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Leora Auslander
unworthy of the attention of the statistician, sociologist, or archivist. A comparative
study of consumption is further complicated by the different record-keeping habits
of different nation-states. These caveats aside, however, there are more than
adequate sources available. Some are the canonical sources for this kind of project
– memoirs, diaries, photographs, architectural drawings, and novels. Some are the
more particular, and in some ways problematic, sources generated by the National
Socialist regime in Germany and its ally, the Vichy regime in France. These sources
are the reams of paper generated by the effort to expropriate and destroy French
and German Jewry.
Three kinds of archives generated by the Nazi regime in Berlin have been of
particular use here: inventories, correspondence, and documentation produced
during the course of expropriation of real estate, and detailed auction records. 16
Those records include auctions of both “Aryan” and “non-Aryan” households,
with those terms of course, being defined according to government, rather than
self, definition. I have read through approximately half (250) of the extant auction
records of the so-called non-Aryan households for which there are detailed listings.
My research assistant and I have also worked through a parallel selection of the
“Aryan” records.
The Vichy regime produced parallel, but different, documentation. In France,
the end of the war saw the return of thousands of Parisian Jews to their homes,
homes they usually found either empty or furnished with their new inhabitants’
possessions. The administration quickly set up a claims process whereby people
could attempt to repossess their goods. 17 To file a claim, one wrote a letter
explaining one’s circumstances and included as detailed an inventory as possible
of the missing furniture, clothing, jewelry, toys, art work, books, and musical
instruments. These inventories range from notes hand-written in pencil on the back
of a torn paper-bag to twenty-page, typed, mimeographed lists accompanied by
high-quality photographs. Some are accompanied by letters, others are not. I have
read a sample of some 400 such letters and inventories in an attempt to establish
what prewar Jewish Parisian households looked like, across differences of class,
citizenship, neighborhood, and religiosity.
The records for both Berlin and Paris pose both technical and moral problems.
The technical are more easily addressed. Both the French and the German
government documentation poses the problem of determining who is, and who is
not, a Jew. In both the Nazi and Vichy regimes, Jews were defined by the state
along genetic rather than voluntarist principles, thus the records of many of those
identified by the state to be Jewish, may have understood themselves to be
Catholic, Protestant, or without any religious or “ethnic” identification at all. 18
And, even among Jews, of course, there were vast differences in what “Jewishness”
meant. In a further stage of this project I will attempt to determine with
greater precision who of those, defined by antisemitic regimes as Jewish, would
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