3 - Multicultural Germans and Jews of Many Cultures: Imagining “Jewish Berlin”

Summary

… the German Jew served — before and after the Holocaust — as a screen onto which others, Europeans in particular, have projected their wishes and anxieties.

— John Borneman and Jeffrey Peck, Sojourners

The intense and often contentious attention lavished on Jewish Berlin brings decades of German engagement with the Nazi past and the Holocaust into the post-unification period. In the 1990s Jewish Berlin began to play an important role in Germany's claim to normalcy, which required both acknowledging guilt and bringing the process of atonement into the amalgam of post-wall identity.

Two main themes drive the discourse about Jewish Berlin. The first is the quest to explore, describe, and illuminate the realities of Jewish life and experience in Germany, past and present. The second is to sort out the place of Jews in a new Germany. While some, including the philosopher Diana Pinto or the cultural critic Eike Geisel, regard Jewish Berlin as nostalgia for a culture that never really existed, others vigorously engage in documenting and memorializing the lives and fate of Jews in Berlin after 1933. This conversation about Jewish Berlin is by no means limited to Jews: Jews and non-Jews, within and beyond German borders, participate in the dispute regarding projections about German Jews and Jewish realties. It is reflected in literary texts focusing mainly on neighborhoods in which Jews used to live until the 1930s. Remnants of this history still exist, preserved or restored sites influence how this history is perceived, and certain aspects of Jewish culture have experienced a revival since the 1990s.