Space and Time under Persecution: The German-Jewish Experience in the Third Reich. Guy Miron

Extract

In this innovative study, Miron takes two of the most foundational principles by which we make sense of, and experience, the world—space and time—and explores how the Nazi rise to power changed German-Jewish understandings of both. To do so, he asks new questions of familiar sources written and read by middle-class German Jews: articles in the German-Jewish press alongside diaries, letters, and a small number of wartime autobiographical accounts written by refugees. Through careful discourse analysis of these textual sources, Miron paints a variegated picture of how some German Jews experienced and responded to Nazi spatial and temporal attack. The result is an important book that builds upon and adds to understandings of German Jewish life under Nazism found in foundational studies like Marion Kaplan’s Between Dignity and Despair (1998). Miron’s key argument (with the risk of oversimplifying it) is that Nazism posed both temporal and spatial disruption, with German Jews experiencing spatial narrowing and “stationary time” (p. 97).