What this fascinating article does not take account of is wonderfully laid out in Oskar Maria Graf’s Die Flucht ins Mittelmäßige . in which he describes the tensions, ambivalences and relationships between the non-Jewish German-Americans who had been living in and around New York for generations, maintaining their German speaking communities with schools and churches, and the newly arrived, predominantly Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. These two German speaking communities were not necessarily natural allies, despite living next to one another in the American North East. The defeat of Nazism would be the determining factor in turning these generation-old communities into fully-fledged Americans with English, rather than German as a first language. Roosevelt would have been very aware of the size and importance of this constituency and it would not have been easy to have known how non-Jewish German Americans felt about events in Germany. Many in America – and throughout Europe – still saw Hitler as the man to save Germany. Anti-Semitism was not uniquely German. We forget. In light of the Holocaust, all the actions and decisions of world leaders seem so black and white in retrospect.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 16:45:50 +0000
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