German-Jewish Relations Research Articles

IX. German-Jewish Relations

IX. German-Jewish Relations Get access The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 47, Issue 1, January 2002, Pages 385–394, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/47.1.385 Published: 01 January 2002

Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945 (review)

Reviewed by: Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945 Jeffry M. Diefendorf Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945, by Shlomo Shafir. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. 508pp. $44.95. The title of the book summarizes the author’s argument quite well. From the moment that Americans began to discuss postwar policy toward Germany through the unification of West and East Germany in 1990, most American Jews, whether American or European born, were loath to have friendly or cooperative relations with postwar Germany. However, since the United States, pursuing what it considered its own national and strategic interests, rather quickly became set on first the economic recovery and then political and military rehabilitation of West Germany, neither organized nor individual Jews were able to mount effective resistance. Furthermore, in order to solve pressing problems that were of specific interest to Jews, such as reparations, the restitution of property, or the resettlement of Jewish refugees, the American Jewish commun ity had to deal directly with German authorities and not get hung up on the continued existence of German antisemitism or the presence of former Nazis in the German government or in German business. Such key figures as German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and American occupation chiefs Lucius Clay and John McCloy, not to mention the political and diplomatic representatives of the new Israeli state, were all hard-nosed realists, and if Israel could negotiate directly with the Adenauer government, how could American Jews contend that Germany should be shunned? Any improvement in German-Jewish relations and German-Israeli relations would facilitate German-American relations and further the foreign policy aims of all parties. Whatever the American Jewish community thought, it had little choice but to fall in line, and usually it could exert but marginal influence around the edges of larger policy questions. Naturally, since the United States had no formal relations with East Germany until the 1970s, and since even then relations with West Germany remained of primary importance, Shafir devotes only one chapter to the contacts between organized American Jewry and the East German state. Shafir’s study is based on exhaustive research in many archives and a thorough reading of the secondary literature. His approach is encyclopedic in nature, and readers may want to flag for quick reference the three pages of abbreviations liberally used in the text. American Jewish organizations and influential individual American Jews seldom, if ever, spoke with one voice, and Shafir is very good at clarifying the differences between, for example, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Conference, the American Jewish Congress, and the World Jewish Congress. Whatever the issue, such as the Morgenthau Plan, German reparations, or the trials of Nazi perpetrators, Shafir discusses the varied views of organized Jewry and of Jews speaking on their own behalf. Over and over again he shows that where Jewish organizations agreed with broader American policy—examples are the need for German reeducation for democracy and the importance of extending the German statute of limitations law [End Page 148] to make possible the continued prosecution of Nazi criminals—they could exert some influence. But when those organizations were bucking the trend, such as the acceptance of West Germany as an ally and bulwark against Communism, they had little influence. This is no surprise. The American Jewish community may have been prosperous, well-educated, and articulate, but it was a small minority. Readers should not pick up this book expecting to find an analysis of how American Jews responded over time to the Holocaust. This is not Shafir’s main concern. Nevertheless, there is an interesting, if brief, treatment of the American response to the Eichmann trial and to Hannah Arendt’s controversial book on that trial. On several occasions Shafir mentions the outcry against Ronald Reagan’s visit to the Bitburg mili tary cemetery, perhaps because the symbolism of the event and the protests against it were so clear, but Shafir’s overall portrait of relations between Germany and the Ameri can Jewish community suggests that, in fact, Bitburg should not be given too prominent a place. It is too bad that Shafir’s book was completed before the...

Von der Emanzipation zur Entrechtung: Deutsch-Jüdische Lebenswege (review)

Reviewed by: Von der Emanzipation zur Entrechtung: Deutsch-Jüdische Lebenswege Dean Phillip Bell Von der Emanzipation zur Entrechtung: Deutsch-Jüdische Lebenswege [Sachor: Zeitschrift für Antisemitismusforschung, Jüdische Geschichte und Gegenwart, Volume 9 (1999)], edited by die Studentische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Antisemitismusfor schung. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1999. 152pp. DM 23.36. Published yearly, Sachor is an eclectic journal run by graduate students at the Rohr- Universität Bochum. The broad focus of the journal is on antisemitism, Jewish history, and contemporary Jewish issues. The central theme of this issue (Volume 9) is the more general question of German-Jewish relations between the period of Emancipation and the deprivation of legal rights during the National Socialist period. German-Jewish personalities bridging the German and Jewish worlds are considered throughout the volume. In the first article by Heike Catrin Bala, Gabriel Riesser is examined, particularly regarding his political efforts during the German National Assembly in Paulskirche (1848/49). Bala traces the tension and opposition between Riesser’s religious affiliation and many of his political initiatives. Thomas Rink next discusses the question of “double loyalty,” that is, the relationship between German and Jewish identity, in Fritz Rathenau, a cousin of the famous Walther Rathenau. Rink is particularly interested in Rathenau’s thoughts and actions regarding assimilation and acculturation, antisemitism, and emigration; Rathenau’s view of Zionism is also explored. Andrea Löw and Kerstin Robusch sketch the life history of Simon and Karola Freimark, whose children, with the help of their uncle, were able to emigrate to the United States in 1938. The parents, however, suffered under the anti-Jewish measures of the National Socialists; they were deported to Theresienstadt, survived the Red Army and a DP camp, and were eventually reunited with their now-grown children in New York, after eight years. Löw and Robusch have also contributed to this volume a conversation with the historian Saul Friedländer that probes into the ways in which Friedländer’s childhood under the National Socialists affected his later life, identity, and perspective. Benedikt Faber assesses the grappling with and understanding of “Deutschtum” in the diaries of Victor Klemperer at various times of Klemperer’s life, especially during the National Socialist period. Mirjana Stancic analyzes the work of the author and journalist Manès Sperber (1905–1984), whose sentiment was caught between his post-exile home in cosmopolitan Paris and his memories of childhood in the east Galician shtetl and Vienna. Finally, Lothar Mertens offers an obituary for George L. Mosse (who died on January 22, 1999 at the age of 81), the modern historian who taught for many years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Mosse was born in Berlin in 1918, studied history at Cambridge beginning in 1937, and then emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1939. The obituary lists his major published works. Sachor offers a very welcome mix of short essays, an interview, and an obituary focusing on individuals as a means of addressing the central theme of the volume. But [End Page 142] the volume also includes reviews of ten books related to the theme as well as reviews of nine additional books related to a variety of themes and periods in German-Jewish history. Rounding out the volume is a poem, an obituary for Ignatz Bubis, an article on representations of Israeli religious extremism in German publications, and a useful bibliography of recent studies and sources focusing upon German-Jewish biographical and autobiographical writing. Overall, the volume includes studies of some fascinating subjects that may be less likely to appear in other forums. Much of the material is useful, if at times rather general. Throughout the essays and reviews there is a penchant for short biographical and chronological presentations and summary, rather than extended analysis. Nevertheless, the volume is well conceived and offers something for everyone; it is, in some ways, a model for a more reflective journal. Dean Phillip Bell Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies Copyright © 2001 The University of Nebraska

IX. German-Jewish Relations

IX. German-Jewish Relations Get access The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 46, Issue 1, January 2001, Pages 430–439, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/46.1.430 Published: 01 January 2001

Deutsche-jüdische Symbiose—oder Die mißglückte Emanzipation (review)

144 SHOFAR Winter 2000 Vol. 18, No.2 Although Jewish Nietzscheanism may have been rather limited, Nietzscheans ofJewish heritage were at least as abundant as their Christian counterparts. Robert C. Holub Department of German University of California at Berkeley Deutsche-jiidische Symbiose-oder Die mi6g1iickte Emanzipation, by Julius H. Schoeps. Berlin: Philo, 1996. 418 pp. OM 64.00. This is not a monograph but a collection of Schoeps's essays about German-Jewish relations from 1750 to the present. While any such collection must inevitably lack the force ofa more clearly focused book-length study, the author has nevertheless attempted to impose a sort ofunity on these variegated studies. Schoeps thus identifies a single conviction shaping his research-namely, the beliefthat"Germans and Jews on German territory, especially in the last three hundred years, have had a common history" (p. 9). Moreover, he has organized his pieces into three categories, the first dealing with Jewish emancipation, the secondwith German antisemitism, andthe third with Zionism. These themes, he believes, exist in a dialectical relationship with one another, with "emancipation as thesis, modem antisemitism as antithesis, and Zionism as synthesis" (p. 11). Unfortunately, Schoeps's Zionist dialectic of failed emancipation contradicts his hope for a common German-Jewish history which would renew the Deutschejiidische Symbiose under a different name. After all, it is only from a Jewish (rather than a German) perspective that Zionism can be understood as a fmal synthesis ofopposing forces. Schoeps's collection is thus ultimately less about any attempted symbiosis between Germans and Jews than about the failure of Jewish emancipation itself. That emancipation, Schoeps suggests, was conditional upon the willingness of German Jews to give up the particular rituals which set them apart, and embrace what amounted to a "Christianity without Christ" (p. 39). In this context, Reform Judaism was invented as a kind of Jewish "Church" hardly distinguishable from the Protestant denominations (pp. 80-81). During the Frankfurt Assembly, its temporary Jewish vicepresident Gabriel Riesser thus saw Judaism as merely one more German "confession," and assimilation as just another aspect of the larger process of national consolidation around the Prussian state (pp. 110, 119). The failure ofthe Revolution of 1848 made Jewish integration more problematic. Conservative reactionaries joined nationalist revolutionaries in denouncing the project of conversion and demanding instead the long-delayed unification of Germans in opposition to the Jews. A key chapter, "The Flight into Hate," thus carefully delineates the well-known transmutation of Judeophobia into antisemitism, tracing the way in Book Reviews 145 which the image of the Jewish parasite was superimposed on the older picture of the demon Jew. Richard Wagner played a particular role in that transformation by denouncing even converted Jewish artists for allegedly poisoning German culture with their alien spirit (pp. 181-82). Adumbrating Hitler, Wagner vilified the Jews for their technically proficient but ultimately sterile mastery of German forms. Nor was it any accident that the sage ofBeyreuth first published his essay on "Judaism in Music" only a year after the failure at Frankfurt. It was just these increasingly shrill attacks, Schoeps believes, that caused the Zionist seed to finally germinate. To be sure, he concedes that Zionism arose as a variant of German nationalism. But by including an essay delineating the effect of Dreyfus's ceremonial degradation on Theodor Herzl's tum to Zionism, Schpeps ultimately implies that the triumph of the Zionist idea cannot be found within the German cultural sphere alone (pp. 345-346). It is thus precisely here that the book-as a book-goes awry. However interesting the individual essays, any coherent study of the origins of Zionism cannot limit itself to German conditions. Conversely, if this volume is supposed to be about the failure of Jewish assimilation in Germany (a very different topic altogether), it probably should not have ended with a discussion of the Zionists. This is because most German Jews not only wanted to remain Germans, but would have done so but for the improbable rise ofNational Socialism. It thus seems to me (if not to commentators like Goldhagen) that the failure of emancipation was far from inevitable. The very fact that Prussiaand its tradition ofGerman-Jewish symbiosis ruled until 1933...

IX. German-Jewish Relations

Journal Article IX. German-Jewish Relations Get access The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 44, Issue 1, January 1999, Pages 439–449, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/44.1.439 Published: 01 January 1999

IX. German-Jewish Relations

Journal Article IX. German-Jewish Relations Get access The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 43, Issue 1, January 1998, Pages 455–466, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/43.1.455 Published: 01 January 1998

Jews, Germans, Memory: Reconstructions of Jewish Life in Germany (review)

Reviewed by: Jews, Germans, Memory: Reconstructions of Jewish Life in Germany Peter Gay Jews, Germans, Memory: Reconstructions of Jewish Life in Germany. Edited by Michael Bodemann. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Pp. 291. $54.50. The history of modern German Jewry has been well documented and intelligently researched. If there is one stretch of that history, though, that is far from crowded, it is that of Jews in Germany after 1945. One of the handful of fine studies of Jewish life after the collapse of the Thousand Year Reich, by Michael Brenner, is in process of translation. The present collection of short essays, then, addresses this rather neglected field, and on the whole the contributors acquit themselves creditably. The essay by Michael Brenner, just mentioned, “East European and German Jews in Postwar Germany, 1945–50,” sets the tone of candor adopted by most of his fellow-authors. My only complaint is that it is too short at fifteen pages, though it shares brevity with most of the other papers. Brenner explores the paradox that after the end of the war a massive number of Polish, Russian, and Rumanian Jews, almost 200,000 of them, streamed of all places to Germany. “In 1946–47 there was a mass movement of East European Jews who tried to reach the country whose death machine they had just escaped.” Of course, few of them wanted to remain where they landed, but to get to Palestine or the United States; but (as they put it) sitting on their suitcases, most of them eventually unpacked them and stayed. Despite the horrors they had shared with the German-Jewish victims of Nazism, these wanderers from Eastern Europe continued to clash, as they had for so long even before Hitler, with their German fellow survivors. They kept to themselves in the camps put up for them by the Allies, they vehemently rejected the German Jews’ acceptance of intermarriage, they could not get along with German Jews even after they had left the camps and settled in some German town. “In Augsburg,” Brenner notes, “the community of thirty-two German Jews refused until the mid-1950s not only to grant the sixty East European Jews suffrage but even to accept them as community members,” [End Page 205] until, bowing to strong external pressure, the community—a pathetic remnant!—retreated from this exclusionist policy. There is no room for sentimentality or wishful thinking in this essay: “The thesis that the Holocaust eliminated previous differences among Jews belongs to the realm of myth. In the case of Ostjuden and German Jews in postwar Germany we see the emergence of new conflicts, as well as the continuity of traditional ones, between the two groups.” While Brenner drew this conclusion a few years ago, it still holds true today. The same willingness to look inconvenient facts in the face, to report and analyze them without excessive pathos, characterizes most of the contributors. Frank Stern’s essay on German-Jewish relations in the postwar period notes the persistence of anti-Semitism among a substantial minority (perhaps a third) of German gentiles, and the rise of that dubious phenomenon, “philo-Semitism,” an idealization of Jews and Judaism that German Jews have greeted, justly enough, with skepticism. To them it is “white anti-Semitism.” The uneasiness between the overwhelming majority of gentiles and the tiny minority of Jews in Germany may be lessening a bit with the passage of time, the shift in generations, and the continuing insignificance of Jews in German politics and culture. But there is very little realistic expectation that it will ever completely fade away. Several papers address the psychological and sociological theme of Jewish identity formation in post-war Germany. Martin Löw-Beer examines the attitudes revealed in small, largely ephemeral Jewish periodicals written by, and largely for, the young generation. They document the dilemmas that most of the writers, and one may assume the readers, faced, rather incongruously living in a country that had launched the Holocaust: whether to emigrate to Israel, the Jews’ true homeland, or to integrate themselves into the new, democratic Germany. The second group, articulate and intelligent, had to defy its parents’ wishes...

IX. German-Jewish Relations

IX. German-Jewish Relations Get access The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 40, Issue 1, January 1995, Pages 410–418, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/40.1.410 Published: 01 January 1995

IX. German-Jewish Relations

IX. German-Jewish Relations Get access The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 38, Issue 1, January 1993, Pages 498–506, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/38.1.498 Published: 01 January 1993

Otto Weininger and the theme of the German-Jewish friendship in Günther Grass's Hundejahre

It has become a truism of contemporary literary criticism that every text contains overt and covert texts within its construction, that in other words each new text molds and fits previous texts into a new context. In Günther Grass’s Hundejahre (1963) this is especially discernible, since Grass’s novel is inter alia nothing short of a rewriting of a prominent German cultural narrative – namely, the narrative of friendship of two boys who grow into adulthood, one German and one Jewish. This narrative was familiar enough to broad sections of the reading public before the Second World War but disappeared from public consciousness as a result of the traumatized memories attached to German-Jewish relations emanating from the Third Reich. It is possible to exhume many texts in a work of such magnitude, but one text in particular appears with surprising frequency throughout Hundejahre – a fact which has received surprisingly little commentary from Grass critics – Otto Weininger´s Geschecht und Charakter (1903).

IX. German-Jewish Relations

IX. German-Jewish Relations Get access The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 35, Issue 1, January 1990, Pages 566–572, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/35.1.566 Published: 01 January 1990

Control and Cleanliness: German—Jewish Relations in Occupied Eastern Europe during the First World War

(1988). Control and Cleanliness: German—Jewish Relations in Occupied Eastern Europe during the First World War. War & Society: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 47-69.

IX. German-Jewish Relations

IX. German-Jewish Relations Get access The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 32, Issue 1, January 1987, Pages 523–530, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/32.1.523 Published: 01 January 1987

IX. German-Jewish Relations

IX. German-Jewish Relations Get access The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 31, Issue 1, January 1986, Pages 540–545, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/31.1.540 Published: 01 January 1986

IX. German-Jewish Relations

IX. German-Jewish Relations Get access The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 27, Issue 1, January 1982, Pages 459–466, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/27.1.459 Published: 01 January 1982

IX. German-Jewish Relations

Journal Article IX. German-Jewish Relations Get access The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 26, Issue 1, January 1981, Pages 477–483, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/26.1.477 Published: 01 January 1981

IX. German-Jewish Relations

Journal Article IX. German-Jewish Relations Get access The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 21, Issue 1, January 1976, Pages 344–348, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/21.1.344 Published: 01 January 1976

IX. German-Jewish Relations

IX. German-Jewish Relations Get access The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 20, Issue 1, January 1975, Pages 341–346, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/20.1.341 Published: 01 January 1975

IX. German-Jewish Relations

IX. German-Jewish Relations Get access The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 17, Issue 1, January 1972, Pages 308–313, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/17.1.308 Published: 01 January 1972