Eleven marginally Jewish subjects talk about their lives as Jews in
East, West, and united Germany. While Germany abounds with younger
Jewish immigrants from Israel and the former Soviet Union who could
speak about the inherent conflicts of being Jews in post-Holocaust
Germany, Borneman (Anthropology/Cornell Univ.; After the Wall,
1991, etc.) and Peck (German/Georgetown Univ.) have chosen
interviewees (several in their 80s) who are Jews in name only (one
asks, "How could we Germans [perpetrate the Holocaust]?") and are
too committed to GDR socialism to convey much conflict about their
choice of home country. Moreover, too many of the men and women
interviewed here are academics or journalists themselves, including
another ethnographer. The authors interrupt the interviews with
their often unnecessary analysis to further prevent the reader from
interacting with the subjects, and their prose is excruciatingly
jargon-laden and pedantic: "It makes a historical constructivist
(i.e., antiracial, antiessentialist) argument, maintaining that
Jewish identity is syncretic and entails multiple subject
positions." The book only sputters to life with scattered
revelations about decisions to return to Germany, how the reality
of Soviet gulags only emerged after Gorbachev, misconceptions held
about the US and Israel, the decrease in banality and increase in
danger in a united Berlin, and, on the authors' part, why being gay
and single facilitates the writing of exorbitant overseas projects
like this one. A potentially intriguing subject, but the authors
miss the real story by taking such an oddly unrepresentative group
of subjects. (Kirkus Reviews)
“A firsthand confrontation with the inner fears and the outer
realities of [German Jews] as they themselves reflect post-Shoah
history and experience. This is not merely lived ‘history,’ it
is ‘history’ with a living face.”—Sander L.
Gilman This absorbing book of interviews takes one to the
heart of modern German Jewish history. Of the eleven German Jews
interviewed, four are from West Berlin, and seven are from East
Berlin. The interviews provide an exceptionally varied and intimate
portrait of Jewish experience in twentieth-century Germany. There
are first-hand accounts of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, the
Holocaust, and the divided Germany of the Cold War era. There are
also vivid descriptions of the new united Germany, with its
alarming resurgence of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Some of
the men and women interviewed affirm their dual German and Jewish
identities with vigor. There is the West Berliner, for instance,
who proclaims, “I am a German Jew. I want to live here.” Others
describe the impossibility of being both German and Jewish: “I
don’t have anything in common with the whole German people.”
Many confess to profound ambivalence, such as the East Berliner who
feels that he is neither a native nor a foreigner in Germany: “If
someone asks me, ‘Who are you?’ then I can only say, ‘I am a
fish out of water.’” Uncertain, angry, resolute,
anguished—the diverse testimonies of these people provide
startling evidence that “the history of German Jews is not
over.”
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