CIAO DATE: 10/07
Instituting Europe: Germany, the Union, and the Legacy of the Short Century
Michael Werz
Recent debates about the future of the European Union have focused in large part on institutional reforms, the deficit of democratic legitimacy, and the problem of economic and agrarian policies. As important as these issues may be, the most crucial question at the moment is not whether Europe will prevail as a union of nations or as a thoroughly integrated federal structure. What is of much greater concern is the fact that political structures and their corresponding political discourses have lagged far behind the social changes occurring in European societies. The pivotal transformation of 1989 has not been grasped intellectually or politically, even though its results are increasingly visible in both the east and west.
(Re)constructing Community in Berlin: Turks, Jews, and German Responsibility
Jonathan Laurence
In Hungary we always said we were Hungarian Jews. Even in the concentration camps we would say, "that is a Hungarian Jew," "that's a Polish Jew" or "that's a German Jew." After the war, I just felt like a Jew. Now, where I've been for nearly fifty years, I feel like a German Jew.
When a Muslim has lived here for thirty or forty years, then he has become German—as have his kids. When he is constantly being reproached for not assimilating—that is, told he doesn't need a mosque that looks like a mosque, or that his kids do not have to learn about Islam in school like the other Christian and Jewish kids, then there is not really equality before the law in Germany.
An immigration dilemma has confronted the Federal Republic of Germany since the early 1970s. Postwar labor migrants from predominantly Muslim countries in the Mediterranean basin were not officially encouraged to settle long-term, yet many stayed once immigration was halted in 1973. Though these migrants and their children have enjoyed most social state benefits and the right to family reunification, their political influence has remained limited for the last quarter-century. Foreigners from non-EU countries may not vote in Germany, migrants are underrepresented in political institutions, and state recognition of Muslim religious and cultural diversity has not been forthcoming. Since 1990, however, a much smaller but significant number of Jewish migrants from eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have arrived in Germany. This population of almost 150,000 has been welcomed at the intersection of reparations policy and immigrant integration practice. Official readiness to accept and incorporate these foreign Jews into a German religious community stands in contrast to religion and integration policy towards other non-German migrant populations.
Erich Auerbach's Mimesis as a Meditation on the Shoah
Earl Jeffrey Richards
Within the enormous body of critical writings dedicated to literary works devoted to the Shoah, the possibility of its very representation and the problems arising in the potential deformation of memory are frequent topics. In light of these issues, it might be helpful to examine a well-known work of literary scholarship, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written between May 1942 and April 1945, as a potentially overlooked example of a highly sublimated allegorical meditation on the contemporary murder of Europe's Jews. Auerbach's classic work, which explicitly takes literary representation as its central theme, seems to use carefully and subtly selected examples from western literature as figures for current events.
Setting the Tone: A Review of German-Jewish History in Modern Times
Steven Beller
Michael Meyer, ed., Michael Brenner, asst. ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, volume 3, Integration in Dispute: 1871-1918; volume 4, Renewal and Destruction: 1918-194 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, 1998)
The concluding two volumes of German-Jewish History in Modern Times take the history of German-speaking Jewry from the hopes of German national unification, through the ambivalent success of the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, with its political uncertainties and immense cultural and intellectual achievements, to the fatal years of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. In most respects the authors of this collaborative effort are to be praised for continuing the good, synthesizing work of the first two volumes. These are not, however, immune from, and certainly do not solve, the problems in interpretation and approach that marked their chronological predecessors. (For this author's review of the first two volumes, see German Politics and Society, vol. 17, no. 2, summer 1999.)
Where Memory Resides: A Review of At Memory's Edge and Munich and Memory
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
James E. Young, At Memory's Edge: After Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)
Where does memory reside? In the individual mind? In the texts and videotaped interviews that make that consciousness public and enable it to outlive those whose experiences they record? In the art and architecture created by a generation that lack such first-hand experience? In the places in which the events occurred? In their recent books James E. Young and Gavriel D. Rosenfeld propose that the latter two are crucial. Young takes as his subject the art and architecture of those born after the events to which they refer; Rosenfeld views the buildings and monuments of postwar Munich in terms of the ways in which they do or do not acknowledge the city's former position as the Hauptstadt der Bewegung—that is, the capital of National Socialism.