Introduction Excerpt for German Jews in Love

Introduction

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY HISTORIAN and liberal politician Heinrich von Treitschke regarded the wholesome love fostered in the Christian family as among the firmest evidence of Europe’s—and most particularly Germany’s—unrivaled moral standing in the world. For one thing, Treitschke claimed that those “Oriental” countries where harems could be found and where polygamy was still practiced “were unable to even come close” to Christian Europe in terms of “their appreciation of the value of women.” The love between women and men in Germany was superior because it fused together pagan gallantry and Christian piety. Treitschke argued that, unlike the overly feminized Italian and French societies, the occasionally rough manliness of Germanic culture had been softened just enough in those moments when German men had deferred to feminine morals and manners. In Germany, then, a European love that was wondrously paradoxical found especially powerful expression.¹

Where did this understanding of love leave Germans who were not Christians, though? Could they love in the European way? And if not, were they really German or even European?² These were not innocent questions. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such questions were asked about Jews in Germany in newspaper articles, scholarly journals, novels, operas, and social debate.³ At a time when German Jews were experiencing unprecedented social mobility and were achieving prominence in commercial, professional, and intellectual life, defining love as the product of a national and Christian heritage provided another means of ostracizing them. The implication was that it was not sufficient to contribute to the German economy, learn the German language, thrive in German institutions, observe German laws, or even adopt German habits. One had to possess the same emotional makeup as other Germans. If a Jew did not feel the way that other Germans did, so the argument went, then it was not really possible for them to ever become German, regardless of how many trappings of integration they acquired. This was, for example, Treitschke’s judgment when he famously claimed that the converted Jewish poet Heinrich Heine could not speak to the German spirit because he had not composed a “drinking song” like the other great German poets.⁴

In this book I spotlight Jewish love in Germany, setting it within a broader German culture that was, despite Treitschke’s claims, itself the product of encounters between Jews and other Germans. Jews and Christians lived and worked together, learned from each other, and sometimes fell in love with one another, particularly in the urban settings that became ever more populous in the modern era. Indeed, it was the increasing proximity of Jews and non-Jews, especially once Jews entered the middle classes in large numbers, that explains why Jews’ emotions—in particular, the emotion of love—became an important means by which they were measured.⁵

As the middle class began to eclipse the aristocracy in the nineteenth century, its intellectuals provided justifications for its ascendance. The German middle class did not thrive simply because government was administered by qualified professionals or because the industrial economy was in the hands of dynamic entrepreneurs. As texts as varied as Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism testified, it was the values of the middle classes that really counted.⁶ Replacing what had been the more morally dubious lifestyle of the nobility, the German middle class prospered because of its work ethic, sense of honor, and, no less important, its stable domestic life, which was based on the love and fidelity of married couples.⁷ According to this narrative, should Jewish Germans wish to succeed in bourgeois Germany, they would have to prove that they possessed middle-class virtues and sentiments.

In this book, therefore, I focus on how especially middle-class Jewish women and men understood, experienced, and practiced love in modern German society. I begin in the 1870s at a moment when marriages between Jews and Christians were first permitted and end a century later, when the children of Holocaust survivors carved out relationships in a German society where sex, politics, and memory were inextricably and messily entangled. This period was a tremendously dynamic and turbulent one in German history. A German Jew such as Victor Klemperer, who was born in 1881 and lived until 1960, would have witnessed five regimes across the period, each radically different from the one that went before. The country experienced extremely rapid industrialization and urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before plunging into two total wars that, in the case of World War II, aimed at the mass murder of Jews and many others. Gender relations changed dramatically across the period, with women demanding and gaining the right to vote and entering educational institutions and the workforce in unprecedented numbers. Moreover, in the realm of family life, huge changes took place in relations between men and women and between parents and children, most notably through the seemingly inexorable rise of marriages based on love.

The impact of these changes on Germany’s Jewish populations was transformative in terms of Jews’ rights and social experience, providing new opportunities for integration and social mobility as well as surges in antisemitic discrimination and ultimately marginalization and annihilation. At each turn, these upheavals provoked anew the question of whether, and on what terms, Jews—however that elusive category might be defined—would be accepted as fully German. This issue played out in many spheres of life from universities to business, but it acquired a particular intensity in the realm of the family and personal relationships. Indeed, the private spaces where Jews and other Germans practiced love became testing grounds within which the possibility for integration and for the maintenance of a distinctive culture acquired its most intimate and emotional expression.

This book is thus an exploration of the influence of the political and the public on the personal and the private, and vice versa. Historians of modern Germany have already provided pioneering and politically charged works on the history of everyday life, including everyday German Jewish life.⁸ But, by investigating how an apparently private and intimate emotion such as love changed, we can appreciate new means by which cultural and political influences reached far into individual subjectivities.⁹ Close readings of the shifting ways that emotions were experienced and communicated can show how the effects of a society’s norms could be felt in quite visceral ways, working their way into habituated bodily practices and even into seemingly preconscious feelings of arousal and desire.¹⁰ Equally, these readings can illustrate how emotional styles and norms that crystallized in private could outlive any political regime that sought to police, redefine, or proscribe them. Indeed, an emotion such as love might seem all the purer (or, conversely, more exciting) if its expression involved an individual not conforming to what was deemed permissible or respectable by the outside world. The norms for public and private expressions of love therefore informed individuals’ sense of where and how they could be their truest selves. For instance, as we will see with regard to the Third Reich, a regime’s attempts to invade private spaces and control intimate relationships could actually further sanctify them as havens where individuals could freely express their emotions, away from the choreography and coercion so evident in public life.¹¹

These findings can help us to approach a new frontier in the study of the modern self. Alongside the numerous political shifts in modern Germany, the profound social transformations of the era also prompted individuals to reconfigure their notions of self. Industrialization and new transport infrastructure drew men and women into unfamiliar towns and cities, depriving them of established markers of status, such as their place in families, family businesses, and religious communities. In turn, these individuals were offered social, occupational, and geographic mobility and the chance to meet a wide cross-section of people from diverse class, regional, and religious backgrounds. These new urban inhabitants therefore needed to do an unprecedented amount of emotional work to achieve and preserve a sense of self as their circumstances and social standing changed.¹² As I will argue in this book, love provided one of the most important means for individuals to tell a story about themselves that gave them a sense of integrity in the face of turbulent historical forces. But this love was culturally malleable, shaped not only by traditional authority figures in families and religious communities but also by new kinds of experts, such as therapists and pedagogues who could brand actions and behaviors as rational or irrational, healthy or harmful, or even natural or unnatural.¹³

Emotions such as love also sat within the personal drama of individuals’ life spans and their process of aging.¹⁴ The first half of the twentieth century was a remarkable period for those who study the history of aging; it was a time of significant increase in life expectancy during peacetime but also an era when millions of young and previously healthy individuals died during wars or through other forms of mass killing. Different phases in the life course also changed in character across the period. Adolescence stretched out for the young women and men who spent more years in education and training, during which time they experienced many new freedoms as single people who sometimes lived away from their parents.¹⁵ But in times of war, these same young people were mobilized for dangerous war work and were thereby forced to confront their mortality.

The disruptive nature of these changes also obliges us to be sensitive to the generational dimension in how emotions are expressed and consumed.¹⁶ For instance, how did Jewish individuals who had learned to feel and act out their emotions—that is, who had developed their emotional intelligence—in earlier eras adapt to a radically new National Socialist society that sought to efface many previously accepted norms?¹⁷ Were their feelings of attraction, optimism, sympathy, and loyalty differently affected by political persecution and propaganda than the same emotions when experienced by those who matured during the Nazi era? This raises challenging questions about the effect of context on the emotions, especially with regard to the experience and expression of love. It is a familiar truth in the historical literature that emotions are socially constructed;¹⁸ but, when discussing the disrupted course of modern German history, the supplementary question that arises is how much these differences of context created differences in terms of emotions. Scholars have offered increasingly sophisticated accounts of how the Nazi regime achieved a Gleichschaltung (Nazification of state and society) through a mixture of coercion and consensus-building.¹⁹ But it is a moot point how far the regime’s new norms penetrated into the realm of emotions. As Barbara Rosenwein has argued, emotions are often rooted in the domains of face-to-face groups and communities that could form into distinct “emotional communities.”²⁰ These were affected by Nazism, often profoundly, but they were neither created by them nor altogether brought under their control. In that sense, emotional communities—and perhaps especially those formed out of love—always operated at a certain distance from political regimes and obeyed their own dictates. This is emphatically not to say that they were unchanging: Modern love was a malleable and volatile phenomenon. But it had its own logics and momentums, according to which the “emotionologies” identified by Peter and Carol Stearns were a complex admixture of political influences, social norms, and the more private logics of the self.²¹

We should therefore guard against a reductively political reading of the emotional history of Germany in this period. Jews and other Germans were complex individuals; many of them had relatively high educational levels and were shaped by the overlapping and conflicting social norms that they learned from experience or from the consumption of culture. Thus we must expect their expression of their emotions to have been similarly complex. Individuals’ emotional lives were constructed by means of sometimes conflicting, sometimes mutually reinforcing religious, educational, medical, and commercial institutions that structured how they developed forms of communication, approached peers, related to their bodies, understood gender norms, and internalized “feeling rules.”²²

THE BOOK’S STRUCTURE AND ITS PROTAGONISTS

This book has four main chapters, which proceed chronologically. This structure helps to foreground the elements of continuity and change, although each chapter also charts distinct stages along the life course when love was learned about, experienced, and communicated.²³ Beginning with adolescents’ and young adults’ experiences of courtship and moving on to the changing role that love played in marriages, the chapters illustrate how Jewish women and men internalized and reworked their society’s conceptions and valuations of emotions as they matured. The sections on marriage discuss how love developed (or waned) between husbands and wives but also explore how children were taught about love and encouraged to love by their parents. The temporal frames placed around each chapter are taken from political history. I compare and contrast Imperial Germany with the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Federal Republic. Although the decisive junctures in social and cultural history did not always align neatly with political shifts, it is instructive to start with conventional periodizations and then track both elements of continuity across political eras and the changes within them. The main chapters are followed by an experimental conclusion, which presents excerpts from witnesses’ accounts that were often nonlinear and bore the hallmarks of trauma. Spotlighting them in this way invites readers to form their own judgments about how I have integrated the sources into a continuous narrative. It also illustrates the tangled relationship between memory and history.

Throughout this project I have been confronted by the unavoidable complexities of how I should define Jewishness. This is a question that has many different answers, depending on the direction from which one chooses to approach it. However, in common with many historians, I wish to avoid imposing any retrospective definition. Therefore, in general, I use the definition offered by Jean-Paul Sartre and Shmuel Eisenstadt when they included in their analyses all those who considered themselves to be or who were considered by others to be Jewish.²⁴ This is, of course, a broader definition than some scholars might use. But it works better than any more restrictive definition across a broad period when the definition of Jewishness was a moving target that was complicated by the migration of Jewish communities into Germany, processes of secularization, and the intermarriage of Jews and non-Jews. For that reason, this study consciously spills beyond any defined Jewish community. I also examine relationships both among German Jews and between Jews and Christians rather than concentrating only on intra-Jewish relationships. The reason for this is that either being in a mixed relationship or dealing with the effects of relatives being in mixed relationships was a significant and contentious part of the Jewish experience in the late nineteenth and particularly early twentieth century.

Despite the openness of this definition of Jewishness, it is nevertheless important to note that I foreground the experiences and perspectives of Jews who were middle class and urban. Since the eve of World War I, most Jews in Germany were bourgeois city dwellers, although the Jewish population remained variegated, incorporating both rural and working-class communities. As a result, I have tried to include the voices of some workers and rural inhabitants. In both cases I was limited by the much smaller number of egodocuments from these demographic groups that can be found in archival collections. Another way that I was selective is with regard to sexuality. Although I do discuss the experiences of a small number of diarists and memoirists who felt and described same-sex desire, I cannot claim that queer experiences and partnerships receive as much attention as more typical and easily discoverable heterosexual relationships.

I should also explain why I often refer to other, that is, non-Jewish, Germans as Christians rather than as Gentiles or simply non-Jews. The primary reason is that most of the diarists and memoirists whose accounts I read used the term Christian when referring to their non-Jewish partners, in-laws, and neighbors. This was not always true, particularly of those who moved in left-wing circles. The term Christian was also often replaced by Aryan during the Third Reich. That so many individuals nevertheless continued to refer to other Germans as Christians suggests the abiding cultural significance of the Christian denominations, even during an era that might be understood as an age of secularization. Furthermore, although not all non-Jewish Germans professed a Christian faith, most of the German population did retain an allegiance to one of the major Christian churches throughout the period studied. And, even if church attendance waned across this era, this did not mean that confessional identity declined or that, for some, religion did not remain a source of opposition to intermarriage and other forms of legal emancipation for Jews. As recent studies have suggested, the modern era was not only a period of secularization but also a period of the accompanying trends of sacralization and confessionalization.²⁵

THE SOURCES

Trying to interrogate multiple contexts has meant that I have had to tackle an ambitiously broad source base. I combine first-person accounts and literary sources with a wide range of other private and public documents, including court case records, newspapers, advice manuals, synagogue records, love letters, films, and personal advertisements. In terms of archival materials, I draw on fourteen collections from five countries. These include the Leo Baeck Institute’s collection of more than 2,000 memoirs; the “My Life in Germany” archive of 263 life histories housed in the Houghton Library at Harvard University; two collections from the University of Vienna that span in excess of 3,600 life autobiographical writings and 437 sets of literary remains; and the Tagebucharchiv in Emmendingen’s assortment of 22,000 documents produced by 4,500 authors. Alongside these collections of egodocuments, I use Jewish community sources from the voluminous collections at the Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland in Heidelberg, the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin, and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem. In addition, I also consulted various kinds of state and other official records, chiefly drawn from the collections at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, the Landesarchiv in Berlin, the Wiener Library in London, and the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem.

By using this wide array of sources, I can not only illustrate the obvious impact of politics and particularly racial politics on the most intimate aspects of German Jews’ private lives but also bring a multiplicity of social and cultural contexts into play.²⁶ Print media and advice literature have proved particularly useful in illustrating how “feeling rules” could be formulated and could solidify in civil society. Newspapers have been important not least because they are arguably the urban source par excellence.²⁷ They not only helped urban inhabitants to navigate the new and unfamiliar in their cities but also provided new forms of (emotional) community, allowing readers to be shocked by the same scandals, try out the same recommendations, and consume the same political opinions. In the case of Jewish newspapers, the publications featured in this book often offered moral instruction on the topic of love. They also made space for personal advertisements, primarily as a way of binding together a new generation of Jewish women and men who might otherwise become dispersed throughout urban society.²⁸ The flourishing genre of advice literature catered to a new kind of audience that was no longer able to find out all it needed about social mores from trusted local experts. This kind of source reveals the emergence of new kinds of authority figures in Jewish communities, such as sexual therapists and social pedagogues, while also showing how established voices such as rabbis could make their influence felt in new ways.²⁹ Even sources that do seem more obviously political or legal, such as records from court cases, had knock-on social effects. They not only showed which kinds of laws were being enforced but could also present exemplary social dramas in which transgressive emotional displays received punishments and emotionally sympathetic characters were vindicated or at least received clemency.³⁰

While studying these sources, I asked whether they provided a kind of “emotional script” that could be read and, to varying degrees, acted out by Jewish women and men who sought out love. The concept of emotional scripts has not been incorporated into histories of the emotions to the same extent as such other concepts as emotional regimes, emotional communities, and emotional styles.³¹ But the concept has its roots in Erving Goffman’s theory of symbolic interaction and has been applied in various guises to the fields of linguistics, sociology, and social psychology.³² Its application by Beverley Fehr and James Russell is particularly instructive here; their work on love as a “prototype” finds that, because love has proved so hard to define, both for researchers and for historical subjects, one encounters a compensatory profusion of typologies of love.³³ In other words, in the absence of a satisfactory universal concept, individuals have encountered (and produced) a multiplicity of scripts that perform love.³⁴

This finding is relevant not only to how love is studied but also to how it has been felt in past societies. For some of the historical actors featured in this book, it was precisely the variable nature of love that led them to lean on so many cultural prescriptions so heavily. Never being sure of what love was, they searched all the more frantically for authoritative figures who could provide some reassurance. As we will see, such responses to emotional norms show not only how elites’ disciplining and punishing of various acts shaped behavior but also how the production of positive role models and engaging romantic narratives could orient behavior. The other advantage of this concept is that a script can assign different roles to different characters. Although the script for Jewish men and women in the complex cultural landscapes of modernizing Germany was a composite produced by many scattered authors, the combined effect of the many normative sources was to give different lines to men and women who, in turn, were supposed to experience different narrative arcs in their love lives.

To assess these claims about emotional scripts, we need to compare and contrast the public and prescriptive texts with more intimate and private sources of the self, such as diaries, love letters, and memoirs. By producing these sources, individuals conformed with or departed from scripts, testing out whether their experience of emotions rhymed with the descriptions they found in the culture around them. This is particularly true for the period studied because the production of each of these sources peaked during this time because of the advent of mass literacy, national postal services, and the encouragement of diary keeping in schools.³⁵ As we will see, many individuals who wrote diaries, memoirs, and love letters recognized that they needed to write their own script to make sense of their experiences at various phases in their lives, even as they sometimes hoped that their lives would follow conventional patterns. Because their experiences are not so easy to track, it is particularly interesting to explore to what extent women and nonelite men mimicked or departed from dominant scripts in their accounts.

Sources such as love letters and diaries are invaluable for a study that tracks change across the life course, because they provide sequential accounts written in something like real time.³⁶ Yet, whereas diaries are often regarded as reliable because they are immediate and seemingly transparent forms of self-disclosure, memoirs throw up more problems. One issue is that memoirs are often written at the end of an individual’s life. Another is that they may more explicitly conform to literary models.³⁷ This, at least, is the opinion of Philippe Lejeune, one of the foremost experts in the study of life writing. He has summed up the difference between the two genres, commenting, “Autobiography and the diary have opposite aims: autobiography lives under the spell of fiction; the diary is hooked on truth.”³⁸

In this book, nevertheless, I make widespread use of what would usually be called memoirs, for a number of reasons. For one thing, at least some of the collections consulted for this book actually blur the boundary between diaries and memoirs. For instance, the first-person accounts assembled by Harvard psychologists and sociologists in 1940 for the “My Life in Germany” project were not written toward the end of an individual’s life, when the author stood at a (safe) distance from the events they describe. They were instead penned in the midst of a nightmarish wartime present when murderous antisemitism raged. Although the authors may have escaped to the United States, the situation in Europe that they depicted had not been resolved; it arguably appeared more likely that the Europe they described would remain within a German empire that was making significant advances in all directions.³⁹

This collection suggests that the distinction between memoirs as literary constructions and diaries as more neutral and un-self-conscious reports may actually not be so hard and fast in practice. Diaries are also literary sources that have been artfully constructed with the help of genre conventions. For instance, German schoolchildren were taught how to write diaries in the late nineteenth century as a means of honing their powers of introspection.⁴⁰ And Jewish diarists who lived through the National Socialist period, such as Victor Klemperer, sometimes wrote their diaries for an outside audience, hoping that their account would survive as a witness to history, even if they themselves did not.⁴¹ We should not assume, then, that, even though autobiographies or memoirs are written at some distance from the events and with an eye to the audience, diaries are simply more immediate retellings. Instead, it is important to note that neither distance in time nor the presence of a perceived audience necessarily makes a source more unreliable.

This is well illustrated by the important issue of same-sex love. Diarists who were describing homosexual desire in the early twentieth century often wrote in ambiguous and elliptical ways. Perhaps they were using a form of code for fear of being discovered. Or they may have lacked a satisfactory vocabulary or emotional script to help them process their emotions and make sense of their experiences.⁴² By contrast, memoirists who wrote later in the twentieth century felt it important to write candidly and at length about their sexual experiences and feelings of desire. In one well-known case study, Gad Beck, a gay activist from Berlin, wrote explicit accounts of his sexual encounters in 1930s Germany that were strongly influenced (and even inflated) by a sense of hindsight.⁴³ Beck was presumably influenced by other gay pioneers in the postwar era who stressed the importance of bringing queer lifestyles out of the closet. One could argue that such extraneous influences could distort as well as illuminate the historical record. In Beck’s case it seems likely that he exaggerated certain sexual encounters.⁴⁴ But his writings, at the very least, suggest that a greater distance in time between events lived and events recorded does not simply entail authors becoming more forgetful or their accounts becoming vaguer or more selective.

Perhaps, then, it is more productive to think of both diaries and memoirs not simply as records or even as literary texts but as practices or “technologies of the self” engaged in by historical actors.⁴⁵ When viewed from this perspective, both types of source become rich resources that illustrate how individuals have worked on their emotions as they lived, remembered, and relived them. As Lejeune has reminded us, individuals are narrative beings who seek to give their lives order and meaning.⁴⁶ Both diaries and memoirs are a means of doing this, not least because they enable individuals to better understand their feelings about an event or series of events by assigning significance to the event or events within a meaningful sequence. Performing such a task has been vital for many individuals—not least when living through times of crisis—as a means of assuring them that they are not passive beings, pushed around by historical forces.⁴⁷ Letters have proved a similarly important resource for individuals and couples, allowing each party to compare notes and to clarify their feelings and perceptions in conversation with a (usually) sympathetic interlocutor.⁴⁸

Notes

1. Treitschke, Politik, 241–48.

2. Luisa Passerini has discussed the ways that Jews were excluded from European conceptions of love. See Passerini, Europe in Love, 20–21; and Passerini, Love and the Idea of Europe, esp. 225–27.

3. For examples of plays that posed these questions, see Bayerdörfer and Fischer, Judenrollen.

4. Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte, 423.

5. Jensen, Gebildete Doppelgänger, 190–219; Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum. Tyler Carrington has discussed how love and urbanity affected what it meant to be middle class; see Carrington, Love at Last Sight, esp. 2–4.

6. See Johannes Scherr’s much republished Deutsche Kultur-und Sittengeschichte, esp. 3. This kind of valuation of the middle classes also features in many influential historical studies of the German middle class. See, chiefly, Kocka, “Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit”; Hettling and Hoffmann, “Zur Historisierung”; Habermas, Frauen, esp. 7–27; and Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion.

7. See Trepp, “Emotion,” 35–39. See also Habermas, “Rituale des Gefühls,” 174–77.

8. The foundational text is Lüdtke, History of Everyday Life. For everyday German Jewish life, see Kaplan, Jewish Daily Life.

9. Recent works on this topic include Carrington, Love at Last Sight; Cullen, Love, Honour, and Jealousy; Garloff, Mixed Feelings; McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism; Illouz, End of Love; Jeismann, Freiheit der Liebe; McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism; and Rosenwein, Love. For an interesting take on intermarriage between various kinds of insiders and outsiders, see Moses, “From Faith to Race?”

10. See Eitler and Scheer, “Emotionengeschichte”; M. Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice”; and Prestel, Emotional Cities, 13–15. For particularly interesting reflections on the connections between private and public spheres in the realm of emotions, see Langewiesche, “Gefühlsraum Nation.” Some of the most important other studies of other political emotions include Biess, German Angst; Frevert, Politics of Humiliation; and Jensen, Zornpolitik.

11. My thinking here is influenced by William Reddy’s concept of an emotional refuge. See Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 128–36.

12. For an interesting recent discussion of the development of the modern self, see Brown, Mass Violence and the Self, esp. 5–14. See also Hunt, “Self and Its History”; Mauss, “Category of the Human Mind”; Taylor, Sources of the Self; and U. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Riskante Freiheiten. On the “creation of the Jewish individual” between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Wobick-Segev, Homes Away from Home, 2. On a similar theme, see Schlör, Das Ich der Stadt.

13. Herzog, Sexuality in Europe, 45–60.

14. For a general introduction into the historical study of aging, see Kertzer and Laslett, Aging in the Past, esp. 3–80. See also Troyansky, Aging in World History; Ehmer, Sozialgeschichte des Alters; Bryant, “Von der ‘Vergreisung des Volkskörpers’”; and Thane, “Social Histories.”

15. See, for instance, Savage, Teenage; Gestrich, Geschichte der Familie, esp. 41–46; King, Die Entstehung des Neuen in der Adoleszenz; and Baxter, The Modern Age.

16. The history of generations has expanded rapidly in recent years. See Weisbrod, “Generation und Generationalität”; and Jureit and Wildt, Generationen.

17. On the concept of emotional intelligence, see Salovey and Mayer, “Emotional Intelligence.”

18. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, esp. 124–26.

19. For interesting discussions of the coercion versus consent debate, see Gellately, Hitler’s True Believers; Stoltzfus, Hitler’s Compromises; and Richard J. Evans, Third Reich in History and Memory.

20. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, esp. 1–31.

21. Stearns, “Emotionology.” Thanks to Martin Conway for helping clarify my thoughts on this.

22. On “feeling rules,” see Hochschild, “Emotion Work.”

23. Ronald Berger, Surviving the Holocaust, 4. For more on history and the life course, see Hareven, Transitions; Alter, “Generation to Generation”; and Graff, “Interdisciplinary Explorations.” The distinction between life course and life cycle is not always clearly made by historians. See also Youngs, Life Cycle in Western Europe, esp. 1–10.

24. See Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew; and Eisenstadt, “Philip Gillon,” 7. I encountered these definitions in Rapaport, Jews in Germany After the Holocaust, 25. For details regarding how American Jews’ self-definitions have changed in recent decades, see also “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” Pew Research Center, October 1, 2013, http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/ jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/.

25. Ziemann, “Säkularisierung”; Weir, Secularism and Religion.

26. Saul Friedländer discusses how historians can combine a variety of public and private sources into an “integrated” polyphonic history of the Holocaust in the Introduction to his Nazi Germany and the Jews.

27. Fritzsche, Reading Berlin, esp. 12–50.

28. See Wobick-Segev, “Looking for a Nice Jewish Girl”; and Maurer, “Partnersuche und Lebensplanung.” For another interesting discussion of using personal advertisements for histories of love, see Epstein, “Advertising for Love.”

29. See J. M. Hess, Middlebrow Literature, esp. ch. 4.

30. For examples of how court cases have been used as sources for the history of emotions, see Roper, Witch Craze; Rabin, “Shame of the World”; and Ferguson, “Emotion.”

31. On emotional regimes, see Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, esp. 55. On emotional communities, see Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, esp. 1–31; and on emotional styles, see Gammerl, “Emotional Styles.”

32. See, most famously, Goffman, Presentation of Self.

33. Fehr and Russell, “Concept of Love,” 436.

34. Naomi Seidman has also written of how, in the case of modern Jews, “falling in love with love” often went hand in hand with falling in love with stories. See Seidman, Marriage Plot.

35. For the importance of diary keeping for the honing of young women and men’s subjectivity, see Gleixner, Pietismus und Bürgertum, 124–65.

36. On this, see Ben-Amos, “Holocaust Diaries,” 366.

37. Frank Ankersmit offers a useful corrective to this perspective; see Ankersmit, “Transfiguration of Distance.”

38. Lejeune, On Diary, 201.

39. For more, see Liebersohn and Schneider, “My Life in Germany.”

40. Hämmerle and Gerhalter, “Tagebuch,” 13–14.

41. See also Garbarini, Numbered Days, 1.

42. An example that will be discussed in Chapter 1 is Lotte Ginsburg’s diary. See Leo Baeck Institute, New York (LBINY), DM 201, Lotte Ginsburg, Diaries, p. 10.

43. G. Beck, Underground Life.

44. On the possibility that some of the stories were embellished, see United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), RG-50.030*0361, “Oral History Interview with Gad Beck.”

45. Holm, “Montag ich,” 10; Martin et al., Technologies of the Self.

46. Lejeune, On Diary, 201.

47. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 9.

48. On letter writing, see I. Bauer and Hämmerle, Liebe schreiben; and Wyss, Communication of Love.