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Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Studies in Jewish History) (Studies in Jewish History (Oxford Hardcover))

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In Between Dignity and Despair, Kaplan sought to examine the everyday lives of Jewish people under the Nazi Regime. Many Holocaust historians tend to approach the Jewish history from the male perspective (as men were involved in politics). Kaplan sought to explain the importance of women's roles in the Jewish society and how Jewish women urged their husbands to leave Germany when the Nazi gained power and influence.

Kaplan also sought to explain what it felt like to be a Jew living under the Nazi regime and how they became isolated from the rest of the society. She also explained how by and large Germans participated in this persecution and by this she did not mean physical persecution but social persecution.

She gave special attention to the Jewish women and how the women tried to adapt to their new roles and the new situation. The women were able to provide mental and emotional support to their families when their husbands lost their jobs. It was indeed insightful to see how the women were able to cope and how they were the first group to realize the isolation that took place, mainly because of their interaction with neighbors, store owners, public officials, etc.

I would recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn more about the Jewish life under Nazi Germany and the focus here is not those who suffered under the concentration camps but the "ordinary people" who had to cope with their new situation.

Between Dignity and Despair is haunting and painful. The statistics of the Holocaust and "sadistics" of its perpetrators can never capture the true cost in Human terms. History is more than a chronicle and analysis of events. It is also an understanding of the experiences of the people who lived through those events. These experiences do not lend themselves to quantitative assessment and validation. None-the-less, the stories and letters of the people who lived during that time are essential to our interpretation of the geopolitical, military and social events that have shaped our world.

The great question facing us today involves the "collective guilt" of the German people for the persecution and genocide of their Jewish neighbors. The frightening and logical extension of this question is: if such horrors can arise from the children "of the enlightenment," could it not also come from "the sons and daughters of liberty?" It is clear from these accounts that the society as a whole, actively and passively, participated in this process. When studied in Human terms, it is inconceivable that it could have happened any other way.

Cain, after murdering Able, asked of God "Am I my brother's keeper?" The response of the German people to the obvious disenfranchisement, persecution and suffering of the Jews seemed to be: "It depends on your definition of `brother.'" It teaches us that our high and noble beliefs such as equality, liberty, freedom, and brotherly love, are empty words if not applied universally. This lesson was painfully learned in 19th century America when the statement "all Men are created equal" was understood as only applying to those of White, Northern European ancestry.

Between Dignity and Despair is haunting and painful because within its pages we see our own demons and feel the fragility of our own Humanity. We also see to what extreme our quiet personal prejudices can lead us when they go unchecked by the better angels of our nature.

Ms Kaplan has contributed to our understanding of the horrors of systematic psychological terrorism practiced by the Nazis. No revisionist, seeking to absolve German society, can deny the conclusions drawn from the experiences she has documented. Her work is essential to an understanding of the Holocaust.

Scholars of the Holocaust tend to focus on the horrors of the concentration camps. While people need to be aware of these horrors, it is also important to know the details about Jewish life in Germany before the "final solution" went into effect. Marion Kaplan provides us with these details, and the Holocaust emerges as far more terrible than most people imagine.

Marion Kaplan's, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) is an in-depth study into the lives of Jewish people in Nazi Germany beginning with the takeover by Adolf Hitler in 1933. She concludes that not only were the physical lives of the Jewish people tormented and taken from them, the pervasiveness of the German government into everyday life led to emotional and physiological death of the Jews.
In developing the reader's mind to comprehend the lives of the Jews, Kaplan gives attention to little known details of Nazi Germany. As spoken about in chapter one, by establishing the Jews as social outcasts, they were removed from the rest of Germany. The new position of Jews in the public sphere affected their private lives as well. Focusing primarily on the role of women in the Jewish household, the challenges of dealing with new laws makes apparent the death beyond that of the physical means. Perhaps most intrusive to the emotional downfall of the Jews was the hostile environment they were forced to live in everyday. Faced with the torturous nature of school, Jewish children became aware of the plight of their families even as their parents tried to hide it from them. The November Pogrom of 1938 stifled the Jews politically, economically, and socially more intensely and more violently that ever before. By the official outbreak of World War II, Hitler had succeeded in massacring the Jews psychologically.
Throughout the book Marion Kaplan makes it very apparent that the destruction of Jews did not begin when war was declared in 1939 but instead in 1933. The affliction against the Jewish people deteriorated them emotionally and psychologically as well as physically. There is concrete evidence proposed in the book such as the staggering number of suicides, and the indifference to death among the Jews. The deceased were not criticized or blamed for their actions, but they were admired and envied signifying the loss of Jewish will to live.
Overall, Marion Kaplan's Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany is extremely well written. Through her frequent use of primary sources, the pain and distress of the Jews is more easily comprehended as the expressions of the suffering Jews appeal to the reader's emotions. Its exploration of little known details of Jewish life in Germany is useful not only to those studying the Holocaust, but also to all people. Kaplan makes it evident that acts of discrimination or the invasiveness into one's private life can profoundly destroy a person's pride. Ultimately, the destruction of the emotional and physiological conditions of people can occur as it did to the Jews in Nazi Germany.

This book kept me engaged in the tim eand circumstance. It was a very good read. This book was not repetitive of other narratives of this terrible time. I recommend it.

I read Marion Kaplan's Between Dignity to Despair a number of years ago and am now realizing what a powerful effect it had on me. It was very important to my own research into the 1930s and daily life in Germany. Her approach and scholarship were inspirational for me, and I appreciate her attention to detail and accuracy. I recommend the book for any group, college students or adults, studying the coming of the Holocaust.

This book does a marvelous job of helping us to understand how such a thing as the Holocaust could occur in a supposedly "civil" society such as Germany in the mid-20th century. Kaplan shows us how the deprivations increased so incrementally that by the time people became aware of what was truly taking place, it was too late for many of them to rescue themselves. This book also reveals how the people of Germany came to accept what was happening to the Jewish people among them; even rejoicing in it, and it lifts the veil over our eyes of the day-to-day tribulations endured before the exterminations. Well done.

This is an outstanding, richly documented, graphic and poignant description of the day-to-day life of German men, women and children in Nazi Germany. The true horror of living a life that could be (literally) taken away at a moment's notice is fully captured by Marion Kaplan in this detailed account. I can't recall any book that personalizes the plight of Germany Jews so well. Highly recommended!

Missing in many Holocaust works are the experiences of common German Jews and what daily life for them became like after Hitler's rise to power in the early 1930s. One can read about the Nuremberg Laws or the November Pogrom but one can't get a real feel for how those laws impacted daily life except through memoirs and the testimony of common people. Marion Kaplan's book wonderfully fills the gap between history from the "top down" and history from the "bottom up."
This book makes you realize that stories of hiding and rescue weren't just an occasional thing that's celebrated by Hollywood in such things as Schindler's List, but they happend every day. Kaplan also makes it clear the incredible courage involved in hiding and also the courage of others who hid Jews during Hitler's reign of terror. One bone of contention among historians many times is also how popular were the anti-Semitic measures, with many historians asserting that the population at large really wasn't that bad. Kaplan's book destroys any myths that the German popluation didn't overwhelmingly approve of Hitler's anti-Semitic measures, even if they perhaps didn't see the conclusion of them coming in the "Final Solution." If a German didn't know about the anti-Semitic measures it's only because they willingly didn't pay attention or tried to delude themselves.
One interesting part that Kaplan writes about are the Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in cities as "Jew Hunters," including one Jewish woman who led the Gestapo to over 60 hidden Jews in a single day. Reading stories such as this, perhaps Hannah Arendt's frightening conclusion wasn't so far off in that without the help of the Jews many more could have been saved.
The one drawback to this book is that Kaplan focuses on memoirs and testimony exclusively from women and assumes much about the male Jewish population. This could have been a much better book if she had included memoirs from a wider selection of men rather than constantly referring to Klemperer's book.