Jewish Life In Germany Research Articles

“Zwischen allen Stühlen”: Reflections on Judaism in Germany in Victor Klemperer’s Post-Holocaust Diaries

This article focuses as a case study on Victor Klemperer’s diaristic representation of German-Jewish identity and culture after 1945 in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR. The contribution shows how Klemperer’s professional and social situation remained very uncomfortable even in East Germany. For the diarist, the communist code ‘antifascist/fascist’, just like the code ‘German/un-German’ before it, was tantamount to concealing Jewish origin. His post-Holocaust journals provide an immediate insider’s view of Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust from the perspective of a victim of active persecution. Against this backdrop, the contribution examines how the author’s original German nationalism gradually makes way, caught between contradictory impulses of assimilation and decreed Jewish identity, for a much more complex understanding of his own cultural identity. Klemperer’s diaries highlight a number of tensions that ultimately reflect on the disjunction between living and writing: The divide between a single and changing self lies at the heart of his diaries after 1945, which depict an astute, complex psychogram of the assimilated German-Jewish bourgeoisie that survived the Holocaust and tried to continue living in communist Germany.

Berlin, ‘Epicenter’ of Jewish Life in Germany (1871-1933)

Als Berlin 1871 zur Hauptstadt des Deutschen Kaiserreichs wird, behauptet es sich gleichzeitig als Herz judischer Lebenswelten in Deutschland, wobei es die anderen Zentren judischer Bevolkerung und Kultur rasch uberholt. Auf allen Ebenen betatigen sich die Juden und Judinnen Berlins als ArchitektInnen einer sich verandernden deutschen Gesellschaft, vor allem im Bereich des kulturellen und intellektuellen Lebens. Bald als Neues Jerusalem oder als Spree-Babel verunglimpft, wird die Stadt ebenfalls zum privilegierten Ort des Antisemitismus, der ab Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts neue Formen annimmt.

Despite the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany after 1945*

Abstract In 1945, the return of Jewish life to Germany was by no means a foregone conclusion. Aiming to understand the developments that laid the groundwork for a long-term continuation of Jewish life in post-Holocaust Germany, this paper discusses the difficult process of rebuilding Jewish institutions in ‘the land of the perpetrators’ during the first two decades after the Second World War. Particularly significant are the essential contributions of two high-profile representatives of this minority to the process of renewing Jewish life in Germany following the Holocaust. By creating a sense of unity among the different Jewish groups and securing financial and practical support essential to the revival of Jewish life in the Federal Republic, the first General Secretary of the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany), Dr Hendrik G. van Dam, and the journalist and chief editor of the German-Jewish newspaper known today as Jüdische Allgemeine, Karl Marx, played a key role in establishing Jewish institutions. These helped to convey a sense of permanency—a central factor for ensuring a continuation of Jewish life in the years and decades to come.

Lucky Boy in the Lucky Country: The Autobiography of Max Corden, Economist, edited by Werner MaxCorden. Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 243 pages, ISBN: 978-331965165-1, AU$ 149.00

Lucky Boy in the Lucky Country: The Autobiography of Max Corden, Economist, edited by Werner MaxCorden. Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 243 pages, ISBN: 978-331965165-1, AU$ 149.00

Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism, and Judaism by Yaacov Yadgar

Reviewed by: Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism, and Judaism by Yaacov Yadgar Motti Inbari Yaacov Yadgar. Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism, and Judaism. Albany: SUNY Press, 2017. Vii+ 288 pp. Cloth $85.00. ISBN: 978-1438465340. Sovereign Jews "deconstruct[s]" and "critically analyze[s]" the secular-religious binary among Israeli Jews. Yaacov Yadgar argues, stemming from the Marxist notion of false consciousness, that Israeli "seculars" are living a lie regarding their so called secularity. Although the majority of Israelis define themselves as hilonim (seculars), their true identity is an "ethno-national identity" that distinguishes them from Arabs. In order to prove his point, Yadgar rebuts leading Zionist thinkers; among his targets are Gideon Shimoni, Shlomo Avineri and A.B. Yehoshua. The common understanding of Judaism and Jewish identity in the Zionist project, and later in the State of Israel, tends to see Judaism as civilization [End Page 307] that contains what we refer to as "religion," with rituals, sacred texts, a set of ethics and beliefs, but also a "nation" by which all Jews are members of one community. Some of these national notions can be explained by the fact that Jewish identity is matrilineal, thus it makes Judaism almost like a race, but ancient Jewish texts had also emphasized that all Jews are responsible for one another, and this responsibility can be understood as being connected by mutual past, heritage, and language. Whereas before modern times all these components were viewed as holistic, meaning that the religious and national were combined, the project of the modernization of the Jewish people intended to break the bond. Thus Zionism elevated the national component while downplaying the religious component. The Jewishness of Zionism was not in its loyalty to rituals, but in the loyalty to the nation. Yadgar argues that this analysis is false and misleading, resulting in an unauthentic adaptation of a Protestant model of modernity. The book is divided into three parts. In the first part Yadgar explains that the Reformation was a catalyst for the invention of religion. "Religion," this distinct category of human activity, was invented to separate it from other activities such as culture, politics, and other realms of the modern West. The transformation of religion into the private, universal, and apolitical matter came hand in hand with the rise of sovereign states in Europe. As the state strove for monopoly over the use of violence, it reduced the power of the church and pushed religion into a matter of personal piety. Yadgar claims that a similar process took place among the Jews. Moses Mendelsohn called for an adjustment to the Jewish life in Germany in the eighteenth century, while arguing that Judaism does not strive for power; thus was absent a political dimension. This would enable the inclusion of Jews inside the political order of the modern nation state and there would be no conflict between being Jewish and being loyal to the state. Both Reform and Orthodox streams of thought agreed with Mendelsohn's analysis that Judaism is not political. The second part of the book deals with the Zionist narrative regarding Jewish traditions. He quotes Shlomo Avineri, a famous Zionist scholar, who argued that the Israeli nation state is the ultimate substitute for the traditional Jewish religion. (70) Yadgar says that in Avineri's analysis, the state emerges as positioned at the very heart of the Jewish people's existence, as the only agent installing meaningful content into the collectivity. He continues with two Zionist thinkers who developed an opinion on Judaism: Ahad Ha'am, who demanded a reinterpretation of Jewish tradition in order to secularize Judaism and to replace religion with national pride, and Micha Yosef Berdyczewski, who completely negated the religious tradition in favor of absolute individual sovereignty. According to him, there is no place for dialogue with tradition in order to reinterpret it, but a complete release from its essence is required. His Jewishness, he argued, was a biological component which he cannot control, just like race. The third part of the book turns to the Israeli nation-state. Yadgar opens his discussion with the paradox that although Zionism has been a harsh [End Page 308] critic of tradition, Zionism nevertheless defined itself...

Preface

The year 2015 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the appearance of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book. From its beginnings, the Year Book has been produced by the editors at the London Leo Baeck Institute and published on behalf of all three international branches of the Institute. The first generation of editors under the aegis of Robert Weltsch, a journalist and editor by trade, conceived the Year Book as an intellectual outlet for the finest German-Jewish historians of the period who had survived the National Socialist persecutions in exile. And yet, the Year Book’s scope was always wider, for it also published manuscripts by leading representatives of German-speaking Jewry from the legal profession and the fields of economics, theology, philosophy, and literary studies, to name just a few. Many of them had already been public voices of Jewish life in Germany and Austria before the National Socialists’ rise to power. The Year Book’s rapid transformation into an academic publication of German-Jewish history, and later of German-Jewish studies in the broader sense, reflects the intellectual values of the historic German-speaking Jewry which the Year Book both represented and studied.

Judische Politik und Presse in der fruhen Bundesrepublik

Andrea Sinn describes her book on the first two decades of Jewish politics after the Holocaust in West Germany as a contribution to the slowly growing field of post-1945 German-Jewish history. More specifically the goal of her book is to offer an account of the emergence of the two main Jewish institutions representing Jews in post-Holocaust West Germany: the Central Council of Jews in Germany (Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland) and the Jüdische Allgemeine. The Central Council was founded in 1949 to give the various Jewish groups and communities a single voice in their dealings with both international Jewish organizations and the West German state. The newspaper started life as Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt für die Nord-Rheinprovinz und Westfalen in 1946 and received its final (and current) name in 1949. Sinn looks at these two institutions in the first two decades of post-1945 Jewish life in Germany through the lens of their leading, if not founding, figures: Karl Marx (no relation to the philosopher), the editor of the Jüdische Allgemeine; and Hendrik G. van Dam, secretary general of the Central Council. Both Marx and van Dam had survived the war in exile in Great Britain, and both returned as early as 1946 to the British Zone. Beginning with a sketch of their biographies pre-1945, Sinn describes in great detail how these two men shaped the organizational structure and the public appearance of the Jewish community(s) in West Germany.

THE BRESLAU JEWISH MUSEUM: “DISINTEGRATION OF THE MANIFEST WORLD”

The Breslau Jewish Museum's brief history mirrors the changing identity German Jews held in the national community between 1928 and 1938. The Museum was initially founded by an optimistic group of prominent Breslau Jews who wished to both chronicle and celebrate the place Jews had in Weimar era Silesian and Breslau culture. But the group's ambitions soon had to be reassessed. After Hitler's assumption of power in 1933 it became increasingly clear that Jewishness was not to be flaunted or celebrated publicly, much less institutionally. As Jews came under attack, the Jewish Museum assumed the defensive role of guardian of Jewish heritage, objects and culture. Its new isolation from the non-Jewish Silesian and Breslau communities paralleled the growing marginalization of German Jews generally. The Museum's closure just days before Kristallnacht in 1938 seems prescient; both events signalled the end of Jewish life in Germany and the abrogation of German Jewish identity.

Lost in Third Space? Narrating German-Jewish identity in Maxim Biller’s autobiography Der gebrauchte Jude (2009)

After the Holocaust Jewish life in Germany was invisible: many survivors left Germany, and most of those who did stay or returned from exile preferred to keep a low profile. Most Germans were keen to move on; their awareness of Jewish life was reduced to memorial contexts, and, being the majority, they dominated public discourse of commemoration. From the 1980s on, young German-Jewish writers of the second generation started to reflect in their work on what it meant to be Jewish in Germany. They have thus contributed to making Jews more visible again in Germany. This process has been helped by the immigration of Jews mainly from the former Soviet Union following the fall of the Iron Curtain. This article examines how in his most recent text, Der gebrauchte Jude, the controversial second generation writer Maxim Biller reflects about the parameters of this visibility through his autobiographical discourse.

THE JEWISH HIGH SCHOOL IN BERLIN: DENOMINATIONAL RELIGIOUS EDUCATION BETWEEN THE PUPILS’ NEEDS AND THE EXPECTATION OF A RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY

Since the beginning of the early 1990s, Jewish life in Germany has begun to revitalise. Due to the immigration of Jews from the states of the former Soviet Union, the Jewish community in Germany has increased from 30,000 to 120,000 individuals and its age structure has become younger. Jewish communities are hoping for a religious revival among the recent generation of young Jews in Germany. This means that the Jewish schools – and especially religious education faces great challenges. The following article deals as a case study with the Jewish High School in Berlin (JOS). In view of the high expectations of the Jewish community, it appears necessary to gain an insight into the attitude of the pupils towards religion and their desires in religious education.

Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland, Michael Meng (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), xiv + 351 pp., hardcover, $35.00

Shattered Spaces tells the complex story of material traces of Jewish life in Germany and Poland over the last sixty years. In this excellent study of the multiple factors responsible for “turning rubble into ruins” during those six decades, Michael Meng asks why and how, in what has become a “region of few Jews,” seemingly worthless broken bricks and stones from destroyed Jewish buildings, neighborhoods, and cemeteries were first ignored and then transformed into meaningful and prized cultural objects. The book is part urban history, part sociological study of collective memory-making. By showing in detail why local, national, and trans-national social actors first ignored, then recovered and saved, and finally elevated remnants of Jewish life in central Europe, Meng sheds light on the complex process through which the cultural value of objects—ruins, in this case—is established. He shows how that value is shaped and constrained by national narratives, political ideologies, and global aspirations.

Between Triumph and Tragedy: The Use and Misuse of Hebrew in Germany from Mendelssohn to Eichmann

Hebrew was never a language spoken much in modern Germany. But the variety of its uses over the last two centuries reflect the diverse experiences of Jewish life in Germany. The maskilim attempted—without much success—to revive Hebrew and launched a few journals for this purpose. Protestant missionaries used the language in their fight over Jewish souls. During the 1920s, Berlin hosted a thriving colony of Hebrew writers from Eastern Europe with their own publishing houses and journals, while Shmuel Yosef Agnon lived and wrote in the small town of Bad Homburg until his house there burnt down in 1924. One of the most tragic chapters in the use of the Hebrew language began when Nazi officials acquired the language in order to control the Jewish population. In some instances, it served even as an instrument in the extermination process of the Jews. Adolf Eichmann only acquired skills to read the Hebrew alphabet in order to understand the Yiddish press, but lower-ranking Nazis were able to deceive the East European Jews by their decent knowledge of Hebrew. The article closes with a brief epilogue on the use of German in the State of Israel, ending with Günther Grass’s speech in German during his 1967 Israel visit.

Haunting images: stereotypes of Jewishness among Russian Jewish immigrants in Germany

Glancing at the Jewish spaces in contemporary Germany, an occasional observer would probably be startled. Since the Russian Jewish migration of the 1990s, Germany's Jewish community has come to be the third-largest in Europe. Synagogues, Jewish community centres, and Jewish cultural events have burgeoned. There is even talk about a “Jewish renaissance” in Germany. However, many immigrants claim that the resurrection of Jewish life in Germany is “only a myth,” “an illusion.” This paper is part of a project exploring the processes of the reconstruction of Jewish identities and Jewish communal life by Russian Jewish immigrants in Germany. The focus of this paper is on the stereotypes of Jews and Jewishness evident in immigrants' perceptions and imaginings of their physical gathering spaces – the Jewish community centres (Gemeinden). Focusing on the images that haunt a particular place, I seek to shed light upon the difficulties of re/creating Jewish identity and life among the Russian Jewish immigrants in contemporary Germany.

Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses Daniel H. Magilow Francis R. Nicosia and David Scrase (Eds.) Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Pp. xvi, 245. Cloth $60.00. ISBN 978-1-84545-676-4. Holocaust historians have never relied exclusively on perpetrator-created sources to narrate and analyze the genocide of European Jewry, but the fact that so many sources were German-language documents written for Nazi audiences might sometimes lead one to think otherwise. While perpetrators' perspectives are certainly crucial components of Holocaust narratives, the scholarly focus on body counts and grisly details of the mechanisms of annihilation has ominous collateral effects. In Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-day Ukraine (2007), Omer Bartov criticized this scholarly fixation on Jewish death as echoing the perpetrator's mindset because it "[brings the Jews] into history for the sole purpose of depicting their extermination." The challenge is to reinscribe the Holocaust into a broader narrative not just of European history but of Jewish history and Jewish identity. Francis R. Nicosia's and David Scrase's edited volume Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses is one example of the fruits of a new scholarly focus intended as a corrective to such "perpetrator source fetishism." This reorientation has benefitted from new institutional initiatives, notably the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's (USHMM) source edition project "Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933-1946." This concerted effort to acquire and preserve archival materials created by Jewish individuals and organizations before, during, and after the Holocaust is helping open the way for new approaches to the topic. Nicosia's and Scrase's volume of scholarly essays is the conference proceedings of a similarly titled 2006 Symposium at the University of Vermont's Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies that approached Holocaust history from victims' perspectives. The symposium brought together a group of prominent Holocaust scholars to examine questions about German Jewish identity in Germany in the 1930s from the perspectives of the persecuted Jews themselves. What did it mean to belong to a loyal, patriotic, and economically important minority group when the government deemed it a threat and systematically suffocated it? In his introduction, Nicosia recognizes that these questions are not entirely unexplored ones. To frame them, he briefly surveys the legal basis of German persecution in the 1930s and cites earlier research on the subject, some of it by the volume's own contributors. He shows how the volume does not [End Page 77] simply rehash old territory, even if the outlines of the history of Germany's discriminatory legislation in the 1930s are well known. Although Nicosia does not explicitly say so, what follows is a tightly focused set of essays that wisely strive for depth and close analysis of selected topics, rather than an encyclopedic coverage of the daily experiences of Jewish life in Germany in the 1930s. Central themes are Jewish institutions and spaces: Konrad Kwiet writes on the de facto ghettoization enforced through the creation of Judensiedlungen (Jewish Settlements) and Judenhäuser (Jews' Houses); Beate Meyer considers the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Representation of Jews in Germany); and Michael Brenner discusses theater and the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Cultural League.) Aside from his introduction, Nicosia also contributes an essay about Zionism in Nazi Berlin. Though all of the essays are of high quality, several merit special comment for their focus on the Alltagsgeschichte (everyday history) of Jewish life and identity in 1930s Germany. Developing further her widely respected work on the subject, for instance, Marion Kaplan examines changes in family dynamics. Kaplan influentially characterized German Jewish experiences as suspended "between dignity and despair" in her 1998 work of the same name. Families that might not ever have identified themselves as Jewish found themselves categorized as such and subject to new pressures. The extent to which the notion that the family is always a "haven in a heartless world" was a useful fiction became increasingly obvious. (16) The many new economic, social, and psychological pressures that Jewish families faced created a situation in which "their world was shrinking and Jews spent more and more...

"To the hate that surrounds us we respond with new love for Judentum ." The Jüdische Rundschau and the Struggle for Jewish Identity in Nazi Germany, 1933-1935

"To the hate that surrounds us we respond with new love for Judentum." The Jüdische Rundschau and the Struggle for Jewish Identity in Nazi Germany, 1933-1935 Christina Morina (bio) Introduction: The Jüdische Rundschau and the Question of (German-) Jewish Identity Eleven months after Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor, the editors of the Zionist newspaper Jüdische Rundschau redefined the role of their biweekly publication. In under a year, they transformed the mouthpiece of German Zionism into a spiritual haven for Germany's Jews, now stranded on the edge of society. During its first year, Hitler's regime inaugurated anti-Jewish measures, a series of systematic policies aimed at the segregation and persecution of German Jewry. By the end of 1933, the Jews of Germany were in a "completely new situation," and were in need of "spiritual orientation," as the Jüdische Rundschau noted in December: The Jüdische Rundschau wants to help the German Jew...to endure his worries and to find his spiritual orientation in the midst of the daily turmoil. The Jüdische Rundschau fights for the establishment of a dignified legal position for the Jews in Germany, for the freedom of their economic occupations, for a change in their occupations [Berufsumschichtung, in reaction to Nazi laws limiting the professional freedom of German Jews] and for the cultural reconstruction of German Jewry. It reports thoroughly about all the possibilities and preconditions of emigration and in particular about all questions concerning Palestine and the Jewish national home. 1 The Zionist community responded to the threats posed by the Nazi regime with "anxiety...but not with panic or a widespread sense of urgency," a response that was typical for most German Jews. 2 This muted anxiety was the result of a "loss of balance" felt by Germany's Jews after January, 1933. 3 Moreover, the Jüdische Rundschau, as the voice of leading Zionist intellectuals in Germany, exemplified the largely unselfconscious reaction of the Jewish leadership in general, [End Page 29] namely to attempt to "hide...distress behind a façade of confidence." 4 Though the core principles of the Zionists' response are not surprising—given their long history of adherence to the ideal of a Jewish state and nation—it was nonetheless remarkable, considering that they sought to transform this self-protective confidence among Jews, many of whom still believed in peaceful German-Jewish relations, into a genuine belief and pride in Jewish nationhood. This article provides an analysis of the major anti-Jewish policy measures of the Nazi state and the response articulated by the Jüdische Rundschau in the name of the affected German Jews in order to refute anti-Semitic propaganda and policy and to provide a spiritual framework for the continuation of Jewish life in Germany, a framework that sometimes included astoundingly opportunistic portrayals of Hitler's government. The article seeks to contribute to the attempt made most convincingly by Saul Friedländer to integrate the history of the "perpetrators" and the history of the "victims" (and German society as a whole), and thereby to transcend these dualistic and in fact reductionist categories. Only then, Friedländer argues, might it become possible to reconstruct the Jewish experience in Nazi Germany and to understand their story not just as the stories of victims but as the stories of individual human beings (re)acting as agents of and in history. 5 This view from below will be sharpened by a focus on the way German Jews sought to reformulate their personal and collective identities in the wake of the Nazi takeover of power. This focus avoids the retrospectively applied victims-perspective and instead seeks to restore the present and future of the historical subjects, their contemporary concerns, self-perceptions, and aspirations. Thus, in addition to the analysis of the Jüdische Rundschau's political response to anti-Jewish policies, I will also be concerned with the cultural, literary, scholarly, and religious themes the paper featured in its attempts to (re)create a Jewish self-image. It is this blend of political and cultural themes that the newspaper's editors believed would provide the basis for a new Jewish identity and pride among "assimilated...

Holocaust: the Nazi persecution and murder of the Jews

Introduction Historical Background: Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic PART I: RACIAL PERSECUTION, 1933-1939 1. The Displacement of Jews from Public Life, 1933-1934 2. Segregation and Comprehensive Discrimination, 1935-1937 3. Interim Conclusions: The Removal of Jews from German Society, the Formation of the National Socialist 'People's Community', and its Consequences for Jewish Life in Germany 4. The Intensification of the Racial Persecution of Non-Jewish Groups by the Police Apparatus, 1936-1937 5. Comprehensive Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937-1939 6. The Politics of Organized Expulsion PART II: THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS, 1939-1941 7. The Persecution of Jews in the Territory of the Reich, 1939-1940 8. German Occupation and the Persecution of the Jews in Poland, 1939-1940/1941: The First Variant of a 'Territorial Solution' 9. Deportations PART III: MASS EXECUTIONS OF JEWS IN THE OCCUPIED SOVIET ZONES, 1941 10. Laying the Ground for a War of Racial Annihilation 11. The Mass Murder of Jewish Men 12. The Transition from Anti-Semitic Terror to Genocide 13. Enforcing the Annihilation Policy: Extending the Shootings to the Whole Jewish Population PART IV: GENESIS OF THE FINAL SOLUTION ON A EUROPEAN SCALE, 1941 14. Plans for a Europe-Wide Deportation Programme After the Start of Barbarossa 15. Autumn 1941: Beginning of the Deportations and Regional Mass Murders 16. The Wannsee Conference PART V: THE EXTERMINATION OF THE EUROPEAN JEWS, 1942-1945 17. The Beginning of the Extermination Policy on a European Scale in 1942 18. The Further Development of the Policy of Extermination after the Turning of the War in 1942-1943: Continuation of the Murders and Geographical Expansion of the Deportations Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Community, Memory, and Shifting Jewish Identities in Germany Since 1989: The Case of Munich

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The influx of Jewish emigres from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) since 1990 has altered the shape of Jewish life in Germany, and profoundly influenced the 105 Jewish communities of the Federal Republic. Between 1990 and 2005, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) had admitted 219,604 Jewish emigres from the FSU, and could boast that it has the fastest-growing Jewish population in the world. The restriction of the flow of Jewish emigres from the FSU in 2005 as a direct result of new German immigration laws radically changed this situation. The intense immigration of Jews from the former Soviet States between 1990 and 2005 followed by a rather abrupt reversal in immigration policy reshaped the sense of Jewish community, memory, and identity in Germany. These shifts have placed pressure on both German-Jewish relations and relations within the Jewish communities. Certain basic assumptions concerning German-Jewish relations have been called into question on an unprecedented scale: the overwhelmingly positive view of Germany as an immigration destination for Jews; what it means to be Jewish in Germany; the very idea of a singular unitary Jewish community (Einheitsgemeinde) under the umbrella of the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany) in post-Wall Germany; and, perhaps most significantly, the absolute, and hitherto unquestioned centrality of the Nazi Judeocide for the self-understanding of German Jews. Recent developments threaten both the unity of the Jewish communities themselves as well as the tremendous gains made in the ongoing, genuine public discussion of and confrontation with the Nazi past since the 1980s. In this article, I suggest the sociocultural construction of a new Jewish identity or culture within the Jewish community in Germany and what might be referred to as a sense of community, memory, and cultural identity within the Russian Jewish community, one that finds a powerful resonance in contemporary German culture more generally. The Jewish Museum of Munich, which was founded to be a museum of Jewish life in Munich and specifically not a Holocaust museum, is an example of precisely this sense of identity formation and memory. The museum to be built in Cologne—scheduled to open in 2011 and designed by the same architects who designed Munich's museum, Wandel Hoefer Lorch & Hirsch—is another case in point. The simultaneous emergence of a new Russian Jewish emigre majority culture within the Jewish minority of Germany, and what I refer to as a post-Holocaust sensibility, coincides with a broader marginalization and fragmentation of Jewish identity in Germany despite the growth in sheer numbers over the past two decades. The approximately 10,000 Jews of Munich serve as both an exemplary model and as a demonstrative case-study of shifting Jewish identities in contemporary Germany. Like other Russian Jewish emigres within Germany, they have their own complex histories and collective memories forged by years of repression and persecution under Stalinism and post-Soviet discrimination. In Munich, these emigres have the additional task of becoming part of a Jewish community that has been especially challenged by historical precedents and recent developments within the community itself. Munich is a city of particularly conflicted postwar memory. Russian Jewish emigres comprise approximately 75% of the Jewish population of Munich, and their integration into German society and the existing Jewish community is decisive if the Jewish community is to survive and grow. The official, stated intention at the outset of the programs enacted in 1991—the HumHAG (humanitarer Hilfsaktionen aufgenommene Fluchtlinge or Refugees Accepted as part of a Humanitarian Aid Program) and the so-called Kontingentfluchtlingsgesetz (Quota Refugees Act), which first made possible the mass immigration of Jews from the FSU into Germany—was ostensibly to rescue the Russian Jews from an oppressive situation, but the subtext was clearly to strengthen Germany's diminishing Jewish community of 28,000. This study was conducted in the spring of 2007 with the assistance of advanced undergraduates fluent in German in the German Studies Program at the College of William and Mary as well as various members of the Jewish community very close to the situation: Rabbi Steven Langnas, Professor Michael...

Resurgence of Jewish Life in Germany

Resurgence of Jewish Life in GermanyPaul MarcusPaul MarcusSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:October 2005https://doi.org/10.1521/prev.2005.92.5.795PDFPDF PLUS ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations About Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 92Issue 5Oct 2005 Information© N.P.A.P.PDF download

The New Jewish and German Questions and the Transatlantic Alliance

IN UNDERSTANDING THE CURRENT STATE of international affairs, including transatlantic relations, one needs to look at the role the continued existence of the question plays in relations between Germany, Europe, the United States, and Israel. In the larger international debates on civilizational conflict, terrorism, and cultural/religious rifts, the question seemed once again to be on the forefront of international focus and analysis. In the context of inter-European, European-American relations, as well as Europe's anticipated role in international affairs, one must recognize that the question is intrinsically tied to the question. The two questions constantly interact, impose on, and feed each other because of the strong currency of the Holocaust for world affairs. The nuances of this larger context have indeed captured the attention of many commentaries. Yet many overlook the strong ties between the Jewish and German questions and their consequences for a number of issues: the European role in the Middle East; European internal relations with its minorities and, in particular, its Islamic communities; transatlantic relations; the tie between anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism; and, the critical role of diasporas in world affairs, especially in terms of American Jewry as a guardian of and voice for Jewish kinship. The symbolism and historical memory attached to the reality of the existence of the Jewish community inside Germany today constitutes both a sixth dimension and a common link between the issues. It is our contention that the importance, stature, and meaning assigned to Jewish life in Germany by a variety of international actors has consequences for the conduct of international politics exemplified by the five dimensions mentioned above.

The New Jewish and German Questions and the Transatlantic Alliance

The New Jewish and German Questions and the Transatlantic Alliance Yossi Shain (bio) and Tanja Flanagan (bio) In understanding the current state of international affairs, including transatlantic relations, one needs to look at the role the continued existence of the "Jewish question" plays in relations between Germany, Europe, the United States, and Israel. In the larger international debates on civilizational conflict, terrorism, and cultural/religious rifts, the "Jewish question" seemed once again to be on the forefront of international focus and analysis. In the context of inter-European, European-American relations, as well as Europe's anticipated role in international affairs, one must recognize that the "Jewish question" is intrinsically tied to the "German question." The two questions constantly interact, impose on, and feed each other because of the strong currency of the Holocaust for world affairs. The nuances of this larger context have indeed captured the attention of many commentaries. Yet many overlook the strong ties between the Jewish and German questions and their consequences for a number of issues: the European role in the Middle East; European internal relations with its minorities and, in particular, its Islamic communities; transatlantic relations; the tie between anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism; and, the critical role of diasporas in world affairs, especially in terms of American Jewry as a guardian of and voice for Jewish kinship. The symbolism and historical memory attached to the reality of the existence of the Jewish community inside Germany today constitutes both a sixth dimension and a common link between the issues. It is our contention that the importance, stature, and meaning assigned to Jewish life in Germany by a variety of international actors has consequences for the conduct of international politics exemplified by the five dimensions mentioned above. [End Page 188] For all practical purposes the Jewish community in Germany is marginal to international affairs in numbers, political influence, and societal position; yet, through its continued existence in the "land of the perpetrators" alone, it has gained a symbolic worth that allows for its instrumentalization and involvement far beyond its actual relevance. Its symbolic value is not only limited to the German context, but extents to the European realm, relations between the West and the Islamic world, and the transatlantic alliance. Indeed, the Jewish community in Germany is important on a domestic (and, by extension, international) level precisely because of its vulnerability, because it is perceived as an abnormality attempting to normalize its place in German society and, by extension, impacting on Germany's and Europe's role in world affairs, in particular vis-à-vis the United States. I The last few years have thrown into sharp relief the fact that the "Jewish question" is still alive and relevant. Indeed, in many world conflicts and dilemmas, Israel and the Jews have been inserted and have become a focal point of controversy in civilizational issues and discord. The eruption of the "Jewish question" into the international arena is even more dramatic after a decade during which there was a growing sense that Jews had achieved a certain degree of normalization in both Israel and the Diaspora. In the 1990s, the years of the Oslo peace process and the concomitant Israeli drive for normalization, the premier question among Jews, inside and outside Israel, became the content of Jewish identity. Israeli Jews confronted mainly cleavages over growing trends of fundamentalist Jewish religious identity vs. the universal pressures of globalization. Internal debates over religious values and definitions, the challenges of peace, post-Zionism, relations between the homeland and the Diaspora, and so on, prevailed over traditional questions of security vis-à-vis the world at large. During the Oslo years, many Israelis and Diaspora Jews believed that comprehensive Middle East peace would alter fundamentally both Israel's Jewish character and the relations between the sovereign Jewish state and Jewish communities in the West. Peace would have enabled Israel to achieve a level of normalization that would have loosened the bonds of involvement with and responsibility for the Diaspora, while releasing the Diaspora from burdensome entanglements with Israeli security issues that had overshadowed their lives in their countries of domicile for over a generation. [End Page 189] Until very recently many observers...