Atina Grossmann

Victims, Villains, and Survivors: Gendered Perceptions and Self-Perceptions of Jewish Displaced Persons in Occupied Postwar Germany

AS W E W R I T E the history of the post-1945 years, we are only now rediscovering what was amply obvious to contemporaries: that in the immediate postwar period occupied Germany was the unlikely, unloved, and reluctant host to hundreds of thousands of its former victims, housed in refugee camps in the U.S. and British zones and in the American sector of Berlin. Of course, at war’s end, millions of people, including ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe as well as former soldiers, forced laborers, and survivors of death and work camps, were on the move. The available statistics, both those collected at the time and those calculated by historians, are highly variable and surely inaccurate, itself a sign of the chaos that accompanied peace and the speed with which conditions changed. Some twenty million people clogged the roads, straggling from East to West and West to East. Astonishingly, between May and September 1945, the victors had managed to repatriate about six million of the seven million persons defined as “displaced” and eligible for return to

Grams, Calories, and Food: Languages of Victimization, Entitlement, and Human Rights in Occupied Germany, 1945–1949

By spring 1945 when the Allied Military Government and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) confronted the masses of refugees and displaced persons gathered in, or streaming toward, occupied Germany in the wake of the Third Reichs defeat, food—its supply, distribution, and, not least, symbolic meaning—had been clearly established as a key political and psychological issue for military and occupation policy. The rhetoric of allied war aims and of relief work posited food provision as a fundamental issue of human survival, development, and dignity. In 1943, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, deploying both political and psychoanalytically oriented social work discourses, cautioned American policy makers planning the future of a defeated Nazi Germany about the importance of rationing for establishing control over an occupied population. “Whenever a people feels that its food supply is in the hands of an authority,” she reminded them—in terms suffused with unarticulated gender assumptions, “it tends to regard that authority as to some degree parental.” Moreover she added, “probably no other operation, even the provision of hospitalization and emergency care, is so effective in proving to an anxious and disturbed people that the powers that be are good and have their welfare at heart.”

SHADOWS OF WAR AND HOLOCAUST: JEWS, GERMAN JEWS, AND THE SIXTIES IN THE UNITED STATES, REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

The article reflects on the––muted––“shadows of war and Holocaust” motivating Jewish activists in the civil rights and New Left movements of the “sixties” as well as the womens movement in the 1970s. For children of Jewish refugees from National Socialism, as well as for “red diaper” offspring of American Communists and alienated rebels against the newly comfortable Jewish suburban middle class, participation in these political struggles could serve both as a key form of alternative “Americanization” or “assimilation through protest” and a link to Jewish values of social justice. In a radically forward-looking movement, profoundly influenced by the African-American church, and linked with a few prominent refugee rabbis, the call for “Never Again” admonished young Jews never to be “good Germans,” to reject complicity with unjust policies at home and abroad; the specifically Jewish invocation of “never again a victim” only came later, decades removed from the events of war and Holocaust.