The lived experiences of German Jews under the Third Reich continue to inspire new scholarship. Whether focusing on antisemitism, organized or small-scale resistance activity, emigration or cultural agency, these works, of which Guy Miron’s Space and Time under Persecution: The German-Jewish Experience in the Third Reich is a recent contribution, highlight how Jewish men, women, and youth responded to increasing constrictions on their movements in public and private life. Among Mark Roseman's Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany (2019), Richard N. Lutjens, Jr.’s Submerged on the Surface: The Not-So-Hidden Jews of Nazi Berlin, 1941-1945 (2019), and Wolf Gruner's Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler's Germany (2023), Miron's is the most significant practitioner of how these constrictions prompted German Jews to reconceive of their worlds and texts in subjectively spatial and temporal ways.

Space and Time under Persecution's main provocation is to understand how Jews became everyday navigators of the loss of space and time under the Nazi regime, as the rapid shrinking of the right to move and to access culture as features of modern citizenship. Miron's motivation is to explore “how human beings, in the shadow of momentous historical events, perceive the world around them, their own identities, and the fabric of social relations that connects them” (2). He offers a theoretical and yet humane interpretation of the German-Jewish bourgeois experience with well-chosen excerpts from personal diaries, correspondence, autobiographical accounts, and the contemporary press.

The book expresses its preoccupations with space and time across two parts, each with three chapters. Part I's focus on “Space” outlines the gradual sequestration of Jews from German public space, a loosely defined zone understood as the high point of emancipation's pace and promise—to move in public space was evidence of arrival, an arrival into cultural and mobile citizenship actioned by legal and civic access to and across consumer culture, promenades, and the railroad. This promised mobility also extended to cafés, theaters, opera houses, museums, cinemas, driving, countryside retreats, public libraries, sports facilities, and vacation spots. Miron documents the gradual withdrawal of German Jews’ access to these beloved spaces of cultural citizenship as Nazi legislation took hold. Diaries and memoirs illuminate Jews’ retreat into self-isolation. Diminishing access to public space resulted in a re-energized attachment to the Jewish spaces of synagogues and cemeteries (as explored in Chapter 2) and an expansion of mental travels from the present threat to geographies of the past and future—a necessary adventurism that signified an immense alienation from the places that formed German Jews’ attachment to Germany.

Miron's navigation of Jews’ enforced retreat from sociability to Jewish spaces is further articulated in the domestic sphere. The exemplary bourgeois artefact of the home, as the place of creating Gemütlichkeit (the comforts of home), whether it is in homemaking or home-leaving (into smaller houses or apartments or via emigration), is discussed as the material zone of women’s attachment and management of redundancies—emotional and object based. Chapter 3 is particularly insightful in analyzing women’s commitment to their homes and furnishings as “spatial resilience.” It explores how they adapted to constant shifts in the scale of their personal space, the maintenance of walls and privacy as bourgeois practices, making decisions about the retention of personal objects and heirlooms, and the displeasure of moving into furnished or “alien” apartments. The argument here, however, is not only spatial, but also material and intergenerational. The German-Jewish home and its diminishing materiality was constantly resized and scaled, elasticized as a place of protection, reimagining, and gendered adaptation.

If “Space” provides concrete materialities to re-interpret the cartography of the German-Jewish bourgeois experience, Part 2's focus on “Time” turns to the realignments of temporal habits in response to the politicized recasting of the German national calendar. The revival of the Jewish national calendar and its religious holidays, such as Pesach and Rosh Hashanah, argues Miron, became a means of mnemonic socialization, a way to synchronize events in the collective Jewish past with the lived intrusions of the Nazi regime, an interpretation that echoes Alan Rosen's The Holocaust's Jewish Calendars: Keeping Time Sacred, Making Time Holy (2019). Chapter 5 asserts a compelling and convincing binary of center and periphery in relation to the experience of time. Jews were, according to Miron, living with double desynchronization. They were fated to living in “creeping time” (166), a slow social death that presaged their actual ones should they be deported, or less likely averted, should emigration extricate them, and excluded from Nazi society's construction of “accelerated time” (169) with its emphasis on rapidly attaining, at whatever cost, a promised yet exclusionary social, economic, and cultural future.

“Turning toward the Past,” with its focus on how rabbis, social activists, and pundits created narrative models and mobilized past narrative archetypes to find meaning in the present is a fitting final chapter of this memorable book. It returns us to the temporal, if not transit moment, of how to write the catastrophe as it unfolded, so much a theme in scholarship about the Holocaust and Jewish history. Miron's analysis and exemplary evidence in this chapter recall Laura Jockusch's notion of “transit history,” as recounted in her Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (2012). Although Jockusch's primary focus was the historical commissions which facilitated the early testimony gathering of Holocaust survivors, Miron's book returns us to the origin story of that collecting imperative: the exodus, the exile, and the breakage of the emancipation bonds during 1930s and early 1940s. He does so in ways that also recall the tensions involved in narrating decline and resilience in the contemporaneous writing of historians and ghetto residents in Warsaw, Łódź, and Vilna.

Space and Time under Persecution is a landmark book that transcends its subject matter. Miron restages and replaces the German-Jewish bourgeois response to the Nazi regime, shifting effortlessly between multiple scales, temporal worlds, and spheres of this ever-active and erudite community who bequeathed incredibly rich insights about their struggles to hold onto space and time.