Eternal Guilt?: Forty Years of German-Jewish Relations - Hardcover

Wolffsohn, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0231082746 ISBN 13: 9780231082747

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 1993

Synopsis

Should the Germans of today continue to atone for the sins of their forebears? "Eternal Guilt" argues persuasively that Germans, Israelis and American Jews cling to their historical legacy in order to manipulate contemporary political ends. In their social interactions since 1950, Germans, Jews, and Israelis have largely abandoned the "us versus them" worldview fostered by the Holocaust. At the personal level, members of these groups increasingly deal with one another as individuals living in the present. Germans and Israelis are increasingly willing to visit each other's countries; Diaspora Jews are reluctant to settle in Israel; intermarriage is prevalent among Jews and majority populations everywhere. Nonetheless, at the official level images and memories of the past prevail; the past remains important not as intrinsically instructive but as pragmatically useful in manipulating political aims. Wolffsohn demonstrates that this gap between "routine policy" among individuals and "historical policy" among nations results in continuing misunderstandings and ongoing disputes. Wolffsohn argues that if the continuing spiral of inflammatory rhetoric and political manoeuvering is ever to end, official positions must catch up to popular behaviour. His epilogue analyzes the implications of reunification for the relations among these groups.

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This sure-to-be-controversial polemic, which has had four printings in Germany where it was first published in 1988, argues that the Holocaust and anti-Germanism remain "key Jewish fixations" even though the vast majority of Germans are tolerant, liberal and by no means anti-Semitic. Wolffsohn, a Jew who was raised in Israel, is a German citizen and a professor of government at a military university in Munich. He maintains that the Jewish- Israeli "fixation" on the Holocaust, fostered by the false notion that German Christians born since 1945 share collective national guilt for the genocide, threatens to open an unnecessary rift between descendants of the Holocaust's perpetrators and descendants of the survivors. Less controversial than his central thesis is Wolffsohn's intensive analysis of German-Israeli and German-Jewish relations extending from the debate over German restitution payments to Israel in 1952, through the Persian Gulf War--in which the danger loomed that Iraq might attack Israel using chemical weapons developed in Germany.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0231082746
• ISBN 13: 9780231082747
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 225