This is the first comprehensive history of Jewish negotiations with East Germany regarding restitution and reparations for Nazi war crimes. Angelika Timm analyzes the politics of old and new anti-Semitism and the context in which they grew under the officially propagated ideology of antifascism. Investigating the mass of unpublished, newly available archival data from the United States, Israel, and the former German Democratic Republic, and more than forty personal interviews, Timm fills a critical gap in the scholarship on postwar Germany. She analyzes the role of the Holocaust and the image of Jews in the historical consciousness and political culture of East Germany and chronicles the efforts of Jewish organizations, especially the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, to negotiate reparations with the East German state. The unique relationship between ideology and Realpolitik defined the manner in which East Germany confronted the crimes of its past and allowed anti-Semitism to reemerge.

East Germany’s ruling party never officially acknowledged responsibility for the crimes committed in Germany’s name during the Third Reich. Instead, it cast communists as both victims of and victors over National Socialist oppression while marginalizing discussions of Jewish suffering. Yet for the 1977 Academy Awards, the Ministry of Culture submitted Jakob der Lügner – a film focused exclusively on Jewish victimhood that would become the only East German film to ever be officially nominated. By combining close analyses of key films with extensive archival research, this book explores how GDR filmmakers depicted Jews and the Holocaust in a country where memories of Nazi persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political.

Jews and Germans is the only book in English to delve fully into the history and challenges of the German-Jewish relationship, from before the Holocaust to the present day. The Weimar Republic era--the fifteen years between Germany's defeat in World War I (1918) and Hitler's accession (1933)--has been characterized as a time of unparalleled German-Jewish concord and collaboration. Even though Jews constituted less than 1 percent of the German population, they occupied a significant place in German literature, music, theater, journalism, science, and many other fields. Was that German-Jewish relationship truly reciprocal? How has it evolved since the Holocaust, and what can it become? Beginning with the German Jews' struggle for emancipation, Guenter Lewy describes Jewish life during the heyday of the Weimar Republic, particularly the Jewish writers, left-wing intellectuals, combat veterans, and adult and youth organizations. With this history as a backdrop he examines the deeply disparate responses among Jews when the Nazis assumed power. Lewy then elucidates Jewish life in postwar West Germany; in East Germany, where Jewish communists searched for a second German-Jewish symbiosis based on Marxist principles; and finally in the united Germany--illuminating the complexities of fraught relationships over time.

2 Jews in East Germany

This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989 by recovering and analyzing the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust.

The Ruin -- The Socialists' Cemetery -- The Church -- Concentration Camp Memorials -- The Artists' Cemetery.

Based on interviews and the voluminous materials in the archives of the SED, the Stasi and central and regional authorities, this volume focuses on several contrasting minorities (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, ‘guest’ workers from Vietnam and Mozambique, football fans, punks, and skinheads) and their interaction with state and party bodies during Erich Honecker’s rule over the communist system. It explores how they were able to resist persecution and surveillance by instruments of the state, thus illustrating the limits on the power of the East German dictatorship and shedding light on the notion of authority as social practice.

In August 1942 a thirty-year-old counsel in the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress sent a cable to Rabbi Stephen Wise in New York with the following message: RECEIVED ALARMING REPORT THAT IN FUHRERS HEADQUARTERS PLAN DISCUSSED AND UNDER CONSIDERATION ALL JEWS IN COUNTRIES OCCUPIED OR CONTROLLED GERMANY NUMBER 3-1/2 TO 4 MILLION SHOULD AFTER DEPORTATION AND CONCENTRATION IN EAST AT ONE BLOW EXTERMINATED TO RESOLVE ONCE FOR ALL JEWISH QUESTION IN EUROPE. Sent by Gerhart Riegner, this first recorded notice of the "Final Solution" came to be known as the Riegner Telegram. It was perhaps the most famous and tragic moment in Riegner's career, but there were many other important and fascinating episodes in his life of service, told now in Never Despair, Riegner's impressive memoir. He recounts his youth in a cultivated, middle-class Jewish family in Germany, and as a young lawyer in Leipzig who fled to Switzerland after Hitler's rise to power in 1933. He worked all his life for the World Jewish Congress and was involved in its most important undertakings: rescue programs and diplomacy in response to the Holocaust; the struggle for broad-scale human rights at the League of Nations and later at the United Nations; relations with Christian churches; advocacy in behalf of North African Jewry; German reparations; and work with international student organizations. In Never Despair he recounts his efforts behind the scenes and offers a firsthand estimate of many of the leading international figures of the past century. This is an essential book for students of the Holocaust and of the Jewish role in world affairs from World War II to the end of the century. With 8 pages of black-and-white photographs.

While Germans, the largest immigration group in the United States, contributed to the shaping of American society and left their mark on many areas from religion and education to food, farming, political and intellectual life, Americans have been instrumental in shaping German democracy after World War II. Both sides can claim to be part of each other's history, and yet the question arises whether this claim indicates more than a historical interlude in the forming of the Atlantic civilization. In this volume some of the leading historians, social scientists and literary scholars from both sides of the Atlantic have come together to investigate, for the first time in a broad interdisciplinary collaboration, the nexus of these interactions in view of current and future challenges to German-American relations.

German Reparations and the Jewish World" has become a standard reference work since it was first published. Based extensively on archival sources, the author examines the difficult debate within the Jewish world whether it was possible to reach a material settlement with Germany so soon after Auschwitz. Concentrating on how the money was spent in rebuilding Jewish life, he also analyzes how the reparations payments transformed the relations bteween Israel and the diaspora, and between different Jewish political and ideological groups. This revised and expanded edition includes material on sensitive relief programmes from archives that have only recently been opened to researchers. In a new, extensive introductory essay the author reexamines the reparations, restitution and indemnification processes from the perspective of 50 years later.