German Jewish soldiers celebrate Hanukkah, 1916 |
When war broke
out in Germany in August of 1914, German Jewish newspapers urged men to
volunteer:
To
all German Jews! At this hour we must again show we Jews, proud of our
heritage, belong to the best sons of the Fatherland. The nobility of our thousands of years of
history demands this of us. We expect that our youth will volunteer for the flag
with joy in their hearts. German Jews! We call up on you, in the sense of our
old Jewish commandments, to devote yourselves with all your heart, soul and
property to the service of the Fatherland.*
An estimated
100,000 Jewish soldiers joined the German army, and for every eight of those
who enlisted, one was killed -- 12,000 died in the First World War.**
Much as Israel’s
King David asked God in the imprecatory Psalms to punish his enemies,
Jewish rabbis led prayers for the destruction of Germany’s foes:
Our
Father Our King: Oppose the evil ones of the earth who are fighting against us.
Send against them calamity upon calamity, breach upon breach. Destroy them utterly by your wrath and your
anger each time they attack us….Weaken their armies and swallow up their
thoughts and let both them and their ships go down together into the uttermost
depths….Therefore harm will not come to our country, because You will bring
destruction to our foes.***
Alfred Lichtenstein |
Alfred Lichtenstein,
a Prussian Jew born in Berlin, was less than two months from finishing his year
of compulsory military service when the war began. Lichtenstein had graduated with a law degree
in October of 1913, but in August of 1914, he was ordered to the Western Front
with the 2nd Bavarian Infantry Regiment. His friends knew him as “a clown, a wit, a
man apart, possessed by a profound sense of the absurdity of the world.”† Historian Niall Ferguson asserts, “Lichtenstein
has a good claim to have been the first of the anti-war poets. His ‘Prayer
before Battle’ predates Sassoon’s change of style by a year and a half.”††
Prayer before
Battle
The troops are
singing fervently, each for himself
God, protect me
from misfortune,
Father, Son and
Holy Spirit,
That no grenades
strike me,
That the
bastards, our enemies,
Do not catch me,
do not shoot me,
That I don’t die
like a dog
For the dear
fatherland.
Look, I would
like to go on living,
From Chicago Tribune, 20 Dec. 1914 |
Milk cows, bang
girls
And beat the
bastard, Sepp,
Get drunk often
Until my blessed
death.
Look, I eagerly
and gladly recite
Seven rosaries
daily,
If you, God, in
your grace
Would kill my
friend Huber or Meier,
And not me.
But if the worst
should come,
Let me not be
too badly wounded.
Send me a slight
leg wound,
A small injury
to the arm,
So that I may
return as a hero,
With a story to
tell.
—Alfred Lichtenstein,
trans. by Sheldon Gilman, Robert
Levine, and Harry Radford†††
Lichtenstein
did not return home as a hero. Shot in the
stomach in the German attack on Vermandovillers on the Somme, he died several
days later on 25 September 1914.° He is
buried in one of the fifteen mass graves in the German War Cemetery at Vermandovillers,
the largest German War Cemetery in France and the final resting place of
22,632 German soldiers.
1920 leaflet "To the German Mothers.... do not tolerate that a Jewish mother is scorned in her grief |
The
expressionist poet died two years before Germans imposed the Jewish military
census of 1916, the Judenzählung, intended
to expose Jewish perfidy. As
casualties mounted and Germans faced starvation on the home front, old
prejudices were exposed. Germans began to blame Jews for the country’s
psychological and economic collapse, charging that Jews were war profiteers who
shirked military service. For Jewish soldiers, “the census represented a
catastrophe as well as a direct insult.
It showed clearly that neither society, nor the military nor the
government recognized their patriotism or their sacrifice.”°° In the years
following the war, the situation would worsen dramatically for German Jews as “through
one of the most immoral conjuring tricks in history,” the Jewish people became
the scapegoat for their nation’s military losses: Germans came to believe the
invented argument that their army had not lost the war, but “had been betrayed
by communists, Jews, and other dissidents.”‡ Lichtenstein was killed fighting
for Germany in September of 1914; his mother and two of his siblings were
killed by the Nazis 28 years later.‡‡
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Editorial
appearing in Jüdische Rundschau, 7
Aug. 1914, cited in Peter C. Appelbaum’s Loyal
Sons: Jews in the German Army in the Great War, Vallentine Mitchell, 2014,
p. 49.
**Applebaum, Loyal Sons, p. 272.
***Applebaum, Loyal Sons, pp. 49-50.
† Patrick Bridgwater,
German Poets of the First World War, St.
Martin’s, 1985, p. 63.
†† Niall
Ferguson, “Introduction,” The Pity of
War, Penguin, 1999.
††† Alfred
Lichtenstein, The Prose and Verse of
Alfred Lichtenstein, translated by Sheldon Gilman, Robert Levine, and Harry
Radford, Xlibris, 2000, p. 181.
° Ray Ockenden,
“The Neglected Voice of Alfred Lichtenstein,” Oxford German Studies, vol. 41, no. 3, 2012, p. 364.
°° Applebaum, Loyal Sons, p. 261.
‡ Jay Winter,
“Foreword” to Peter C. Appelbaum’s Loyal
Sons, p. xxiv.
‡‡ Sheldon
Gilman, Robert Levine, and Harry Radford, “Introduction,” The Prose and Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein, Xlibris, 2000, p. 13.
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