Speech on the Occasion of the Memorial Ceremony for 80 Years of Resistance in Rosenstraße
Berlin, Marienkirche, March 6, 2023
Let Us Treat This Legacy With Care
Von Eva Menasse
If today, eighty years after the protests of the women in Rosenstraße, we recall this courageous act, we must not forget that it is nevertheless only a tiny light in the midst of a murderous sea of darkness. Perhaps this light only makes the surrounding darkness all the deeper. There is – however much we might wish it otherwise – nothing consoling in the history of Nazi tyranny, nothing that can even begin to counterbalance the overall picture of human cruelty, infamy, unbridling, and mass murder on a scale of millions. To this must be added complicity, silent assent, and a disturbing collective numbness toward the fate of fellow citizens and neighbors.
Annihilation was the norm
The women in Rosenstraße, who for many days stood outside the building of the Jewish Welfare Office to obtain news of their husbands, fathers, and sons imprisoned there; the industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved 1,200 Jewish forced laborers from certain death in the extermination camps; the American diplomat Varian Fry, who in Marseille, with a network of helpers, managed to rescue well over two thousand people by smuggling them into neutral Portugal or by ship to Martinique; or the unknown peasant woman who, in January 1945 near Palmnicken, did not close her door to a survivor of the massacre on the Baltic Sea – like so many others: all of them are the exceptions that prove the rule, that only more starkly highlight the mass moral failure, the passivity and the looking away of the majority. Annihilation was the norm; normal was a story like that of Anne Frank, the linguistically gifted young girl whose hiding place was betrayed and who was murdered in a concentration camp – just like one million other Jewish children.
This event – the mass murder of Jews, homosexuals, Sinti and Roma, of the physically and mentally ill, of Communists, Socialists, forced laborers, and opponents of the regime – has confronted us, the generations that followed, especially in this country from which it all originated, with a heavy task that will never end: to continue researching it, to place the facts in their proper context, and to commemorate it appropriately. Yet both research and remembrance are, by their very nature, in motion, for remembrance is a condition of the present; it is defined by the particular perspective from which one looks back.
Nevertheless, today we stand, as we have for some years now, at a special point on the timeline: we are losing the very last eyewitnesses. From now on it will be entirely up to us to preserve remembrance – and equally, composure and presence of mind. For only this serves the dignity of the persecuted and murdered.
In recent times this has not always succeeded in German debates; too much weight has been given to minor differences, normal variations of interpretation have been inflated into fierce disputes of principle. Yet we must all carefully guard against being infected by the unrestrained culture of opinion that prevails in digital media. When contemporary historians, curators, politicians, and journalists debate, they must continue to regard one another as interlocutors – with emphasis on »partners« – and not as enemies to be driven from the discussion through personal denigration. Even on the subject of Rosenstraße there are differences of assessment and interpretation, but these play no decisive role if we keep in mind how much separates us from the time eighty years ago.
The last great wave of deportations from the »Old Reich«
In the early morning hours of February 27, 1943, the so-called »Factory Action« began. Some 10,000 Jews still living in Germany – for the most part those employed as forced laborers in the armaments factories – were to be arrested simultaneously and deported to the extermination camps. It was the last great wave of deportations from what was called the Old Reich, a logistical undertaking that had to be planned in advance. The war was in its fourth year; from our knowing hindsight, the military and psychological turning point had already come – the Battle of Stalingrad had just been lost in catastrophe, the 6th Army destroyed. The so-called Thousand-Year Reich had a little more than 26 months left; the more hopeless the situation became, the more delusional and obsessive grew the rulers’ efforts at annihilation.
It may be for that reason that in some places there was already a little sabotage; in any case, word of the planned Factory Action spread in advance, and an impressive number of some four thousand people managed to go into hiding in time – thus began for them a long odyssey, dangerous at every moment, dependent on the goodwill of others.
The misery of those arrested in those days was indescribable. Many were seized in the middle of winter wearing nothing but their work smocks and loaded onto trucks; their relatives learned only hours later what had happened and in some cases needed days to discover the whereabouts of their family members. In Berlin, people were gathered at five different sites – in addition to Rosenstraße, these included the synagogue on Levetzowstraße and the stables of the barracks on Rathenower Straße, both in Moabit, a vehicle hall of the Hermann Göring barracks in Reinickendorf, and the hall of the entertainment venue »Clou« on Mauerstraße in Mitte. Many children, too, were simply taken along, as otherwise they would have been left alone at home. All those who could prove that they were living in an existing »mixed marriage« with an »Aryan« partner were taken directly to Rosenstraße – some of them released again immediately from there.
Telling details of Nazi history
All this went on for many days; the arrests did not end on February 27, nor did the general chaos. People from other collection points were transferred to Rosenstraße, and others moved out from there to different sites – for example, if their partners had died or if they were demonstrably no longer living with them. Only Jews in intact marriages with so-called »Aryans« were still protected; during the Factory Action these people were separated from the others and housed exclusively in Rosenstraße. For them, different rules still applied; quite a few of them were later placed in the last remaining Jewish administrative posts after their predecessors had been deported.
»In the camps there was a lack of everything,« writes Wolf Gruner. »The majority of people had been taken by the Gestapo straight from the factories, which meant that unlike earlier deportations they had no chance to make even minimal preparations for a journey, let alone to take a suitcase with them.«
As in all collection points, the conditions in Rosenstraße were chaotic and degrading. Up to 2,000 people were forced to stay simultaneously in the rooms that had formerly housed various Jewish welfare organizations. They were literally crammed together; there were more people in the rooms than could sit on the floor. The sanitary facilities collapsed; within days the house and courtyard sank into filth. These details are always telling in Nazi history: even in this brutal and ruthless manner, something was being communicated to the detainees – namely, the denial of their humanity. They were kept like animals, and that was how they were meant to feel and behave. That was exactly the intention.
»We want our men back!«
Those imprisoned in Rosenstraße had a decisive advantage over all the others arrested in the course of the Factory Action: they had non-Jewish families – in most cases wives and children, sometimes also parents-in-law, brothers-in-law, and others. And these relatives still had rights, as ordinary German citizens. They, the non-Jewish relatives, now came to Rosenstraße to make inquiries. They brought parcels with clothing, food, and letters, and tried to persuade the guards at the door to pass them on. In many cases, this evidently succeeded.
Thus, in the days after the wave of arrests, there arose this protest, which only became known much later – mostly silent, but at times with the non-Jewish wives, and occasionally also children and other relatives, standing in the narrow street throughout the day and even shouting in unison: »We want our men back!«
This was possible only because they were »Aryan« Germans. It was a courageous act, regardless of whether their husbands were in fact destined for deportation or not. Their wives had to fear the worst, and they had no idea what might befall them for their protest. And yet they stood their ground, were driven apart by the police, gathered again and again, and would not leave until their husbands were released.
The subject of mixed marriages and their children – the so-called »Mischlinge« (a dreadful Nazi term that must nonetheless be used here for historical precision) – was not taken up by scholarship until later; after all, it concerned relatively few, and compared with all the other Jews they were better off.
Remembrance, as I said earlier, is always a condition of the present. It seems to me that this sideline and special issue of Nazi history may be particularly instructive today – it can show us once more that certain things cannot be cleanly separated. There is an almost sarcastic irony in the fact that not even the Nazis, determined as they were to the utmost, could resolve this question – not even by the end of their rule. Already at the Wannsee Conference there was disagreement over how to deal with the Jewish partners of mixed marriages. The hardliners proposed simply deporting all Jews; the others – one might call them the more skillful public-relations men – feared protests and resistance, such as indeed later became visible and known in Rosenstraße.
The question of Jews in mixed marriages was therefore repeatedly postponed; 98 percent of the Jews who survived in the Old Reich at the end of the war were those in such marriages. A supportive non-Jewish spouse was thus the only life insurance that remained valid until the end of Nazi rule – though not in every case.
Rules for racial delusion
The subject of mixed marriages also concerned my own family. I am especially grateful for Nathan Stoltzfus’s book »Resistance of the Heart«, published in German in 1999, because it was the first to cast broad light on this complex and only seemingly marginal subject. For from the Nazis’ point of view, it was not enough, as in 1935, simply to forbid marriages between Jews and non-Jews; the race theorists already found too many such marriages and the children that came from them. And for these, according to the logic of racial delusion, rules had to be devised.
Research has shown gender-specific differences: significantly more Jewish men were married to non-Jewish women than the other way round; the ratio seems to have been about 60:40. When the Nazis later put considerable pressure on the respective non-Jewish spouses, it was again significantly more men – that is, non-Jewish men – who chose the easy path, highly welcomed by regime and society, of getting rid of their wives. An employee of Adolf Eichmann’s »Central Office for Jewish Emigration« in Vienna testified after the war in 1945: »I witnessed cases where Aryan men came and said ›Take away my Jewish wife.‹«
One such case in Germany was documented twenty years ago in the book »My Wounded Heart. The Life of Lilli Jahn 1900–1944«: Ernst Jahn, a physician, divorced his wife despite their five children and thereby even put the children – the youngest daughter was only two years old – in temporary danger of death; his ex-wife Lilli Jahn was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only decades later did a shattering collection of letters from the last months of Lilli’s life, her correspondence with her children, come to light.
Nazi legislation, in any case, made distinctions among mixed marriages: if the children were brought up Christian, the marriage was considered »privileged« – but this in turn depended crucially on the father, since at that time it was normally the man, the so-called »head of household«, who determined the family’s religion.
The bitter path of my grandmother Dolly
So too in my grandparents’ case. Richard Menasse, a Jewish businessman from Vienna, married in 1917 a red-haired Catholic woman from the Sudetenland who had training in typing and shorthand. My grandmother did leave the church, but it was not then necessary for her formally to convert to Judaism. In times of social liberalization and dissolving religious ties, the Jewish communities were glad of every child that was registered as Jewish. Thus all three children of my grandparents (a daughter and son born in 1919 and 1923, and my father, a late arrival, in 1930) were entered at birth in the records of the Vienna Jewish community – and thereby were Jews.
So they were also Jews in the eyes of the Nazis: after 1938, the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany, this constellation was the worst possible. My grandparents’ marriage now counted as a »non-privileged mixed marriage«, the children as so-called »Geltungsjuden«, equated with »full Jews«.
My grandmother Dolly, who – like so many non-Jewish women – refused to divorce, went with her husband down the entire bitter path. They were separated from all three children. Their adult daughter fled to Canada; the two younger children found places on a Kindertransport to England – my father was only eight at the time. My grandmother would not know for many years what had become of her children; she learned only at the end of the war that her firstborn daughter had already succumbed to tuberculosis in 1940.
She herself, with her husband, had to move from one Jewish shared flat to the next, all marked on the outside with a »Jewish star«. My grandfather was a »star-bearer« and a forced laborer. With the exception of the risk to her life, she endured everything: the stigmatization, the loss of her children, the destruction of her bourgeois existence. Had my grandmother died during the harsh war years of accident or illness, it would have meant an immediate death sentence for my grandfather.
I say this not because it concerns my own family, but because it makes clear what the non-Jewish partners in non-privileged mixed marriages bore – that is, most of the women who at the end of February and beginning of March 1943 stood and protested in Berlin’s Rosenstraße. But I also say it because later, with at times enormous ignorance on the part of those who came after, such families were denied their history of suffering.
My father was already over seventy when he began to wonder whether he had really needed to grow up alone in a foreign land; some half-educated people had sown doubt in him. »But your mother wasn’t even Jewish – why did you have to flee?« At that time we went together to the register office of the Vienna Jewish community and had his Jewish status confirmed, his entry and those of his siblings shown to us, and were told that this constellation had existed thousands of times – Jewish children of non-Jewish mothers who had been Jews both before and under the Nazis, but later were not supposed to be anymore.
The only distinction: victims and perpetrators
I say this because today there is an unhealthy tendency to issue, as it were retroactively, Aryan certificates – or to lay claim to a Jewish identity – depending on whether one wishes to discredit or to elevate another’s political position. And I say it above all because it is precisely the absurd dance around mixed marriages, precisely the arbitrariness of the Nazi crimes, that shows human beings can never be neatly classified by any such criteria – and that we must, on the contrary, vehemently reject such a worldview.
As with other religions, institutional Judaism has the right to define rules of membership – for instance, that children of non-Jewish mothers are not recognized as Jews. That these rules were applied more strictly after the Shoah than before is all too understandable.
But the persecution and murder of human beings under Nazi rule had nothing whatsoever to do with halachic rules of descent. In their obsession with pure Aryan blood, the Nazis set themselves in the place of God, or of fate, by establishing wholly arbitrary criteria that sorted the people they ruled into those with rights and those without – and later into those condemned to death. And they carried out persecution and murder – on a scale of millions.
The only distinction one could reasonably make, when speaking and writing about that time, is the one between victims and perpetrators. And even that, if one zooms in close on certain individual cases, is not always clear-cut. Even eminent perpetrators at times rescued or spared someone. And some of the persecuted, in their desperation, made themselves guilty – though for them it remains true that without tyranny they would never have been forced into such guilt-ridden situations.
To say this does not mean equating anything with anything else. But it does mean insisting that every historical detail deserves its own attention and care – and its own frame of reference. To draw both the large and the small picture as precisely and reliably as possible – that is the demanding task of professional historiography. And it is made all the more difficult by the prevailing tendency toward snap judgments and exaggerations in digital media.
Not only tell the stories of the survivors
And that is why today, 80 years after the protests of the women in Rosenstraße, we should also turn our attention to the small but ugly details – the chaos and the lack of oversight, the rubbish, the stench, the overflowing toilets. To how those imprisoned there had to endure it, in some cases for two weeks, with little sleep and no winter clothing, poorly nourished and unwashed. To how many of them emerged psychologically shattered – and how little that counted in the end, so long as one had survived.
How great – and here I return to the beginning – these exceptions were, in sum highly improbable. Or as Martin Doerry, the grandson of the murdered physician Lilli Jahn, writes: our remembrance must on no account become a distorted balance sheet by telling only the stories of the survivors. For then there would emerge »the picture of a reign of terror that most in the end somehow escaped« (Doerry). And that is simply not how it was.
Compared with then, we live today – despite all problems and crises – in paradise. Whoever, in this rich and fortunately still so stable democracy that is Germany, constantly paints the threatening return of the Nazis on the wall in order to buttress their arguments is, in my view, not a serious interlocutor. Or, to cite a crystal-clear sentence of Michel Friedman’s: »If your argument is right, you don’t need Auschwitz for it. If your argument is wrong, Auschwitz won’t help you either – but you will have misused it.«
And precisely because we now stand at the threshold of having to preserve and carry forward the memory of Nazi crimes without the last eyewitnesses, I believe that nearly eighty years after the end of the war it is time to leave behind the strange genealogies by which participants in today’s debates are sorted – or sort themselves – into descendants of perpetrator families or of victim families. To discuss productively, no such certificate of authenticity is needed. The murder of my great-grandmother Berta Menasse in Theresienstadt lends no greater weight to any opinion I might hold today – nor is it diminished by the fact that her daughter-in-law, my courageous grandmother Dolly, was not Jewish.
A short, powerful maxim
Over this long span of time, other criteria have become more important: historical expertise, moral steadfastness, care, composure, and the ability to accept other well-founded opinions without outrage. Hannah Arendt once said: »That the Nazis are our enemies – my God, we didn’t need Hitler’s seizure of power to know that! (…) The personal problem was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did.« Adapting this quotation to the present, I would wish that all who today seriously commit themselves to remembrance and against antisemitism and racism would recall much more strongly who their natural allies are – and who the true enemies.
On January 27 of this year, in a commemorative address to the Thuringian state parliament, the historian and director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, formulated a short but powerful maxim: »Remembrance culture is education for democracy.« And so it is.
The element of democratic education is what should and must make the memory of the crimes of the Nazi era relevant and meaningful for everyone in Germany – including those who have only recently arrived here from afar. Otherwise remembrance could indeed have been left solely to the families of the victims. And then we would not today be gathered here to recall the hundreds, perhaps well over a thousand women, who eighty years ago refused to be driven from the center of the capital in protest against the arrest of their husbands.
That was a strong appeal – also to courage and civic spirit – addressed to a then far-distant future that has now become our present. Let us treat this legacy with care.
* Eva Menasse, born in 1970, writer (»Vienna«, »Dunkelblum«) and essayist, spokesperson of PEN Berlin since June 2022