How To Remember
A visitor to Germany questions whether Jewish identity can be preserved within a culture that emphasizes past atrocities

by Sheryl R. Adelman

Recent events in Germany, including the train station bombing in Dusseldorf and vandalism of a synagogue in Potsdam, suggest that anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiment continue to plague German society despite governmental aims at reform. Like any country experiencing large waves of immigration and economic unrest, Germany has a high degree of anti-immigrant sentiment. While such acts are not new developments in the world, when Jews are the targets of terrorism in Germany one has to question the success of post-Holocaust German reform.

I explored this issue on a recent trip to Germany as a fellow on a program for North American Jewish graduate students entitled “Bridge of Understanding.” Despite the program’s intention to reveal Germany’s improvement since the Second World War, it did not leave me assured of a Jewish future in Germany. My impressions were largely due to the realization that while it is evident that the German government is committed to reform and Holocaust education, it is also true that the manner in which such issues are addressed risks perpetuating racial, religious and ethnic intolerance in Germany.

The German coordinators of our fellowship continually assured us that anti-Semitism is pass’ in Germany and, if anything, feelings of intolerance are generally directed toward other (mostly Moslem and Polish) ethnic minorities. Nonetheless, we learned that while anti-Semitism might not be expressed on the surface of affairs, it is still apparent at an ideological level. It wasn’t necessarily the graffiti or the state of affairs between Jews and others that revealed the dark side of Jewish existence, but the statements made by Jewish and non-Jewish students, parents, rabbis and educators that forced me to look back and reflect.

While in Dusseldorf, our group was hosted by members of the Jewish Community Center and the local synagogue. We met Jewish teenagers and twentysomethings who informed us that life is not easy for Jews despite the level of public regret and enforced Holocaust reparations. We were surprised to learn, for example, that while urban life in Germany is growing in terms of diversity, Jewish students in Dusseldorf feel unsafe wearing yarmulkes in public. 

When I spoke with one group of young men, almost all of whom were born in Dusseldorf to immigrants from the former Soviet Union, they explained their conflicted sense of identity as Jews and their desire to leave Germany.

One exclaimed, “Just because we were born here does not mean that our parents were born here or that our parents really wanted to have children here. It just happened.” I soon learned that this particular young man’s parents had hoped to gain entry to the United States or Israel. The young man assured me that he would not be staying in Germany, but plans to fulfill his family’s dream.

Another Dusseldorf community member, the Orthodox rabbi, informed our group that he would be leaving Germany to return to his native country of Switzerland. The rabbi explained that his children are young, and after spending 15 years in Dusseldorf and helping Russian Jewish immigrants settle into the community, he is ready to focus on his own family’s best interests; he wants his children to grow up with positive Jewish role models and a cohesive Jewish community. We learned soon thereafter that the youth director of the Dusseldorf Jewish Community Center also hoped to leave Germany with her husband and family. An American married to a Russian Jewish immigrant, this woman explained that she feels she has done her service and wants to begin to live her own life with her family.

While I could understand an American wishing to return to the States, I wondered why Jews from the former Soviet Union would refuse an opportunity to live in a country that encouraged their settlement and even offered compensation. Then, the answer hit me: Compensation for the Holocaust might, in fact, be the entire problem. Furthermore, Holocaust education may very well function to maintain Jewish difference in Germany.

While already draping the walls of much of German society, Holocaust memorials continue to be constructed. These memorials are not modest, but most often dramatic displays of horror. Mutilated, tortured and starved bodies of victims are carved out of marble and stone to depict the horrors inflicted on the Jews by the Nazis. The largest memorial is a sculpture of a train car with the bodies of Jewish victims carved into the marble. While most of the standing memorials throughout Germany are sculptures set at the locations of destroyed Jewish buildings and businesses, other structures serve a somewhat larger, symbolic purpose. 

The Jewish Museum in Berlin, for example, confronts the eradication of Jews and Jewish culture through its fractured design. The architect uses displacement to manipulate visitors’ perceptions of distance and space. In the museum, the walls become narrower as they get longer, the stairs lead nowhere and tall pillars cause the visitor to become dizzy and even nauseous.

A sense of displacement exists well beyond the exhibit for the Jewish visitor to Berlin. In the city’s streets and businesses, as well as in interpersonal exchanges, Jews continue to feel a strong sense of “outsiderness’ in Germany. Jews are seen in the eyes of German law as different, ironically, due to the government’s effort to reverse some of the effects of the Holocaust. Only Jews, for example, are exempt from mandatory civil or military service upon completion of their (pre-college) education.

When I asked my non-Jewish host family why Jews are not required to serve, they informed me that it was simply a necessary consequence of the Holocaust. They explained that it would be cruel to force Jews to serve in the German military or civil service when it had been the cause of millions of Jewish deaths. I thought to myself: “But, this is the new Germany, right?”

I asked the young Jewish men in Dusseldorf about their exemption from service, and their response was the same. They replied that some of their relatives were killed at the hands of German soldiers. I decided that the German civil and military service either needs to be reformed or more time must pass before Jews will be expected to serve their country in Germany. Regardless, it seemed that Germany was missing an important educational step in combating racism and discrimination.

Holocaust education in Germany is supposed to be geared toward prevention and reform. Therefore, it is mandatory in German schools. While visiting numerous memorials and museums, I witnessed a constant flow of German students on class visits to Holocaust exhibits. I observed the students’ reactions, and wondered as an educator whether students left the museums truly educated on the issues involved in the Holocaust. I was not convinced that the exhibits’ materials or format fostered the “appropriate” response from students. From what I witnessed, students’ first impressions were of horror and, by the exhibit’s end, simple apathy.

The exhibits focused on portraying the Nazis’ implementation of the Final Solution through the systematic policies of discrimination, segregation, terrorization and annihilation. I watched as young German students stood in awe of life size photographs of naked women being shot and thrown into ditches by Nazi soldiers; or of photographs revealing what the German officials did with the women’s clothing, teeth, hair and belongings. I wondered why it was necessary to present the Holocaust and its victims through the terrors they experienced instead of the lives they had that were destroyed. Many of the Jews that perished in the Holocaust were prominent members of German society, statesmen, leaders and intellectuals, but there is little reminding visitors of their achievements.

I left each museum more convinced that that the world will remember the Jews of Germany through their suffering, over and above their historical accomplishments and contributions. By the completion of the fellowship, I arrived at some conclusions regarding contemporary German society and Jews. First, if all that remains in Germany’s public memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust is their suffering, then Hitler succeeded in destroying their legacy. While the world should never forget the Holocaust, the Jewish victims should not be memorialized through terror.

Second, Jews remain an easy target for German unrest because of the nature and content of Holocaust education in Germany. The fact that Jews are portrayed first, foremost, and lastly through the Holocaust rather than on the basis of their historical contributions to German life and law, makes the German public perception of Jews limited to that of victims and outsiders.

Certainly, with the continuous flow of a diversity of immigrants to Germany since World War Two and the unification of East and West Germany, one would suspect Germany would come to accept its multicultural future. Yet, I wonder how either Germans or new immigrants can be expected to both accept and tolerate diversity when the laws governing their society, taxes and civic duties are based on past wrongs. The longer the German people are forced to suffer for past mistakes, the more likely they are to become fixated on those mistakes, rather than to move forward and create a better society.

Sheryl R. Adelman is a doctoral student in American Studies at the University of Kansas

Related Sites
- Information on right-wing violence and hate crimes in Germany
- Writing in The Nation, Jon Weiner reviews The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick which explores the identity of Jews as victims and the effect popular culture has had on Holocaust consciousness
- From CultureFront, The Holocaust and American Jewish Identity, an article by James E. Young, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "With the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., it could be said that America has finally recognized the survivors’ experiences as part of a national experience - and has in this way made the Holocaust part of American history," writes Young. "… Unlike European memorials, however, often anchored in the very sites of destruction, American memorials are necessarily removed from the ‘topography of terror.’"
- The Missing Identity Web site seeks to identify children from the Holocaust who were separated from their families and know little about their identity
- The National Museum of American Jewish History has features online exhibitions, including "Creating American Jews"
- New York Times review of Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry by Samuel G. Freedman