Jay Howard Geller. Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiii + 330 pp. $24.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-54126-8.

Reviewed by Anthony Kauders (Department of Jewish History and Culture, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Published on H-German (March, 2005)

Don't Trust Blurbs

The blurb on the back, in this case an endorsement by a fellow academic, reads as follows: "This is a solidly researched and cohesive study of the recognition of Jewish political life in Germany in the eight years after the Holocaust. It is a welcome addition to the literature."

Two likely responses to this statement come to mind. The cynic would dismiss the work out of hand, arguing that "solidly researched" and "welcome additions" usually bespeak lifeless scholarship. The habitual enthusiast, by contrast, would greet the new work with much aplomb, maintaining that solid research is per se a welcome addition to the field. Neither response is justified. Jay Howard Geller's book, based on his Yale University dissertation, is the best work on the early history of the Jews in post-Holocaust Germany--in any language. It supersedes more general overviews that lack documentary support. It supplants German studies such as Jael Geis¹s Übrig sein--Leben "danach" that amass documentary support but lack focus. And it moves well beyond the many edited volumes whose focus is often one-sided and whose contributions can be particularly spiritless. For anyone wishing to gain an understanding of Jewish life in postwar Germany, Geller is the best place to start.

Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany contains eight chapters. These examine several aspects of Jewish existence in all zones of occupation as well as in the subsequent East and West German states. Among the more important subjects we find the question of reparations, political parties as they related to Jews and Wiedergutmachung, divisions within the community, and (international) Jewish hostility toward continued Jewish life in Germany. In all of these discussions, the author manages to proffer a sane rendition of the problems facing many Jews. He is especially keen on documenting the beginnings of the Central Council of Jews in Germany (Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland), being one of the first historians to address the "Jews' relationships with state and party leaders" in a systematic manner (p. 3).

Some of the stories in Geller's book are familiar enough. The treatment of restitution and West German-Israeli relations, for example, is not new. The East German decision to distinguish between (Communist) fighters and (Jewish) victims, as well as the antisemitic purges of the early 1950s, have been examined by Jeffrey Herf, Ulrike Offenberg, and Jutta Illichman, among others. And the exploration of the way in which West Germany's political parties dealt with the "Jewish question" is not unlike the one in Herf's Divided Memory. This generalization is particularly true for Geller's emphasis on Adenauer, Schumacher, and Heuss. Some of the author's assertions can be qualified, too. Jewish leaders not only lauded the SPD leader, they criticized him for meeting with former members of the Waffen-SS. Moreover, the SPD was not always and everywhere the "most courageous champion of equal rights for Jewish Germans before the Nazi assumption of power" (p.125). Social Democrats were occasionally wont to underestimate hatred of Jew and mistake it for a right-wing ploy. Similarly, his support for Catherine Epstein's contention that the "pre-1933 Communist Party was not antisemitic but rather disinterested in Jewish issues" (p. 91, fn. 2) is not matched by the evidence, which indicates that Weimar's Communists readily employed antisemitic images if it meant attracting nationalist voters or ridiculing National Socialist politicians. Finally, Geller suggests that the rift between German and Eastern Jews in postwar Germany ended, at the latest, sometime in the late 1950s (p. 51), while in fact the split between both groups persisted well into the 1960s (and even beyond), as can be gleaned from various local election campaigns.

By and large, however, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany offers the most accurate and balanced discussion of the above issues currently available. It is able to show how the "Central Council intentionally drew closer to the West German government" as a result of (international) Jewish disregard for German-Jewish concerns (p. 185). It is able to trace the process by which Jews in Germany sought the support of Bundespräsident Heuss at the same time as Jews in Israel and abroad relied on Chancellor Adenauer's position of power. And it rightly portrays the history of the Jewish community in the years 1945-1953 as a "triumph" (p. 295) in light of the survival of German antisemitism and widespread hostility toward Jewish life in the country.

In the introduction, Geller announces that he is less interested in "psychological or sociological phenomena related to being Jewish in Germany" (p. 8) than in rooting his work in "archival evidence." For those who nevertheless wish to (re)assess the psychological and sociological phenomena of Jewish life after 1945, Geller's book will from now on serve as the ideal starting point, in this sense resembling Donald Niewyk's classic study The Jews in Weimar Germany.

And perhaps future editions will dispense with the above-mentioned blurb.

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Citation: Anthony Kauders. Review of Geller, Jay Howard, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953. H-German, H-Net Reviews. March, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10299

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