A review in “Publishers Weekly” aptly characterizes a book taken from real life by Christiane Kohl as having “the cadence of a Greek tragedy.” That book, “The Maiden and the Jew: The Story of a Fatal Friendship in Nazi Germany,” although filled with cruelty and injustice, differs profoundly from classical tragedy in one respect: while tyrants abound in Grecian drama, they are treated primarily as individuals. The classic stage presents nothing like the modern fascist dictatorship.
Aristotle ruled that the tragic hero must be a noble person destroyed by a flaw in his own character. Leo Katzenberger, an aging, married, and enormously successful shoe magnate in Nuremberg of the 1930s, was a devout Orthodox Jew, very kind and charitable both in himself and as leader of one of the city’s richest congregations. He was also a bon vivant, “liking to play the cavalier when it came to pretty women.”
He befriended Irene Scheffler, a charming but flighty young woman whose family he’d known for years, with money, gifts and other kinds of help.
The first act of this tragedy takes place in 1932 at 19 Spittlergraben, an apartment building owned by Katzenberger. Kohl writes: “Irene fluttered into this world, with its ever-present smell of floor polish, like a brightly colored butterfly.” The neighbors spied on her flutterings between her apartment and Katzenberger’s adjoining office, and rumored that “something shady” was going on between them. They were scandalized by the fact that Leo was Jewish, while Irene was, in the parlance of the burgeoning Nazi movement, an “Aryan.”
Later acts feature the public spectacles — increasingly noisy, lavish and hate-filled — that punctuated the Nazi takeover of Nuremberg. “It cannot be true,” writes the author, “that people in Nuremberg and elsewhere did not know about the insults, degradation, and mistreatment suffered by their Jewish neighbors or about the deportation of the Jews.” Having researched major archives in Germany, Israel and the United States, and interviewed more than 50 witnesses, she has ample documentary evidence that many thousands of Germans were involved in those crimes — and never under compulsion.
Irene’s neighbors were a prime example. Far from being a passive Grecian chorus, they were furies who willed Leo Katzenberger’s destruction. In 1938, when “Aryanization” forced him to sell the building at a ruinous price, they hastened to pass on their malicious gossip to the new landlord. A nighttime visit by Leo to Irene’s apartment led to his arrest. For the unproved allegation of having sex with her during a blackout, he was beheaded, by order of Judge Oswald Rothaug, on June 3, 1942.
Katzenberger’s tragic flaw was not his interest in pretty women, but his unwillingness to see that the world around him was a closing death-trap for the Jews. When he finally did see the trap, it was too late. The reader is increasingly horrified by the Nazis’ persecution and infuriated by Leo’s blindness.
The book provides some catharsis with its account of the Nuremberg trials, but reveals that justice was compromised even there.
The 1961 film “Judgment at Nuremberg” included the story of Katzenberger and Irene, with Judy Garland as Irene and Burt Lancaster playing Rothaug. “The Maiden and the Jew” was filmed in 2001 as “Leo and Claire,” which focused on the Katzenbergers’ marriage.
Christiane Kohl is Italian correspondent for the “Suddeutsche Zietung.” Her style, even in translation, is brilliant enough to turn the decades-old black-and-white photographs that illustrate the book into shadows. Moreover, she writes with fiercely appropriate moral indignation.
“The Maiden and the Jew: The Story of a Fatal Friendship in Nazi Germany,” by Christiane Kohl, translated from the German by John S. Barrett (202 pages, Steerforth Press, $23.00).