Divided Lives: The Untold Stories of Jewish-Christian Women in Nazi Germany [Paperback]

This book brings together the horrifying real life stories of women who woke up one day and were not who they thought they were. The government changed and they suddenly no longer had the right kind of blood, the right name, the right family background, the right physical features to be considered a member of society, city, or state. These stories are from German women who were a part of a Jewish-Christian mixed marriage and were subsequently persecuted under the Nuremberg laws. Hitler called them mischling - half-breeds, however, they have often been passed over in studies of the Holocaust - perhaps because they are often not considered real Jews. But these women are still struggling with the nightmares of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, the loss of family in concentration camps, and with their own identity-divided between their Jewish and Christian roots. Often their Jewish background was revealed to them only after Hitler's laws were passed. These are the narratives of eight women who remained in Germany, struggling to reclaim their German heritage and their cultural and religious identity. The narratives are compelling and sensitively written, addressing questions of cultural and ethnic identity.Introduction * Ingeborg Hecht * Ingrid Wecker * Ruth Yost * Ruth Wilmschen * Ursula Randt * Ilse B. * Gretel Lorenzen * Sigrid Lorenzen * Margot Wetzel * Ursula Bosselmann

Cynthia Crane's exploration of Jewish-Christian women resists simple

classification. It is at once a personal memoir of a scholar's intellectual

journey, an oral history, and a serious study of German women who

had been marginalized both by the Nazis and by previous scholars. She

writes of transgressions in the past and in the present as she and the other

interview participants grapple with the issues of identity, inclusion, and

exclusion .Crane's straightforward eloquent prose anlÓ4