AJS Review: The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies

In A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War, Tim Grady offers a powerful study of the lives of German Jews during the First World War and raises important questions about how scholars situate the actions and attitudes of members of minority populations within larger national contexts. Grady places the experiences of German Jewish soldiers and citizens firmly within the [End Page 232] context of German culture, and he reaches conclusions that are both compelling and unsettling. Looking backward through the lens of the Holocaust, we may be most inclined to see the ways that the violence and destruction of the First World War led to the rise of Nazism and the total exclusion of Jews from German society. Grady demonstrates, however, that during World War I German Jews were active participants in the wartime culture that ultimately turned against them. They were, Grady argues, "co-constitutive" in shaping German wartime culture. Their Jewishness may have colored some of their experiences, and ultimately determined their fate in Germany, but Grady convincingly shows that it did not overshadow their deeply held commitments to kaiser and country, or to the wartime cultural norms that Jews and other Germans helped to construct during World War I.

Grady identifies seven main aspects of the German war effort: war enthusiasm, total war, a culture of destruction, cases made for annexation and territorial expansion, the denigration of both internal and external minorities, divisions at home and among the troops, and the infamous "stab in the back" myth as means of explaining Germany's seemingly inexplicable defeat. Grady explores Jewish engagement with each of these aspects of wartime German culture, persuasively describing how German Jews bought into both the promise of 1914 and the violent and destructive path on which World War I set their country.

In chapter 1, Grady explores the forces that led Germany to enter the war and describes the somewhat tenuous position of Jews in prewar German society, where they were enfranchised citizens but still on the margins of many German institutions, particularly the military. For all Germans, but perhaps especially for Jews, the war seemed to offer a chance to create a stronger and more united national future. Following Kaiser Wilhelm II's announcement of a "civic truce," in which differences of religion and political conviction would be set aside so that the country could unite in national defense, the vast majority of German Jews fully embraced the war. They did so, Grady argues, both as Germans supporting their country and as Jews imagining that this civic truce would establish their value and valor as German citizens and soldiers while simultaneously positioning them as the liberators of east European Jews oppressed by the antisemitic regime of the Russian tsar.

The first weeks of the war did not disappoint, as Grady shows in chapter 2. Jews and other Germans embraced war enthusiasm and rushed to volunteer for military service in order to hasten Germany's triumph and the establishment of a new German-controlled Mitteleuropa. Chapters 3 through 6 explore different aspects of the culture of total war, German superiority, and destruction that took hold as the war ground on in 1915 and 1916. In each of these chapters, Grady focuses on the roles that both average and influential German Jews played in shaping this culture. In highlighting the work done by Jewish shipping magnate Albert Ballin, industrialist Walther Rathenau, and others to bring food production, industry, labor, and chemical research into the service of an ever more deadly war effort; the promotion of German annexation and colonization projects in eastern Europe; the exploitation of defeated civilian populations as laborers; the celebration of death and brutality; suspicion of domestic and foreign Others; and highly [End Page 233] racialized depictions of prisoners of war, Grady makes it clear that Jews were active participants in all aspects of Germany's war. At times, as when the Jewish Committee for the East proposed that Yiddish...