Military Man Family Man

You are what you eat, but why are you eating so much? Your moods! Why can't you stay with a reasonable exercise programme, and why is obesity at epidemic proportions in our society today? Negative moods hold the explanations. Feeling down? Wish you had more energy and less stress? If this describes you some or most of the time, you are probably among the millions today who respond to increasing stress and low moods with food - a candy bar, or perhaps a cup of coffee and a sweet. Such emotional eating may temporarily boost your spirits, but this effect is a short-lived quick fix that perpetuates chronic overeating and obesity. Moreover, the same negative moods that have grown to substantial proportions in society today, sap your resolve to exercise.

When the Nazis came to power, they used various strategies to expel German Jews from social, cultural, and economic life. Fighter, Worker, and Family Man focuses on the gendered experiences and discrimination that German-Jewish men faced between 1933 and 1941. Sebastian Huebel argues that Jewish men’s gender identities, intersecting with categories of ethnicity, race, class, and age, underwent a profound process of marginalization that destabilized accustomed ways of performing masculinity. At the same time, in their attempts to sustain their conceptions of masculinity these men maintained agency and developed coping strategies that prevented their full-scale emasculation. Huebel draws on a rich archive of diaries, letters, and autobiographies to interpret the experiences of these men, focusing on their roles as soldiers and protectors, professionals and breadwinners, and parents and husbands. Fighter, Worker, and Family Man sheds light on how the Nazis sought to emasculate Jewish men through propaganda, the law, and violence, and how in turn German-Jewish men were able to defy emasculation and adapt – at least temporarily – to their marginalized status as men.

An investigation of the social pressures on the serviceman with a family and the operational implications of social change on the armed forces.