Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945-2000 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945–2000 Björn Krondorfer Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945–2000, edited by Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes. New York: Palgrave. 2002. 335 pp. $69.96. After 1945, it seemed unlikely that a Jewish community would be able to find a new place within German society. The devastation that European Jews suffered at the hands of Nazi Germany and its collaborators was on such a grand, horrifying scale that it seemed neither possible nor desirable for Jews to remain among Germans. But in an ironic twist of history, large numbers of Jews who had survived the Shoah and could no longer settle in their former home countries, especially in the East, moved to Germany where, under the auspices of the Allied forces, displaced person (DP) camps were set up to accommodate the steady stream of refugees. By the end of 1946, more than 140,000 Jewish DPs were in the American zone of Germany alone. Most of them eventually moved on to Palestine, later Israel, and to the United States. But others stayed. Michael Brenner, one of the contributors to Unlikely History, states: “By 1948, more than 100 Jewish communities had been founded, and a total of some 20,000 German Jews were registered in the reestablished communities” (p. 51). Thus began the reconstitution of the Jewish community in post-war Germany, today an estimated 80,000 people, about 0.1 percent of the total population. The fifteen contributors to the volume Unlikely History reflect on various political, historical, cultural, and social aspects of the uneasy relationships that developed between the Jewish minority and non-Jewish majority in Germany. The contributions cover the periods from the immediate post-war years until the present in West, East, and [End Page 156] unified Germany as well as Austria. A common thread throughout is the question of whether Jewish life in Germany can be described in symbiotic terms. Such a symbiosis may have been one-sided before the 1930s and at best delusional after the Shoah (Gershom Scholem’s often quoted position). Many have used the term “negative symbiosis” to describe “a kind of opposed reciprocity” (p. 32) in which Jews and Germans found themselves in the shadows of Auschwitz—a term frequently attributed to Dan Diner but actually originating with Hannah Arendt in 1945, as Katja Behrens points out. Others question the usefulness of this concept altogether, Behrens among them, arguing passionately that “it is a rift and not a symbiosis” (p. 45) that best describes the relationship between Jews and their non-Jewish German fellow citizens. Unlikely History grew out of a conference in Minnesota in 2000 that addressed the changing post-1945 relations between Germans and Jews. The co-editors Morris and Zipes have gathered an impressive list of contributors from different academic disciplines in the United States and Germany, among them Andrei Markovits (political studies), Atina Grossman and Michael Brenner (history), Katja Behrens (award-winning novelist), Wolfgang Benz (director of the Berlin Center for Research on anti-Semitism), and Dagmar Lorenz (German studies). Formally, the contributions are divided into those that illuminate social and historical issues and those that examine cultural relations. These two parts are preceded by a short editorial preface and two chapters that aim at introducing some of the larger issues. Regrettably, the opening piece by Karen Remmler is also the weakest. Her disjointed thoughts on a variety of themes—ranging from antisemitic connotations of the term “cosmopolitan” to the German embrace of Judaism as “an ersatz folk culture” (p. 23), from Jorge Semprun’s literary work to Edward Said and postcolonial theory—encumber her task of making connections between the different chapters. Behrens’s piece, however, makes up for the short comings. In her keynote address at the Minnesota conference, printed here in full, she presents a lively but pessimistic talk on the impossibility of any true encounter between Germans and Jews. Among the social and historical contributions, two stand out: Brenner’s concise, informative and non-apologetic description of the Jewish-German community since 1945 (quite appropriate for classroom use), and Grossmann’s detailed and intriguing work on “bordercrossers,” which traces shifting...