HISTORY THEN AND NOW
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was pretty high, but not that it was thirty percent. How did that compare
with intermarriage in Holland, France, Italy or Austria? More generally,
are you aware of other measures of assimilation? What about access to
higher education or access to the professions? Was the intermarriage rate
higher among educated Germans than in other countries? Are there good
comparative measures of assimilation that are available to us for the late
twenties?
Robert Wistrich:
I think Walter Lagueur would be able to deal with
Weimar Germany, about which he has written. But on the guestion of
intermarriage, the statistic of thirty percent really applies to Berlin in the
early 1930s. Intermarriage rates in Germany on the eve of World War I
were closer to twelve percent. There seems to have been a steady increase
in the twenties and then especially in the last years of the Weimar
Republic, when it became a major trend. Still, intermarriage never attained
the scale we see today across the western diaspora. However, prognoses
were made not only on the basis of intermarriage, but by considering other
measures of assimilation, incl uding income, occupational profile, conver–
sion rates, the limited use of Jewish languages compared to the use of the
dominant language in the country, urbanisation and educational levels.
There were books by Jewish demographers that predicted the disappear–
ance of German Jewry within a generation or two. In his famous book,
Der
Untergang der Deutschen Juden,
published in 1913, Felix Theilhaber actually
envisaged the peaceful extinction, in fifty years or so, of the Jewish com–
munity in Germany. At that time, the young Hitler had just arrived in
Munich and was still an unemployed artist.
Walter Laqueur:
I know some of the figures, but not others. Of course,
in Germany the rate of intermarriage was higher in big cities than in small–
er communities. In countries like Holland and Denmark, it had reached
fifty percent at the time of World War
1.
However, after that war there was
a stream of immigrants from eastern Europe, for which we have no pre–
cise figures. When the Nazis came to power, they didn't know, and no one
knew, whether there were two hundred thousand or four hundred thou–
sand children of mixed marriages. As far as Italy is concerned, I don't think
there are figures, for reasons unknown to me.
Tibor Machan:
I wanted to ask whether there is or has been another
group anywhere in the world that might be said to confront a similar con–
cern about its fate, about assimilation, about transformation along the lines
that you were articulating about Jews? I'm a Hungarian refugee who came
here when I was seventeen. I gave up Hungary, but not completely. There
are certain old-country sights and sounds that still resonate with me, but
