Article Note: Harry Legg, “‘I Hid for Days in the Basement’: Moments of ‘Jewish’ Discovery in Pre-Holocaust Germany and Austria”
Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)
Article Note: Harry Legg, “‘I Hid for Days in the Basement’: Moments of ‘Jewish’ Discovery in Pre-Holocaust Germany and Austria,” Contemporary European History (2024), 18 pages, doi:10.1017/S0960777324000262.
By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University
This is the second article from Edinburgh PhD candidate Harry Legg, following his 2022 publication “Non-Jewish ‘Full Jews’: The Everyday Life of a Forgotten Group Within Nazi Germany,” in which he analyzed the experienced of Germans who were racially identified as Jews by the Nazi regime but who did not consider themselves Jewish religiously or culturally. In this article, Legg asks a related question: “What happens when someone ignorant of their Jewish heritage uncovers the truth in dramatic circumstances?” (1). He examines four facets of this moment of discovery: the clues to Jewish ancestry that were overlooked, the reactions of antisemites who discovered they were racially Jewish, the despair many felt when they discovered they were Jews, and the minority who reacted positively to the discovery of their Jewish heritage. Legg’s overriding purpose is to explore the nuances of identity among those who didn’t fall neatly into the binaries of Jew and German (or Austrian) Christian.
The title of the article comes from the testimony of Rudolf Briske, who secluded himself after learning of his Jewish ancestry from his parents in 1929. Briske was one of forty Germans and Austrians who Legg studied, most of whom were not initially aware of their Jewish ancestry (in part, of course, because they were raised as non-Jews) but who later wrote about it after the war. (2) (He calls these subjects non-Jewish “Jews” because they did not identify as Jewish but were identified as either “Full Jews” or “Mischlinge” [partially Jewish] by the Nazi regime.) Most of the “moments of discovery” Legg studies did not come from parents but at school, whether as denunciations by classmates (armed with knowledge from their parents) or as discoveries from filling out racial forms for school or for Nazi youth groups (7).
Legg argues that there were in fact clues that might have alerted these non-Jewish “Jews” to their Jewish ancestry. One was the presence of Jewish relatives, which might seem more obvious in retrospect than in real time, when many non-Jewish “Jews” didn’t think of Jewishness in racial terms (10). Since many of the subjects of Legg’s study were minors, they simply didn’t understand what racial terms like Mischlinge or slurs like Rassenschande meant (11).
The most dramatic moments of discovery of Jewishness were those of antisemites. As Legg points out, the very fact that non-Jewish “Jews” could be deeply antisemitic illustrates how separated they were from the Jewish communities around them (12). Some tried to deny their Jewishness, invoking their “hereditary character” as evidence of their hoped-for non-Jewishness. Others adjusted their worldviews, abandoning their antisemitism. One compared it to the adaptation process involved in a diagnosis of a terminal illness. Another experienced guilt over her antisemitism. For others still, their moment of discovery amounted to an emergence out of naiveté. Still, the language of these discoveries was usually the language of despair: “thunderstruck,” “horrified,” “stunned,” and “terrible, terrible, terribly upsetting” (14). For many, the hardest part of the discovery was being “dropped” by friends (15). Others experienced the disgrace of public exposure (16).
A few of the non-Jewish “Jews” who Legg studied reacted positively to the discovery of their Jewish ancestry, though this was more common among those whose moment of discovery came before 1933 (17).
This is a fascinating article which offers genuine insight into the experiences of those who were raised as Germans or Austrians—and normally as Christians—and then discovered their Jewish ancestry. It sheds light on the diversity of experiences among ordinary Germans and Austrians forced to face the brutalities of Nazi racial ideology.
