism could find in addressing properly the outrage of Nazi anti-Semitism. He maintains that the German Communist Party ‘never recognized the centrality of anti-Semitism for National Socialism’ and only protested against the persecution of the Jews after the November 1938 pogroms (66). He also argues that GDR historians subsequently tended to interpret anti-Semitism as amounting to an attempted repression of the workers and destruction of the Soviet Union (150). Given the difficulties that Communists had in coming to terms with core concerns of Hitler’s politics, it would have been interesting to hear a bit more about the exact contents of a Communist discussion pamphlet circulated in late 1941, ‘Organize the Mass Revolutionary Struggle’ – particularly since no mass revolutionary struggle emerged in Germany in 1945.
As the study focuses in on Baum, it also manages to provide some useful information. It provides evidence about his personality, given by those who knew him personally. This, incidentally, varied from him being a ‘bad-tempered’ ‘fanatic’ to being ‘supportive and warm’ (85). It tells us about the topics Baum’s discussion groups dealt with (including Goethe’s Egmont and the work of Jack London) and suggests there was a concern to conjure up heroic spirits to help Baum and his Jewish friends imagine a positive future (102). We hear about anti-Nazi graffiti actions in Berlin, and, following the famous Lustgarten attack, find an analysis of why the Baum group was rounded up by the police so quickly and comprehensively. The author, by the way, feels this was not so much due to the existence of an informer among Baum’s co-conspirators as to the whole group being unskilled at covert operations (137). Finally, the study discusses the (predictably) deficient way in which the GDR sought to remember Baum’s activities. As one would expect, that government emphasized Baum’s Communist credentials over his Jewish identity – although Cox adds that Baum would not have objected too strongly to such a bias (164).
Readers familiar with resistance literature will wish the author had spent more of this brief study giving more detail about the life, work and concerns of Herbert Baum and his friends. Librarians purchasing the book will probably wish that Peter Lang had produced a more robust item, since pages began falling out of the review copy the first time it was read. Nevertheless, the intentions of the study are undoubtedly good and there is no question that Herbert Baum’s actions deserve to be as widely known as those of, say, the Scholls.
University of Bradford