Emotions are everywhere. Countries are now ranked based on their level of ‘happiness’, voters’ choices are influenced by feelings of anger and fear and recent research even suggests that feelings of joy and optimism can lead to a longer life.Footnote 1 Historians have also become preoccupied with the impact of emotions on the course of history itself and the processes of historical writing and remembering.Footnote 2 One of the most emotionally wrought events in modern European history is the Holocaust. Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazi regime and its collaborators murdered nearly six million Jewish individuals and five million non-Jewish civilians.Footnote 3 These numbers do not account for the extremity of emotional lives during the Holocaust. In Eastern Europe, shooting squads called Einsatzgruppen combed the countryside, rounding up, humiliating and killing Jews at point-blank range. In the West, Jewish families were crammed into rail carriages and sent on brutal journeys plagued by starvation and fear. Upon arrival at German-operated killing centres, these women, men and children suffocated to death as they gasped for their loved ones. Emotions were central to the genocide of European Jewry.
This review article seeks to treat recent literature on emotions and the Holocaust as a renewed scholarly urge, one informed by both an early post-war tendency to understand the relationship between the Holocaust and emotions and relatively new conceptions of emotional communities as mapping onto existing social groupings. To be sure, the impulse to write histories of the Holocaust and Nazism through an emotional lens is not new. As early as 1951, when Hannah Arendt published her now iconic The Origins of Totalitarianism, theorists have posited a direct link between societies’ emotional impulses and the destruction wrought by the Second World War. Terror’s assault on human life was central to Arendt’s views on the relationship between violence, totalitarianism and emotions.Footnote 4 In this sense, emotions have always been central to the historical concepts of Nazism and the Holocaust.
Arendt’s observations precede what, in the past two decades, has become a renewed trend to engage with historical emotions and sensibilities in writing European histories. This new historiography departs from much of the field’s earlier scholarship, which tended to focus on long-term narratives of increasing emotional restraint.Footnote 5 Instead, they largely draw inspiration from Barbara Rosenwein’s call to understand the study of emotions in history as an overlapping set of ‘emotional communities’. In Rosenwein’s conception, such communities reflect common social groupings – from families to friend networks and even parliaments – and capture ‘what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them; the evaluations that they make about others’ emotions; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore’.Footnote 6 Rosenwein’s focus on emotional communities is one ripe for application to the field of Holocaust studies due to her emphasis on the competing role of individual and communal identity in shaping emotional impulses.
In reviewing new approaches to studying emotional histories during the Holocaust and its aftermath, this article examines four works that all analyse the diverse lives of European Jews. The first section, centring on Jewish identity under the Nazis and the use of agency as a category of analysis, examines Amy Simon’s Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries and Florian Zabransky’s Jewish Men and the Holocaust. Both works take us into the minds of Jews in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust’s most murderous phase. The second section moves forward in time to examine questions of communal anxiety and belonging in the post-war era. Both Robin Judd’s Between Two Worlds and Constance de Bollardière and Sharon Kangisser-Cohen’s After the Darkness argue that it is in the post-war era where we can best identify the emotional effects wrought by Holocaust survival. I conclude by discussing the common themes within these four works and pathways for further research on emotions and the Holocaust.
Identity and Historicising Agency
In a recent German History forum discussing the role of emotions in the field, Alon Confino called for Holocaust historians to move beyond mere ideology as an explanatory paradigm in research on Jewish lives. Confino stated that a ‘history of sensibilities goes beyond the logic of ideological thinking into those emotions and memories that make human motivations and actions, into those images of the self, collectivity and the past that cannot be reduced to ideology’.Footnote 7 Such an exploration of ‘emotions and memories’ that go beyond ideological explanation characterises Amy Simon’s Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries. As a book grounded in the surviving remnant of both published and unpublished Yiddish ghetto diaries, Simon’s work engages with the key question of how ghetto life was experienced, and interpreted, by Jews themselves.
Based on her doctoral dissertation, Simon’s book presents a new model for understanding the writings of Holocaust diarists, emphasising how a fusion of empathetic history with histories of emotions can assist scholars in uncovering new perspectives on how ghetto inhabitants experienced genocidal perpetration in the Polish cities of Warsaw, Łódź and Vilna. Arguing against dated notions of scholarly objectivity, Simon argues that the historian’s positionality should be aligned with the ghetto diarist.Footnote 8 Reading ghetto diaries from their perspective, Simon’s primary contribution is her development of a new taxonomy of perpetrator behaviours in the eyes of diarists, ranging from ‘administrative to lethal: Taking advantage, persecuting administratively, robbing, guarding, beating, rounding up, and killing’.Footnote 9 This categorisation of diarists writings allows us to view the myriad levels of persecution against Polish Jews that only concluded in outright killing.
Key to Simon’s argument, and indeed, a common element in other histories of emotions during the Holocaust, is the use of agency as a category of analysis. Reflecting on the work of Polish Jewish diarists, Simon concludes that ‘representing and closely examining their own and broader ghetto community’s emotions was a primary way that ghetto diarists demonstrated agency during the Holocaust’. Footnote 10 Rejecting tropes of powerlessness among European Jews, Simon’s analysis demonstrates diarists’ constant struggle to maintain their identities in the face of radicalising persecution. In this sense, Simon’s monograph contributes to studies of Jewish behaviour in the Nazi ghettos.Footnote 11
However, agency is far from an uncontested category in Holocaust studies, let alone histories of emotions.Footnote 12 Anticipating such views, Simon shifts her gaze to study agency’s negative connotations: the question of potential collaboration by Jews in the Polish ghettos. Simon writes that ‘Jews were most concerned with the behavior of other Jewish people who hurt them in the ghettos’, suggesting that diarists were preoccupied with the phenomena of Jews who participated in violent acts against their brethren.Footnote 13 Notably, the diarists reject any such collaboration in their writing, projecting such anxieties onto their fellow ghetto residents. Such emotional impulses provide an important historical reminder that agency, far from a synonym for resistance, must be deployed to examine the full range of Jewish responses during the Holocaust.
In addressing such a range of emotional responses to genocide, Simon persuasively argues for moving beyond the now well-critiqued taxonomy of victims–perpetrators–bystanders.Footnote 14 Additionally, her work is one of the first to examine Holocaust diaries written in Yiddish, a surprising lacunae given the importance of Yiddish-language sources to recent Holocaust research.Footnote 15 Yet there are a few missed opportunities in her work. For example, the reader is left wondering about her choice of cases. Are the writings of diarists in Polish ghettos unique? Why exclude the Kraków ghetto – one of the largest in Nazi-occupied Poland – in favour of Vilna? Clarifying such questions would further enhance this important monograph.
Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries also addresses a theme that is explored by another work in this review: gender and masculinity. While Simon explicitly acknowledges the absence of female diarists in her study due to the lack of surviving sources, she does not use the opportunity to examine the operation of Jewish masculinities in the ghettos, a new and innovative area of Holocaust research.Footnote 16 It is this neglected area of inquiry that Florian Zabransky seeks to address in his first book, Jewish Men and the Holocaust. Expanding Simon’s focus on ghetto geographies, Zabransky writes a history of Jewish masculinities during the Holocaust, exploring the connections between agency and intimacy to explore four distinct spaces: the ghetto, the camp, the forest and the displaced persons camp. Arguing for understanding the transformation of Jewish masculinities throughout the Nazi period, Zabransky contends that Jewish men existed in distinct – albeit constantly rupturing – emotional communities under Nazi rule that directly shaped their decision-making processes.
Drawing on Rosenwein’s call to understand histories of emotions through a series of overlapping emotional communities, Zabransky contends that an emotional community developed around the shared experiences of Jewish men during the Holocaust.Footnote 17 As Jewish men encountered a new Holocaust space, Zabransky argues that the gendered dynamics of their emotional lives shifted. These shifts often mapped onto the geographic movements of Jewish men themselves. While Jewish life in ghettos was largely family based, the heterosocial sphere of the ghetto later shifted into the homosocial sphere of the camp. Zabransky connects such gendered experiences into Jews’ post-war lives, claiming that a return to the heterosexual spaces of displaced persons camps was characterised by a process of Jewish ‘remasculinization’.Footnote 18 Drawing on personal chronicles such as diaries, memoirs and video interviews, Zabransky presents a new history of the Holocaust characterised by shifting gendered norms and social expectations.
Zabransky’s monograph builds on the now well-established historiography of women’s experiences during the Holocaust.Footnote 19 In studying the gender-specific experiences of Jewish men in Nazi carceral spaces, Zabransky calls for historians of sexuality during the Holocaust to critically study Jewish masculinities in their gender-specific contexts, deserving of analyses that examine Jewish males’ intimate lives. In doing so, Zabransky deploys the concept of ‘intimate agency’ to examine ‘power struggles, negotiations of relationships, social dynamics and representations of masculinities’.Footnote 20 Here we can identify a commonality with Simon’s work: both authors draw upon the language of Jewish agency in their readings of emotionally charged first-person accounts.
Echoing Simon’s nuancing of Jewish agency, Zabransky contends that Jewish males’ ‘agency should not only be understood in connection with survival or manifesting itself in acts of resistance . . . it was also strongly existent in practices and choices linked to the intimate and emotional sphere’.Footnote 21 While this point is well taken, it could be even more revealing if Zabransky pushed his argument to discern the differences in agency’s operation between men and boys. Perhaps the ‘agency of youth’, in Zabransky’s formulation, is of a different narrative quality than the agency of adult men.Footnote 22 While Zabransky examines youth agency in his discussion of male–male rape, the term could also be of use when discussing Jewish boys’ lives in ghettos and forests. Further parsing the differences between the experiences of Jewish boys and men outside Nazi camps could help the reader understand the fraught relationship between boyhood, Jewish masculinities and intimacy in the broad geography of Nazi Europe.
Jewish Men and the Holocaust addresses a reality that needs restating in the historiography of the Nazi camps: with a few notable exceptions, encounters between Jews in the camps were largely segregated by gender.Footnote 23 Zabransky uses such homosocial spaces as laboratories to examine not just the particularities of Jewish male experiences during the Holocaust but also the constant ruptures of gendered identities that characterised life as a Jew in Nazi Europe. These ruptures continued into the post-war era. Zabransky discusses the case of Jack O., a Jewish man who was castrated in Auschwitz.Footnote 24 Unlike other Jewish survivors, Jack could not have biological children as he sought to build a post-war life. In this sense, the Nazis continued to attack Jack’s own sense of male identity even after the end of the war. Jack’s experiences, and other Jewish survivors’ emotional lives, form the second core of a renewed historiography examining emotions, Jewish lives and the Holocaust.
Anxieties in the Aftermath of Destruction
While agency characterises much of the recent historiography linking histories of emotions with Holocaust studies, the post-war era invokes new questions concerning Jewish communal anxieties in the aftermath of utter destruction. Since the early 2010s, there has been a significant growth in works that examine Jewish lives in the Holocaust’s immediate aftermath.Footnote 25 Simultaneously, the burgeoning field of aftermath studies has emerged as a central problematic in writing histories of the Holocaust. Histories of emotions are situated at the nexus of these two fields. Attuned to the immediate traumas faced by Holocaust survivors, much of the recent literature that studies Jewish emotional lives in the aftermath of the Holocaust centre around the themes of anxiety and belonging in a newly liberated world.
Sharon Kangisser-Cohen and Constance de Bollardière’s edited volume entitled After the Darkness is one such work that brings the anxieties of post-war Jewish life into sharp focus. The volume itself is broken up into three roughly equal sections: caregivers and caregiving models, survivors as a collective and survivors’ voices. When read as an interrelated corpus, the authors seek to argue that early observations on Jewish survival in the Holocaust’s immediate aftermath ‘informed later psychological and sociological conceptualizations of the impact of the war on the emotional world of the survivors’.Footnote 26 In this sense, the authors connect the crucial days and months following liberation to the development of Holocaust survivor narratives over time. Notably, Kangisser-Cohen and de Bollardière depart from the other works examined here by situating their volume within the literature on trauma theory, rather than the broader historiography of emotions. In exploring the emotional impact of war through survivors’ rehabilitative efforts, the authors seek to historicise what became known in the post-war decades as the ‘KZ-Syndrome’. As early as 1943, with the publication of Bruno Bettelheim’s ‘Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations’, scholars have theorised the long-term effects of life in the Nazi camps.Footnote 27 ‘KZ-Syndrome’ has since become a shorthand for the largely psychological effects of life as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. The authors in this volume draw upon the legacy of such early scholarship to argue for understanding survivors’ emotional and psychological journeys as inextricably linked to the legacy of survival under genocidal conditions.Footnote 28
Many of the contributions to this volume bring together recent trends tying individual Jewish experiences to broader communal anxieties. In her examination of a group of Jewish girls who attended an ultra-Orthodox school in Sweden between 1945 and 1948, Beth Cohen argues that ‘anxiety about Jewish continuity gripped the Jewish community across the ideological spectrum and imbued child survivors with symbolic proportions’.Footnote 29 Such arguments echo the works of historians such as Tara Zahra and Daniella Doron, both of whom have argued for understanding the symbolic nature of Jewish children in the early post-war era.Footnote 30 In this sense, the role of emotion takes on a far broader role in communal reckoning with the effects of the Holocaust. Rather than an individual impulse, emotional stability transforms into a societal priority.
Other authors in After the Darkness address underexplored emotions in Jewish communities. For example, Katarzyna Person’s chapter argues for the centrality of Jewish rage in understanding Polish Jews’ early post-war lives.Footnote 31 Rather than a side effect of liberation, Person contends that rage was a central means through which Polish Jews rediscovered their own agency and crafted their Holocaust histories.Footnote 32 This perspective echoes the previously reviewed work of Amy Simon, who used the category of agency to explore how Polish Jewish writers recorded their Holocaust experiences. Drawing on Polish Jews’ desire for revenge, Person takes a different approach to using agency as a category of analysis. In post-war Poland, revenge could take many forms, from building a family to committing physical violence. Some survivors even targeted Jews who were judged to have betrayed fellow Jews.Footnote 33 Agency was thus not only deployed to regain control over one’s life but could also be viewed as an emotional drive towards physical violence.
After the Darkness provides a commendable geographic coverage: the volume includes child survivors’ experiences from the streets of Paris to the Polish countryside. The authors’ combined efforts demonstrate the sheer diversity of Jewish survivor trajectories in the early post-war era. However, notably absent from this interdisciplinary volume is the extensive historical literature on emotions, sensibilities and mentalities that ties works in Holocaust studies to the broader literature on histories of emotions in modern history. Situating the authors’ contributions within such historiography beyond earlier works on psychology, trauma theory and the KZ-Syndrome could enlarge the implications of this important volume to other fields in European history.
de Bollardière and Kangisser-Cohen title their volume with the question ‘after the darkness?’ It is precisely this question that the reader is left to grapple with at the end of the book. How do Jewish survivors construct post-war lives in the aftermath of the Holocaust? Robin Judd attempts to answer this question in Between Two Worlds. Inspired by her own grandmother’s history, Judd writes a history of Jewish war brides, most of whom wed American GIs, in the immediate years following the end of the Holocaust. Judd draws upon personal chronicles to argue that Jewish war brides drew upon communal traditions, a desire for belonging, and a need to reconstruct their lives in building new families with Allied military personnel.
In the context of post-war Euro-American history, Judd demonstrates that war brides were far from a rare phenomenon. Over 200,000 women – including the author’s grandmother – immigrated to America as spouses of American military personnel after the Second World War, constituting almost 22 per cent of all legal admissions in the early post-war years.Footnote 34 Judd’s focus on Jewish war brides demonstrates the unexpected ways in which Jewish spaces, languages and cultures were key mediating factors in coming to terms with a post-genocide world.
The monograph is largely ordered chronologically, centring on five particular processes in Jewish war brides’ lives: liberation, encounter, marriage, immigration and acculturation. Judd’s narrative ends around 1950, when the pressures of building new families and lives subsumed war brides’ Holocaust experiences. Throughout all of these periods, Judd argues that a ‘heightened sense of not fully belonging’ pushed Jewish war brides to explore and build what it meant to be a Jewish woman in the aftermath of the Holocaust.Footnote 35 Throughout this process, Judd argues that Jewish communal society and cultural rituals were important mediating factors in how Jewish war brides came to understand their sense of belonging in a new post-war society.
Of particular note to the study of emotions in Holocaust history is Judd’s usage of memory as a historical source. Wary of the dangers of sentimentalising survivors and their post-Holocaust narratives, Judd instead seeks to mine memory as a way to understand the transformation of testimonial narratives into recorded history.Footnote 36 Indeed, the dangers of sentimentalising Jewish war brides’ narratives are found in Judd’s recollections of her own grandmother Arlene, an American Jewish war bride. In a remarkable conclusion, Judd ponders if Arlene feared the spread of disease on her ship to America, due to her experiences in the Nazi camps. She asks if Arlene’s American GI husband Joe’s return home after his demobilisation served as a reminder of the death of Joe’s brother, Arlene’s first husband.Footnote 37 This intricate tapestry of family history, intertwined with the broader phenomena of war brides, allows Judd to explore the painful absences of survivors’ emotional lives while avoiding post-facto glorification of survivors’ struggles.
Between Two Worlds argues that it is precisely due to the lack of belonging that pushed Jewish women to explore ‘what it meant to be a Jew . . . in the aftermath of the Holocaust’.Footnote 38 Some Jewish women joined synagogues or gatherings of survivors, while others faced pressures by their husbands families’ to shed their Jewish pasts.Footnote 39 This exploration of both individual and communal identity in a post-war world became central to how war brides came to see themselves torn between a destroyed Jewish world and a Western society that sought to quickly move away from the horrors of war and genocide.Footnote 40 Such anxieties characterised the lives of Jewish war brides, and through the intricate analysis of Judd, the reader can view the rapid changes in Jewish identity that swept through European Jewry’s surviving remnant in the late 1940s.
Conclusion
Emotions lie at the heart of Holocaust history. On a macro level, some scholars of German history have sought to characterise the Nazi period as a ‘hot’ emotional era in comparison to the ‘cold’ period of Weimar.Footnote 41 On a micro level, more recent trends have encouraged historians to examine the sensations and emotions of individuals themselves. In the context of prisoner experiences in Auschwitz, Nikolaus Wachsmann has argued that ‘we need to look more closely at the lived experience of prisoners, perpetrators and onlookers, uncovering their perceptions of the everyday and the meanings they attached to them’.Footnote 42 The works reviewed here echo Wachsmann’s words, demonstrating the value of studying individual Jewish emotions and sensations both during and after the Holocaust.
In every one of these four monographs, we can identify a common focus on European Jews’ lives and anxiety surrounding their feelings of belonging. This sensitive and nuanced exploration of Jewish lives during the Holocaust might also provide models for studying the emotional experiences of perpetrators and collaborators.Footnote 43 In Arendt’s early work on emotions and the Holocaust, it was the perpetrators who were often central to her analysis.Footnote 44 In the 1990s, debates over perpetrators’ emotional motivations dominated the historiography.Footnote 45 While scholars have rightly moved to include the experiences of European Jews in such histories, we need more analyses that provide new approaches to the field’s earlier questions concerning the emotional lives of diverse actors living in Nazi Europe.
Agency also emerged as a central category of analysis for many of the reviewed works. While agency has illuminated the various means through which Jews came to terms with radicalising antisemitism, we should not reduce agency to a mere metonym for resistance. While agency can be exercised in the form of ghetto fighters or uprisings in camps, it can also be found in the actions of Jewish ghetto police who assisted in the deportation process.Footnote 46 The dangers of sentimentalising victims into what Judd terms ‘secular saints’ must be considered when studying the emotional lives of survivors, and future works should seek to capture the full range of Jewish responses to persecution.Footnote 47
Finally, family life and childhood can be found in most of the new works on emotions and the Holocaust. Zabransky demonstrates the value of childhood in accessing Jewish emotional communities. Judd uses gender as lens to view the competing pressures of post-war life. Beth Cohen centres children’s communal journeys in examining psychological responses to the Holocaust. Works that examine the emotional lives of survivors must do so through a communal lens, attuned to the particularities of an individual survivor’s experiences and aware of the broader atmosphere of both persistent antisemitism and assimilationist pressures. Only then will scholars be able to unlock the emotions that lay at the centre of Holocaust history.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the review editors of Contemporary European History for their feedback.
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