Leseprobe

159 The Youth Memoirs of Erika Plaut, née Salzburg at the Saxon Picture Library in Dresden, before embarking on a six-month residency in Paris. Al- though early adulthood is typically characterized by new experiences, the period nevertheless marked a particularly stark contrast to Erika’s shel- tered childhood and youth. Erika was thus finally able to find her feet as an increasingly independ- ent young woman, expanding her social circle and making new friends. Indeed, it was through the new people in Erika’s life that she eventually met her future husband, a radiologist from Leipzig by the name of Dr Hans Plaut. During this period, her sister Thekla (then twenty years old) began to en- gage more consciously with her own Jewish iden- tity following her marriage to Dr Adolf Strauss, a Rhinelander from the town of Siegburg (near Bonn). Amedical doctor by profession, Erika’s new brother-in-law was also a committed Zionist. Hav- ing previously been forced to leave school, Erika was finally able to resume her academic education at 22 years of age—described as a cause for de- light, since it marked the moment when she was finally able to pursue her long-held ambition of completing her Abitur . The memoirs end here, with Erika poised to return to academic education. It seems that some of those who read the memoirs, including her own children, were disappointed that Erika Plaut decided not to write any further. Erika Plaut’s memoirs encompass her years of growing up in an affluent upper-bourgeois Ger- man-Jewish household in the early 20th century. They tell of a cultivated and well-connected fami- ly, who, until the outbreak of the First World War, enjoyed a life of considerable material comfort. However, this comfortable existence was governed by the codes of German-Jewish bourgeois respect- ability, which dictated family life either via explic- it proscriptions and social restrictions, or through a range of anxieties that implicitly set the param- eters of acceptable behaviour. Erika Plaut’s focus on particular aspects of this life illuminates a com- prehensive picture of a bourgeois ethos that in- formed the family’s awareness of its own socio­ economic and educational standing, and mani- fested itself in a lifestyle built on such key values as modesty, hard work, and thrift. In the years after 1918, the family’s tribulations were some- thing of a mirror image of the all-encompassing economic, political, social, and cultural upheavals unleashed by the First WorldWar. The old ideas of social order that once upheld the German monar- chy had gone the way of the Kaiser. The zeitgeist underwent a profound change in the years be- tween the old monarchy and the new republic— evident, for example, in the dramatically chang- ing (and greatly expanded) role of women, and the era’s ‘return to nature’ philosophies that underlay the vogue for outdoor physical activities. While considerable numbers of the German-Jewish pop- ulation had joined the ranks of the affluent upper-middle classes during the boom years spanning Germany’s unification in 1871 through to 1914, this trend was disrupted (and even reversed) during the economic and social turmoil that followed in the wake of the First World War. Erika had been made to feel ‘different’ because she inhabited a world rife with anti-Jewish sentiments and in- stances of anti-Semitic discrimination. Hence, she felt she was falling uncontrollably from a familiar world that had once given her an illusory sense of security. Although Erika never questioned her affiliation to Germany’s overwhelmingly Christian society—not least, because of the security prom- ised by the German legal system—some parts of society were out of bounds to her as early as 1920, when she was still just a little girl. ‘Eri’s Autobiog- raphy 1906–1928’ might in some respects read like a typical family history from any member of the German affluent upper bourgeoisie in the early 20th century. However, such a broad categoriza- tion would be insufficient, as it does not acknowl- edge the specifically (German-)Jewish dimension of the narrative. In particular, Erika Plaut’s account is notable for its descriptions of the underlying Erika Plaut, née Salzburg; Liselotte Stein, née Salzburg; Thekla Strauss, née Salzburg. Date unknown.