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Michael Brenner - After the Holocaust

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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Based on the Yiddish and German press and unpublished archival material, the first part of this book provides a historical introduction to this fascinating topic.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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Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany Michael Brenner Translated from - photo 1
Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany Michael Brenner Translated from - photo 2
Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany Michael Brenner Translated from - photo 3
Rebuilding
Jewish Lives
in Postwar
Germany
Michael Brenner
Translated from
the German by
Barbara Harshav
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
First published in Germany under the title Nach dem Holocaust: Juden in Deutschland 1945-1950 C. H. Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung (Oscar Beck), Munich, 1995
English translation 1997 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved
Third printing, and first paperback printing, 1999
Paperback ISBN 0-691-00679-2
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows
Brenner, Michael.
[Nach dem Holocaust, English]
After the Holocaust: rebuilding Jewish lives in postwar Germany / Michael Brenner ; translated by Barbara Harshav.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-00679-2 (alk. paper)
eISBN 978-0-69123-220-1 (ebook)
1. JewsGermanyHistory1945- 2. Holocaust survivorsGermany. 3. GermanyHistory1945-1955. 4. GermanyEthnic relations.
I. Title.
DS135.G33B7513 1997
943.004924DC21 97-1149 CIP r97
http://pup.princeton.edu
R0
Tothe memory of my grandparents Lippmann and
Malka Brenner, my aunt Jadwiga Brenner, and my uncle
Meir Brenner. For all of them the liberators came too late.
Preface to the English Edition
AS THIS BOOK appears, the German-Jewish community is undergoing its most significant transformation in the postwar period. Within the last five years this community has doubled in size, and an end to the immigration of Jews from the states of the former Soviet Union is not in sight. In fact, Germany, which half a century ago launched the attempt to create a Europe without Jews, is today the only European country showing a steady increase in its Jewish population. Alongside the statistical changes come challenges to the internal structure of the Jewish communities in Germany. Reform and Conservative Judaism have recently made inroads into a community previously characterized by East European-style orthodoxy. The trend toward religious pluralism has perhaps found its most visible expression in the 1995 installation of the first woman rabbi in a German-Jewish community.
The last section of this English edition incorporates those most recent changes, which have occurred since the appearance of the German edition in 1995. The main body of this book, however, remains unaltered. It deals with the very foundations of the German-Jewish postwar community between 1945 and 1950, the study of which is even more relevant in light of its present expansion. Only a few details have been revised. Annotations were added if thought necessary for the English reader. I would like to thank Dr. Juliane Wetzel of the Zentrum fur Antisemitismusforschung in Berlin for her valuable remarks on the German edition; my translator, Barbara Harshav, for her thoughtful comments much beyond pure translation issues; my editor at Princeton University Press, Dr. Brigitta van Rheinberg, for her assistance throughout the editing process; and Lauren Lepow for her meticulous review of the manucript. I would also like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to my colleagues and students at Brandeis University and the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, where most of this book has been written. I am especially indebted to Sylvia Fuks Fried, with whom I had the pleasure to plan a conference on Jews in postwar Europe.
As I complete this English edition, I feel more attached to the topic than ever before. Having received an invitation to become the first incumbent of the newly created chair for Jewish History and Culture at Munich University, I will return to Germany after spending over a decade studying and teaching in Israel and the United States. Thus in contrast to the German edition I can no longer speak of the secure distance from which I undertook this study, but should rather express my hope that I may be able to add my modest share to the rebuilding of the German-Jewish community from within.
Whether the five decades of Jewish life in postwar Germany were merely a brief epilogue to a glorious past or the beginning of a new, albeit modest, chapter in Jewish history remains to be judged by future generations.
Lexington, Massachusetts
October 1996
L IBERTY the improbable the impossible liberty so far removed from Auschwitz - photo 4
L IBERTY, the improbable, the impossible liberty, so far removed from Auschwitz that we had only dared to hope for it in our dreams, had come, but it had not taken us to the Promised Land. It was around us, but in the form of a pitiless, deserted plain. More trials, more toil, more hunger, more cold, more fears awaited us.
PRIMO LEVI, The Reawakening
Introduction
TEN YEARS after the beginning of the Thousand Year Reich," Joseph Goebbels declared Berlin judenrein [free of Jews]. By this time, over half a million German Jews had either left Germany or had been deported to death camps in the East. Those who remained were either in hiding or (still) protected by Aryan" spouses or parents. During the last years of the war, Jewish life in Berlin and the rest of Germany was nonexistent. The few thousand illegal" Jews or those protected by mixed marriages" could expect to be discovered any moment and wrenched away from the protection of their relatives.
After the war, the legacy of Mendelssohn and Heine, Freud and Einstein remained without heirs; the ruins of synagogues were to give way to parking lots and lawns. In terms of quantity, even half a century later, the Jewish community in Germany is not equal to one-tenth of its prewar population; in terms of quality, the comparison is even more striking. Yet 1943 did not mark the end of the visible presence of Jews in Germany once and for all. In the first postwar years, some quarter of a million Jews lived in Germany; most of them were East European survivors of the Nazi terror. In many places that could not be rendered judenrein" by the Nazis since no Jews had ever lived in them, Jewish schools and sports clubs now emerged. In the provinces of Lower Bavaria and North Hesse, in the cities of Berlin and Munich, and near the Bergen-Belsen camp, these remnants" (in Hebrew: sheerit ha-pleyta) created an unfamiliar Jewish culture in modern Germany They established several yeshivas and printed hundreds of Yiddish newspapers; they elected their political leadership and initiated theater groups, historical associations, and Jewish soccer leagues.
These activities produced only an ephemeral phenomenon, which came to an end when two sovereign German states replaced the Allied administration. For most Jews, the blood-soaked soil of Germany was only a stopover on the way to Israel or the United States. Nevertheless, in many respects, this brief, and so far last, chapter of Jewish creativity in postwar Germany has far-reaching significance. The fact that Jewish survivors were firmly entrenched on German groundand, as the
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