Seventh Generation

61. Werner Cahnmann^1,43 was born on September 30, 1902 in Munich, Germany. In 1971 he was an a professor of sociology at Rutgers in New YorK.¹ He died on September 27, 1980 in New York, New York. From Joseph B. Maier and Chaim Waxman, editors, Ethnicity, Identity, and History: Essays in Memory of Werner J. Cahnman. Transaction Books, New Brunswick, 1983. pages 1-11.

Werner Jacob Cahnman was born in Munich on September 30, 1902, the first son of an old German Jewish family. His paternal and maternal families were quite different. His father was born in a village, Rheinbischofsheim, and so were almost all of his relatives. Their Judaism was rustic and folksy, sentimentally attached to family and community, but without Jewish learning. Werner's maternal family, on the other hand was almost entirely concentrated in Munich and Nuremberg. They belonged to the haute bourgeoisie, were real estate operators, bankers, industrialists and jurists, not retailers. Their sons and daughters were interested in art and music or literature and philosophy. Kultur was their religion. . . .

While Werner was always nearer to the female line in his maternal as well as his paternal families, it is from his father that he inherited the perspective of a participant observer, the emotional attachment to places of his youth, and Jewishness as a matter of unquestioned belongingness or Gemeinschaft. . . . The house of his parents in Munich was a meeting place for notables of all persuasions. Zionism, socialism, and women's problems were frequently discussed. . . .

There is no need to write here in detail about Cahnman's work in the Centralverein and the six years he spent under Nazi rule. He described and analyzed the events of that time in two incisive papers, "Die Juden in Muenchen 1918-1943" (Zeitschrift fuer Bayerische Landesgeschinchte, 1979), and "The Decline of the Munich Jewish Community, 1933-1938" (Jewish Social Studies, 1941). . . . Werner came to appreciate the Jews in the antisemitic small towns of Franconia and Suebia . . . He discovered in them, especially the Jewish teachers among them, a degree of sensitivity, patience, perseverance in adversity and Jewish loyalty which he could not find in the big city Jews of Munich, Augsburg, and Nuremberg. . . .The Berlin leadership, Werner felt, never fully comprehended what was happening in Bavaria, and "when the catastrophe was upon us, the initial attitude of incomprehension and vain hope gradually changed (after 1935, surely after 1938) into an urge to flee." . . .

In the spring of 1937 Werner visited Palestine. "The sacredness of its soil could still be experienced," he said. He met many Jewish leaders. The Arab riots lasted throughout his stay in the Holy Land. When he saw Judah Magnes, president of the Hebrew University, on Mount Scopus, he commented that, unlike others, he thought the unrest might last a long time. Magnes replied:"A very long time." Cahnman abandoned original plans of permanent settlement. He strongly felt that his place was still in Munich. . . .

Werner was confident that his luck would not desert him and that he would be able to catch the right moment to leave Germany. That moment came when Hitler marched into Vienna. He was sure that World War II was not imminent. His number on the waiting list for an immigration visa to the USA would not be called so soon. He new he could not wait for two or three more years. Fortunately, an elderly lady cousin in London underwrote his stay in England and Werner was able to emigrate in June 1939, just a few short weeks before the outbreak of the war. But first he had to go through the trials and tribulations of the concentration camp in Dachau, with torture and death ever before his very eyes. Werner's description of his two months in Dachau, Novemeber and December 1938, is still a moving document (Chicago Jewish Forum, 1964).

America opened an entirely new chapter in Werner Cahnman's life story. . . . Cahnman came to the United States in 1940. His first feeling on American soil was one of immense relief, of joy that he had succeeded in getting a spot on Noah's Ark to the land of freedom. . . .The University of Munich had certified him as Doctor oeconomiae publicae, something of a cross between an economist, economic historian, jurist, and political scientist, but Professor [Herbert A.} Miller evaluated his Jewish, Bavarian, German, Austian, and near Eastern antecedents, as far as intellectual interests were concerned, in such a way as to define and designate him as a race and culture specialist in sociology. He recommended him as a "visiting Ph.D." to the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. In due course, "I became a Chicago sociologist," Werner recalled. . . .

At the time, Cahnman felt actually closer to the Hashomer Hatzair than to the Labor Zionists, even as he opposed their antireligious attitude and was skeptical toward their Marxism. He liked their Gemeinschaft way of life, and in agreement with them, he supported the idea of a binational state in Palestine rather than the Biltmore Program. He was, in those years, perhaps more of a Chovev Zion than a political Zionist. In due course, Werner realized that the binational state was an illusion -- the Arabs would never ageree to it. . . .In 1948, Chaim Greenberg involved him in the fight for the Partition Resolution of the United Nations. Werner was supposed to use his contacts with blacks. "I enlisted the initially wavering votes of Liberia and Haiti," he recalled, "which simple fact ensured victory." . . .

Werner Cahnman did finally find his "home" in American Jewish life, when Rabbis Mordecai M. Kaplan and Eugene Kohn asked him to join the editorial board of The Reconstructionist magazine. To the end of his life, he faithfully cooperated in the work of the editorial board and published many thoughtful articles in the journal. It would be an exaggeration, though, to say that he as a thoroughly kosher Reconstructionist. For one, he did not share their William James--John Dewey tradition. He preferred his science and religion pure; he found no sense in a "scientific" religion and in a "natural" rather than supernatural God. His God was the God of Nishmat kol chai whom we can acknowledge, but never recognize. Werner did, however, agree with Kaplan's idea of "peoplehood.". . Said Werner, "We are a people, the land of Israel, which we love, is not the center, but the periphery; the Jewish people as a world-people, defines the center and holds it in place. That is the kind of Zionism I can accept.". . .

He died of cancer in New York on September 27, 1980, leaving a devoted and loving wife, Gisella, who had shared his trials and triumphs since their early days in Chicago.

Werner Cahnmann and Gisella Levi were married. Gisella Levi¹ was born estimated 1912 in Torino, Italy. She was a was a bio-physicist.¹