Things Could’ve Been a Lot Worse: The Experiences of a German American Bellybutton Jew of Berlin Origins by Gerd K. Schneider

Reviewed by: Things Could’ve Been a Lot Worse: The Experiences of a German American Bellybutton Jew of Berlin Origins by Gerd K. Schneider Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Gerd K. Schneider, Things Could’ve Been a Lot Worse: The Experiences of a German American Bellybutton Jew of Berlin Origins. Translation by Dennis McCort. Saarbrücken: Haddassa World Press, 2016. 247 pp. Gerd K. Schneider made a name for himself as a scholar of Austrian literature, in case the descriptive title of his autobiography should raise any doubt about its inclusion in the book review section of the Journal of Austrian Studies. Schneider’s title also points to the reversals of fortune experienced by German authors with some Jewishness in their background, who lived in Nazi Germany as outsiders at a time when national boundaries and personal identities had been eroded. Unlike Jews who fled the country or faced deportation, Schneider was granted a precarious existence at the margins of [End Page 192] Nazi German society. His existence was marked by identity crises and displacements after the destruction of the “German-Jewish symbiosis” and the segregation put in place by the Nazi racial laws. Because of his “mixed” background he repeatedly failed in his attempts to fit in with other children at youth organizations and schools. One such disruption was his dismissal from a Berlin college preparatory school ominously named the Horst Wessel Gymnasium after being denounced by a Nazi student. The trajectory of Schneider’s life story calls to mind memoirs by Jewish refugees who tried to pass as non-Jewish, including Joel König’s Den Netzen entronnen (1968) and Jakov Lind’s Counting My Steps (1969). Schneider’s account of his boyhood under the Nazis and the war years is spellbinding and humorous—humor being possibly the only way to face the disruptions and the spoiled chances of the past, not to mention the malice of Schneider’s German contemporaries. Schneider has an uncanny ability of turning disadvantage into opportunity, keeping an open mind, and learning from every situation in which he found himself, be it an apprenticeship at the Hotel Continental, his later job at the Hotel am Zoo, life under Russian occupation, or various dealings with the black market. Entwined with these learning experiences are Schneider’s reports about his academic pursuits, his belated Abitur, and his eventual move to Canada after declining a study place at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. His accounts of his adventures in Edmonton and Vancouver and his life in the United States as a Germanist are interspersed with personal episodes and insightful observations about the years of the Vietnam War and the mentality of the 1960s, the protest movements and the hippie era. Reflecting on identity, Schneider asserts that he drew strength and confidence from adversity. He believes that living transcontinentally in two languages and the necessity of mastering many different lines of work compensated him for the calamities of his younger years. A wide perspective, openness, and wit are the special traits of Schneider’s autobiography, which adds to the mosaic of autobiographies by Germanisten of the Nazi era, including the books of exile Egon Schwarz’s Keine Zeit für Eichendorff (1979), Shoah survivor Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben (1992), and émigré Jost Hermand’s Als Pimpf in Polen: erweiterte Kinderlandverschickung, 1940–1945 (1993). Gerd Schneider is best known for his research in Austrian Jewish studies and especially his critical studies on Arthur Schnitzler. Of his many publications three book titles stand out, those being Arthur Schnitzler und die Psychologie seiner Zeit: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Philosophie [End Page 193] Friedrich Nietzsches (1977), Die Rezeption von Arthur Schnitzlers Reigen, 1897–1994 (1995), and Grenzüberschreitungen: Energie, Wunder und Gesetze: das Okkulte als Weltanschauung und seine Manifestationen im Werk Arthur Schnitzlers (2014). A close reading of Things Could’ve Been a Lot Worse suggests that Schneider’s affinity for Schnitzler is no coincidence. In the Vienna of the early twentieth century, Schnitzler’s career and personal life had also been overshadowed by anti-Semitism. The year 1931, Schnitzler’s death year, was the year Schneider was born. Two years later, the Nazis came to power, and...

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