Living in an Abnormal Normality. The Everyday Relations of Jews and Non-Jews in the German-Dutch Border Region, 1933–1938

Abstract

This article examines the everyday relations and interactions between German Jews and non-Jews in the period between Hitler’s takeover of power on 30 January 1933 and the pogrom of 9 November 1938 that has come to be known as Kristallnacht. The focus is on the relations between Jews and non-Jews in a specific region—the German-Dutch border region of the Grafschaft Bentheim, the Emsland, and the Westmünsterland. The choice of everyday interactions as the subject of study yields insights into the social practices of exclusion that occurred in the concrete, everyday lives and encounters of Jewish and non-Jewish neighbours, classmates and acquaintances. The first years of the Third Reich were characterized not only by exclusion at the level of social interactions, but also by a transformation at the level of the existing moral order. While the coexistence of German Jews and non-Jews had been marked by clear boundaries, social anti-Semitism in the years before the establishment of the Third Reich and the status of Jews as equal citizens had long been a much-debated topic, Jews were still seen as being equal human beings. In Nazi Germany, however, they were deprived even of this level of acceptance. To interpret the social dynamics of how Jews and non-Jews lived together, and the ambivalences and contradictions that came with this coexistence, it is important to examine practices of exclusion in relation to these moral shifts.