FRAMING THE CONVERSATION: JEWISH VOICES IN THE GERMAN SIXTIES

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Notes

1. By early 1948 there were also 26,316 Jews living in 110 different communities in small towns and villages, all outside of the DP camp setting. Brenner, Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, 84. See also Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies.

2. Brenner, After the Holocaust, 7–77. On re-emigrants see Bergmann, “‘Wir haben Sie nicht gerufen,” 19–39. See also Krauss. “Jewish Remigration,” 107–19.

3. Brenner, After the Holocaust, 45.

4. Kolinsky, After the Holocaust, 228. On Jews who returned to East Germany see Borneman and Peck, Sojourners.

5. The fullest work in English on the reconstitution of Jewish life in post-war Germany is Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany.

6. Brenner, Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, 153–82.

7. Kolinsky, After the Holocaust, 215.

8. The last DP camp to shut down was Föhrenwald near Dachau in 1957. The literature on post-war Jewish culture among DPs is burgeoning. See, e.g., Tobias, “Arojs mitn bal cu di tojznter wartnde cuszojer”; Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps;” Patt and Berkowitz, We Are Here; Lewinsky, “Goles Daytshland/Galut Germanija;” Fetthauer, Musik und Theater im DP-Camp Bergen-Belsen; and Jockusch, “Historiography in Transit.”

9. Brenner, After the Holocaust, 66.

10. Kauders, “Heimat ausgeschlossen.” See also Jütte, “Not Welcomed with Open Arms.”

11. Kolinsky, After the Holocaust, 187–227.

12. Kauders, Unmögliche Heimat, 32.

13. Kolinsky, After the Holocaust, 220.

14. Cited in Kolinsky, After the Holocaust, 220. The Heidelberg philosopher, Karl Jaspers, took up the subject of Germany's “pariah existence” in his post-war series of lectures, published in English as The Question of German Guilt. Interestingly, one of his recommendations for avoiding this ignominy was not to sit in silence, but to articulate feelings. “We must,” he said, “learn to talk with each other.” The talking did not extend to passing political judgments on world affairs. Germany had not yet earned the right to do this. See Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, 4–5. According to the testimony of Alexander Alter, executive director of the Federal Union of Jewish Students in Germany, he experienced the pariah status as late as 1989 when the German delegation attended a conference of the European Union of Jewish Students in Luxemburg, where they were greeted with the cries of “We hate you Germans.” He put it down to Jewish fears of a recently united Germany. “Niederländer, Franzosen, judische Studenten wohlgemerkt, brachten mich ganz schnell auf den Boden der Tatsachen zurück und signalisierten mir, daß wir nicht erwünscht waren. ‘Was macht ihr eigentlich hier?’ Grund für dieser Haltung waren gerade die Ereignisse in Berlin, der Fall der Mauer, die Angst vor einem neunen ‘Großdeutschland’ und so weiter.” See Alter, “Die Koffer sind ausgepackt,” 243–251.

15. This is the opinion of Broder and Lang, Fremd in eigenen Land.

16. Hagen, German History in Modern Times, 353.

17. On anti-Semitism in post-war Germany see Kolinsky, After the Holocaust, 187–227: the quotation from Bernstein appears at 189. See also Geis, “Die Juden essen Schokolade.”

18. On the post-war leadership see Sinn, Jüdische Politik und Presse. I wish to express my thanks to Dr Sinn for sharing the page proofs of her forthcoming book with me. On compensation see Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 219–56.

19. Gardner Feldman, Germany's Foreign Policy of Reconciliation, 134–8.

20. Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust.

21. Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz.

22. Mendel, “Aufgewachsen zwischen zwei Welten,” 79–90. While Mendel makes a point of the large number of Jews unable to come to terms with remaining in Germany and who went to Israel, the article is important for articulating the problems faced by second generation Jews in postwar Germany.

23. Tauchert, Jüdische Identitäten in Deutschland. Tauchert studies the development of Jewish identity in Germany across three post-war generations, noting how by the second generation—the focus of this volume—Jewish public and private sentiments about being in Germany were elided, while for the first generation, public utterances and private feelings were at odds with one another.

24. Meyer, “When Does the Modern Period in Jewish History Begin?”

Additional information

John Efron is Koret Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Institute of European Studies at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of The Jews: A History, with Matthias Lehmann and Steven Weitzman (Prentice Hall, 2009; 2nd ed., 2013); Medicine and the German Jews: A History (Yale University Press, 2001); Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Yale University Press, 1994); and is co-editor of Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (University Press of New England, 1998). He has written on debates about Jews in the history of German anthropology and medicine, as well as on subjects dealing with European Jewish popular culture, such as Jewish boxers in eighteenth-century England and Yiddish cabaret and political satire in pre-war Poland and in Israel. He is currently completing Sephardic Aesthetics and the Ashkenazic Imagination: German Jewry in the Age of Emancipation to be published by Indiana University Press.