The Paradoxical Normality of Jewish Life in Germany

Jewish life in Germany eighty years after the Holocaust is vibrant, self-confident, and diverse. An existing community of only 30,000 in the late 1980s was swollen following the arrival of 220,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, taking advantage of Germany’s commitment to accept Jews, and their non-Jewish family members, as automatically qualifying for asylum. These are the “Jewish quota refugees”—jüdische Kontingentflüchtlinge—admitted under the same legal provision that had allowed entry for Vietnamese boat people in the mid-1980s.1See Belkin, “Jüdische Kontingentflüchtlinge und Russlanddeutsche.” Now, 120,000 people—the eighth largest Jewish presence anywhere in the world—belong to Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform congregations,2The relationship between these different strands is not always harmonious. The Union progressiver Juden in Deutschland (UPJ), for example, has often been in conflict with the more observant umbrella body Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland and, in April 2023, the Jüdischer Liberal-egalitärer Verband broke away from the UPJ following allegations of misconduct on the part of a prominent rabbi. and tens of thousands more can claim a Jewish heritage.3This is according to the World Jewish Congress in 2023. See https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/about/communities/de. Last accessed July 25, 2024. Indeed, Orthodox Judaism is undergoing a revival in Germany4See Arfa, “Modern Orthodox Jewish life.” even as the Liberal/Reform movement has become re­established in the country where it originated, and lesbian Jews, secular Jews, interfaith couples, and converts are also catered for, for example in the Ohel Hachidusch in Berlin.5See https://www.ohel-hachidusch.org/index.html. Last accessed July 25, 2024. As Melanie Eulitz puts it, “there are different ways to live Judaism in Germany today.”6Eulitz, “Die jüdisch-liberale Bewegung.” Whatever congregation they belong to (or none), Jews are visible in politics and the media and are not afraid to challenge the majority on the Nazi past, antisemitism, and racism more generally. Jews in Germany are writers, filmmakers, and playwrights.

In the postwar decades, the Eastern European survivors who had ended up as displaced persons in the American, British, and French occupation zones (West Germany from 1949) mostly hoped simply to rebuild their lives and not draw attention to themselves.7Wolffsohn, “Jews in Divided Germany (1945–1990).” See also Brenner, “East European and German Jews.” The same was true of those German Jews who had fled the Nazis or survived in hiding and who, after 1945, chose to live in the country that had killed their families.8See Kauders, Unmögliche Heimat. In the Soviet zone, later East Germany, emigrés returned to help build socialism and saw their Jewishness as secondary to their ideological convictions. Over time, the Jewish communities in the two Germanys aligned themselves with their respective states while also remaining somewhat apart.9Sinn, “Returning to Stay?” Today, the majority of Jews are committed to participating in German society as Jews, and as German Jews. The protagonist of Rafael Seligmann’s 1989 novel Rubinsteins Versteigerung (Rubinstein’s auction) declares “Ich bin ein deutscher Jude” (I am a German Jew),10Seligmann, Rubensteins Versteigerung, 189. having grown up in the country, and the writer Maxim Biller—a “Deutscher wider Willen” (a German against his will)—is no less German: “Ich habe in diesem Land Abitur gemacht, ich habe hier Hashisch geraucht und Sex gehabt [. . .] und manchmal [. . .] fällt mir ein, daß ich besser Deutsch spreche als die meisten Deutschen.”11Biller, “Deutscher wider Willen,” 121. (I did my school leaving exams in this country, I have smoked hash here and had sex [. . .] and sometimes [. . .] I become aware that I speak German better than most Germans). As discussed below, identifying as a German Jew is by no means always comfortable—the self-description of the protagonist of Esther Dischereit’s Merryn (1992) as an “integrierter Fremdkörper”12Dischereit, Merryn, 117. (integrated foreign body) resonates still—but it is a significant reorientation, nonetheless.

This “new positioning,” as Y. Michal Bodemann describes it,13Bodemann, “A Reemergence of Jewish Life?,” 48. can be dated back to the time of reunification in 1990; however, it does not relate solely to that seismic political transformation but rather incorporates more gradual attitudinal shifts. For the last thirty years, the last Holocaust survivors have been fading away and their children and grandchildren are rethinking their relationship with the country that perpetrated the crime. Immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who were often greeted with suspicion by members of the established community, bring different historical experiences, including the Red Army’s victory over Nazism and communist repression. (Throughout this book, the term “established community” is used to render the German alteingesessene Juden and to distinguish them from Soviet-born Jewish immigrants). In 2021, Rabbi Mordechai Balla was appointed as the first rabbi in the German armed forces since the First World War.14Schwartz, “Germany’s 1st post-WWII Military Rabbi.” In 2019, the American philosopher Susan Neiman asserted in Learning from the Germans that there was much to absorb from Germany about confronting difficult pasts, including, for America, the legacy of slavery.15Neiman, Learning from the Germans.

The opening in June 2023 of the Pears Jewish Campus in Berlin was a bold affirmation of the Jewish presence in the land of the perpetrators almost eighty years after the World Jewish Congress had declared “the determination of the Jewish people never again to settle on the bloodstained soil of Germany.”16Cited in Brenner, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, 1. Costing $44 million and equipped with a gym, baseball court, movie theater, music studio, and kosher deli, the center is run by the Chabad-Lubavitch, a Hasidic movement based in the United States that engages in energetic outreach around the world, including twenty cities in German.17Axelrod, “Chabad Opens Germany’s Largest Jewish Center.” Likewise, young Israelis are moving “back” to the country that their grandparents fled, rejecting the militarization of Israeli society and its high cost of living, and, in some cases, on account of Berlin’s lively gay and lesbian scene.18See Amit, A Queer Way Out. The extent of their identification with Germany is debatable,19See Hochman and Heilbrunn, “‘I am not a German Jew’.” and they may be more interested in their present-day roots in the Middle East and historical connections to Europe than in Germany today, as Hadas Cohen and Dani Kranz argue.20Cohen and Kranz, “Israeli Jews.” There are signs, though, that Israeli Jews, along with others, are beginning to reshape German Jewish identity. Julius Schoeps relates how “next to the Russian Jews, a large number of Israeli and American Jews have found their way to unified Germany, with most opting to live in metropolitan centres such as Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich,” continuing: “Some are descendants of the former Yeckes, and it will be very interesting to see how all these different groups of Jews will constitute a new German Jewry.”21Schoeps, “Saving the German-Jewish Legacy,” 55. (Yeckes, also yekkes or jeckes, are Jews of German origin.) Y. Michal Bodemann suggests something similar when he notes how diversity in Jewish culture often develops “outside of the big established centres of Jewish life, first and foremost outside of Israel itself” and adds that Germany is one such “periphery [. . .] used by Israelis and North American Jewish artists, scholars, and writers as a laboratory to experiment within their respective fields.”22Bodemann, “Introduction,” 2–3. See also Kranz, “Das Körnchen Wahrheit.” Embodying this diversity in Germany are Tomer Gardi, the Israeli author of the novel Broken German (2016),23See Almog, “Politics and Literary Capital.” the Israeli playwright Yael Ronen, the Israeli comedian Shahak Shapira—who performs in English but tweets in German—and Deborah Feldman, the American author of the 2012 English-language bestseller Unorthodox who now publishes in a Yiddish-inflected German. As described below, the contribution of the much larger number of Russian-speaking Jews who arrived after 1990 is also vital.

The magazine Jüdisches Berlin (Jewish Berlin) publishes articles in German, Russian, and Hebrew and is one of a number of journals dedicated to Jewish news, politics, and culture, for example Jalta: Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart (Positions on the Jewish present), which appeared between 2017 and 2020 and now continues as a book series.24There has been a lively Jewish press in Germany since the 1980s. See Bodemann, “A Jewish Cultural Renascence in Germany?” More generally, Jewish journalists, writers, and activists are present in the mainstream media, demanding a proper reckoning with the past and an end to antisemitism in the present. In 2020, Ronen Steinke, who writes for the Süddeutsche Zeitung on law, human rights abuses around the world, and right-wing extremism in Germany, published two books that sparked intense debate, Terror gegen Juden: Wie antisemitische Gewalt erstarkt und der Staat versagt (Terror against Jews: How antisemitic violence is growing stronger and the state is failing) and Antisemitismus in der Sprache (Antisemitism in language). Comedian Oliver Polak is even more outspoken in his stage shows and his books, Ich darf das—ich bin Jude (I’m allowed, I’m a Jew; 2008), Der jüdische Patient (The Jewish patient; 2014),25See Battegay, “German Psycho.” and Gegen Judenhass (Against hatred of Jews; 2018). Other Jewish voices speak out in solidarity with Muslims, including Palestinians,26See Atshan and Galor, The Moral Triangle. for example Max Czollek, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, and Yael Ronen, whose play Dritte Generation (Third generation; 2008) stages the intersections between historical traumas and features German, Israeli, and Palestinian actors.27See Popescu, “Performance, Memory and Identity.” At the community level, Ármin Langer founded the Salaam-Schalom initiative in Berlin’s Neukölln district in 2013 to counteract dominant narratives in the media—including from Jewish leaders—that Muslims were inveterately hostile toward Jews. (Langer’s book Ein Jude in Neukölln: Mein Weg zum Miteinander der Religionen / A Jew in Neukölln: My path to a dialogue of religions, appeared in 2016.) In 2022, the writer, social scientist, and public figure Dmitrij Belkin helped to establish Schalom Aleikum—later adopted by the Central Council of Jews in Germany28See https://www.denkfabrik-schalom-aleikum.de. Last accessed July 25, 2024.—as an organization dedicated to Jewish-Muslim dialogue, mutual understanding and liberal values, but also to reinforcing contemporary political norms, including a clear disavowal of antisemitism and an unconditional acceptance of Israel’s right to exist.29Belkin, “Der Dialog muss weitergehen.”

The Austrian radio presenter Julia Stallinger explores Jewish identity and culture for a non-Jewish audience in a popular and accessible fashion,30See https://www.freie-radios.online/radiomacher_in/julia-stallinger. Last accessed July 25, 2024. as does Debora Antmann, who writes for the online magazine Missy about being Jewish, disabled, and a lesbian.31See https://missy-magazine.de/blog/category/kolumnen-und-kommentare/kolumnist_innen/debora-antmann/. Last accessed July 25, 2024. In fact, both the cultural and institutional structures of Jewish life in Germany are increasingly accommodating of queerness. The Keshet Deutschland organization, for example, serves the “interests of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, inter, and other queer people inside and outside the Jewish community.”32See https://keshetdeutschland.de/de/unsere-vision. Last accessed July 25, 2024. In 2022, Helene Shani Braun, a lesbian, was training to be Germany’s youngest rabbi, evidencing the growing diversity of the Jewish presence in the country. As an example of this, Shneer cites the Limmud Deutschland, a three-day festival that has taken place annually since 2007: “there are no hierarchies, no titles, no membership dues, and no tests to determine Jewish observance [. . .] one of its most radical acts is its official tri-­lingualism: German, Russian and English.”33Shneer, “The Third Way,” 115–16. Shneer also notes tensions, of course. Orthodox Jews do not attend the Limmud, and Russian-speaking Jews, it is believed, may be less welcoming of gays and lesbians. Together, the presence of Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform branches, the contributions of Russian, American, and Israeli immigrants, and the visibility of queer Jews confirm the new diversity of Jewish life in Germany.34See Jungmann, Jüdisches Leben in Berlin; Katlewski, Judentum im Aufbruch; Rosenthal and Homolka, Das Judentum hat viele Gesichter; and Shneer, “Russischsprachige Immigranten.” At the same time, as Körber notes, relations between the different branches, between the established community and Soviet-born Jews, and between more traditional congregations and gay, lesbian, secular, convert, and non-halachic Jews are often fraught: “In the conflicts and in and around Jewish communal life it becomes clear that the pluralization of the Jewish community has also made many things more difficult.”35See Körber, “Puschkin oder Thora?” Jews in Germany, in sum, are not homogeneous.

Likewise, the fact that Jews are fully engaged in German politics, society, and culture does not mean that Jewish life in Germany is now entirely normal. (Jewish normality should not in any case be measured by the extent of Jews’ participation in the non-Jewish German mainstream.) Recent controversies and conflicts point to the continuing salience of the Holocaust in German discourse, sensitivities on the subject of Israel, an intense focus on who is and isn’t a Jew, and antisemitic tropes or even violence. Both online and on the street, right- and left-wing conspiracists compared COVID-19 restrictions in 2020 and 2021 with the persecution of Jews in the Nazi period.36See “German call to ban ‘Jewish Star’ at Covid Demos,” BBC, 07.05.21. Online at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-57020697. Last accessed July 25, 2024. In intellectual circles and the broadsheets, the withdrawal of an invitation to speak for the Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe in 202037See Sznaider, “The Summer of Discontent.” and the publication of the German translation of American literary scholar Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory (2009; Multidirektionale Erinnerung; 2021) initiated controversies about solidarity with Palestinians; whether criticism of Israel is automatically anti-Jewish; the relationship between the Holocaust and colonial atrocities perpetrated by European powers (including the extermination of the Nama and Herero in German Southwest Africa); and whether the insistence on the uniqueness of the Nazi genocide is part of a self-­congratulatory narrative of Germany’s “successful confrontation” with the past.38See Rothberg, “Lived Multidirectionality”; and Biess, “Holocaust Memory.” In August 2023, Deputy Minister President of Bavaria Hubert Aiwanger was revealed to have written a pamphlet mocking the Holocaust as a schoolboy, provoking a crisis in the state’s ruling coalition through the summer.39See Wilke, “Bavaria Premier Keeps Deputy Aiwanger in Office.” More generally, in Germany as elsewhere, the backlash that began in the early 2000s against globalization, open borders, and liberal politics frequently resorts to the negative trope of the “cosmopolitan Jew.”40See Jacobs, “Globalisation, Anti-globalisation and The Jewish ‘Question.’”

On October 9, 2019, during the Yom Kippur holiday, twenty-seven-year-old Stephan Balliet attempted to break his way into the synagogue in the east German town of Halle. Frustrated in his efforts to gain access, Balliet shot dead two people nearby and then injured two others. Federal investigators identified an antisemitic motive, including a manifesto which named his ambition to kill as many non-whites as possible, preferably Jews. The attack took place against the backdrop of a steep increase in hate crimes against Jews in Germany (and across Europe) over recent years, and some commentators specifically blamed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland for inciting hostility toward people perceived as foreigners.41See Koehler, “The Halle, Germany, Synagogue Attack.”

This is the paradoxical normality of Jewish life in Germany. On the one hand, Jews are more assertive than they have ever been since the reestablishment of the community in the late 1940s and 1950s, and more present in German politics, media, and culture. On the other hand, anti-Jewish tropes—and anti-Jewish violence—are on the increase. In late 2023, following the ferocious Israeli military response to the murder of more than 1,200 Israelis by Hamas on October 7, a huge rise in anti-Jewish sentiment across German cities was reported, continuing and even escalating as the conflict intensified in early 2024. In Berlin, the Star of David was daubed on the doors of apartments with Jewish residents, pro-Palestinian activists handed out sweets, and antisemitic slogans were shouted at rallies.42See Chazan, “Israel-Hamas War.” It remains to be seen, of course, how the most heinous mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust—and Israel’s subsequent brutal assault on Gaza—impacts over the longer term on how Jews in Germany see themselves, their connection to the Jewish homeland, and their relations with other minorities (especially Muslims). The conclusion to this book assesses current responses and speculates on what October 7 might mean for the trend toward worldly engagement.