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“Jewish Taste?” in Paris and Berlin
have given themselves that identity. The auction records also pose problems of
interpretation because people often sold off goods a bit at a time, so it can be
difficult to reconstruct the entirety of a household. A further technical problem is
generated by an unevenness of the source materials. The Parisian Jews who
petitioned the government for restitution of their goods ranged from immigrant
tailors living in one-room apartments in the poorest of neighborhoods to fifthgeneration
bankers living in twelve-room villas in the wealthiest of suburbs. By
contrast, the vast majority of my documentation to date from Berlin is from those
who were solidly within the middle class. That material is broader in kind,
including more photographic evidence, but is more limited in its class scope. A
complexity of interpretation is also created in the French records by the fact that
people sometimes lied about what they had owned. A friend whose family’s form
I found in the archive was certain that her father had exaggerated the value of the
family’s prewar possessions. 19 Finally, the Berlin auction records will eventually
allow me to make generalizations, at least among the wealthy, concerning likeness
or difference between Jews and non-Jews. Finding evidence of non-Jewish
consumption habits in Paris is more difficult. I have, of course, supplemented these
sources with photographs, memoirs, and museum catalogues, but more research,
both to determine my subjects’ identification with Judaism and to obtain a broader
distribution of sources will be necessary before the conclusions can be more
definitive.
The moral problem – the legitimacy of using information generated in the
interests of mass-destruction for any purpose other than that of analyzing that
process of persecution – is more difficult. The story told here is that of life rather
than death. It is the story of how people gave meaning to their lives, communicated
their values and sense of self to others, and remembered their pasts, through the
banal things of their everyday lives. The obligation to struggle to understand the
deaths of European Jews in the 1940s, should not force us to forget their lives. It
is an irony of history that the sources generated by the Nazi regime inadvertently
provide a rich image of the lives of the people it was trying to kill. I see no reason
to accept the Nazis’ purpose and thereby leave these lives deeper in the shade than
they need be. Jews in Paris and Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, like non-Jews in
the same period, created their senses of self, communicated with others, and fought
mortality through the habitats they created for themselves. It is to the specifics of
that story that we now turn.
The Aesthetic World of Parisian Jews
While Jews in Paris lived throughout the city, they tended, as in all other urban
contexts, to group in certain neighborhoods, marked by class and other divisions.
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