Seminar questions:

In what ways was the experience of the Nazi persecution different to the Jewish spouses in mixed marriage and also the "Mischlinge"?

How do you understand the responsibility of the gentile spouses between 1933 and 1945?

Given the overwhelming murder of the full Jews, does the experience of the "Mischlinge" matter? Why?

Core readings:

Beate Meyer, “The Mixed Marriage: A Guarantee of Survival or a Reflection of German Society during the Nazi Regime?” in Probing the depths of German antisemitism: German society and the persecution of the Jews, 1933-1941, ed. David Bankier (New York: Berghahn, 2000): 54-77.

Ingeborg Hecht, Invisible Walls: A German Family Under the Nuremberg Walls, trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), first book.

Extended readings:

Gad Beck, An Underground Life, 1999, as previous session

Martin Doerry, My Wounded Heart: Life of Lilli Jahn (London: Bloomsbury, 2002).

Cathy Gelbin, "Between Persecution and Complicity: The Life Story of a Former ‘Jewish Mischling,’" Holocaust Studies 11,2 (2005), pp. 74-93.

Anna Hájková and Maria von der Heydt, The Last Veit Simons from Berlin: Holocaust, Gender, and the End of German-Jewish Bourgeoisie (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2019). (short book)

Jeremy Noakes, "The Development of Nazi Policy towards the German-Jewish “ Mischlinge” 1933–1945," The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (1989), pp. 291-354.

Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, The Language of Nazi Genocide: Linguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Rosenstrasse, dir. Margarethe von Trotta, 2006.

Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the heart : intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse protest in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).