Why Not America?

“If I nevertheless do not wish to make use of the invitation, this is mainly for the following reasons: North America seems sympathetic to me compared to Argentina only in terms of climate, but from all other economic points of view, not at all.”

Twelve-year-old Udo Günther Heimann wrote these words in a letter from Stuttgart dated September 10, 1936. Addressed to relatives abroad, in particular his uncle Nathan Rosenfelder, who had previously emigrated to the United States, the letter responds to a pressing question confronting the family: whether Udo and his immediate family should leave Nazi Germany for the United States. Although he thanked his relatives for the invitation, Udo unequivocally rejected the proposal to emigrate to North America. The letter is particularly striking for the directness and confidence with which Udo articulates his position. Rather than simply recording the views of the adults around him, it offers an unusually detailed glimpse into how a twelve-year-old understood the question of emigration and the economic prospects of life abroad. The letter is preserved in the Wolffs Family from Dornum Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute Archives, together with additional family correspondence dating from 1936 to 1941. The letter to which Udo’s response refers, as well as direct replies to his letter, do not appear to have survived. The surviving correspondence therefore provides only a partial view of the wider exchange, while offering evidence of Udo’s own perspective.

In this letter, Udo made clear that his reservations concerned the United States itself rather than the prospect of emigration or the support available to him there. He expressly acknowledged that, with the help of his relatives in America, he would be able to build a life for himself. His objections instead centered on his perception of American economic, social, and cultural conditions. The United States emerged in his account as the antithesis of a bourgeois ideal that placed particular value on education, cultural refinement, and intellectual self-development. His criticism focused especially on the American economic system: “I consider this country to be too overcapitalized for continuous tensions and crises not to arise from it.” The language of the twelve-year-old is notable in this context. His use of concepts such as capitalization, economic development, and social crisis suggests that he had already encountered contemporary categories of economic and social thought. His critique also extended to American society and popular culture. He described Americans as “big children: reckless in their goals and plans, and on the other hand entirely devoid of any inner culture, while often childish in their worship of their heroes (from the movies, etc.).” His characterization of New York as a “mammoth city” similarly conveys his ambivalent perception of American urban modernity.

Taken together, these observations reveal a view of the United States shaped by concerns about capitalism, mass culture, and what Udo perceived as a lack of cultural and intellectual refinement. “To me, life there seems to be truly lacking in higher values because of the rush and the emptiness.” Yet his position remained open to revision. He acknowledged the possibility that his assessment might prove mistaken and conceded that he might eventually want to visit the United States: “Perhaps things might turn out differently, and I might one day like to go to the USA. I do not believe or hope that this will be the case; but I hereby grant you the right to scold me or laugh at me.” His remarks can be read within the broader context of European responses to American modernity, particularly contemporary concerns about commercialization, mass culture, and the rapid pace of social and economic change. At the same time, the letter demonstrates how Udo’s assessment of the United States was shaped by the cultural assumptions and intellectual environment of his own social milieu.

In contrast, Udo’s assessment of Argentina was considerably more positive. He described the country as being at an early stage of economic development: “The country is only at the beginning of its development, roughly where the U.S. was 50–60 years ago, and in my view has greater prospects for the future.” Whereas he characterized the United States as an oversaturated economy marked by intense competition, Argentina appeared to him to offer considerable scope for development, particularly for European industrial knowledge and the skills of immigrants. His optimism extended beyond his own economic prospects: he predicted that Argentina would “once again become a major country of immigration for Jews.” He thus understood Argentina not only as a promising destination for himself, but as a country whose economic development could create opportunities for Jewish immigrants more broadly.

His own plans for such a future were already relatively concrete. Through his transatlantic family network, he had obtained a llamada, an immigration guarantee intended to support his visa application, and had already “landed” a position at the Albisäfte fruit-juice factory near Blaubeuren in the Swabian Alb. After two weeks there, he expected a three-month training period to provide him with the skills needed to establish himself in a similar business in Argentina. He ultimately hoped to bring the necessary machinery with him – even mentioning the possibility of importing it “duty-free” – and, after initially working as an employee, establish his own company. The training was provided by an experienced entrepreneur under the condition that Udo neither used his newly acquired knowledge to compete with German businesses nor disclosed trade secrets.

Alongside these economic considerations, Udo’s letter also reveals other criteria in his assessment of agricultural work. Although he had studied agriculture in depth and read numerous books on the subject, he emphatically rejected it as a possible career, writing that he “did not even think about it in his sleep” when it came to going into farming, and that he was even glad that a previous opportunity had come to nothing. He made one exception: “To me, farming for Jews seems to make sense only in Eretz Israel.” He justified this distinction by stating that “the difficulties on the one hand and the lack of prospects on the other in this sector […] can only be endured in the long term if an ideal is associated with it.” Whilst Udo assessed the United States and Argentina primarily from the perspective of their economic prospects, his assessment of agriculture introduced an explicitly ideological and communal dimension. In the case of Eretz Israel, agricultural work was associated with an ideal that could justify its difficulties and limited prospects.

Udo’s comparison of Argentina and the United States was shaped by more than questions of migration and economic opportunity. By September 1936, emigration had become an urgent question of security and survival for the Heimann and Rosenfelder families as the persecution of German Jews intensified. Nathan Rosenfelder’s recommendation to go to the United States must therefore be understood in the context of the circumstances that had already forced him to flee and the wider persecution unleashed after the Nazi seizure of power, which increasingly threatened Jewish families’ economic security, social standing, and physical safety.

One of the earliest and most visible forms of this persecution was the systematic exclusion of Jews from economic and social life. The first Reich-wide organized boycott of Jewish shops, medical practices, and law firms took place on April 1, 1933. By publicly marking Jewish businesses for exclusion, the boycott formed part of the regime’s broader efforts to marginalize Jews from economic and social life. The photograph shown here illustrates the local implementation of these measures in Oberdorf, Bopfingen: two SA men block the entrance to the Heimann family’s department store beneath signs proclaiming “Jews are our misfortune” and “A German buys nothing from a Jew.” The Heimanns – Udo’s grandparents and Nathan Rosenfelder’s parents-in-law – were thus directly affected by the regime’s early campaign of exclusion. For the family, the consequences were immediate: the regime’s campaign of exclusion directly threatened the economic livelihood and social standing that had anchored them in Oberdorf. The significance of these early measures becomes clearer in light of the violence that followed. Within a year, persecution had moved beyond economic exclusion and public intimidation to direct physical attacks on Jewish individuals and communities. For Nathan Rosenfelder, this escalation became a personal threat in Gunzenhausen in March 1934, when the violence he had encountered as part of a wider campaign of persecution reached his own home.

On 24 March 1934, the evening before the Gunzenhausen pogrom – known in German as Blutpalmsonntag (“Blood Palm Sunday”) – Nazis broke into Nathan Rosenfelder’s house with the intention of killing him. The pogrom escalated further the following day and involved an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 participants in a town of around 5,600 inhabitants. Led by the SA, they raided Jewish homes, assaulted their occupants, and forcibly detained Jewish men and women; two Jewish men were killed. Nathan escaped to Stuttgart, where he contacted the American Consulate and reported the violence against Jews. He soon arranged for his daughter Herta to leave for New York, followed by other family members. There, Nathan and his brother Max eventually opened a textile shop that became the family’s economic lifeline in exile.

The violence in Gunzenhausen attracted international attention and prompted the Nazi authorities to initiate a trial in Ansbach, although the resulting sentences offered little meaningful protection to German Jews. The court infamously described the pogrom as reinigendes Gewitter (“cleansing thunderstorm”). Nathan’s experience therefore provides an important link between the persecution of the family in Germany and the migration decisions being discussed in 1936. What had begun as economic and social exclusion had developed into physical violence, forced flight, and the search for safety abroad. By September 1936, the choice between Argentina and the United States was therefore inseparable from the family’s increasingly urgent search for safety and a viable future.

Udo’s initial resistance to emigration to the United States can be understood in the context of his family history and the strong social and religious ties that had shaped the family’s life in Germany over generations. The Heimanns had been firmly rooted in Oberdorf’s Jewish community, maintaining close connections to the town’s social, economic, and religious life. During the nineteenth century, Oberdorf’s Jewish community experienced significant economic and institutional growth, establishing the town as an important center of Jewish life in the region and fostering the emergence of numerous Jewish craft businesses and trading firms, including the Heimann family’s textile business. The double wedding, photographed in 1909, provides a glimpse into the social world in which the family remained embedded in the early twentieth century. The carefully staged studio portrait, the formal dress, and the self-assured poses of the wedding parties and their relatives reflect the conventions of contemporary bourgeois self-representation and the social standing the families had established within their communities. The Heimann family’s connection to local Jewish life is also reflected in the donation of a Torah scroll to the synagogue in Oberdorf, commemorating the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. The Rosenfelders, too, had longstanding ties to Jewish religious life. When Nathan and Selma moved from Nördlingen to Gunzenhausen in 1907, they brought with them a Torah breastplate dating to around 1680, which they later donated to the local synagogue.

The generation before Udo had grown up in a world where Jewish and German identities were not necessarily seen as contradictory. Over the course of the nineteenth century, legal emancipation and increasing social, economic, and cultural integration enabled many German Jews to understand Jewish and German identities as compatible. Many combined their German national identity with their Jewish cultural affiliation and saw themselves as German citizens of the Jewish faith. The First World War lent particular significance to the question of whether Jewish Germans belonged to the German nation. The service of more than 100,000 Jewish men in the German army, including some 12,000 who were killed, became a telling expression of this identification with Germany. Nazi persecution fundamentally challenged these established understandings. Jews were increasingly excluded from the German national community regardless of their citizenship, patriotism, or military service, while Nazi ideology denied that cultural assimilation, social integration, or civic loyalty could make Jews German in the eyes of the state.

Against this backdrop, Udo’s response to Nathan’s proposal of emigration to the United States can be situated within the longer history of Jewish life and identification in Germany. His initial rejection of the proposal suggests that, despite the escalating persecution, his sense of belonging remained closely tied to the social and familial environment in which he had been raised. His response thus reflects the persistence of established notions of German belonging at a moment when the Nazi regime was systematically dismantling the legal, social, and political foundations on which they had rested.

Udo’s letter from September 1936 is significant not only for the precision with which the twelve-year-old assessed different countries and possible futures, but also for the contrast between these plans and the subsequent course of his life. Just three years later, at the age of fifteen, Udo emigrated to the United States with his parents, Hermann and Minnie, and his sister Ursula, traveling aboard the SS Manhattan. The family initially settled in the Bronx, New York, before moving to West Orange, New Jersey, where Hermann established a chicken farm, which he operated with his brother David Heimann. Udo’s uncle Siegfried, another of Hermann’s brothers, instead established a new life in Argentina, the country Udo had envisaged as a possible destination for himself. Udo would eventually return to Europe, but under circumstances that differed radically from those anticipated in his 1936 letter: not as a young emigrant seeking a future abroad, but as an American soldier who participated in the landing at Omaha Beach and the liberation of Europe.

All quotations from the letter were translated by the author from the original German.