11 - Contacts and Relations in the Pre-Emancipation Period - A Comment

Summary

A student in a large lecture class of mine on the Holocaust once prefaced a question with the statement that “unlike you, we, after all, did not experience World War II.” Since I was born several years after 1945, my student's remark obviously wounded my vanity! Reading the essays by Wexler, Guggenheim, and Jütte in Part III of this volume brought my student's remark to mind. All three essays are markedly postwar in theme and method. Each of the authors challenges and problematizes one or another strand in the classic, pre-1933 model of how to write the German-Jewish past. All three essays reflect a shift, sometimes a dramatic one, in our thinking about the German-Jewish past. All three essays reflect new subjects of research, new sources, and point toward fundamentally new conclusions about the vanished subculture that was German Jewry.

Perhaps it sounds odd, almost a half century after 1945, still to be contrasting new work with the picture of German Jewry presented by historians before the Holocaust. Surely that event was the most dramatic watershed imaginable, with huge implications for history writing, and it has also been over for quite a long time. No one would deny that German-Jewish history as it had been known ended at the hands of the Nazis. And that particular kind of ending to the story has, indeed, generated row upon row of books, whose authors aim to explain how things came to such a very bad end for the Jewish Germans. Much of this postwar scholarship is saturated with a retroactive pessimism - a tone, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, of inevitability.