Democratization and the Jews: Munich, 1945-1965

Front Cover
U of Nebraska Press, Jan 1, 2004 - History - 326 pages
Published for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism

Democratization and the Jews explores the ways in which West Germans in Munich responded after 1945 to the Holocaust. Examining the political and religious discourse on the ?Jewish Question,? Anthony D. Kauders shows how men and women in the immediate postwar era employed antisemitic images from the Weimar Republic in order to distance themselves from the murderous policies of the Nazi regime. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, many people?and particularly Social Democrats and members of the churches, both Catholic and Protestant?began to repudiate antisemitism altogether, appreciating the connection between liberal democracy, on the one hand, and the rejection of hatred of Jews, on the other. This change was a revolutionary moment in the democratization of the Federal Republic, as the language of liberalism merged with the spirit of democracy.

From inside the book

Contents

History as Pedagogy Munichs Jewish Community after the War
38
History as Memory Democracy and Antisemitism 19451949
65
History and Memory in the Economic Miracle Dormancy and Difference 19491957
137
History as Change Jews as Fellow Beings 19581965
201
Conclusion Antisemitism Responsibility and Democracy
269
Bibliography
283
Index
319
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 33 - David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603-1655 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p.
Page 14 - ... is held of us because of the people who form that opinion, it follows that the people before whom we feel shame are those whose opinion of us matters to us. Such persons are: those who admire us, those whom we admire, those by whom we wish to be admired, those with whom we are competing, and those whose opinion of us we respect.
Page 25 - Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). For an analysis of the efforts to come to terms with the past...
Page 30 - Woller (Hg.): Politische Säuberung in Europa. Die Abrechnung mit Faschismus und Kollaboration nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. München 1991, S.
Page 6 - Democracy recognizes no races, castes, or orders commissioned by God or qualified by their own attributes to exploit, govern, or enslave their fellow human beings.
Page 6 - Democracy means personal worth: Every human being is precious in his own right and is always to be regarded as an end, never as a means merely... The state is made for man, not man for the State. Here is the foundation of all humane conceptions of life and the ultimate source of the other articles of our faith.
Page 32 - the capacity to feel grief for others and guilt for the suffering one has directly or indirectly caused depends on the capacity to experience empathy for the other as othet."7 This is a radically different position from the one adopted by perpetrators who have tried to identify with the victims because they see themselves, too, as having been "victimized" by the Nazi apparatus; instead of grieving for the other, they feel sorry for themselves.

About the author (2004)

AnthonyøD. Kauders teaches in the Department of Jewish History and Culture at the University of Munich. He is the author of German Politics and the Jews: Dusseldorf and Nuremberg, 1910?1933.

Bibliographic information