German Reunification and the Jews

Abstract

Immediately after November 9, 1989, my trepidation about the future of the new Germany suddenly seemed an adequate Jewish response to the sudden, unpredictable changes in what had seemed to be an immutable political solution to the Question. The very changes in an apparently rigid status quo evoked specific memories of the past. In Israel, Shimon Peres stated that on the one hand, what is happening there brings forth great hope. On the other hand, no one among us is free of the memories of the Second World War.... When we hear of a united Germany, we must ask: kind of Germany will it be? A Germany with an army, without an army? A demilitarized Germany, an undermilitarized Germany?2 Peres's feeling, like mine, is cast in an image of a Germany as the military power in Central Europe. And that image was linked to only one event in both German and Jewish history the Shoah. It is to this focus of the relationship between Jews, in Germany and the rest of Europe, to the path of German history, that I shall return. The emblematic survivor of the Shoah, Eli Wiesel, shared Peres's views. While greeting the collapse of the wall as a moving and rewarding experience, he too asked: What next? Will this unexpected turn of events lead to a reunification of Germany? ... Will a united, powerful new Germany break away from the conquest-thirsty demons that dominated the old Germany? I cannot hide the fact that the Jew in me is troubled, even worried. Whenever Germany was too powerful, it fell