Oberlaender,
F.A. (1995): Coping Strategies and Identity Policy of German
Christians of Jewish Descent, in: The Los Alamos Historical Society
et al. (eds.): Papers from The History Conference on The End of the
Second World War and its Aftermath. Volume
I, 35: 1-12.

Abstract

The "Nuremberg Laws" and the ideas that they embodied transformed Jewish identity structurally from a religious or ethno-religious group into a race. This racial conceptualization includes individuals who had, up to this point in time, neither maintained nor felt any cultural, religious, ethnic nor historical bond to the Jewish community. These laws included people who had been raised in the spirit of Protestantism, Catholicism, atheism or agnosticism. Approximately 5/7 of all Non-Jews of Jewish Ancestry were affiliated with Protestant congregations (Oberlaender, 1993, 1995). They came from all social strata, above all from the middle-class2. They came from families that were national-liberal, German-nationalist or liberal, social democratic, members of Zentrum, (the name given to a Catholic-oriented party) as well as Communist and a few of the völkisch3movement. Through the racial re-definition of the term "Jew," they suddenly found themselves a part of a stigmatized group. Even an individual who had just one Jewish grandparent was include into this newly re-defined category. Approximately 350,000 Christian people of Jewish ancestry living in Germany of 1933 were thus stigmatized and persecuted, in addition to about 500,000 people who belonged to Jewish communities4 (Oberlaender, 1985, Cohn, 1988). The majority of the non-Jewish people of "Non-Aryan" descent was the so-called "first degree Mischlinge" ("mixed breed".) This was the name given to people who had two Jewish grandparents, if they themselves neither had ever been members of a Jewish "Gemeinde" nor were married to a Jewish person. Prior to 1935, "Ist degree Mischlinge" had already been dismissed from public civil service positions. Opportunities for marriage and social interaction became extremely limited by the "Nuremberg Laws" of 1935. The quota systems had their impact on school and college attendance of the "Mischling" population. "Ist degree Mischlinge" served in the armed forces, although never appointed to positions of prominence or command. The dismissal of the "Ist degree Mischlinge" from the armed services followed in 1942. Until 1944 they remained in civilian trade and industry; as of 1944, the "Organization Todt" began to enforce coercive work measures and organized their resettlement into so-called "Mischlingslager" ("mixed-breed" work camps). In 1943, the "final solution to the Mischlings-Question" was settled upon in a follow-up conference to the original "Wannsee Conference". "First degree Mischlinge" were to be legally equated with Jews for a prolonged period of time. The next step taken was the enforced choice for the "Ist degree Mischlinge" between internment and sterilization. These measures were never put into effect because Germany lost the war.

Besides the official persecution measures, there was also unofficial stigmatization within society. Only "Aryans" could be Nazi Party members. This advantage could not apply for "Non Aryans". This had negative consequences on their career, even to the point where careers were sometimes destroyed. The option of emigration - in comparison to the Jews - was not seized in considerable numbers. Through the Protestant and Catholic Emigration Relief only between 20,000 to 30,000 - mostly so-called "full-blood Jews" - of the 300,000 to 400,000 Christian Germans of Jewish Ancestry actually immigrated. The majority remained in Germany and were not murdered because of their "Mischling"-status (Cohn, 1988; Hilberg, 1961; Reutter, 1971).

The legal restrictions, the resulting persecuation and social stigmatization, the emigration and deportation of family members had a psychological impact on the individual. An aspect of the division and demarcation was brought into the collective family conciousness, and inner-family solidarity was put to a difficult test - with all its problematic consequences. (Oberlaender, 1995; Platz/Oberlaender, 1995).

For their existence as a sociological group the Christian Germans of Jewish ancestry are indebted on the one hand to the 19th c. German emancipation movement, which finally put an end to the mutual segregation practiced by both Jewish and non-Jewish people. They are indebted on the other hand to the simultaneously evolving influence of social biology on society, whereby certain political movements of the time considered individuals as belonging genetically to particular biological groups. Because of the power and popularity of such ideas in society, it is important to investigate from a sociological point of view what effect these ideas have on people concerned. Lindesmith/Strauss (1968: 51) comment the following in reference to this: " So long as people - Jews and Non-Jews alike - look upon the Jewish people as a biological group, human behavior will be affected by this fiction". In addition, the differing reactions of the two major German religious institutions to National Socialism in general and to racial politics in particular, the varying degree of support of the National Socialist party among Catholic and Protestant voters, and above all, the differing Church policies concerning baptized people of Jewish background make it necessary to study the coping strategies and reality constructions of the Catholics concerned separately from those of their Protestant partners in fate (Oberlaender, 1992, 1993, 1995).

Sociological research has not yet recognized these intra-psychological coping strategies and constructions of reality as the socio-psychological issues which they indeed are. Contributing to their marginalization within the social sciences is the fact that "Non-Aryans" tended to neither speak out, nor to be represented in permanently organized associations and are thus ideally fitted to be overlooked by any quantitatively-oriented empirical research methods. Also adding to this marginalization is the fact that the persons concerned were not Jews and therefore not considered to be real victims by post-war Germany. For German non-Jews this group of people were neither considered worthy as objects of distanced identification nor as an impetus towards reconcilition.

The study seeks to explore how experiences of stigmatization and persecution altered the relationships of Christian Germans of Jewish Ancestry to identity-generating groups such as Protestants, Catholics, Germans and Jews. How did they experience and cope with these situations? How did they experience such being classified as Jews, given that they had no concrete positive cultural or religious ties to the group? How did Christian "Non-Aryans" respond to the reactions of their own specific Church to the National Socialist state, and how did they respond to the statements and actions regarding fascism, race politics and war made by Protestant and Catholic individuals? (Oberlaender, 1992)

2. The Methodological Approach and Methods of Evaluation: the "Objective Hermeneutics" Approach

The formulation of the question, which will only be broadly outlined in this paper, suggests the use of an approach anchored in the methodological framework of Oral History and Biographical Research. Being a stigmatized group which is difficult to place into any one catagory, Christian Germans of Jewish ancestry leave hardly any autonomously produced biographical documents behind, such that only the general conditions of their persecution seem to be well established. Similar research problems were already formulated decades ago in the US with respect to migrants, ethnic minorities and people with deviant careers.

A total of 45 case-reconstructions based on interviews form the foundation of my work. Each person was questioned about his or her life-story according to Fritz Schütze's Narrative Interview approach (Schütze, 1984). Theoretical Sampling (Strauss, 1990) proved to be the most appropriate method for the developing of theories during the process of case-reconstruction. The interviewees are not selected on the basis of the fact that they correspond to any specific statistical norm, rather because they are able to exemplify certain historical processes. In doing so, a case is chosen, its structural regularities are worked out and then, by a process of imaginative experimentation, it is determined which other case would be completely in contrast to the one at hand.

The authorI would like to outline the concrete sequence-analytical procedure used in my work by presenting the example of one case-study of a Catholic priest, Father Fuchs, born in 1912 to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother.

First the social data of the case had to be gathered. In the case of Father Fuchs I had at my disposal the biographical narrative interview, as well as a hand-written curriculum vitae, numerous official documents (marriage certificate of the parents, death certificate of the father, etc.) as well as letters written by Fuchs. After the interview we also maintained a correspondence. In addition I consulted secondary literature on institutions relevant to Fuchs' life, as well as seeking out material which would give me more information about his social environment (high school documents, yearbooks from his place of religious training, documents on the social and political situation in his home town before and during the Nazi period, documents concerning the concentration camp where he was imprisoned (Moorlager).5 Using these tools I tried to analyze the social data in sequential order in accordance with Oevermann' s "Objective Hermeneutics"-approach.

The main goals of this procedure were to identify critical stages in Fuchs' development, to establish to what degree he was able to make autonomous decisions and to examine the actual decisions which he did make in the course of his life in these contexts. (Hildenbrand, 1991). Through this process a structural hypothesis for Father Fuchs' own life was formed.

In the second cycle of interpretation particular attention is devoted to the beginning of the interview. This is justified by the fact that in the first stages of the interviewing process -- in written exchanges -- Fuchs has already presented a condensed version of the themes, evaluations and arguments which will be most essential to the reconstruction of his biography in terms of the way in which we are interested in approaching it. (Oevermann goes so far as to suggest that this should be seen as a general phenomenon. According to him, at the beginning of the interview the interviewee is especially concerned with presenting what he/she considers to be an appropriate portrait of him/herself and with situating future texts clearly for the interviewer. While this thesis seems plausible, it does need to be confirmed with each interview.) The beginning of the text is evaluated in a sequence-analytical fashion after which a sequential analysis is conducted of those segments of the interview which relate to the topics of special interest to us in this context (Father Fuchs and his relationship to Judaism, Catholicism, Germany, etc.) Through the combination of these different analytic methods we arrive at a structural description of the case. This is then contrasted with general social data from secondary sources as well as with other maximal contrasting interviews which have been conducted. Thus we are able to develop a structural hypothesis of the particularity of the individual biography of Father Fuchs within the framework of the general social processes. The process of contrasting cases is generally pursued until enough cases have been sufficiently comparatively analysed so that a certain degree of saturation with respect to the particular research case at hand has been achieved. By doing so, case-types can be reconstructed and gathered in an analytical paper presenting the results of contrasting different case-types, just as has been done in this paper with respect to the Catholic or Protestant case-type, or the case-type of the person already adult by 1933 or the youth growing up under National Socialism etc. (Hildenbrand, 1991).

What is considered Objective Hermeneutics? Ulrich Oevermann (1983) developed a sequence-analytical "approach" called Objective Hermeneutics, whose intention it is to link structural theoretical basic assumptions to methodological and practical research-oriented consequences. It is based on the assumption that the manner in which experience and actions are constructed in practical life is reflected in social reality's "Textförmigkeit" - that is, "its ability to be structured in the form of a text". "The act of producing texts" demonstrates that the process of interaction is recorded in such a way that it then becomes possible to decipher the "objective meaning" of text sequences independently of the person's intention whose statements are being interpreted. The separation made between the text and its producer is considered to be a basic necessary precondition which enables the text to be seen as a "support containing objective and social sense structure", such that it can undergo discursive analysis. Oevermann calls this procedure working out the " sense structure" of a text: He explicitly disassociates himself in this way from any procedure intent on attempting to decipher a subject's inner-psychological steps, and specifically from psychoanalytically-oriented text-interpretation (Oevermann, 1983). The sociological interest in developing a sequence-analytical reconstruction of structures which a particular case calls forth, is the search for the reconstruction of the general rules which have caused this particular case, as well as the dimensions which make it emerge as particular. This conversion, necessary for practical research purposes, takes place in the form of a process of imaginative experimentation in which all the possible interpretations of a sequentially organized written narrative are gathered and discussed by a research group. The group also constructs the different hypothetically possible situations in which the text could have been generated and then explains them extensively in an "artificially naive way", i.e. in a context-free way without prior knowledge of the subsequent data. The result of the analysis is an outline of the decision patterns which reveal the particularity of the case at hand as a specific process of selection in light of alternative decisions, after having proven false the largest possible number of hypothetical alternatives.

It should be noted that Objective Hermeneutics, which by the way is not the only example of structurally and theoretically well supported Biographcial Research, has not been used in Oral History for generating data. There are still many discussions in the field of Oral History pertaining primarily to questions concerning interview methods, documentation and the storing of the results in archives as well as to questions of ethics when dealing with interviewees, the use of cassette recorders and well-coordinated transcription procedures. I believe that - particularly in the United States - the data material already collected over the past decades can not only serve the "recounting of past realities", but rather would gain more strength if reconstructions of objective sense structures and of subjective interpretation patterns in Oral History documents deposited in archives were increasingly turned to and consulted.

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