Volume 24

Jahre der Ungewissheit

Looking at the 1930s as a whole, this study opens a window onto the dilemma of the myriad questions posed by emigration, German Jews asked themselves before the watershed year of 1938. David Jünger discusses both institutional emigration plans formulated by Jewish facilities as well as questions of individual decisions to depart or stay on. Contrary to the customary approach of seeing this in retrospect from the vantage of the later Shoah – and thus regarding the hesitant attitudes of people toward emigration with a sense of incomprehension – the study seeks to explore the potency in previous times of Jewish experience with citizenship, minority rights and migration. This perspective generates new and illuminating insights into the behavioral patterns and horizons of expectation of German Jews 1933 to 1938 given the increasingly radicalizing German regime they were facing.