Lives Reclaimed by Mark Roseman

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This account of “the Bund” is fascinating on many different levels.

This group had a very 1920s mix of spirituality, health and exercise, hippy-ish but also very disciplined – but as the 1930s brought the rise of the Nazis the group became intentional in their resistance to the regime.

However the impact and legacy of the resistance has been contested – it was a resistance that did not actively attack the regime, a resistance of continued existence, a resistance to the totalitarian state by retaining a life beyond the reach of the regime. Do we view the act of taking flowers to a Jewish couple the morning after Kristallnacht as inconsequential or as radically profound? I think Roseman might suggest that it can perhaps be both.

It is enlightening how much freedom the Bund managed to maintain throughout the Nazi and war years – it shows that the Nazi grip on the lives of German people was not as complete as we tend to believe – and here is one of the tensions – the Bund kept that freedom by being below the radar, if their resistance had been more confrontational it is likely they would have been eliminated – so what is the better outcome?

That the Bund helped safe a number of Jews from the Holocaust is accepted, but as some of the Bund were Jewish the official scheme of recognition has excluded them, as its terms of reference are the recognition of the “self-less” actions of non-Jews – under these terms the Bund is deemed to have acted in self interest.

Is the Bund a template for us in our increasingly dark times? Not in a straight-forward way, but I think essentially yes – we are to live true to ourselves, to be clear about the reasons we resist ( the Bund had 17 points critique of the Nazis), we need to find those we can trust and bind ourselves together, we need to endure, we also need to live as if we are free (the Bund’s walks in nature continued)...