The Construct Ostjuden in German Anti-Semitic Discourse of 1920–1932

Abstract

The author of the following article analyses development of the construct Ostjuden in the language of German anti-Semites in 1920–1932. For this discourse analysis, two main primary sources were chosen: the daily newspaper Völkischer Beobachter and archives of parliamentary debates of the Reichstag. Immigration and the presence of Eastern European Jews in Germany after the World War I played an important role in the anti-Semitic propaganda and speeches of right-wing politicians. Within the period of the Weimar Republic, the construct Ost juden underwent certain semantic changes. Use of the term and its connotations in the anti-Semitic discourse were examined and are presented in this article. Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Germany were among favorite targets of the anti-Semitic attacks at the beginning of the 20th century. The German term Ostjude (lit. “Eastern Jew”) started to be widely used in the German language around turn of the century. At the very beginning, this term was popularized by German and Austrian Jews, who had discovered the romanticized world of their Eastern European coreligionists. Therefore, once this word had entered the German language discourses, it had rather positive connotations. Nevertheless, the term quite soon gained other meanings as well. While some German-speaking Jews continued to load the word Ostjude with positive connotations, German anti-Semites and others of the German Jewry discovered the term for themselves and started to use it to describe “foreign” Jews from Eastern Europe in a pejorative way.1 Numerous anti-Semitic texts, which dealt with the so-called Ostjudenfrage (question of Ostjuden) especially during and after the World War I, discredited such words as Ostjuden, ostjüdisch, Ostjudentum and others. The consequences of this discreditation can still be felt in the modern German language. Although both terms are 1 Staudinger 2015: 36–37. SCRIPTA JUDAICA CRACOVIENSIA Vol. 16 (2018) pp. 97–108 doi: 10.4467/20843925SJ.18.002.10821 www.ejournals.eu/Scripta-Judaica-Cracoviensia 98 alexander klIymuk still used by authors of numerous scientific and journalistic texts to refer to Eastern European Jews,2 other historians criticize this approach, pointing out that these words are to be used exclusively as source terms (Quellenbegriff).3 Various aspects of the life of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Germany before 1933 have been well-researched and described in numerous articles and books. The fundamental studies of Steven Aschheim, Trude Mauerer and Jack Wertheimer from the 1980s were continued and supplemented by other historians in the following years. Despite the diversity of the works on this topic, there is no comprehensive study of the emergence and development of the term Ostjude in German discourses. The aim of the present research is therefore to contribute to this outstanding conceptual history and to examine the role of the construct Ostjuden in the anti-Semitic discourse of the Weimar Republic. The following questions are to be answered: what were the dynamics of the usage of this term by German anti-Semites; how did the connotations of the term change within the researched period; which linguistic and rhetorical means were used in relation to this term; and how was this term instrumentalized by right-wing politicians for their political purposes? For this research, two main primary sources were used: the newspaper Völkischer Beobachter (January 1920–January 1933) and the archive of parliamentary debates of the German Reichstag (1917–1932). The newspaper Völkischer Beobachter was chosen for various reasons, mainly because of its role for further developments in Germany. In December 1920, the young National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) bought the loss-making newspaper. Immediately afterwards, the newspaper became the official journalistic party organ. Although its circulation in the 1920s was relatively small even compared to some regional newspapers (under 10,000 copies before June 1922; over 100,000 after 1931), Völkischer Beobachter seems to be an important source for discourse analysis as the so-called “Hitler’s voice.”4 The most important propaganda newspaper of the Nazi party was chosen to be the starting point of this research from among the whole variety of media: around 4,000 daily newspapers had appeared in Germany by the end of the 1920s.5 The analysis of the newspaper articles is supplemented by research of the archive of parliamentary documents. In accordance with the practice of the German parliament, all speeches, including exclamations from places, are written down in the stenographs, which makes the verbatim reports of the parliamentary sessions a very important source of linguistic research and discourse analysis. Moreover, the documents of the Reichstag make it possible to analyze two layers of language at the same time: the official language (texts of laws, parliamentary requests and written answers to requests), as well as spoken and semi-formal language (verbatim reports). In the case of the parliamentary 2 See Eitz, Engelhardt 2015a; Haumann 1998; Maurer 1986. 3 See: Pickhan 2015; Staudinger 2015. 4 Mühlberger 2004: 21–22. 5 Eitz, Engelhardt 2015b: 23. 99 The Construct Ostjuden in German Anti-Semitic Discourse of 1920–1932 speeches and documents, those concerning the right-wing politicians who represented parties with anti-Semitic political agendas were taken into account.6 The use of the term Ostjuden both in the Völkischer Beobachter and in parliamentary debates has not yet been systematically researched. Studies into the press of the Weimar Republic mostly ignore the topics connected with Eastern European Jews as marginal and unimportant. In Detlef Mühlberger’s two-volume book on the Völkischer Beobachter the topic of Ostjuden is not mentioned at all. Some references to this aspect can be found in the second volume of the study Diskursgeschichte der Weimarer Republik by Thorsten Eitz and Isabelle Engelhardt – however, only in the context of discussions on the so-called Ostjudenfrage (lit. “question of Eastern Jews”) in the early 1920s. At the same time, research on Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Germany lacks a systematic and detailed conceptual analysis, even if an attempt at discourse analysis was made. Thus, for example, in her fundamental study Ostjuden in Deutschland 1918–1933 (1986) Trude Mauerer evaluated several anti-Semitic journals (Alldeutsche Blätter, Deutschlands Erneuerung and Hammer) and convincingly described her results in the chapter “The portrait of Ostjuden in the mirror of the public opinion” (“Das Portrait der Ostjuden im Spiegel der öffentlichen Meinung”). The Völkischer Beobachter, which became a daily newspaper in 1923, is not one of the sources of this study. Some articles from the daily press of the Weimar Republic were included into the study, but none of the daily newspapers was systematically reviewed, as the author herself emphasized.7 Ultimately, for Trude Mauerer, the word Ostjude means exclusively Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Germany, which was typical for historians in the 1980s. However, as most contemporary historians agree, in the use of German language in the 1920s, the construct Ostjude was more complex and went much further beyond these semantic boundaries. The methodology that enabled this research to be carried out is historical discourse analysis. The texts were researched qualitatively and quantitatively by means of complex content analysis. Based on the quantitative analysis, an attempt was made to find out how often the corresponding terms appear in the texts, i.e. the dynamics of the use of terms. For the qualitative analysis, it was important to evaluate the following categories in the texts: selfand external designations, collocations, stigma vocabulary, titles, categorizations, generalizations, neologisms, and specific composites. Attention was also paid to special features of the reporting in the texts, as well as to the interdiscursive context and current political situation in Germany and abroad. Throughout the period of the Weimar Republic, discussions on Eastern European Jews did not lose their relevance. Analysis of all issues of the Völkischer Beobachter for the period from January 1920 to January 1933 has shown that the term Ostjude never completely disappeared from the language use despite its relative rarity at some periods. Ostjuden were mentioned most intensively in the anti-Semitic press in the early 1920s: 30% of all the article titles containing the word Ostjude or its derivatives published 6 Representatives of the following parties and factions: Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP), Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP), Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), Nationalsozialistische Freiheitspartei (NF), Völkische Arbeitsgemeinschaft (VA). 7 Maurer 1986: 102. 100 alexander klIymuk in the Völkischer Beobachter during the analysed time period were found from January 1920 to February 1921. However even later there were periods in which articles on Eastern Jews appeared systematically, for example in October-November 1923 (in the context of the expulsions of Polish Jews from Bavaria) or in the second half of 1926 (at that time the articles were dealing mainly with financial crimes and court proceedings against Eastern European Jews living in Germany). Similar observations can be made regarding the parliamentary discussions. The period of the most intense polemics on Ostjuden in the Weimar Republic is the early 1920s: half of all mentions of the word Ostjude and its derivatives in the stenographs appeared from 1920 to 1923. However, already during the World War I, some right-wing politicians tried to make the so-called Ostjudenfrage a subject of political discussion. This discussion intensified in the context of immigration of Eastern European Jews to Germany from the territories, which suffered from the war actions the most. In the l