This is the history of a remarkable German family of Jewish origin, one that spans some two hundred years and six generations from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. Published in German in 2006 as Die Strassmanns. Schicksale einer deutsch-jüdischen Familie über zwei Jahrhunderte, this book is not merely a window into German-Jewish history from emancipation to National Socialism. Rather it reflects the larger histories of Prussia and modern Germany as it traces the family's journey from western Poland to Berlin and, finally, to Switzerland and the United States. For instance, the political activism of some of the Strassmanns in the cause of liberalism in the nineteenth century, beginning with the revolutions of 1848, coupled with the professional achievements of others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the area of medicine and medical research, provide a fascinating window into that larger history.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Strassmann family had become quite successful and influential in Berlin. Unlike most Jewish families in Germany before the Shoah, however, they were Jewish only in the eyes of pre-Nazi anti-Semites and, later, the Nazis themselves, and not in terms of their own self-identity or religious and social connections. The great majority of “assimilated” German Jews identified themselves as German by nationality, while retaining varying degrees of Jewish identity in some religious and/or cultural sense. They believed one could be both German and Jewish at the same time, an identity that did not apply to the Strassmanns since most of the earlier generations had been converts to Lutheranism, and many married Germans with little or no Jewish ancestry at all. They were, therefore, mostly divorced from Jewish communal life, particularly since their arrival in Berlin in the first half of the nineteenth century. The context of this fascinating family history remains, therefore, more German than German-Jewish, at least until the waning years of the Weimar Republic.

Nevertheless, the Strassmanns were Jews according to Nazi ideology and were treated as such in the context of the specific Jewish policies of the Nazi state. Therefore, these realities make this book a useful source on the growing crisis for all German Jews during the late Weimar and Nazi years and, more importantly, the limited options available to them in the face of looming disaster. Using many of the relevant secondary sources, but more importantly, valuable primary sources in the form of a rich collection of Strassmann family letters, W. Paul Strassmann is able to convey an immediate sense of these harsh realities. Economic deprivation and the ceaseless pressure to emigrate, for example, were among the most devastating realities that German Jews faced before the “final solution,” notwithstanding the constant public humiliation, intimidation, and periodic violence, such as the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938. The economic situation of those Strassmanns who remained in Germany was not quite as grim perhaps as it was for many other German Jews, and the fate of many of the generation of Strassmanns born around the turn of the century was, in the end, generally positive given their successful emigration from Germany to Switzerland and the United States. Nevertheless, the reader is constantly aware of such pressing problems as the steady “aryanization” of every facet of life in Hitler's Germany, the place of Jewish war veterans in Nazi racial policy, the fate of so-called “non-aryan Christians,” the problems faced by so-called Mischlinge (offspring of mixed marriages with two Jewish grandparents), the problems and pitfalls of securing immigration visas for other countries, the “aryanization” of the property of emigrating Jews, and some of the difficulties encountered by refugees in adjusting to their new countries.

In all, the Strassmann family fared comparatively well in the pre-Nazi and Nazi periods. According to the many personal letters cited and often quoted by the author, they appeared to be a happy family that flourished during the nineteenth century in the environment of Jewish emancipation, despite some instances of discrimination due to Jewish ancestry. The same holds true for the Weimar years, notwithstanding encounters with an intensifying anti-Semitism and Nazi threat. Even in the Nazi period, with brief dispensations from the consequences of anti-Jewish laws for military service in World War I, a somewhat higher level of affluence than most German-Jews, as well as professional and family connections abroad that facilitated the emigration process from Germany, the fate of most of the family was, in the end, generally positive. They survived. The author's father Erwin, a renowned physician with professional connections to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, along with Erwin's two sisters and their families, and the author himself and his two sisters were able to make new lives in the United States and Switzerland. There were a few exceptions to this rule, such as Reinhold Strassmann (1893–1944), a severely wounded World War I veteran, a devout evangelical Christian, mathematician, and poet, who was deported to Theresienstadt in 1943, and from there to Auschwitz in October 1944 where he was murdered.

There is much to recommend in this family history for interested students and scholars of modern German and German-Jewish history and the Holocaust. It is a penetrating look into the culture of successful upper-middle-class German families of Jewish descent prior to Hitler's assumption of power in January 1933. It is also a story that was in some ways all the more tragic because the Strassmanns, unlike most German-Jewish families, were fully assimilated, Christian, and considered themselves entirely German and not at all Jewish. But that identity was denied the Strassmanns under National Socialism. They persevered, left the Germany they loved, and most survived. It is an inspiring story of the survival of a strong, loyal, forward-looking, albeit well-placed and well-connected family under the most difficult circumstances.