![\"image](\"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/jul-22-books.22.Fighter-Worker-and-Family-Man-cover.png\")
<\/a>Fighter, Worker and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933-1941<\/em> (University of Toronto Press, 2022) is a thoroughly researched book. In it, Sebastian Huebel \u2013 a sessional instructor in the history department at University of the Fraser Valley \u2013 depicts various strategies used by the Nazis to isolate and degrade German-Jewish men in the years prior to the concentration camps. His metaphor for this program of debasement and humiliation is \u201cemasculation,\u201d and the word identifies the book\u2019s focus: how the Jewish-German (heterosexual) male was shamed by the dispossession of any masculine identity as \u201cfighters, workers or family men\u201d \u2013 the traditional markers of masculinity in Europe in those days.<\/p>\nGender is a rare focus in Holocaust literature and, when the topic of gender arises there, it is almost always about women, and written by feminist scholars, as Huebel notes.<\/p>\n
But men\u2019s victimization, as Huebel demonstrates, also deserves scrutiny. During the 1930s, the overwhelming percentage of camp internees were male (\u201ccheats,\u201d \u201ctraitors,\u201d \u201cgreedy bankers,\u201d \u201crace defilers,\u201d \u201cmanipulators of international capitalism,\u201d etc.): in other words, women did not fit the Nazi stereotype of the gendered male Jewish fifth-column \u201cenemy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Jewish male \u201cenemy\u201d was uniformly forced out of work, his business expropriated; he was excluded from the military, and his military service in the First World War ignored. In public, he was ridiculed, he was caricatured in propaganda and openly derided \u2013 all, as mentioned, to further the absurd Nazi fantasy of the \u201cAryan\u201d \u00fcbermensch. For what reason? Simply to \u201cjustify the need for protecting Germany from within\u201d by inventing a supposed internal threat \u2013 to this day, a tried-and-true strategy practised by would-be and extant dictators.<\/p>\n
(It\u2019s worth noting that Huebel does not address the perceived threat emanating from the predominance of Jewish men in the German Communist and Social Democratic parties, in labour unions, and among other dissidents.)<\/p>\n
In private, the Jewish father\/husband paradigm crumbled under the weight of Nazi deprecation. With no work, no \u201cbread being won,\u201d the only way the Jewish father\/husband could show his worth to the family was to arrange for emigration. But, as Holocaust historians have amply shown, by the time it was clear to the German Jews that the Nazis were not going to go away, the \u201cfree world\u201d had closed its doors to them. (Canada\u2019s famous response to the question of how many Jewish refugees should be admitted was \u201cNone is too many!\u201d)<\/p>\n
On a more positive note, Huebel notes that the at-home father model led to increased bonding \u2013 unusual for the time \u2013 between father and family, and Huebel offers lots of documentary evidence of signs of love and affection between the unemployed father and his children. As well, fathers frequently became at-home teachers to their expelled children \u2013 more evidence of \u201ca new presence at home\u201d that led to a reaffirmation of men\u2019s role as father\/mentor-educators.<\/p>\n
On the streets, as Nazi violence against men increased, men were often coated with tar, made to walk barefoot over broken glass, made to stand for attention for long hours in bitter cold, and forced to open their mouths for Nazis to spit in. As a result, women were more and more often required to go out in public for menial chores.<\/p>\n
The gender-specific treatment of men in the camps has not, Huebel says, been examined as closely as has been the treatment of women. To illustrate his point, he stresses how forced labour demanded of men, particularly in brickworks and quarries, led to disfigured bodies, \u201cviolated psyches\u201d and premature death. Those who survived returned home like ghosts, permanently traumatized both physically and mentally, tortured by nightmares and often considering (and committing) suicide.<\/p>\n
At no point in his book does Huebel denigrate the experiences of Jewish women under Nazism: \u201cdifferent horrors, same hell,\u201d as Myra Goldenberg and Amy Shapiro said in the title of their excellent 2013 book.<\/p>\n
Huebel\u2019s oft-stated intention is to draw attention to the specific way men were abused, from beard-pulling to climbing up and down rock quarries until death. Jewish males were, as mentioned, typically regarded by Nazis as the \u201cgreater threat,\u201d and were victimized accordingly.<\/p>\n
Overall, Huebel shares the hope, in his conclusion, that a study of the erosion of Jewish male masculinity under Nazism can \u201csharpen our understanding of contemporary issues related to gender.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is a daunting objective, if not fulfilled, at least boldly addressed in this groundbreaking book.<\/p>\n
Graham Forst<\/strong>, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches in the continuing education department at Simon Fraser University. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As soon as they got into power, German Nazis began to make life hell for German-Jewish men \u2013 partly to promote their sadistically comic-book ideal of \u201cAryan\u201d masculine supremacy, and partly out of a desire to plunder valuables and property. And also, it must be said, out of simple criminal\/pathological malice. Fighter, Worker and Family […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[3076,6366,4242,53,2594,2038,21681,330],"class_list":["post-39226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-education","tag-gender","tag-history","tag-holocaust","tag-men","tag-nazis","tag-sebastian-huebel","tag-shoah"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}