Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany
Atina Grossmann
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 069114317X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, more than a quarter million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust lived among their defeated persecutors in the chaotic society of Allied-occupied Germany. Jews, Germans, and Allies draws upon the wealth of diary and memoir literature by the people who lived through postwar reconstruction to trace the conflicting ways Jews and Germans defined their own victimization and survival, comprehended the trauma of war and genocide, and struggled to rebuild their lives.
In gripping and unforgettable detail, Atina Grossmann describes Berlin in the days following Germany's surrender--the mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the liberated slave laborers and homecoming soldiers, returning political exiles, Jews emerging from hiding, and ethnic German refugees fleeing the East. She chronicles the hunger, disease, and homelessness, the fraternization with Allied occupiers, and the complexities of navigating a world where the commonplace mingled with the horrific. Grossmann untangles the stories of Jewish survivors inside and outside the displaced-persons camps of the American zone as they built families and reconstructed identities while awaiting emigration to Palestine or the United States. She examines how Germans and Jews interacted and competed for Allied favor, benefits, and victim status, and how they sought to restore normality--in work, in their relationships, and in their everyday encounters.
Jews, Germans, and Allies shows how Jews were integral participants in postwar Germany and bridges the divide that still exists today between German history and Jewish studies.
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Constructing a viable new community—after extraordinary trauma and even in transit. Let me be clear: despite the frequent invocation of the term “replace” by contemporary observers, and the clear conviction that new babies were intended to assure a future for the Jewish people, the baby boom among the She’erit Hapletah could not offer any redemptive meaning to the catastrophe (Churban) that had been experienced.57 But it did, perhaps, offer a means to “redeem the future” or at least to begin the.
Therefore constitute a dangerous site of infection.”73 Since it was in fact not quite proper to attack Jews as Jews, they were instead criticized as “foreigners” or as “certain circles.” They were labeled as outsiders in a kind of extraterritoriality that the DPs—and for that matter virtually all Jews living in Germany—would, in different but quite functional ways, also claim. Indeed, there should be no doubt that the philosemitism or shamed silence that tabooized anti-Jewish acts or.
Berlin as it looked after the attacks on “Kristallnacht.” 173. See, among many sources, Zink, United States in Germany, 154. According to Zink, 163, German denazification tribunals “tried some 930,000 persons on various charges, though more than two million persons were reported as ‘chargeable’ after the amnesties had reduced the numbers. Of these only 1,549 were found guilty as major offenders and approximately 21,000 as offenders.” 174. See Bendersky, “Jewish Threat,” 367. 175. See Hilton,.
A heterosexual version of Beck’s account, Orbach recalls the thrill of wartime Berlin, his love affairs, his contacts with communist resisters, his hideouts in seedy pool halls and brothels—“romance, friendship, delight, and adventure in the midst of murderous oppression”—with a certain degree of embarrassment and disbelief. But Orbach also spent “eight months in the hell of Auschwitz and Buchenwald,” after nearly two years as an “illegal” in Nazi Berlin. When he returned to Berlin in 1945, his.
Transnational category that the Military Government and UNRRA initially tried to impose on them, and which the motley group of young aid workers sometimes claimed for themselves; the trauma of statelessness produced the drive for national and particular recognition and identity.30 The Jewish survivors, many of them the last remaining members of their large prewar families, were indeed a diverse and traumatized group. They spoke different languages, came from various nations, subscribed to.