The Future of the German-Jewish Past: Memory and the Question of Antisemitism - Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Future of the German-Jewish Past: Memory and the Question of Antisemitism ed. by Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin Paul Lerner The Future of the German-Jewish Past: Memory and the Question of Antisemitism. Edited by Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2020. 332 pages. $34.99 (paper). In 1989, Fritz Pinkuss, chief rabbi of the Congregação Israelita Paulista in São Paolo, Brazil, returned to his native Heidelberg and lamented the disappearance of German Jewry, noting the few remaining traces of its once thriving cultural and religious life, the vanishing of its institutions, structures, memories, and legacies. With these words, he was evoking Leo Baeck's famous assertation in the aftermath of the war that the Nazi regime and the Holocaust had brought an end to centuries of German Jewish history. Not long after Pinkuss's lament, however, it became clear that those pronouncements were premature. Neither Pinkuss nor Baeck could have predicted the remarkable resurgence of Jewish life in a reunified Germany; nor could they have foreseen the repopulation of hollowed out Jewish institutions by new waves of émigrés and expats from the former Soviet Union, Israel, and North America. How do the Jewish cultures and communities in Germany today, which consist of a great number of Jews with eastern-European backgrounds, connect to the longer German Jewish past? How does that past look at a moment when the disappearance of the last Holocaust survivors is so close at hand, and when the influx of Syrian refugees and broader immigration patterns have begun to shift perceptions of the homogenous ethnic bedrock of German national identity, even as the backlash against those refugees fuels a resurgent radical Right? How is Israel entangled in this matrix, as a flashpoint of political controversy, and alternately as a projection of philosemitic identification? What, in short, are the geographical, spatial, and temporal boundaries of German Jewish history, and how are those boundaries changing at a time when Holocaust memory is almost completely mediated by recorded testimonies and institutions in an increasingly diverse and globalized Germany? These are among the questions posed throughout this excellent volume, a collection conceived in celebration of the twentieth [End Page 418] anniversary of the official inauguration of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex. Beyond demarcating this noteworthy milestone, The Future of the German-Jewish Past does the sub-field of German Jewish Studies an important service by bringing together the contributions of a range of international voices, from younger scholars to established professors, including public-facing historians, memoirists, and academicians in the humanities and social scientists. Taken together, these essays offer glimpses of the exciting new work being done today and catalogue the range of approaches, topics, and methods that animate the study of the "inexhaustible richness of the German-Jewish interrelationship" (xxii), which makes this area of research as vibrant and challenging as ever. What ties many of these works together, beyond the subject itself, is a shared self-consciousness about the ways history writing as practice is itself embedded in historical processes—fittingly so, given the intense historicism of generations of German Jewish scholars and writers. Several focus on often overlooked questions about the raw material of history, how sources are collected and archived, for example, or how museum exhibitions address different audiences and community and municipal pressures. Many of the contributors historicize themselves both concerning their place in evolving disciplinary landscapes and in the context of ever-changing Jewish presents and futures in a Germany marked by both flourishing Jewish life and resurgent antisemitic violence, in cityscapes where pedestrians literally stumble over memorials to the genocidal past, but often partake in a collective blindness toward other kinds of racism and hatred in the present. This rich intellectual thicket makes the volume useful for scholars beyond German Jewish Studies and indeed to anyone interested in considering the limits and possibilities of history, relationships between scholarly history and public memory, trauma and its aftereffects, and antisemitism, ethnicity, and race in the past and present. The volume's 20 chapters (following an informative introduction by co-editor and institute director Gideon Reuveni) are...