Mark Roseman uses the Bund (a communal group of left-leaning idealists) to help readers understand the private lives, actions, and thoughts of an anti-Nazi group. His work examines not only their struggles against the regime and its policies, but also their interwar and wartime existence. Herein lies the crux of this book's larger significance. The lived experience of ordinary Germans during the Third Reich is hard to find, explain, and analyze. Roseman utilizes this group, several core leaders and members in particular, to delve into the questions of what people in opposition to the Nazis understood and did during the Third Reich, how their postwar writings explained their thoughts and actions, and what the common threads and discontinuities between these two sets of writings reveal.
Through careful examination of words and deeds, Roseman's work reveals the reality of life within the Third Reich from the standpoint of those who endured a life lived, mentally and physically, in a state of constant private and occasionally public opposition. The strength and power of the Bund rests not on bare statistics, such as the documented rescue of and assistance to eight Jews within Germany. Instead, this is the story of a group so firmly committed to their end goal that they were willing to continue to live in and envision an alternative world, one rooted not in fascist hyper-nationalism but rather in a socialist utopia, amid a concerted effort by the Third Reich to destroy all other visions of the present and the future. Although the Bund members shared bombing raids with their fellow Germans, they also endured denunciations by their neighbors and were isolated from the “people's community.”
Starting with the Bund's formation in the 1920s, the book follows its members into the Third Reich and then into the postwar period. The initial chapters introduce key members, including the group's dynamic leader, Artur Jacobs, and trace the development of their adult education and dance programs, where they actively recruited members. This group's geographic center was the Ruhr region, its official name was League: Community for Socialist Life, and it never had more than perhaps two hundred members. Its goal was a communal group, with its members willing to place the collective good before individual desires and needs, which at times created tension between adult members and their own children. Focusing on their lived experience, Roseman unflinchingly tells their stories, even those that paint them in a less than favorable light. For example, he explains Artur Jacobs's postwar embellishment of his actions in order to qualify for additional rations. He also discusses the risky actions of Marianne Strauss, a Jew in hiding, who put others in potential danger.
The book rests on the remarkable cache of surviving documents, drawn from across archives and personal papers. It was dangerous for people engaged in resistance to keep evidence of their efforts, and Roseman details multiple times that Bund members destroyed or hid documentation that the Gestapo could have used as damning evidence of their subversive activity. Yet his scouring of both archives and personal collections has unearthed letters, pamphlets, diaries, and other documents that do not exist for other resistance organizations. The result is a deeply researched book drawing on oral history interviews, archival sources from Germany and the United States, and, crucially, private collections of papers and images from the descendants of Bund members.
This work is not, however, an homage to German anti-Nazi resistance. Instead, Roseman uses the Bund, which largely faded into obscurity after the war, to probe how scholars and the public initially defined both resistance and rescue and how this has shifted. The members of the Bund did little, if anything, to confront the regime directly, a decision they collectively made in the early years of the Third Reich. By rescuing people through their extended network, the Bund's efforts did not match the initial, public idea of rescue (one family hiding one or more Jews for a prolonged period in one place). Scholars have since demonstrated that this conception of hiding (immobile and silent) was rare. In fact, the few Jews who survived in hiding within Germany did so with the assistance of dozens of helpers and were dependent on them for shelter, food, medical care, and identification documents. A key influence on this willing commitment to offer assistance were the Bund members in mixed marriages (between so-called Aryans and non-Aryans). But the development of Nazi policies and their impact on privileged and nonprivileged mixed marriages following Kristallnacht in November 1938 are, at times, under-explained.
Roseman's work fits within newer scholarship that is redefining resistance. This scholarship analyzes and contextualizes resistance, i.e., what was possible for different groups of people living in a specific time and place. He provides many examples of group members taking risky actions—from bringing flowers to the home of a Jewish couple the morning following Kristallnacht, to providing assistance to Jews in Germany escaping deportation, to shipping hundreds of parcels to Jews in ghettoes (Theresienstadt) and even in Auschwitz. Roseman also highlights the ways in which early definitions obscured Jewish self-help. Some Jews in hiding or who were passing (assuming an Aryan identity and living in public view) also provided assistance to others in need, acting as survivors, rescuers, and resistors, moving across these categories. For scholars seeking a detailed, historiographical explanation, Roseman provides starting points, laying out key questions in both his introduction (6–9) and his concluding chapter (230–40).
This is not a celebration of resistance and rescue in the more common, public sense of heroism. Instead, Roseman's book stands as a sober reminder that the vast majority of German citizens offered neither resistance to the Third Reich nor assistance to those whom it persecuted. He effectively uses the Bund to raise important questions about how definitions of resistance and rescue emerged in the postwar period, and to deepen scholarly understanding of them today.
