Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany by Geller, Jay Howard; Meng, Michael;

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.”

Contents

Introduction

Jay Howard Geller and Michael Meng

Chapter 1: The Politics of Jewish Representation in Early West Germany

Jay Howard Geller

Chapter 2: We have the right to exist here: Jewish Politics and the Challenges of Wiedergutmachung in Post-Holocaust Germany

Andrea A. Sinn

Chapter 3: Bernhard Brilling and the Reconstruction of Jewish Archives in Postwar Germany

Jason Lustig

Chapter 4: Whose Heritage?: Early Postwar German-Jewish History as Remigrants’ History-The Case of Hamburg

Miriam RÜrup

Chapter 5: Migration, Memory and New Beginnings: The Postwar Jewish Community in Frankfurt am Main

Tobias FreimÜller

Chapter 6: Helmut Eschwege and Jewish Life in the German Democratic Republic

Alexander Walther

Chapter 7: Learning Years on the Path to Dissidence: Stefan Heym’s Friendship with Robert Havemann and Wolf Biermann

Cathy S. Gelbin

Chapter 8: Ernst Bloch’s Eschatological Marxism

Michael Meng

Chapter 9: Diasporic Place-Making in Barbara Honigmann

Katja Garloff

Chapter 10: Tur Tur’s Lantern on a Tiny Island: New Historiographical Perspectives on East German Jewish History

Constantin Goschler

Chapter 11: Community Responses to the Immigration of Russian-Speaking Jews to Germany, 1990–2006

Joseph Cronin

Chapter 12: Policing the East: The New Jewish Hero in Dominik Graf’s Crime Drama Im Angesicht des Verbrechens

Jill Suzanne Smith

Chapter 13: “You are my liberty:” On the Negotiation of Holocaust and Other Memories for Israelis in Berlin

Irit Dekel

Epilogue

Jay Howard Geller and Michael Meng