For Peter Schrag, Aufbau, a periodical aimed at German-speaking Jews in the United States, was a household item. He first commented on its contents in a footnote to the memoir he published with his father, When Europe Was a Prison Camp: Father and Son Memoirs, 1940-1941 (Indiana University Press, 2015, xvi). The World of Aufbau: Hitler's Refugees in America uses the newspaper as a source base to present a variation on a familiar theme: how Jewish refugees made sense of the world they left and negotiated the world they were entering. Aufbau’s approach was assimilationist. It was dedicated to “Serving the Interests and Americanization of the Immigrants.” But it did not negate its readers’ past. It called to save “the values of our European past from destruction” (5). These phrases were directly below the title, which subtly illustrated this tension. Tellingly, the verbal form of Aufbau, aufbauen, can mean “to build up” or “to rebuild,” and it can also be extended metaphorically to mean “to give someone strength or confidence.”
This is not a history of the newspaper itself. Instead, Schrag reconstructs how the world looked for Aufbau’s readers. The newspaper’s audience was quite diverse: readers were not necessarily religious Jews, nor were they only from German-speaking countries. And, despite being published in New York City, they were sometimes not even in the United States. A future editor laid his hand on an issue for the first time in a French concentration camp (6). The two chapters Schrag dedicates to the war make its appeal to not-yet-Americans—who, given the American reluctance to take any more Jews, were unlikely to become Americans—obvious. The newspaper reported more on the war than American mainstream media. It also retained an unwaveringly optimistic stance about the future and America. More importantly, this optimism could be gleaned from more than just editorials. Even from afar, readers could see that enlisting in the army, becoming doctors, or graduating from college in the United States was possible.
Schrag paints vivid, if tragic, pictures of wartime life using all parts of the newspaper, from headlines to advertisements. The proliferation of single rooms offered for cheap tells much about the host society; so do the advertisements for services in Germany: shipping American food or offering to contact relatives, for example, which appeared right until Pearl Harbor (89). Advertisements are often the furthest we can go in gauging the readers from inside the newspaper. The difficulty of working with newspapers also emerges clearly from the pages of the book. Whom does a newspaper represent? To what extent does it shape its readers or reflect them? Does it simply exist, allowing readers to absorb its editorial line for a few minutes between apartment hunting and taking an “American English” class? Thus, the readers of The World of Aufbau are only slightly more privileged in their access to information than those of Aufbau. They have the privilege of hindsight, but learn little about the newspaper’s editing or reception.
The volume is commendable for its sensitivity to American history. Schrag intervenes at critical points with comparisons to earlier waves of European immigrants, who sought financial opportunities and sometimes aspired to return to their home countries. He also continues the narrative long after 1945: the rise of anti-communism, the return to Europe or the emergence of postwar tourism, the restitution process, and the role of Israel all receive cameos. This is perhaps also the book’s biggest weakness. In general, Schrag organizes his material chronologically. If he wanted to take his readers through the life of newly arrived German-speaking Jews in the US by following Aufbau, this would have been a reasonable choice. But Schrag also frequently moves back and forth in time. Instead of choosing between following one theme throughout the years or exploring a key theme in each time period, the same themes repeat amid disparate sections. Therefore, it is not immediately clear what each chapter says beyond covering the headlines.
The decline of Aufbau can be interpreted optimistically. If we were to measure the magazine by its own goals, it would mean that Aufbau succeeded: widespread Americanization did in fact occur The next generation was likely to read in English. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Aufbau was reborn in Switzerland in 2004, having ceased publication in New York that year. It is now a journal with a modest circulation for German-speaking Jews in Central Europe. The two versions of Aufbau seem unrelated. The original took a cosmopolitan view without being too concerned with Judaism. In some ways, it was at odds with newspapers that did. Aufbau’s reincarnation appeals to Jews first. It does not facilitate cultural transfer or integration, but gives voice to a religious group. Perhaps most importantly for Schrag, the original Aufbau was read by many, but also by the elite. As his chapter "Legacy" shows, Aufbau is the story of Hannah Arendt and Thomas Mann. Between their "pre-war" and "post-war" chapters, between their stories of exile and flight, there was also Aufbau. It gave them a place to publish, something to read, and a community with which they shared a past and a destiny.
In the final pages, Schrag warns of the “neo-nationalism” that resulted in (among other things) Trump and Brexit. This warning sums up the book’s strengths and weaknesses. It is often touching, like many Holocaust histories. This is also the problem. The thesis—Americanizing without negating the past—is unevenly developed throughout the book (had it focused only on this idea, the book would have been much shorter). The warning, therefore, stems from the history of the Holocaust more than Aufbau. Does Aufbau show us an alternative to nationalism, an example to turn to instead of returning to nationalism? For this, I would have liked to hear more about the people of Aufbau. Not Einstein (who appears in at least two photos), but the editors. Seeking to reproduce the world as described by Aufbau clouds the crucial fact that Aufbau’s world was actively constructed. Its constructors remain more or less outside of the book’s scope.
Without entering their archives, the result is a readable and often captivating overview of two interlocking stories: settling in America while learning about the Holocaust. The World of Aufbau is not burdened by historiographical discussions or a theoretical apparatus. It would appeal to a general audience, perhaps more than specialists. Undergraduate students and their teachers would benefit from the exposition of a major source unavailable in English. Yet it is most clearly intended for children of the world Aufbau represented: children to parents whom Aufbau accompanied from Europe to Americanization. This guide to acculturation succeeded to the point of relinquishing its own existence. Making sense of it, if so, is making sense of a period families might have left undocumented.
Orel Beilinson is a PhD candidate in Russian and Eastern European history at Yale University.
Orel Beilinson
Date Of Review:
May 29, 2023