Shades of Red in the GDR: On the Identities of Jewish Communist Exiles after 1945

Abstract

Discourse on Jewish life in the German Democratic Republic has often offered a clichéd portrayal of a society in which Jewishness was subsumed into the antifascist founding myth of the GDR, leaving Jews as either self-hating (Stalinist) Jews or as citizens forced to deny their Jewish origins. In particular, Cold War narratives have often differentiated between Jewish communists who were in exile in the Soviet Union, and thus seen afterwards as more loyal, and those who were in exile in the West, and thus more likely to be suspected of disloyalty. This paper focuses on non-Soviet exiles and their descendants to explore the diversity of Jewish identity, politics and culture in the GDR, ranging from assimilationist communist identity to explicit engagement with Jewish traditions and even the Jewish religion. Surveying through the generations from pre-Nazi communist activism to the GDR-born children of such activists, it finds a diversity that belies monochrome portrayals of GDR life, while also establishing that, far from being mere passive instruments in the service of an SED-led (neo-)Stalinist society, Jews in the GDR were agents in the establishing of their own multi-faceted identities.