Women of exile: German-Jewish autobiographies since 1933

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requires knowledge of standard medieval history since it attempts to shift canonical emphases. To achieve this goal, Labarge provides information on women in seven different social situations (chapters 3-9; queens, noble ladies, nuns and beguines, recluses and mystics, townswomen and peasants, healers and nurses, and fringe cases). In addition, she begins with a chapter that briefly looks at important women of earlier centuries, followed by a discussion in her next chapter on perceptions of and social historical evidence on women, and she concludes her study with a chapter on women’s contributions to medieval culture. Generally, her approach makes historical and sociological data comment on women of the period, women who, however, are often viewed through male lenses, although Labarge consults women’s writings whenever they are available. She has more data for the first four groups she examines (chapters 3-6) than for the remaining three, but her final chapters are nevertheless the most convincing, perhaps because they seem less a survey of various individuals and have more of a coherent overview. Primarily, Labarge avoids detailed controlling hypotheses and reduces her conceptual framework to three axioms: (1) women who were single or widowed had the highest degree of freedom; (2) freedom was defined by social class; and (3) within a social class, women were subject to the authority of their husbands or, usually male, guardians. By reducing her argument to these axioms, Labarge can present material that provides important detail in a balanced fashion. Thus, she reports briefly the attempt of the beggar woman Alice de Salesbury to exploit another female (p. 205) as well as the generous charity of Elizabeth, the Lady of Clare (pp. 90-92). Or, for example, Labarge comments on ideal expectations held towards women (pp. 75-76) as well as the harsh realities such views helped to create, especially for peasant women (pp. 26, IOl), while reminding readers that hysterical witch trials were nevertheless predominant only after the medieval period, in the seventeenth century (pp, 215 216). A Small Sound of the i?umpet is a very effective overview. In lucid and readable prose, Labarge offers insights into medieval women by drawing together vast quantities of material that might otherwise go unnoticed if looking at the period through canonical glasses. What may appear to be a mass of colored pottery shards is actually a well conceived mosaic, formed from pieces that were forged in the middle ages and arranged through a perspective that allows glimpses into the situations of real medieval women. Sun HEE Km GERTZ

Jews were killed. Panes of glass from thousands of Jewish shops and homes were shattered giving the riot its name Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass. The German police arrested 30,000 Jewish men and sent them to Buchenwald, Da&au and Sachsenhausen. At this point in time, Nazi policy was not yet genocide but forced emigration. Therefore, in order to buy their freedom, the prisoners needed to prove that they would immigrate immediately upon their release. While we are all familiar with these tragic events, the impact of them upon the German Jewish women whose husbands, fathers, brothers and sons were incarcerated has been overlooked. How did the women balance protecting themselves and their children with obtaining the release of their husbands? Did they flee, hoping that their husbands would join them later or did they wait for their husbands’ freedom, hoping that emigration would still be possible at a later time? The courage and resourcefulness of German Jewish women in the face of these dangers are highlighted in Andreas Lib&Purcell’s anthology of memoirs. One of the most striking autobiographies is that of Alice Oppenheimer who was determined to save her husband, Siegfried, after he was sent to Buchenwald. Endangering her own life, she agreed to meet with a stranger who claimed (falsely, as it turned out) that he could help Siegfried only if she provided him with the proper passport. In her autobiography she recalls the sad conversation she had with her two daughters before setting out to meet this man early one morning: Listen children.” I said with tears in my eyes, ‘I can do nothing else. I have to go there, I have to save Daddy, even if it costs my life.’ When I saw their frightened faces, I appealed to our common burden which we had to carry: ‘Listen girls! Here is some money. I shall give you each some. Put it in your stockings. Here is your passport and that of your younger brother. You, Clementine, will, if necessary, look after Walter. You, Carola, will take care of Adolf. Here is the address of the Wormsers in Switzerland. If I don’t return home within a few hours, see that you catch a tin to Switzerland, with Mrs. Franke’s help. ‘Ihke care that you don’t get separated from one another. (p. 73)

After surrendering her husband’s passport to the stranger, Oppenheimer became fearful that she might have placed herself and her children in a dangerous situation. That next morning they fled their home and embarked on a long journey which took them through CURJCUNIVERSITY Switzerland, Italy and finally to Palestine. ‘Iwo weeks Woucasrz~, MA, U.S.A. later, Siegfried, who had a certificate for Palestine, was released from Buchenwald. After much trial, he obtained a new passport and was reunited with his family in Palestine. WOMENOF EXILE: Gw -JEWISHAUTOBIOGRAPHIW In her essay “At the Border,” Armemarie Wolfram, a SINCE1933, edited by Andreas Lib&Purcell, 264 pages. young girl during the War years, remembers the close Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1988. Price US$35.00 bonds that ezisted between her mother and her women cloth. friends during those difficult days. They supported one another in their frequent trips to Gestapo headquarters in search of their husbands’ releases. Wolfram recollects The history is well known. It was Germany, in the evethe conversations she overheard between her mother and ning of November 9,1938. Synagogues and other Jewish institutions were burned to the ground, and nearly 100 friends:

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I heard awful things then. At first in their desperation the women had gone to the Gestapo. There they had been thrown down the stairs. They did not give in, but instead returned again and again. I can well imagine the way they looked standing there-an endless line in a narrow corridor. Nobody dared to speak. And when somehow they made only the slightest noise, some stupid young rascal would come and scream, “If it isn’t absolutely quiet in here immediately, I’ll throw this who goddamned Jewish circus down the stairs!” Then the women would creep close to one another like frightened hens. They did not speak any longer, but looking at their faces one could see they were praying that they would succeed in helping their husbands. Some of them also had fits and cried and screamed. The others were helping whenever they could. They were all like sisters. (p. 83) Dealing with government agencies while trying to obtain the coveted visas was a bureaucratic nightmare. Many countries had strict immigration quotas, and even when the quotas were not fllled, consulates were reluctant to grant this life-saving document to the incarcerated men since th9 could not be physically examined. The Gestapo. meanwhile, insisted on seeing the visa before releasing the Jewish prisoners. As a result, these women refugees scattered all over the world to wherever they could find entry-Morocco. Albania, China, Ecuador. Australia, Scotland, England, Cuba, Palestine and the United States. This book of 26 memoirs tells the story of women surviving with others and women surviving alone. It is about the pain of being separated from loved ones and the women’s ceaseless efforts to protect others, especially their children and husbands. Some of the autobiographies are, of course, more compelling than others. At times I was sorry that the excerpts were so short because I wanted to know more ‘about these women’s lives. The strength of this volume is that it uncovers a previously unexplored dimension of the Nazi era through the voices of German Jewish women. %XRLLY

‘IBNRNRAUM

cLARKuNM3RSITY WORCRSTRR,

MA, U.S.A.

ROSALUXEMRURG: A LIFE. by Elabieta Ettinger. Beacon Press, Boston, 1986. Price USS24.95. This biography is meticulously researched, relying on Luxemburg’s massive correspondence with her friends and lovers, as well as interviews with people still’alive who knew her, or the children of people who were close to her. I found much interesting and poignant in the tale Ettinger tells, but also much about it disappointing. Herself Polish by birth, Ettinger seeks in this biography among other things to recover Luxemburg as a Pole and a Jew. In this she succeeds admirably. Her early chapters on Luxemburg’s childhood in Poland place her coming to political awareness in the context of Polish nationalism, anti-Jewish pogroms, and the unique underground revolutionism that brewed in Warsaw in the late 1880s. Ettinger plausibly traces Luxemburg’s anti-

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particularism-whether in the form of nationalism, Jewish identification, or feminism- to her youthful experience in Poland. Ettinger’s primary project, however, is to present Luxemburg’s adult life in its personal dimensions. She goes behind the public show of strength and cheer that Luxemburg usually made, to reveal a woman longing to be loved and coddled, often depressed and self-doubting, wanting and never having the stability of bourgeois marriage and motherhood. Again the portrait is persuasive. Most of the tale revolves around Luxemburg’s life long and tumultuous relationship with Leo Jogiches. and Ettinger draws a good deal of her material from the letters between them. Ettinger projects vivid pictures of Luxemburg’s relationship with Jogiches, and with other lovers after that relationship broke down; of the rooms she lived in and decorated, her interest in clothes and the theater; her intimacies with Clara Zetkin, Luise Rautsky, and even her cat. But she provides too little an understanding of Luxemburg’s political commitments, achievements, and disputes. It is like seeing Rosa Luxemburg’s life through a key-hole: what we witness is authentic and intimate, but very circumscribed and cut off from its wider social milieu. Ettinger reports that Luxemburg’s criticism of Eduard Berstein, one of the leading Social Democratic theorists, in her article, “Social Reform or Revolution,” brought her stardom in the SPD less than six months after she came to Germany (pp. 84-85). But Ettinger does not tell us what Rosa said, and why it was controversial. Ettinger quotes from the passionate letters Rosa wrote to Jogiches in 1900 while in Mainx at the Congress of the Social Democratic Party, and she reports that her speeches at the Congress were very well received. But we are told nothing about the issues debated before that Congress, and what positions Rosa took. We learn that Rosa travelled through Germany and Poland speaking to crowds who loved her, but Ettinger gives us little more than a vague sentence or two describing Luxemburg’s organizing and agitation activities. Though Ettinger quotes letters from Luxemburg’s many prison stays, she never explains to us why on each occasion Rosa was imprisoned. Ettinger reports on Luxemburg’s response to Lenin’s One Step FoMtord, that in it “Luxemburg proved as has no one before or since that equating Marxism with Leninism was a fallacy” (p. 119). Ettinger quotes a few sentences from the piece, but not enough to make us understand what the issues were between Lenin and Luxemburg, and why she thinks Luxemburg was right. She mentions Luxemburg’s criticism of Bolshevik vanguardism, and that she put forward her own theory of revolution at the Russian Social Democratic Worker’s Party in London in 1908 (pp. 145-149). But she does not tell us what Rosa’s theory was. We are told that Luxemburg was “in and out of prison” in Germany between 1915 and 1918, but we are given almost no understanding of her fervent anti-war socialist internationalism, or the chaotic economic crisis and revolutionary situation precipitated by the ending of the war and the Russian Revolution. And in the end we are given no explanation of why Luxemburg was so dangerous in 1919 that she had to be assassinated. For readers aheady well versed in European socialist revolutionary history, the political events and debates that raged in the German Social Democratic Party at the height of its revolutionary glory, and the place of Rosa