After the Holocaust
Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany
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- 35,99 €
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- 35,99 €
Publisher Description
This landmark book is the first comprehensive account of the lives of the Jews who remained in Germany immediately following the war. Gathering never-before-published eyewitness accounts from Holocaust survivors, Michael Brenner presents a remarkable history of this period. While much has been written on the Holocaust itself, until now little has been known about the fate of those survivors who remained in Germany. Jews emerging from concentration camps would learn that most of their families had been murdered and their communities destroyed. Furthermore, all Jews in the country would face the stigma of living, as a 1948 resolution of the World Jewish Congress termed it, on "bloodsoaked German soil." Brenner brings to life the psychological, spiritual, and material obstacles they surmounted as they rebuilt their lives in Germany. At the heart of his narrative is a series of fifteen interviews Brenner conducted with some of the most important witnesses who played an active role in the reconstruction--including presidents of Jewish communities, rabbis, and journalists.
Based on the Yiddish and German press and unpublished archival material, the first part of this book provides a historical introduction to this fascinating topic. Here the author analyzes such diverse aspects as liberation from concentration camps, cultural and religious life among the Jewish Displaced Persons, antisemitism and philosemitism in post-war Germany, and the complex relationship between East European and German Jews. A second part consists of the fifteen interviews, conducted by Brenner, with witnesses representing the diverse background of the postwar Jewish community. While most of them were camp survivors, others returned from exile or came to Germany as soldiers of the Jewish Brigade or with international Jewish aid organizations. A third part, which covers the development of the Jewish community in Germany from the 1950s until today, concludes the book.
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In 1945, the newly reestablished Jewish community of Dusseldorf was confronted by a municipal official "holding a writ of attachment, to collect `unpaid property taxes from 1938 to 1945,'" complete with late fees and monitory charges. It's just a small story, but one that's indicative of the rather surreal position of Jews in Germany after WWII. Brenner starts with what is usually the end--the Allied liberation of the death camps. However, most Jewish survivors were DPs (displaced persons) and moved to camps that were equally overcrowded, unhealthy and restricted, and, to boot, they sometimes shared these camps with their former tormentors. Brenner's examination of the DP camps captures the combination of apathy, anxiety for loved ones, a bit of cautious hope and the horrid fear that the DPs were still forgotten. By the early 1950s all but a very few Jews had emigrated, and those who remained were often in or born of mixed marriages, which meant that people on the fringes of Jewish society had the responsibility of recreating it. Equally ironic was the large influx of Yiddish-speaking, unassimilated Eastern European Jews, which often made the tiny Jewish community more noticeable than the larger prewar ones had been. After the war, Brenner notes, everyone wanted a Jewish friend (a 1946 Jewish newspaper headline declared "Jewish Grandmothers at Black Market Prices."), and he follows this trend to today when almost any klezmer concert or Jewish studies course is packed with non-Jews curious about a lost culture. If the middle section of interviews seems redundant, it is only because Brenner has covered the material so well and so succinctly elsewhere.
