Space and Time under Persecution: The German-Jewish Experience in the Third Reich

Miron (The Waning of Emancipation), a history professor at the Open University of Israel, offers a detailed if less-than-revelatory study of how German Jews during the Third Reich dealt with exclusionary policies by negotiating perceptions of space and time. For example, when public areas were closed off, some Jews used driving to “expand their spaces and thus to augment their sense of self,” until an 1938 edict revoked their licenses. Miron also notes that as the German calendar became “Nazified” with celebrations of the party’s heritage, Jews began to hew more closely to their own calendar’s cycle of holidays, even those virtually unobserved in the past. While Miron weaves in valuable historical detail, too often his verbose analyses fail to meet his stated aim of “break[ing] through the accepted boundaries of Jewish historiography in the Nazi era”: formulations such as “Jews—acting in this context as persons in the street facing the hegemonic Nazi system that shaped the rules for the production of space—tried to act in different ways to produce for themselves a tenable experience of space” obscure more than they reveal. Despite some promising moments, this comes up short. (Sept.)