Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany

Jay Howard Geller,Michael Meng

• Editorial: Rutgers University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978800731
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, 100,000 Jews live in Germany. Their community is diverse and vibrant, and their mere presence in Germany is symbolically important. In Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany, scholars of German-Jewish history, literature, film, television, and sociology illuminate important aspects of Jewish life in Germany from 1949 to the present day. In West Germany, the development of representative bodies and research institutions reflected a desire to set down roots, despite criticism from Jewish leaders in Israel and the Diaspora. In communist East Germany, some leftist Jewish intellectuals played a prominent role in society, and their experience reflected the regime's fraught relationship with Jewry. Since 1990, the growth of the Jewish community through immigration from the former Soviet Union and Israel have both brought heightened visibility in society and challenged preexisting notions of Jewish identity in the former "land of the perpetrators."

CHAPTER 1

The Politics of Jewish Representation in Early West Germany

Jay Howard Geller

Since 1950, the Central Council of Jews in Germany (Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland) has been the principal representative body for the organized Jewish communities in Germany and their chief mediator with the German federal government. Despite the relatively small size of its constituency—just under one hundred thousand individuals in 105 Jewish communities in 20171—the Central Council has a notable role in German public affairs. Non-Jewish German politicians consider the opinions of the Central Council’s leadership when making decisions regarding Jewish affairs, including memorialization of the Holocaust and the regulation of rituals such as circumcision and kosher slaughter of animals.2

Considering the Central Council’s political prominence and central role in organized Jewish life in Germany, it is important to illuminate its origins and early years. Close examination demonstrates that despite its importance, this group’s establishment was a reaction to external circumstances and not the result of factors deriving entirely from the Jews then living in Germany. Moreover, in its early years, the organization had a relatively marginal role in the West German government’s relations with the Jews, broadly speaking, and was even dependent on the (non-Jewish) government for its survival.

During the years of Allied occupation before the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany, there was not a single unified Jewish community in Germany. At best, one can speak of two distinct groups separated by cultural, religious, and political differences.3 The larger of the two communities consisted of Eastern European Jews, who had mainly come to Germany after their liberation from the concentration camps. While it may seem paradoxical that non-German Jews who had been liberated from Nazi German camps would come to Germany (and specifically Western Germany) of their own volition, this is precisely what happened. Faced with the persistence of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe and the rise of discriminatory Communist regimes, tens of thousands of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and Jews who had spent the war in the Soviet Union made the decision not to return permanently to their hometowns but rather to flee to the relative safety of the Western Allies’ occupation zones in Germany. While some did settle in German cities, the vast majority congregated in refugee camps under the auspices of the Allied armies, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and, later, the International Refugee Organization (IRO).

These Jews, known as displaced persons (DPs), had a different pre-Holocaust cultural, religious, and political experience from Western European Jews. Their native milieu was Yiddish-speaking (or bilingual, with Yiddish and a European national language). While many of them had lost their Jewish faith in the camps or had secularized before the Holocaust, Orthodox Judaism was practically the only variety of Jewish religion practiced by DPs. Additionally, prewar politics among Eastern European Jews were intensely Jewish, with competition between Labor Zionists, Bundists, Revisionist Zionists, and other specifically Jewish political parties that were unpopular or unknown in Western Europe.

In addition to the Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, who numbered as many as two hundred thousand, there were also remnants of pre-Holocaust German Jewry. After liberation on 8 May 1945, many German Jews who had survived the camps returned to their hometowns or congregated in large cities. Other Jews, who had survived in hiding or through their marriages to non-Jewish spouses, emerged from the shadows. Some German Jews returned to Germany from their exile abroad. These Jews were culturally German. Their politics were German liberal or social democratic, and their religious practice was overwhelmingly Liberal Judaism, a variety of Jewish rite largely unknown outside of Central Europe. As they recommenced their personal and professional lives in German cities, they reestablished synagogues and Jewish communal institutions. In their efforts, they looked chiefly to German governments on the local level and even state level for assistance. For collective political representation, they organized themselves into state associations (Landesverbände) and zonal “interest representations” (Interessenvertretungen). In total, the German Jews did not number more than twenty thousand and were likely far fewer.

With nothing to return to in Eastern Europe, most Jewish DPs wished to leave Europe permanently. A large number of them, possibly the majority, desired to settle in Palestine in the hope that it would soon be home to a Jewish state. However, the British, who still controlled Palestine under the terms of a League of Nations mandate and who faced a disintegrating situation between Palestine’s Jewish and Arab populations, did not wish to permit Jewish immigration to the territory. Additionally, immigration to the United States was either not possible or not desired. For the most part, the Jewish DPs found themselves stuck in DP camps. There, they built up microsocieties that both drew upon the culture of prewar Jewish Eastern Europe, which was no longer extant, and the culture of Zionist Palestine, which they regarded as their future home. The camps had schools for children and occupational retraining programs for adults, religious institutions, a flourishing press, and entertainment venues. They received assistance from American and international Jewish welfare agencies, as well as the U.S. Army and UNRRA and IRO. Some DPs lived in camps but worked in German cities. Nonetheless, they did not see themselves setting down permanent roots on German soil and intended to leave when they could. Meanwhile, many DPs, most notably in the American zone of occupation, slipped out of the camps and Germany and traveled to Mediterranean ports to hazard the illegal journey to Palestine.

Politically, the Jewish DPs organized themselves on a camp-by-camp basis and later into organizations, known as Central Committees, for all DPs in a given zone of occupation. Generally speaking, they had very few ties to the German Jews, who were much fewer in number, culturally and religiously very different, and who intended to remain permanently in Germany. And this is how the situation concerning the two Jewish communities remained until 1948.

At the same time, Jews living in Germany had to reckon with a boycott by their foreign coreligionists. During the summer of 1948, the World Jewish Congress (WJC), meeting in Montreux, Switzerland, proclaimed “the determination of the Jewish people never again to settle on the bloodstained soil of Germany.”4 A. Leon Kubowitzki, general secretary of the WJC from 1945 to 1948, called for the dissolution of the Jewish communities in postwar Germany, whose existence, in his view, somehow mitigated German guilt for the Holocaust.5 DP leader Pessach Piekatsch also spoke against Jews remaining in in Germany: “We feel no responsibility toward those DPs who choose to remain. By helping the Gemeinden [Jewish communities established by German Jews] to achieve permanence we encourage DPs to remain too.”6 Looking back on that time four decades later, DP leader Norbert Wollheim, who had been born in Germany, saw things similarly: “I didn’t destroy Germany. I have no duty to build it up again. I can’t. For me, Germany is one big cemetery.”7

Another sign of how foreign Jewish groups viewed the future of Jewish life in Germany was the dispensation of property owned by German Jews killed in the Holocaust whose heirs either could not be found or did not make a claim. Control of this ownerless Jewish property was not assigned to the actual, existing Jewish communities in postwar Germany but rather to the Jewish Trust Corporation (JTC) and the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO), as per the terms of an agreement between the Western Allies and these foreign Jewish groups. The JTC and JRSO directly or indirectly promoted the dissolution of organized Jewish life in Germany and intended to use proceeds from the sale of properties to support Jewish life elsewhere. Naturally, the impoverished communities of German Jews protested this decision, which both undermined their own financial well-being and tacitly signaled disapproval of their remaining in Germany.8

In the course of 1948, the situation on the ground in Germany changed dramatically. With the establishment of Israel as an independent state, Jewish DPs were free to leave the Western Allies’ occupation zones and immigrate to the new Jewish state. Concomitantly, the stream of Jewish refugees to Western Germany ceased. As a result, the number of Eastern European Jewish DPs in diminished from 150,000 to 66,000, and the numbers continued to shrink further. Israel intended to accommodate all the DPs by the end of 1949. Under these circumstances, the American occupation authorities began to consolidate and close DP camps. To many outside observers, this seemed to mark the end of a Jewish presence in Germany, but in fact, this would not be the case.

Thousands of German Jews and Eastern European Jewish DPs remained in Germany despite the wishes of the Israeli government and Jewish relief organizations. Soon, the U.S. Office of Military Government (OMGUS), the American occupation authority, accepted the new reality. The OMGUS adviser for Jewish affairs, Harry Greenstein, met military governor Lucius Clay and summarized his views: “It is his conviction that it is possible for Jews to build a future for themselves and their families in Germany and felt it would be a tragic mistake on the part of the Jews to make Germany ‘Judenrein.’”9

More consequential for all sides was the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany in May 1949. As representatives of the people of Western Germany worked to create a federal government, it was clear that the Americans were going to relinquish responsibility for many aspects of governance and relations between the state and civil society, including the supervision of Jewish affairs. Under these circumstances, American occupation authority leaders were of the opinion that it was important for all the Jews in Germany—Eastern European DPs and German Jews—to unite, and Harry Greenstein endeavored to bring the DP communities and the German-Jewish groups together. U.S. high commissioner John J. McCloy favored a central organization for all the Jews in Germany.10

Greenstein organized a series of conferences on the future of Jewish life in Germany. At the most important of the conferences, in Heidelberg on 31 July 1949, Greenstein spoke bluntly about the reality of the situation: “This conference has been planned on the premise that there are at the present time[,] and there will continue to be, Jewish communities in Germany.” While recognizing the controversial debate on this issue, he proclaimed that it was time to merge the DP and German-Jewish communities. Moreover, he wanted conference participants to “agree on the desirability of setting up an over-all Jewish organization which will make it possible for us to plan together for all of the Jews in Germany.”11

McCloy also supported the reestablishment of Jewish life in Germany, though his remarks on the matter evince a certain naïveté and even condescension. He attacked the notion that a country as large and important as Germany would not have a substantial Jewish community, and he even went so far as to say that it was odd that the Jews could not live in Germany as in other countries. He ascribed the high degree of residual anti-Semitism in Germany to the effect of repeated, intense propaganda under the Nazis and expected that it would be some time before the atmosphere changed. However, in his opinion, the Jews in Germany needed to contribute to the change in German attitude. They had to comport themselves with honesty and courage. Moreover, he called the development of the Jewish community in Germany as an indicator of “Germany’s progress toward the light.” The entire world would be watching. Oddly, though, he seemed to place the onus on the Jews: “The success of those that remain will to a large extent depend on the extent to which that community becomes less a community in itself and m...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Politics of Jewish Representation in Early West Germany
• Chapter 2. We Have the Right to Exist Here: Jewish Politics and the Challenges of Wiedergutmachung in Post-Holocaust Germany
• Chapter 3. Bernhard Brilling and the Reconstruction of Jewish Archives in Postwar Germany
• Chapter 4. Whose Heritage? Early Postwar German-Jewish History as Remigrants’ History—the Case of Hamburg
• Chapter 5. Migration, Memory, and New Beginnings: The Postwar Jewish Community in Frankfurt am Main
• Chapter 6. Helmut Eschwege and Jewish Life in the German Democratic Republic
• Chapter 7. Learning Years on the Path to Dissidence: Stefan Heym’s Friendship with Robert Havemann and Wolf Biermann
• Chapter 8. Ernst Bloch’s Eschatological Marxism
• Chapter 9. Diasporic Place-Making in Barbara Honigmann
• Chapter 10. Tur Tur’s Lantern on a Tiny Island: New Historiographical Perspectives on East German Jewish History
• Chapter 11. Community Responses to the Immigration of Russian-Speaking Jews to Germany, 1990–2006
• Chapter 12. Policing the East: The New Jewish Hero in Dominik Graf’s Crime Drama Im Angesicht des Verbrechens
• Chapter 13. “You Are My Liberty”: On the Negotiation of Holocaust and Other Memories for Israelis in Berlin
• Epilogue
• Notes on Contributors
• Index