Jewish history: Peter Kern’s “Village View with Nazis”: Aryanized provincial idyll

In recent years, a variety of social reflections have been observed that are based on one’s own experiences. Most of these books were written by authors who rose socially through their studies and thus outgrew the milieu of their parents and families. With their reflections on life, Didier Eribon’s “Return to Reims”, Édouard Louis’ “The End of Eddy” and Annie Ernaux’s books triggered political debates about the question of why the left and the working class have become alienated. In Germany, Christian Baron has now positioned himself in this line with his biographical book “Man of His Class”. For him, the discussion about alleged or actual mistakes of the left plays a central role – although the line between criticism and resentment occasionally becomes blurred when Baron takes on feminists, vegans and social minorities, as if he had the keywords for Sahra Wagenknecht’s polemic » The self-righteous ones want to deliver.

Peter Kern takes a completely different approach in his biographical book “Village View with Nazis,” which was recently published by Hentrich & Hentrich. He also describes a social rise from the lower middle class in a village in the Palatinate, which took him through his studies to become a secretary on the board of the industrial union IG Metall and a regular author in the socialist “Frankfurter Hefte”. Kern is not a story of alienation, but rather a story of emancipation, which is being pushed forward by the social left. In this respect, Kern has not written a reckoning with the left. Rather, it becomes clear to him how contact with comrades has broadened his horizons. They were the ones who helped him escape from the small town of Rodalben in the Palatinate, where church bells and the confessional structured life. With the book, Kern succeeds in two things: the very dense description of a childhood and youth in the 1960s and early 1970s in the southwest German province, as well as a study of the largely forgotten Jewish history in this region.

Leftist love of US culture

“Once a year the bells stopped ringing, that was before Easter, when Jesus died on the cross for our sins,” says Kern, describing his childhood attitude to life. Regular confession was a ritual that no one could avoid if they did not want to be labeled an outsider. »The sins had to come out before Easter. The black hymnal had the confessional mirror on the front. A confessional mirror holds the mirror up to you. There the child read what he had not thought about before entering the dark confessional on Saturday afternoon.”

In the first part of the book, Kern explains how an obedient churchgoer who obediently attended confession and later became an altar boy becomes a left-wing rebel who increasingly hitchhikes to the larger city. He describes the major role of culture and especially American music in his youthful emancipation. “It was this love for culture from the USA that probably saved me from the stupidest anti-Americanism,” Kern reflects in retrospect in an interview with “nd”.

Young leftists demonstrated in the Federal Republic of Germany against the Vietnam War, but did not want to know what their own parents had done during the Nazi era.

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He came into contact with this US culture through leftists. This is by no means a contradiction to his youthful involvement with two members of the Black Panther Party (BPP), who wanted to distribute leaflets in front of the US base in Ramstein in the Palatinate in which they called on soldiers to desert instead of taking part in the war in Vietnam participate. Kern wrote about the consequences: “The German security guard who controlled them had to be considered a racist because he tried to pull the fuse off the two of them. The Black Panthers abandoned their car and fled. They were tracked down with German shepherd dogs, taken to prison in Zweibrücken and brought to court months later.” It’s good that Kern recalled a left-wing German-American cooperation that has largely been forgotten: the support of war opponents from the USA, who did not want to kill or be killed in Vietnam. »The boy was allowed to see himself as a member of their solidarity committee. “The aim was to prove the innocence of the Ramstein Two,” says Kern, recalling his political involvement at the time with the deserters Edgar Jackson and William Burrell.

Palatinate rural Judaism

In his memoirs, Kern does not skimp on self-criticism. He can remember times when young leftists in the Federal Republic of Germany legitimately demonstrated against the USA’s Vietnam War, but did not want to know what their own parents and relatives had actually done during the Nazi era. This is where the second part of the book begins, which becomes an “autobiographically framed study” “that provides authentically described traces of information about a largely forgotten group of people involved in the National Socialist violent policy: the Palatinate rural Jews,” writes the social scientist Micha Brumlik in the blurb. Kern was able to draw on the work of Peter Conrad, who has been researching the history of the Jews in Rodalben for years.

At the beginning, the author Kern was faced with the question that also bothered the politically active young Peter Kern: Was Aunt Antoinette, of whom he had too many childhood memories, involved in the persecution of the Jews in Rodalben? The suspicion arose because the notorious Gauleiter Josef Bürckel had penned Jewish families in their house during the Nazi era before they were transported to the extermination camps. During Kern’s research, it turned out that his aunt had nothing to do with it and bought the house much later.

But Kern’s interest in the history of the Jewish population in the region up to the 19th century was aroused. He traces the biography of Julius Moses, a doctor who practiced in Rodalben for several years and whose name is not mentioned in the calendar pages of a kind of village chronicle. Julius Moses, who was a friend of Theodor Herzl, made a name for himself in the field of child psychology. Because he was able to leave for Tel Aviv in time, he was spared from the Nazi extermination policy. Even in his old age, Moses wrote his last texts about his life in Rodalben.

Kern also remembers the businessman Ludwig Samuel in “Village View with Nazis”. He was one of the village’s honorary gates, sat on the board of the synagogue council, was a patron of the hospital and warned early on about the rise of the Nazis. After they came to power, Samuel was interrogated by the Gestapo in Neustadt and treated like a criminal. In 1939, he and his wife managed to escape at the last minute. In 1946 he visited Rodalben again. »His son Fritz speaks of his father’s bitterness. He is made an honorary citizen of the village, but his property is irrevocably bequeathed to Mr. Bernd and Knecht”: This is how Kern describes how those who profited from Aryanization in the village kept the stolen property in 1945. Also poignant is the chapter about Gustav Samuel, Ludwig’s brother, who, impoverished after leaving for the USA, wrote a letter to the Nazi authorities asking in vain for the payment of his confiscated savings.

The neighbor who deports Jews

Also of great historical interest is an exchange of letters between the Nazi perpetrators, which Kern makes public for the first time in his book. It’s about the Jewish Metzger family from Rodalben, who found refuge with relatives near Göppingen after their property was Aryanized. The NSDAP mayor there wanted to get rid of them and got into a heated argument with his Palatinate brother, who even employed the Württemberg Ministry of the Interior and the NSDAP district administration. »The party knew what to do. She caused the Metzger-Baer families to be deported from Süßen to Riga,” writes Kern. Only one daughter survived and was later able to travel to Haifa.

Josef Bürckel is described as an early Nazi from Rodalben who supported Adolf Eichmann in organizing the Shoah. Bürckel was also one of the organizers of the deportation of over 5,000 Jews from Baden and Saar-Palatinate to the extermination camps on October 20, 1940. In his home village, the mass murderer was known to be affable. Just a few years ago there was a dispute over his burial site in a Neustadt cemetery, which had been classified as a “historical monument” by the responsible Mainz authorities.

On October 22, 2016, the 76th anniversary of the deportations of Jews from southwest Germany, as part of a memorial event, the name on the Bürckel grave was covered with a white cloth and a red ribbon with the names of the 58 Jews deported from Neustadt was looped over it. Giving the victims of persecution and terror in history their names back: This is also one of Peter Kern’s main concerns.

Peter Kern: Village view with Nazis. Hentrich & Hentrich 2024, 280 pages, br., 24.90 euros.