Between 1933 and 1941, nearly 55,000 Jews from Germany migrated to the British Mandate of Palestine as a result of Nazi persecution. Another 9,500 Jews from Austria migrated to Palestine after the so-called Anschluss of March 1938; 11,000 Jews from Czechoslovakia followed after the Munich Agreement of September 1938, some of whom were German-speaking. In total, 90,000 German-speaking Jews found refuge in Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, thus representing nearly 15 percent of the yishuv (i.e., the Jewish settlement in Palestine).Footnote 1 The yishuv was a community of immigrants, but it did not easily absorb this influx. Before 1933, only a few thousand German-speaking Jews had migrated to Palestine. And, though this migration has been labeled the “Fifth (or German) Aliyah” in Zionist historiography, a majority of the German-speaking Jews had not planned on “ascending” to the Promised Land. Most of them emigrated out of necessity and would have stayed in Europe, had the Nazis not come to power. Consequently, Jews in the yishuv reproached the German Jews—called Yekkes—for their reluctance to integrate. The term Yekke brings to mind the stereotype of highly cultured urban intellectuals: it connotes cultural difference and formal stiffness. According to the dominant etymology, the word derives from the Yiddish word for “jacket.” The pun allegedly plays on the Yekkes’ inadequate clothing choices (i.e., wearing a jacket, or sports coat, in desert conditions) as a trace of their bourgeois past. It was meant to ridicule German-speaking Jews and mock their deeply habitualized formal manners. Yet, over time, the term lost its pejorative connotations.Footnote 2
Though German-Jewish emigration to Palestine has been researched widely, not all aspects have received the same attention.Footnote 3 Numerous studies have stressed the Yekkes’ “great intellectual contribution” to the making of the Jewish nation and to the Westernization of Israel, but their socio-gendered lifeworlds still need to be explored. Recent scholarly interest in German-Jewish masculinities makes the masculine identities available to German-Jewish immigrants in Mandatory Palestine and Israel particularly worthy of study.Footnote 4 This article argues that a focus on gender—in this case, on masculinities—casts new light on social, generational, and racial issues in Palestine and Israel. Furthermore, using Raewyn Connell's idea of a prism of difference that explores masculinities as an ongoing dynamic process, a focus on multiple masculinities allows us to understand better how gendered power dynamics function between the sexes, but also among men.Footnote 5 The article presents an investigation of the lives, experiences, and gendered identities of young emigrants from Nazi Europe who had partly been socialized in Europe, but then forced to interrupt their education and adjust to a new society and culture.
This involved adopting new forms of sociability, learning new body postures and gestures, as well as incorporating new habits—which, together, formed a cultural repertoire shaped by hegemonic injunctions on how to behave as a Zionist “New Jew.”Footnote 6 These patterns of behavior formed a new habitus, i.e., a set of acquired social assets and dispositions that established the range of “normal” masculine behaviors.Footnote 7 To incorporate Zionism meant to change one's European socialization, to erase traces of a German accent, and to alter one's European gestures—like extending the hand as a form of salute, or automatically tipping one's hat as an expression of greeting.Footnote 8 These habits, which were seen as diasporic and bourgeois, had to be replaced by a new body hexis, i.e., “a durable manner of standing, speaking and thereby of feeling and thinking.”Footnote 9
Because of a lack of sources, it is difficult for historians to study something as fleeting as bodily resocialization or the imposition of gendered injunctions. Yet, personal narratives maintain traces of bodily interactions and adjustments. The following article is based on self-narratives that include 143 oral history interviews conducted in the early 1990s with male and female Yekkes in Israel.Footnote 10 According to Alessandro Portelli's oft-cited phrase, working with self-narratives and oral history interviews “tells us less about events than about their meaning.”Footnote 11 These narrative sources do convey something of past events through individual mediation, and they are full of statements about social, cultural, and historical realities. Though gender and masculinity are rarely explicitly mentioned as such, these sources enable us to inquire into the sociocultural interpretations of historical experience, as well as into the complex, multifaceted (and, at times, contradictory) nature of historical reality—including gender. Self-narratives require interpretation because they are shaped by social, historical, and cultural frames. Looking at “then” now raises issues of subjectivity, as well as the narrative construction of history through social memory.Footnote 12 According to Harald Welzer, narrators are involved in constant processes of adjustment, aligning their self-narratives with compatible and socially accepted narratives of the past.Footnote 13 By doing so, they are not only recalling their past selves, but also highly emotive areas of (German and/or Israeli) memory. Studying the dynamics of masculinity conveyed by these sources sheds new light on the making of coexistent multiple masculinities within a “macho-society” that finds itself in a state of constant alert, as Esther Herlitz, the famous Israeli diplomat and politician (b. 1921 in Berlin), phrased it in her self-narrative.Footnote 14 This also deepens our understanding of the modes of embodiment of Yekkish masculinities in the post-migration period.
The main focus of this article is on the generation of those born between 1910 and 1925, who experienced an important post-migratory resocialization process and were confronted with new gendered norms and behavioral repertoires. Their self-narratives evoke the changes that occurred in their everyday lives, as well as the meanings and emotions attached to those changes. Each self-narrative generally voices a multiplicity of standpoints and situational adjustments, which is why the article proceeds thematically. First, it focuses on the adjustments that German-speaking Jews had to go through in order to adapt to the Zionist archetype of the “New Hebrew.” The second part then analyzes how the conflict between the hegemonic Hebrew masculinity and its Arab counterpart affected the Yekkes’ own process of resocialization. The third part looks at how the Yekkes participated in the imposition of a military ethos of masculinity. Finally, addressing the inherent ambiguities illustrated by one case study, the article concludes with thoughts about coexisting and competing models of multiple Yekkish masculinities.
The Making of New (German) Jews
In the early years of Israel, the Zionist movement, dominated by the Labor Party (Mapai), sought to unite all Jews in a sort of melting pot. Zionism combined a socialist discourse, collectivist values, and a secular national ethos. It advocated a pioneering spirit, the use of Hebrew as the national language, as well as physical labor, agricultural settlement, and military defense. These injunctions translated into political power, as well as socioethnic and gendered hegemonic patterns. The Zionist archetype of the “New Hebrew” was just one of these: a man, a pioneer (haluts), and a citizen-in-arms. The ideal resembled that of “muscle Judaism,” a term coined by Max Nordau during the Second Zionist Congress of 1898. Muscle Judaism was part of a Zionist politics of social regeneration; it was aimed against the perception of the Ostjudens’ alleged weakness and against the rapid assimilation of Western Jewry. It was both a response to antisemitic stigmatization, and an adaptation of nationalist discourse.Footnote 15 The “muscle Jew”—a disciplined, agile, and strong man—later came to represent, as the “New Hebrew,” a dominant current of Jewish identity refashioning, as well as a concrete manifestation of Zionism.Footnote 16
The New Hebrew had to free himself from his diasporic roots. In this process, gender politics played a significant role.Footnote 17 In particular, Zionist injunctions aimed to reshape Jewish masculinity through bodily and military training, thus paralleling European—and especially German—nationalistic masculinity.Footnote 18 This translated into specific body cultures that were dominant in the organizations and places that helped young Central European Jews to emigrate, such as the Youth Aliyah, the hachsharot (preparation farms), or the kibbutzim and moshavim that received large numbers of immigrants.Footnote 19 This was the case, for example, in Ein Harod (established in 1921), Givat Brenner, Heftsiba, Hazorea and Kfar Shmaryahu (founded in 1936 and 1937, respectively, by German Jews), or Beit Zera (founded in 1927 as Kfar Nathan).
The continuity in body rituals and physical training before and after migration gave the young emigrants some sense of continuity, and these episodes are vividly recalled in the life-stories. Ernst Loewy, born in 1920 in Krefeld, went through just such a process of Zionist resocialization. After he had been forced out of school in 1935, his parents sent him to a farm belonging to the Youth Aliyah, where he went through a training program to prepare for emigration. A year later, he emigrated without his parents to Kiryat Anavim, near Jerusalem. Between 1935 and 1938, Ernst wrote long and frequent letters to his parents, describing his new surroundings, his life on the kibbutz, and the hardships of rural labor. The correspondence reads like a report about the moral and physical transformations of a young man in the process of becoming a haluts. Ernst repeatedly discouraged his parents from joining him, warning them about the difficult process of adaptation. In 1938, however, in light of the dramatic changes that were taking place in Germany, he finally sponsored them on a tourist visa, and they reached Mandatory Palestine shortly after Kristallnacht. In one of his last letters from October 1938, he wrote that this “might be my last letter to you in Germany … I very much look forward to welcoming and hugging you. But please don't be surprised if you don't find your little ‘Ernstchen,’ the one you said farewell to over two years ago. Instead, you'll find a fully-grown and changed man. One grows fast here.”Footnote 20
These lines underscore Ernst's Zionist rite of passage to manhood. Leaving behind his bourgeois background, he no longer had the apparence of the young, unsexed, unmanly “Ernstchen.” His transformation was physically apparent, to the point that his own parents would not, he believed, recognize the earnest and “serious” (ernst) New Hebrew he had become. Yet, as Ernst was writing these lines, he was increasingly distancing himself from collectivist and rural pioneer life. He eventually left Kiryat Anavim to be trained as a librarian in Tel Aviv, which he saw as a form of resistance against Zionist masculinist injunctions, and as a way of claiming an alternative gendered identity, namely, that of the learned Bildungsbürger.Footnote 21
Zionist reeducation took advantage of the enthusiasm of those youths who, in contrast to their parents, often saw migration as an opportunity to live a new life among peers. Aharon Doron (b. 1922 in Ludwigshafen) retrospectively invoked the idealism of this period: “The ideology came almost by itself—it was like we were voting with our feet.” As a staunch Zionist (who would later become a general in the Israeli Defense Forces), he recalled that the years between his emigration in 1939 and the “War of Independence”—Doron used the Zionist term—in 1948 were the “best of [his] life,” despite emigration, war, and the Holocaust: “It is both comical and tragic: these were the years of World War II and the Holocaust, but they were the best of my life. I was young and I felt useful doing what I did. When I look back, these were the best years of my life.”Footnote 22 This experience was largely generational, as another Yekke, Abraham Friedländer (b. 1916 in Cottbus), underscored: “Like most people of my age, I started as a pioneer. We called ourselves halutsim and, as we were sent to the first kibbutzim, we showed a lot of enthusiasm and, I wouldn't say illusions, but hopes, or maybe fantasies of youth … There was an atmosphere of building something together!”Footnote 23 Ari (Arnold) Rath (b. Vienna in 1925) was thirteen years old when he was sent to Palestine on a Kindertransport via Trieste. He subsequently spent sixteen years near Haifa, in Kiryat Bialik and on Kibbutz Hamadia. During his interview, he insisted in particular on the bodily aspects of his Zionist transformation: “This was the best conditioning [Abhärtung] and the best school of life. After a few days, any hard physical work became almost a pleasure, like cutting wood.”Footnote 24 A year later, in a second interview, he expanded on that part of his life-narrative, combining his personal philosophy of life with Zionist discourse about deintellectualizing Jews. The process of Abhärtung—both physical and psychological—was a central theme in both interviews: “These years were intellectually stimulating. It was not just about digging latrines or physical work. The balance and equal value given to physical and intellectual work have accompanied me since … Until now, I fear no physical effort … I'm sure that the physical labor served then as a conditioning [Abhärtung] for life, and this still holds true to this day. I'm not and never have been a pale and weak intellectual.”Footnote 25
Zionist reeducation also built on contemporary youth cultures, as Zionist organizations intensely used peer socialization, group activities, and a common gendered repertoire to transform young Central European Jews into New Hebrews.Footnote 26 In this process, national, Jewish, generational, as well as gendered identities all intensely intersected. And, in the context of a young Jewish nation and of a society in the process of being created, the youth—especially the male youth—played a strategic role. Though the groups were generally mixed by gender, the pioneer was predominantly seen as male. Consequently, even the female pioneer (halutsa) was highly masculinized.Footnote 27 In her brilliant visual history of German Zionist youth movements, Ulrike Pilarczyk has shown that the postures, gazes, poses, and clothing of photographed young women read as gendered performances of masculinization. At the same time, the young men seem to exaggerate heroic and manly poses in front of the camera.Footnote 28 These visual codes, Pilarczyk argues, enabled these young men and women to project themselves in a performative fashion as New Hebrews.
The creation of a highly gendered, Zionist body language clearly excluded other, alternative ways of being a (Jewish) man. In a letter to his parents, a youth by the name of Ben described his visit to the Western Wall in July 1935. The sacredness of the site seemed to strike him less than his encounter with Orthodox Jews, who embodied a diasporic form of masculinity, the Galut (diaspora) masculinity. As someone thriving to become a New Hebrew at Kibbutz Mishmar-Haemek, he violently rejected this countermodel:
Who are these people at the Wall?! They stand like figures carrying the burden of the Galut. Centuries of Jewish enslavement weigh on their backs. Even the boys grow beards and wear Galut clothes. Not to speak of the older ones: bent and weak, they embody degeneration … They are Halukka-Jews, demoralized and degenerate. They await the Messiah, pray and kiss the Wall, but they wouldn't lift a finger to build-up the land [Aufbau].Footnote 29
The reference here to the “building-up of the land” is a central Zionist element, and the (body-)building of the male Jew thus becomes an allegory of Zionist nation-building. Associating the male body with the nation's body, Zionism constructed a masculinist ideology that excluded those who did not have “able” bodies. In his work on soft and “unheroic” Eastern European rabbinic masculinities, Daniel Boyarin named this alternative form of masculinity Edelkayt, i.e., a gentler, “unmanned but not desexualized” Jewish masculinity that resisted gendered injunctions.Footnote 30 Young Ben identified with heroic Zionist figures like the productive laborer. He saw himself as a Hebrew man-to-be, and trained his body accordingly—with the weak and bent figure of the religious and diasporic Jew serving as a countermodel.
Through Zionist injunctions, new behaviors and postures were invented, and young male bodies seemed malleable enough to be reshaped into hard, lean, and able bodies. The young German-speaking immigrants from Central Europe were trained to become Sabras, i.e., Jews who, like the prickly pear (tsabar), were rough outside but full of vital energy inside.Footnote 31 Zionism had to be incorporated through behavioral norms, gestures, postures, and a new bodily repertoire. The young immigrants learned an elaborate discourse on health, hygiene, and the body, as new illnesses (e.g., malaria, typhus, paratyphus, leptospirosis, and various viral fevers) and climactic hardships required new bodily adaptations.Footnote 32 Rudolf Goldstein (b. 1908 in Berlin), who successively recovered from infectious hepatitis, malaria, acute diarrheas, and furunculosis, laconically commented in retrospect: “All of this fortified me.”Footnote 33 The New Hebrew's strong body also had to be hardened from within. Certain food types—like dairy products and heavy meats—and certain fluids were banned, whereas others—local herbs, vegetables, and olive oil—were seen as beneficial. A new national food culture that went beyond the rules of kashrut contributed to this forging of new bodies.Footnote 34
Not all young men conformed to the ideal, however, and the act of regeneration was painful for those who did not meet the standard. Gabriel Walter (b. 1921 in Kolberg, Pomerania) remembered that his older brother's bodily and mental condition had not enabled him to adopt the manly rules of the kibbutz. It was consequently the younger sibling who had to step in and assume his brother's chores.Footnote 35 Young “rebels” were regularly singled out and reported. In a letter to “Frau Neter,” the head of a Berlin-based Zionist organization, one member of Kibbutz Givat Brenner complained about the newly arrived leader of the youth section: “The main reproach we and others have is that he doesn't even try to work physically, though this is crucial! We know how important role models are. Here in Palestine, a man's valor is measured by his physical involvement, not so much by his intellectual qualities. This is why immigrants from Germany must go through tremendous adaptation efforts. Beware of those who won't or can't make the effort.”Footnote 36 In some cases, forms of gendered violence also served to train reluctant boys into becoming New Hebrews. Chanan (Hans) David, who reached Kibbutz Gesher in 1935, had painful memories of such rites of passage. As the youngest of the group (kvutsah), he was nicknamed “the child” (das Kind), and his training soon became a collective issue—his behavior a target of social attention:
On two occasions, an older, established Jew named Eli took me with him for what he called “easy chores.” The first time, he took me to a construction site. We had to lift heavy bags of cement and carry them up four floors. There were no stairs …, it was around noon. My shoulders became one big wound full of cement. I was finally sent home and my wounds were taken care of. Eli, who'd taken me with him, was punished that afternoon. What had gone through his mind to make “the kid” work so hard? But there was a second occasion. Eli took me again for an “easy chore.” We had to dig pits in the shape of a pillar, and then pour concrete. This time, I withstood the trial of strength, even though my kid's hands were covered in blisters. After that, I was given a steady job: picking oranges.Footnote 37
David's autobiography constructs a heroic narrative of (pioneer) manhood. It also provides useful information about power relations and gendered violence at the time. In the narrative, the “established” Sabra, Eli, embodied the hegemonic model of masculinity, whereas the newly arrived boy from Germany, Hans, had to overcome physical challenges in order to prove he was a New Hebrew worthy of joining the community. His social and gendered identity became safe after that: it is telling that, two pages later in his autobiography, Chanan David wrote about his heroic years fighting against Arabs as a member of the Jewish self-defense force, the Haganah.
Jewish-Arab Man-to-Man Encounters
Demonstrating one's adherence to Zionist ideals was a highly gendered act. In the Zionist master narrative, the masculine haluts (pioneer), reenacting his Jewish ancestors’ mythical gestures, was a builder working in hostile lands. Michael Evenari's autobiography, titled The Awakening Desert, exemplified this sort of mythical imaginary. Evenari (born Walter Schwarz) left Germany in April 1933 at the age of twenty-nine, after having been expelled from the Darmstadt Botanical Institute. His emigration to Palestine was facilitated by his Zionist affiliations, and he was able to join the staff of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. There he became interested in the Nabataens’ ancient system of rainwater management, and he eventually designed new irrigation systems for the Negev desert. Entire passages of his autobiography read as an archetypal Zionist narrative about land and space. Evenari describes Palestine as a deserted land awaiting (male) pioneer conquest:
In spite of all the Zionist “schooling” I had received, Palestine was a strange land to me when I came to live here in 1933. Although I could not say that I had come home, I soon came to feel that in time, Palestine would become my country. I was an equal among equals, a proud Jew among Jews who worked in every conceivable field: farmers, builders, factory workers, policemen, drivers, waiters, and fishermen. We were idealists, eager to build our own country. Daily life in Palestine was tough at that time. The land had been neglected for hundreds of years, the original forests destroyed, and Jerusalem was surrounded by stony, depressing wasteland.Footnote 38
As Boaz Neumann has convincingly demonstrated through his close reading of archival documents, diaries, and literary prose produced by early halutsim, this conquest was highly gendered and sexualized: it was all about a visceral desire for the land.Footnote 39 In turn, this desire for the land mediated male bonding. This is particularly striking in Fritz Joseph Heidecker's autobiographical account of a drilling process that would “make the desert bloom.” Heidecker, who emigrated in 1934 at the age of twenty-two, lived on a kibbutz and then in a moshav. In the following passage, a collective of male pioneers conquers the (feminized) soil, thus producing Zionist Hebrew masculinity. The passage also reads like a collective moment of manly pleasure, as the layers of soil yield loudly to their efforts:
The shaft of the well was dug to a depth of twenty meters. The second part of the work consisted of pushing fourteen-inch iron pipes into the earth, deeper and deeper … With sweaty shoulders, four workers, two on each side, circling around the shaft, pressed the drill into the sand. The sand gave way with crushing rage. Then the man-sized steel cylinder went up, while the winds jubilantly shouted, vomiting its feeding, then dancing at the straightening rope again, until the tip stood over the mouth of the shaft, and dived down again. We went in circles with aching shoulders. From time to time, we pushed the iron shaft further into the conquered stratum … Never before had I felt such satisfaction in seeing the results of my work. Each newly won inch felt like a personal triumph.Footnote 40
The “Zionist settler project” in Mandatory Palestine and later Israel resembled a colonial venture that relied on a solid, collective, Hebrew masculinity.Footnote 41 This gendered mode thus drew a boundary between “civilized” and “primitive” masculinities; at the same time, it was designed to police that boundary by defining them as separate. The yishuv (and later Israeli society as a whole) was an immigrant society riven by ethnic issues, and Zionist politics involved racial differentiation.Footnote 42 The hegemonic Zionist ideology—as conveyed by Zionist organizations—portrayed Palestine as a deserted region, an oriental terra inculta awaiting the return of the Jewish people.
Mandatory Palestine was not deserted, however, and most German-Jewish immigrants were surprised to find a local Arab population, “a fact for which our Zionist leaders had not prepared us.”Footnote 43 Accordingly, the German-speaking Jewish immigrants of the 1930s felt alienated, not only by the landscape and harsh climate of the “promised land,” but also by the local population. Many were shocked by confrontations that would later become hostile, which explains why encounters with Arabs are important tropes in many post-migration Yekke narratives. They have ideological, biographical, and historical significance, and man-to-man encounters with Arabs were instrumental in drawing the boundaries of Hebrew masculinity. Most immigrant individuals and families in the 1930s saw Palestine—and Arabs—as “oriental” and “levantine.” But the image of Arab masculinity had several facets. On the one hand, the Arab was an agile worker who lived in harmony with nature; on the other, he was violent, rude, and “primitive.” This exoticized image evolved profoundly in the 1930s, as the “backward Arab” gave way to “the enemy.”
In 1935, shortly after his arrival from Germany, young Fredi described an Arab village in a letter to his parents. Throughout the letter, the adolescent's narrative becomes more and more focused, the description ultimately zooming in on a group of Arab men, then on a single “black-eyed” Arab “with a turban”:
At last we arrive in a village. It looks like this: one house, which in Germany would be considered a ruin, and mud huts all around. After a while, we meet a group of Arabs … Suddenly I come up with the idea of buying an Arabian dagger … It's frightening to see an Arab with a thirty-inch dagger, weighing it in his hand. You should have seen the man: black eyes, a turban—a wild sight. I haggled the [price of the] dagger down to twenty piastres and left. All of a sudden I notice my watch is missing. The Arab must have untied it while we were bargaining. Had I caught him, he surely would have needed the dagger! I would have knocked him down!Footnote 44
Fredi's narrative is particularly binary. The “Arab,” fashioned by an environment marked as “other,” was at first fascinating and menacing. Then, after the transaction, the enemy unveiled himself as sly, trying to cheat the young pioneer, who, in the end, evokes his muscular Hebrew masculinity.
The tensions between Jews and Arabs intensified with the migratory surge of the 1930s and the increase in the population of the yishuv. The proportion of Jews in Mandatory Palestine rose from one-sixth in the early 1930s to more than one-third ten years later. Tensions had been dormant since 1931, but in 1936, Arab riots against the British authorities and against the Jews broke out, marked by general strikes, material destruction, and death on all sides, reaching a peak in 1937 and 1939.Footnote 45 The uprising deeply affected relations between the communities, changing everyday neighborly interactions. Some German Jews reacted by completely rejecting “the” Arab enemy: Alexander Cohn (b. 1912 in Lübeck), for instance, emphasized the competition between Jews and Arabs over the use of space. Just as important, his narrative reads like an account of competiting masculinities: “Anyway, I think we are better than the Arabs. I know what this land looked like when we arrived. A desert, but not like the Sahara. Here, fertile lands had turned into a desert … Anyway, whatever was built here, we built it. When you look at Arab villages nowadays, with their big houses—thanks to us. Had the Arabs remained on their own, they would be as foolish as [they were] one hundred years ago. That's a fact.”Footnote 46 Yet, in contrast to this narrative, most Yekke voices stressed the ambivalence and paradoxes of the confrontation with Arabs. Eugen Laronne (b. 1914 in Unna) used a particularly telling formula: “Respect the Arab man, but remain on your guard. That's how I would summarize our relationship.”Footnote 47 As Gad Landau (b. 1909 in Lübeck) similarly put it: “In Hebrew, there is a saying that goes ‘kav dehu ve-hash dehu’ (honor him but don't trust him). That's the general idea about our relationship.”Footnote 48
In the early years of Israel, the Yekkes were often scorned because of the positive nature of their everyday interactions with Arabs, as well as for their belief that there was room for compromise between Zionist nationalism and its Palestinian Arab counterpart.Footnote 49 Alfred Engel (b. 1895 in Nangard, Pomerania), a pediatrician who had left Berlin in 1933, remembered the early days of the relationship in this way: “Arabs and Jews lived together peacefully. I had an Arab medical practice … I learned Arabic … My Arab friends used to say: ‘Now we live together peacefully, but watch out. In ten years we'll face each other with guns.’ You could see it coming. And they were right, except that it came much faster than they had thought.”Footnote 50 One can speculate, as the historian of Zionism Yoav Gelber has, whether this conciliatory attitude was partly a result of violent discriminatory experiences in Germany.Footnote 51 Several Yekkes indeed became prominent in circles that hoped to further cooperation and “conciliation” (Verständigung) between Jews and Arabs.Footnote 52 In his memoirs, the journalist and theologian Schalom Ben-Chorin (born Fritz Rosenthal in 1913 in Munich) described everyday life in the Jewish neighborhood of Romema near Jerusalem in the 1930s and 1940s. Though his statements about the “Arab” are not exempt from Orientalist, racialized, and gendered clichés, his ultimate political goal was nevertheless peaceful coexistence:
Though I never found a way to make my way into the Arabic language, I had neighborly relations with our fellow citizens in Lifta, the village opposite our neighborhood Romema. These relations were problematic. The Arabs sometimes shot at us at night. During the daytime, the fellahas, the Arab peasant women, came to fetch water from our cistern … I said to them: “Off you go! No more water—I knew that much Arabic—if you shoot at night.” Of course, the women weren't the ones shooting—the men were. Nevertheless, I continued: “If you leave us alone for three days, you will get water again.” And my primitive policy was successful. We had peace for some time. The fellahas got their water, and sold the eggs they removed from their beautiful embroidered necklines.Footnote 53
Until 1947–1948, the “Arab”—whether a Muslim, a Christian, or a Druze—was a neighbor, a patient, a coworker, sometimes even a friend. He embodied a different, oriental, exoticized masculinity, but, cultural differences notwithstanding, it was possible to get along. The situation deteriorated toward the end of 1947, as the war of 1948 approached. In more and more cases, man-to-man encounters turned violent. The interpretation of “1948” as a foundational historical event remains to this day one of the most controversial aspects of the Israeli-Arab conflict, with irreconciliable, nationalistic master narratives serving as mobilizing myths. In Israeli Zionist historiography, “1948” became the absolute justification for legitimizing Jewish claims, whereas Arab-Palestinian historiography has emphasized a Jewish conspiracy. It was not until the 1980s that Israel's “post-Zionist” historians began to challenge Israel's founding myths, including the heroization of Jewish combatants.Footnote 54 As historians have shown, the war of 1948–1949 and the ensuing wars of 1967 and 1973 durably marked masculinities.Footnote 55 Jakob Tachauer (b. 1928) retrospectively wrote in his 2003 autobiography that “everything was normal and peaceful before 1948. We bought from Arabs, the Arabs bought from us, man-to-man … But now the friendship is not as great anymore … The Arab can be described like this: for years he gives you the keys to his house, invites you to his daughter's wedding, but one day he takes revenge and stabs you.”Footnote 56 In this excerpt, the pre-1948 period appears in a particularly idealized fashion, implicitly compared to other highly emotive areas of Israeli memory that emerged between “then” and “now” (i.e., after the 1990s). The inferred narrative is that the Arab man, moved by violent instincts, suddenly revealed his wild side. In a 1991 interview, Moshe Cederbaum (b. 1910 in Hanover) was particularly vehement in criticizing what Arab masculinity had become, ultimately diagnosing a loss of manly virtues on their part. Arab men were the ones who attacked from behind and did not hesitate to kill women:
A generation of murderers has grown up among the Arabs. They don't mind stabbing Jews from behind. They just want to kill. This has nothing to do with manly ideals: a man who stabs four defenseless women … It's a generation of murderers, and it will take a good deal of time to change this. Only a man who believes he will go straight to Paradise and meet all the huris [virgins] is capable of such things. It's bad.Footnote 57
Cederbaum's narrative specifically refers to a violent incident that took place at the time of the interview in the southeast of Jerusalem on March 11, 1991. In the context of an official visit by US Secretary of State James Baker, a Palestinian from Gaza stabbed four Jewish women. But the narrative also addressed the passing of time (Cederbaum speaks of “a generation of murderers”), as well as a change in the way Arab masculinity was perceived. It reproduced a discourse of stigmatization of Arab masculinity, a discourse that coalesced with the Israeli nation-building process.
It would appear that Zionist racial politics were constitutive in this process of othering. Ella Shohat has brilliantly exposed the Orientalist undertones inherent in early Zionism: “orientals” became ethnically marked, which, in turn, defined a white, hegemonic group, the Ashkenazim.Footnote 58 David Biale insists on the intersections between these Orientalist representations, on the one hand, and masculinity, on the other: “The image of the Arab as a sensual savage played a key role … When the national struggle between Zionism and Palestinians became sharper, the Arab was frequently seen as effeminate in opposition to the virile modernism of Jewish nationalism. The image of the impotent diaspora Jew was now projected onto the Palestinian.”Footnote 59 In a racialized Israeli society, Arab, as well as Sephardic and Arab-Jewish (Mizrachi), masculinities were instrumental in installing European-Jewish Ashkenazi masculinity as hegemonic. The Ashkenazim were thus constituted as the social, political, and cultural elite, and they perceived themselves as such. In the Israeli nation-building process, they gradually abandoned the stigma of otherness previously attached to the Jews in Europe.Footnote 60 “Ashkenaziness” as a form of “whiteness,” seemingly nonethnically marked and transparent, actually played a normative and hegemonic role.Footnote 61
Despite their difficulties of adaptation, the Yekkes, as part of the dominant group, participated in this process of othering. Esriel Hildesheimer (b. 1912 in Halberstadt) saw the Mizrachim, for instance, as being the utmost “Levantines.”Footnote 62 And, according to Ephraim Orni (b. 1915 in Breslau), “oriental Jews were influenced by the Arabic way of thinking [arabische Denkweise] they had learned in their countries of origin.”Footnote 63 Both see the Mizrachim’s “Arab past” as a danger to the inner cohesion of Israel. These “matter-of-fact” utterances actually reveal highly racialized representations that reject Arab and Oriental masculinities as retrograde and different. Gender, intersecting with race, is mobilized to establish a distinctive, dominant Yekke-Ashkenazi identity, thus positioning Yekke masculinity just at the margin of the center.
Military Ethos and the “Palmach Generation”
In his book on German-Jewish immigration, published in 1983, Shlomo Erel, who was born in 1916 in Neustadt, Upper Silesia, and had served in the Israeli navy, celebrated the Yekke generals. The book's appendix lists fifteen generals in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF: Tzva Haganah le-Israel, or Tzahal) who were born in Germany or Austria.Footnote 64 According to Erel, these generals largely contributed to making the IDF a “hard” army. This statement, written over thirty years ago, has remained largely unexplored. But what were the actual links between “military hardness” and German-Jewish masculinity? The Israeli case is particularly relevant when studying military issues. Because of the central place of war in Mandatory Palestine and Israel, the military ethos has permeated all relationships between the army, state, and society. As early as 1920, the Haganah was founded as the yishuv's paramilitary organization. It was a Jewish defense organization intended to protect against Arab attacks, and soldiers and officers were volunteers; many came from local self-defense brigades. The idea was to create a Jewish people's army, and the young German-Jewish immigrants who had arrived in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s participated in these Jewish self-defense operations. Some later joined the British army and participated in the Arab-Israeli wars.
In his autobiography, Fritz Joseph Heidecker “romanticizes” the Jewish defense's military ethos during the Arab revolts of 1936. As in the above passage about the drilling of a well, his narrative is centered on a male-bonding collective, whereas women are—in a very traditional way—relegated to first aid and nurturing: “A few days are needed to gather a squad of men ready to fight … The half-grown youths occupy the water tower and are in charge of the light signals. The women are preparing for first aid … We don't fight for prestige, but for our naked lives, not for some ancestral civilization, but for something we built with our own bleeding hands. We shall defend the pioneer tents where our tired comrades sleep with a glowing heart.”Footnote 65 Despite Zionist discourse about gender equality, the military remained a male domain, as feminist military history of the last twenty years has shown, thus revising the image of Israel as a nation of men—and women-in-arms. The self-defense brigades had initially been mixed by gender: young women and men were both rudimentally trained in using weapons, but gendered divisions were soon put in place. The military was instrumental in constructing degrees of inclusion and exclusion by using gender and race.Footnote 66
David Bar-Levi's military trajectory was typical of one generational experience. Born in 1912 as Heinz Levisohn, he migrated to Palestine in 1939, fought in World War II and then in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. During the Six-Day War of 1967, he was a reservist; he was too old to fight during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, but his sons and grandsons were drafted, as he proudly mentioned in his oral history interview.Footnote 67 Similarly, Yehuda Amichai, an Israeli poet born in 1924 in Würzburg, gives special importance to his military experience. At the very beginning of his oral history interview, he summarizes the stages of his life in just a few sentences, mentioning his emigration, his military experience during World War II and the war of 1948, his years in college, his first book, and, finally, his family life. This incipit reads like the summary of all the significant stages in a (young) man's life:
In 1935, I arrived [in Palestine] and went to school here. In 1942, I entered the Jewish brigade (that was part of the English army) as a volunteer, and I took part in World War II. After that, I was trained as a primary school teacher. In the War of Independence, I joined the Palmach, a commando group. After that, I went back to Jerusalem. Until ten years ago I was a teacher in primary school, then middle school, later university. My first book was published in 1955. I am married, I have three children, and I live in Jerusalem.Footnote 68
For the generation born between 1910 and 1925, the military experience strongly influenced social and professional integration, and it was central to gendered identity formation. Gabriel Walter (b. 1921 in Simötzel, Pomerania) distinctly remembered what it meant for a Jew who had been forced out of Germany to carry a gun: “It was the first time in our lives that we carried a weapon and could defend ourselves. Until then, when someone in Germany attacked us, we couldn't fight back!”Footnote 69 “Fighting back” as a Jew was seen retrospectively as a way for a young immigrant from Germany to regain a sense of manliness.
Ari Rath remembered that the Haganah enlisted recruits from the age of fourteen or fifteen onward. He also recalled his initial hesitation to join: “Everything happened on a volunteer basis, and for weeks I wouldn't join because all of this marching, ‘left-right-left.’ All the exercises seemed to me a bit too militaristic, perhaps even too fascist.”Footnote 70 This episode directly related, in Rath's interview, to his traumatic memories of his last weeks in Vienna, right after the Anschluss. Having experienced the exaltation of masculinist militarism in its extreme National Socialist form, he was understandably wary of military drills. But, faced with the pressure of his (male) peers and with the prospect of losing educational opportunities, Rath yielded in the end: “They said: ‘Ari, you have to do it!’ Otherwise you cannot go on with your education. And so I was sworn in as a Haganah fighter.”Footnote 71 The ritual oath marked the passage to both adulthood and manhood: “I was sixteen years old and, like all the other guys my age, we were simply declared adults.”Footnote 72
In the course of the 1930s, the tense climate in Mandatory Palestine made unified Jewish defense a priority. The Haganah soon became the unofficial armed wing of David Ben-Gurion's party, the socialist Mapai. In the eyes of the British authorities, the organization was illegal, but it was nevertheless tolerated. In the second half of the decade, the Haganah's initial strategy of “restraint” (havlagah) became more and more contested internally, particularly by its “revisionist” right wing, which founded the “Haganah B (Beth),” also known as the “National Haganah.” In 1937, this competing organization was renamed the National Military Organization (Irgun Tzvai Leumi, or Etzel).Footnote 73 Whereas the Haganah cooperated more and more openly with the British, Etzel advocated violent action. When World War II broke out, the former took an active part in the British war effort. Tens of thousands of Jews—nearly 10 percent of the yishuv—joined the British Armed Forces, including a large number of recent immigrants. In 1944, they were grouped in a special unit, the “Jewish Brigade.”Footnote 74 After the foundation of the State of Israel in May 1948, the Haganah, Etzel, the Jewish Brigade, and the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (Lohamei Herut Israel or Lehi, also known as the Stern Group) merged to form the IDF.
The military—and the paramilitary—served as a means of social integration and ascension. It gave (young) men a position that included them in society and made them feel useful. As he wrote in his autobiography, Zwi Hermon (b. 1912 in Hamborn) “naturally” joined the Haganah a few weeks after his arrival. After being briefly trained in operating old Canadian rifles from World War I, he fought as a sentry and closely collaborated with the British authorities. At the same time, he was also a member of the auxiliary police, which the British tolerated. This meant that his everyday life was divided between his legal activities with the police, and his illegal activities with the Haganah. At the beginning of the war, Hermon's own place in the Haganah hierarchy prompted him to join the Jewish Brigade, where he felt a sense of belonging.Footnote 75 Like Hermon, Josef Stern (b. 1921 in Gießen) described his military period as a profoundly transforming experience, which gave him strength and autonomy. Not a born soldier, he became a “new man,” able to overcome the panic attacks he had suffered since leaving Germany: “The war broke out. I wanted to be a soldier and fight the Germans, although I wasn't originally a military boy and had no interest in fighting … After a year and a half, I said: ‘I'm joining the military, I want to be an English soldier’ … I became much more open, more self-confident and self-sufficient. Step by step, I overcame my anxieties. The military helped me achieve that.”Footnote 76
In 1941, with the support of the British, the Haganah created the elite Strike Forces (Pelugoth Mahatz, or Palmach) to carry out guerrilla actions. The Palmach recruited predominantly young cohorts, especially among kibbutz youth, among whom were a significant number of young men from the German and Austrian Youth Aliyah. A “German squad” was even created, the machlaka ha-germanit, which was led by Shimon Avidan (born Siegbert Koch in 1911)—a former member of the International Brigades who had come to Palestine in 1934—and was in charge of carrying out acts of sabotage behind enemy lines. At the end of World War II, the Palmach, which was comprised of some six thousand combatants, resumed the Zionist struggle against British authorities. The prestige of the Palmach as an elite group that actively contributed to the creation of Israel is still widely celebrated there, e.g., through the Palmach Museum in Ramat Aviv. But it is also celebrated in the memorial literature about 1948 and the “birth” of Israel.Footnote 77 As much as it affirmed the equality and organic unity of all male Jewish combatants, this cultural memory excluded women. The collective memory thus constructed a male “Palmach generation” of heroes and “native sons.” Yet, the collective memory was subject to controversy, and Anita Shapira has shown that the “Palmach generation” was instrumental in the transition from a “defensive” to an “offensive ethos” in Israel.Footnote 78
General Aharon Doron, who was born in 1922 in Ludwigshafen and arrived in Palestine with the Youth Aliyah in 1939 at the age of seventeen, exemplifies the Palmach generation. He is one of the Yekkes who had a prestigious military career, and, like the majority of his peers, Aharon first joined the Haganah. He recalled that the choice was to become active in the British Army, the Jewish Settlement Police (controlled by the British), or the Haganah, and he soon became a Haganah coach and recruiter at Kibbutz Yagur. During the war of 1948, he directed a training camp for high school recruits:
The Palmach was a unit of the Haganah. Just as there are units within the military today—special units, elite groups—the Palmach was just such an elite unit … The Palmach recruited athletic boys, young men who had somehow been active in the Haganah and who knew what a rifle was … It was a successful attempt to get the crème de la crème of Jewish male youth. They approached youth movements especially, because of their ideological proximity. The Palmach found excellent human material, including many high school graduates … To this day, there is still something left of that feeling that “we are just better.”Footnote 79
Usi Biran (b. 1920 in Ludwigshafen) confirmed this esprit de corps in his interview, in which he described the way the military ethos had forged his new masculinity. First a member of the Haganah, he was later recruited to join the Palmach, where he mingled with native sons:
The Palmach was the group that really made me a Hebrew. For the most part, it was a group of Israeli-born Jerusalemites. The group was fairly close-knit. The boys had known each other for years, mostly from high school in Jerusalem. These Jerusalemites were nationalistic and spoke very good Hebrew … The Palmach was a military unit that prepared people through elite training. The long marches of up to twenty, twenty-five kilometers, were exhausting. So were the physical and military exercises. I wasn't physically strong back then, so I worked very hard. At the same time, this gave me strength and some sense of inner security. The group organized get-togethers, we drank and sang, and we had an intense social life … They accepted me as one of them, so I was no more the little Yekke.Footnote 80
Adapting to Israel's masculinized and militarized “offensive ethos” involved adopting new forms of sociability, bodily and gestural repertoires that had to be learned. Arie Nir, who titled his 2003 self-narrative “The Yekkes have always marched” (Die Jeckes sind immer marschiert), described at length the episodes of (un-)learning a body hexis, i.e., a way of standing, walking, speaking, and behaving. He also retraced the difficulties he faced in incorporating new militarized ways of being: first in the Jewish youth movement; then, after his emigration in 1936, among the Zionist Builders (Habonim); finally, in the Jewish self-defense forces. His narrative ends with a telling joke: “The Yekkes even marched to go to the toilet—left, right, left, right.”Footnote 81 The military was pivotal in creating a new bodily repertoire for German-Jewish men. It reshaped daily practices, developed comradeship, and thus aimed to regulate the physical proximity between men.Footnote 82 Body practices played a primary role in this socialization. The example of the “marching Yekkes” evoked by Arie Nir shows that learning a “better way to walk” was akin to demonstrating both one's national belonging and one's (new) masculinity. At the same time, this had a strategic and a social function: a comrade (haver) could be recognized at a distance just by the way he walked or shook hands.Footnote 83 In civil life, this body language later served as a sign of recognition among men, denoting a common military past. Many Yekkes recalled, for instance, the lack of overt politeness and courtesy, as well as the harsh and rough style of military Hebrew, a language that was harsh and “masculine” lexically, syntactically, and phonetically.Footnote 84 To Abraham Kadimah (b. 1925 in Vienna), this language achieved “brutal military efficiency,” though this toughness reminded some of the Yekkes of those antisemites who had “barked” orders in German.Footnote 85
Despite their skepticism toward militaristic values, it was particularly crucial for the Yekkes, as newcomers to Israel, to be recognized as members of the “Palmach generation,” which indicated that they were a part of one of the founding myths of Israel. This generation successively fought the Nazis, the British Mandatory Authorities, and the Arabs. Even more than the Haganah, the Palmach embodied the militaristic and manly values of the young Jewish nation. In an interview he gave in 1990, Alfred Engel, who was born in 1895 in Nangard (Pomerania), commented, “During the war of 1948, I was, of course, a member of the Palmach. I experienced these things, I was involved. Let me tell you: that's stuff for a novel.” The year 1948, as a historical event and as a myth, was a crucial moment in Israeli history but obviously also a controversial event—a “war of independence” for some, a “catastrophe” for others. When the interviewer, who knew that the Palmach had predominantly recruited young people, pointed out to Engel that he had already been fifty-three years old in 1948, the narrative became confused: “You know, as I grow older, I tend to forget about these things.”Footnote 86 Was this confusion a result of age? At the time of the interview, Alfred Engel was ninety-five. It is possible that he lied. But let us take his oral narrative seriously. Alfred Engel stated that he was, “of course,” a member of the Palmach: beyond the issue of whether he had indeed belonged to the elite squad—which is highly unlikely, given his age in 1948—his narrative sheds light on something else: it is less about his belonging to the Palmach than about belonging to this generation of fighters—and to the Israeli hegemonic model of masculinity. The narrative appears therefore strategic, as it allows the German Jew and former refugee to achieve the national myth. As Engel acknowledges, the mingling of “facts” and “fiction”—typical of oral testimony—is indeed “stuff for a novel,” but his statement nevertheless remains significant from the point of view of gender history.
In Lieu of a Conclusion: Multiple Yekke Masculinities
The dominant narrative about the Yekkes in Mandatory Palestine and Israel is that of cultural alienation. Yet, the persistence of this culturalistic narrative is paradoxical because it hardly corresponds to the eventual social and economic integration of the Yekkes.Footnote 87 To address this tension, this article has analyzed the gendered aspects of that integration, and, in particular, their adaptation to Zionist injunctions of masculinity. The German-speaking Jews did not exactly match Zionist expectations: some voiced reluctance about endorsing militaristic and nationalistic values related to defense, having witnessed first-hand the dangers of extreme militarism in Europe. Despite their “Ashkenaziness”—and hence their identification with some form of hegemonic “whiteness”—Yekke masculinity in Israel remained at the margin of the center. The major reason for this seems to have been the European-like, bourgeois habitus of the Yekkes, which was not in accordance with the New Hebrew masculinity. They thus provided, according to Dan Diner, “an almost ideal projection surface for what the Israeli, the Hebrew Jew, should not be. They were the inner other.”Footnote 88 The fact that forms of Yekkishkeit did persist as a form of “symbolic ethnicity” suggests that some distinctive habits were indeed worth maintaining.Footnote 89 And, in the Israeli context of a young Jewish nation in the process of being created, Yekkishkeit could, at times, represent a strategic response to hegemonic sociocultural dynamics.
A close look at individual trajectories shows that masculinities were strategically used, according to situational experiences—a point that one last case study helps to make.Footnote 90 Ernst Georg Martin Pfeffermann was born in Berlin in 1917 to a family he described in his interview as assimilated. He insisted on pointing out that Hannah Arendt was a “distant cousin,” as if to position his family—and himself—within the grand constellation of German-Jewish Bildungsbürgertum. Ernst grew up in a climate of widespread everyday antisemitism: he remembered numerous cases of verbal abuse during his adolescence. His younger brother, who had always had the “dream” of emigrating to Palestine, became an early member of the Zionist Workers’ Movement, but Ernst did not join. At the age of thirteen, however, he ended up joining a youth movement—“like everyone else.” Although “never a Zionist” at heart, he was sent by his mother to a training camp (hachshara) in order to learn practical skills that would be helpful in Palestine. This, it turned out, would save his life. In 1936, at the age of nineteen, he was sponsored by “Herr Rosenberg,” a German-Jewish factory owner in Palestine looking for workers, and he left Germany. Ernst never saw his mother again. She was deported and perished in the Holocaust. On the day after his arrival, Ernst began to work in the port district of Haifa, Bat Galim, where he performed several low-skilled jobs for two years. In his interview, he stressed the fact that it was at that very moment in his life that he really started identifying as a Zionist pioneer worker. He competed with other immigrant coworkers, and, on several occasions, had to fight to prevent his belongings from being stolen from the collective hut. But after just a few months, Ernst was elected staff representative in the local workers’ union. He campaigned for a rise in wages, even organized a strike, and was soon fired for these subversive activities. Summing up this part of his life, Ernst adopts a bildungsbürgerliche stance by quoting a line from a famous German Romantic poem, Ludwig Uhland's “The Brave Swabian” (Der wackere Schwabe): “We had many stones and little bread.”
The next stage of his life was set in the orange groves of Pardes Hannah, near Haifa. There, Ernst joined the Jewish auxiliary police in 1938, and was trained in rudimentary military discipline. At this point in the self-narrative, the interviewer made a remark about his endurance, muscularity, and physical strength, to which he proudly responded: “Nobody could bend me.” In the police force, he was assigned to the surveillance of Arab prisoners who had participated in riots; sometimes, he acknowledged, he would shoot at these “terrorists.” Ernst got married in 1942, and he claims that the prestige of the police uniform helped him seduce or “intoxicate” (berauschen) his future wife, a saleswoman. This episode was an important step in his life, for marriage “normalized” his chaotic adult life as a man. The rabbi who presided over his marriage urged him to adopt a Hebrew name. Though he refused to change his birth name, he did agree to add his father's Hebraic first name to his own: “Ernst Georg Martin Ephraim Pfeffermann, and I was fit for marriage!”
In 1942, Ernst joined the British navy. He traveled the Mediterranean, was stationed in Egypt, and participated in the Allied landing in Italy in 1943. Because he was not particularly “gifted for the sea” and had “no ambition whatsoever” in that area, he left the navy in 1944. Ernst nevertheless insisted on the importance of the male bonding he had experienced in the navy: “You end up knowing what a guy thinks.” These ties soon proved to be of use to him when he sought employment after his time in service, and his former captain in the navy found him a job in a refinery. He witnessed firsthand in 1948 the violent battle of Haifa, a city populated by both Jews and Arabs, uncritically referring to the latter in his narrative as the “present absentees,” i.e., those who remained within the borders of what would become Israel, but were considered “legally” absent—with regard to their property claims—by the State of Israel.Footnote 91 He mentioned as well those who came back, mainly the Druze, whom he considered “equal to us.”
Ernst's self-narrative partly constructs his own masculine identity by rejecting “Arab/violent” masculinity. Though he did not “dislike the Arabs,” he considered them to be culturally, socially, and racially different; on several occasions, in fact, he used the totalizing phrase “this entire race” (diese ganze Rasse). According to him, the Arabs understood only two languages: “Arabic and force.” He also thought that the Yekkes—like him—were not “Orientals,” that their mentalities were different. Toward the end of the interview, Ernst reflected on “German” masculinity, which was characterized by “a love of order” (Ordnungsliebe) and “meticulousness” (Gründlichkeit). He linked it to the tragic fate of his mother, whose property had been confiscated by male SS officers who embodied the radicalized epitome of “German” masculinity: everything happened “the German way, according to plan, with no second thoughts and even with a receipt.” Consequently, he continued, he did not want to be identified with those “German” manly virtues. He nevertheless did identify with the other German virtues of culture and Bildung, and he was “proud, full stop, to have received a German education.”
In his self-narrative, Ernst Pfeffermann showed a strong sense of self-affirmation and willfulness, of something Alf Lüdtke has referred to as Eigen-Sinn.Footnote 92 This form of “stubborn consciousness” makes it difficult to categorize in any definitive way the masculine identity of Ernst—or other Yekkes, for that matter. Instead, Ernst voiced a fluid sense of self. On a macrosocial level, different masculinities coexist in definite relations with one another, relations that include hierarchy, exclusion, or complicity. Ernst Pfeffermann, as an individual, nevertheless embodied multiple, as well as situational, masculinities. His own sense of masculinity and identity was more than just that of a Zionist pioneer or of a Bildungsbürger. Yet, he identified with both: he felt fully Israeli, but remained fully European. Though he had received a bourgeois education, he asserted his masculinity as a worker among workers after arriving in Haifa in 1936. He had no military ambitions, but still used warlike phrases to describe the “Arab enemy.” His narrative, while coherent, revealed ambivalent affiliations. Ernst Pfeffermann was just one case, of course, but the same held true for other Yekkes who, in their postwar self-narratives, (re)constructed fluid masculine identities in the shadow of the Holocaust.
