By
– December 5, 2011
During a stay of several months in Berlin, from fall 1932 to spring 1933, Plotkin, an American Jewish organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), kept a diary. The editors rescued his impressions from the obscurity of the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Plotkin went abroad primarily to study the German trade union movement and its response to mass unemployment and social instability. Plotkin’s visit coincided with Germany’s descent from Weimar’s democracy to Nazi totalitarianism. This is a serious work. General readers may find some sections dry as Plotkin includes lengthy interviews with prominent trade unionists and Social Democratic Party leaders. However, the diarist is an astute observer and captures ever-changing public moods. There are echoes here of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, later made into Cabaret, and novelist Alexander Doblin’s Alexanderplatz. Plotkin’s reports on mass rallies of Communists, Nazis, and Social Democrats and his final entry on the burning of the Reichstag are high drama. Plotkin is always aware of pervasive anti-Semitism and is, on occasion, its target.
There is empathy and some identification with the Jewish population, but this aspect of Plotkin’s experience remains a secondary concern. The editors have appended “The Destruction of the Labor Movement in Germany,” an essay by Plotkin, which was published in a union periodical after Plotkin’s return to the United States. For academic collections of European History and Labor studies. Black and white photographs, chronology.
Libby K. White is director of the Joseph Meyerhoff Library of Baltimore Hebrew University in Baltimore, MD and general editor of the Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter.
