Courtesy of Bruce Neuburger/Monthly Review Press
In the 1980s, Bruce Neuburger was given a sheaf of letters by his father, which contained correspondence from his grandparents, Benno and Anna Neuburger. The exchanges took place between late July 1938 to 1941. Bruce's father and aunt had successfully made it out of Nazi Germany; his grandparents didn't. They became part of the murdered masses.
Benno's death was unique, as Bruce would learn in the early 1990s when his aunt shared with him a transcript of Benno's trial by "The People's Court" of the Third Reich. Those records became available after Germany's reunification when the East Germans released court documents formerly in their possession.
It was then that Neuburger learned Benno's death by guillotine was the result of a guilty verdict for high treason. His grandfather's crime was writing and mailing a succession of postcards with messages attacking Hitler for the treatment and ensuing genocide of the German Jews.
The book is divided into three sections: "The Family", "The Jews Are Our Misfortune", and "Despair Becomes Defiance". Neuburger used research culled from materials in the Bavarian and Munich archives, interviews with family survivors, court evidence, and information from German historians to weave together what he calls "the social environment of that period".
Neuburger gives readers a primer on German history, from the depression, which began in 1873, to the country's subjugation in World War I. "Leftists and Jews" were blamed for the defeat. The anti-Jewish sentiment emanated from the view of Jews as "war profiteers".
The book echoes current political themes, including population migration. There is a look at the immigration of Jews from Russia, East Poland, and Galicia into Germany. In Munich, 20 percent of the Jews were from the East (15 percent nationwide). Some were in transit to the United States. However, those hoping to stay in Germany were at higher risk of deportation.
The Jewish Women's Association in Munich, which Anna joined, was proactive in trying to help these Jews assimilate into the German Jewish community by finding them housing and jobs. Many established German Jews saw these poorer Jews trying to escape the upheaval and poverty of their homelands as a threat to their standing within the larger German society.
Neuburger shapes the narrative to situate the reader into the atmosphere that would lead to Nazi power-- including references to Kurt Eisner, Munich politics, the Bavarian Parliament, and a militia called the Freikorps.
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